Category: Investments
FullContact Continues Its Journey To Solve The Contact Management Problem
When we invested in FullContact in 2012, they were a small team with a big vision to create One Address Book To Rule Them All. Over the past four years, they’ve systematically executed on their vision, building a contact management platform that touches all aspects of the problem. Along the way they built a sizable business.
Two weeks ago FullContact raised a $25 million round. They followed this up with two acquisitions – first Conspire and then Profoundis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD1Kn3AUPf8
I love using a targeted acquisition approach in conjunction with a business that has a clear strategy and strong organic growth. My first company (Feld Technologies) was acquired by a company doing a rollup (AmeriData – acquired 40 companies between 1992 and 1996 when it was then acquired by GE Capital.) I learned a lot from that experience and then proceeded to try to use the rollup strategy with several other companies, including Interliant, my biggest failure of all time.
By 2002 I realized that what was classically called a rollup strategy was not generally effective, at least not for me. But by reflecting on which particular acquisitions worked, why they worked, and when they worked, along with understanding the opposite (what failed, why, and when they failed) I started to develop a clear view around a targeted acquisition strategy.
Today, I’ve got a clear view of how this can work. I’ve learned a lot from my partner Seth and his own experiences around M&A. While a few acquisitions don’t work out, with the right strategy, approach, and clarity on what success is, it can be a very powerful approach.
At the essence of the approach is a focus on two things – acquiring people and product. The classically rollup strategy was much more focused on acquiring revenue. In my world, historical revenue is the least interesting thing to consider in an acquisition strategy. The goal is to acquire technology that is on your product roadmap or people that fit culturally within your organization and help you execute on your roadmap faster. The phrase acquihire emerged from this, but many acquihire’s, especially by large companies, are not particularly well thought out or integrated into an existing roadmap.
Ultimately, the goal is to use acquisitions to compress time on product development and get people on the team, especially in senior roles, who can help build out areas of the company they have experience in. Interestingly, many technology assets don’t need a lot of people. At the same time, many people are interested in working on things other than the technology they’ve been focused on.
In FullContact’s case, the team, led by Bart Lorang, has figured out their own strategy around this and is executing well on it. In the absence of any of the acquisitions they’ve done, FullContact has a strong business. But our acquisitions of Cobook, nGame, Brewster, and now Conspire and Profoundis has accelerated our business in powerful ways.
I love getting this in my inbox. Over the past few years I’ve walked from the North Pole to the South Pole. That’s 12,430 miles.
If you are counting steps, it’s 23,882,806 as of this morning. And my best step day ever was April 7, 2012, when I ran a 50 mile race and covered 96,442 steps.
Ok – back to work …
We just led a $35 million financing at Formlabs. In case you were wondering, lasers are super cool.
In 2010, when we invested in MakerBot, the maker movement was just beginning. While 3D printing technology had been around for 30 years, there were no desktop 3D printers. The concept of using an additive process for 3D printing, where you built up a 3D object from continuous extrusion of a material such as ABS or PLA (plastics) was well understood. But this technology had not been brought to the desktop at a $2,000 price point. MakerBot did that and created an entirely new market segment within the 3D printing industry.
Last year we invested in Glowforge, a company playing into the same trend that made MakerBot successful but in an inverse way. Instead of an additive process, Glowforge uses a subtractive process to create objects. Glowforge has a product that uses lasers to perform the subtractive process. In the same way that MakerBot completely disrupted the 3D additive manufacturing industry, we believe that Glowforge can completely disrupt the 3D subtractive manufacturing industry. Last week we announced that we led a $22 million financing for Glowforge.
In 2011, at about the same time that MakerBot was starting to scale, another new company – Formlabs – was founded with the vision of also creating a desktop 3D printer. However, unlike the technology that MakerBot used which was called FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling), Formlabs used a technology called SLA (Stereolithography) which has many advantages over FDM, but is more complicated to implement. As a result, it took Formlabs longer to get their product into the market.
In the fall of 2012, Formlabs did a $2.95 million Kickstarter campaign. In the early summer of 2013, around the time Stratasys acquired MakerBot, Formlabs started shipping their Form 1 printer. By the end of 2015, Formlabs shipped their Form 2 printer, which is a spectacular product.
While we knew Formlabs because of our MakerBot investment, we didn’t meet Max until after Stratasys had acquired MakerBot. I knew Max from a distance because we were both in the Netflix documentary Print the Legend. Even though there are many cringe-worthy moments, it’s a powerful story about the creation and emergence of MakerBot, Formlabs, and desktop 3D printing.
In 2014 Max hunted me down at a talk I did in Boston hosted by Katie Rae and Reed Sturtevant with my uncle Charlie about his book The Calloway Way: Results and Integrity. We talked for a little while and he made a powerful impression on me that I tucked away deep inside my brain.
This spring, Max and his cofounder Natan Linder reached out to me about having Foundry Group lead a financing. The company had only raised one major round of $19 million, led by Barry Schuler at DFJ Growth. Barry had a long history with 3D printing and he had put in a term sheet to lead the round Makerbot was considering. When Stratasys acquired the company, Barry invested in Formlabs. I’m on the board of littleBits with Barry and have loved working with him so between Barry’s encouragement, Max’s direct approach, and my love of lasers, we dug into Formlabs.
In the past two years, 3D printing has gone through the classic Gartner Hype Cycle bottoming out in the trough of disillusionment.
At this point, we think there is an enormous void for a new market leader as we move into the slope of enlightenment. We are honored to get another shot at this with our investment in Formlabs.
Oh – and lasers are super cool.
We just led a $22 million financing in Glowforge. I’ll start with the punchline – lasers are super cool.
When we led a $9 million financing in Glowforge a little over a year ago, we were excited about the potential to do to the subtractive 3D printing world what we did with MakerBot in the additive / FDM 3D printing world. We were also fired up by the beautiful and practical stuff that the team made us to show what the product could do.
In June 2015, Glowforge had a prototype and a plan. A few months later, Glowforge ran a 30-day crowdfunding campaign, which ended up raising $27.9 million and is still the #1 30-day crowdfunding campaign ever.
By the time the 30 days were over, it was unambiguous that we had found the ever-elusive product market fit. We knew that all kinds of designers, crafters, artists, and makers wanted a 3D laser printer in their home. The feedback around what we were doing was incredible and awesome. Oh – and lasers are super cool.
It has been less than nine months since the pre-order campaign and I’ve seen the product and the company move at a lightning quick pace. In Q2 they brought a full beta unit to our office in Boulder and it blew our mind.
My partner Ryan’s son Quinn (who is 12) was in the office so we sat him down in front of the Glowforge, gave him an iPad with the Glowforge software on it, and he went to town making stuff in our conference room. After 30 minutes the grin on my face was so huge I had to go sit quietly in my office for a few minutes to calm down.
Units are now coming off our US manufacturing lines and we are starting to get them into beta user’s hands each week. We are trickling them out slowly to make sure that we’ve got the manufacturing process nailed for the hardware. The software is continually improving, so a short passage of time as we dial in the manufacturing before scaling just results in an even better end product.
Dan Shapiro (the CEO) and his team is obsessed about having the highest quality possible product. While they didn’t need any additional money at this point, they were willing to let us do a financing to have major cash on the balance sheet that would allow them to weather any challenges. Given the extreme demand we had from the pre-order campaign, we are expecting this to accelerate once we start shipping, so it made sense to raise more money right now to support growth so the company could focus 100% of it’s energy on customers and product.
We proactively offered to lead a financing rather than have Dan and team run around few a few months. As part of our overall strategy, we have long described ourselves as syndication agnostic. We are happy to invest with others, but we are also happy to lead rounds ourselves in companies we’ve already invested in. At Glowforge, we already had a great partner with True Ventures and were able to agree on terms with Dan and his team that allowed us to quickly do a round.
As Glowforge printers make their way out into the world, I’m super excited to see what people do with them. Oh, and lasers are super cool.
Many cities around the world have bike to work day. We take it up a level in Boulder and have an annual tube to work day which occurred today.
The gang at Sphero went all in and decided to make it a Raft to Work day. They tried hard, but ended up with a classic FAIL blog experience.
Enjoy a laugh at the end of the week after a troubling few days in the world.
My friends at Oblong have been involved in some very cool new installations of their Mezzanine product in different vertical markets. They are suddenly seeing a lot of interest from hospitals and health care systems.
A recent new installation is the Mercy Virtual Care Center, which is the world’s first virtual care center.
If you are at HIMSS this week in Las Vegas, go visit Oblong at booth #10725 on the show floor and see the future of collaboration in action.
The Force Awakens has been particularly exciting to me since we are investors in Sphero. If you haven’t seen BB-8 from Sphero yet, take a look.
I watched Star Wars for the first time the week it came out in 1977. I was 11. I’ve been an unashamed Star Wars fan since then, loving almost every moment except for the ones I had to suffer through with Jar Jar Binks. It turns out that I’m about six months older than J.J. Abrams so I feel similar to him about Star Wars.
“I was 11 when I saw the first ‘Star Wars’ and my mind was blown,” he says. “It was everything. It was funny, it was surprising, it was aesthetically gorgeous. It had designs and effects you’d never seen before. It had the most incredible sound effects and music you’d ever heard. It had amazing characters who grabbed you by the heart. It was spiritual. It was filled with adventure. On every level, it was just this incredible thing. If it had only looked that cool, or had that great script, people would still be talking about it. But it had all of it. It reminds me of the Beatles, the way, for any other band, any one of their songs would have been enough for a career. But they did it all — the way George Lucas, somehow through his brilliance, did it all.”
And yes, I’m a big Beatles fan also.
BB-8 is so deeply awesome. If you don’t have one yet, you know you want one. See you at the movies.
If you’ve been following our Glowforge investment you will be familiar with the pre-order campaign they are currently running. Halfway through (with 15 days to go) they are now at $7.8 million.
Yesterday, Dan Shapiro and I did a video of me creating a Foundry Group coaster out of a piece of wood. It was done remotely – I did all the design work on my computer in Boulder, uploaded it to the Glowforge cloud, and printed it on a Glowforge in Seattle. As a bonus, you get to see a VC (me) struggle with Adobe Illustrator, which – while being ubiquitous – is one of those pieces of software that can only be described as “a beast.”
If you haven’t ordered a Glowforge yet, use my referral code to get 50% off + another $100 dollars off. Given my experience with Dan and team so far, I think this is going to be one of the amazing products of 2016.
It’s here. And you know you want it. You can buy just the Rock Band 4 software (if you have your old instruments) or, if you are like me and you’ve given your instruments away, you can buy a new full bundle of everything.
And, in case you missed it, Spark Capital joined us an investor last week with a few other long time friends in a $15 million round.
I originally invested in Harmonix as an angel investor in 1995. It’s rise was well chronicled in this awesome Inc. Magazine long form story titled Just Play. Basically, Harmonix tried to go out of business every year between 1995 and 2005 and just managed to fail at that, always coming up with a new revenue deal or a small amount of financing to stay alive before it became an overnight success in 2005 with the original launch of Guitar Hero.
MTV acquired the company in 2006 for $175m plus an earnout, which after a long “discussion” that ended in 2013, resulted in a total purchase price over $700m. MTV decided to get out of the video game business in 2010 and sold the company back to the founders (Alex and Eran) and a small investor group.
In 2013 Alex and Eran asked me to join their board. We arranged a financing that made sense for both parties so Foundry Group could invest. Harmonix is easily the most accomplished video game company in the world around music and rhythm games and with the eventual, and long awaited emergence of VR, I can think of no better company around our HCI theme to work with. Spark Capital, which was one of the original investors in Occulus, agrees, which makes me very happy.
Rock Band 4 is now out. In states like Colorado where a certain substance is now legal, I expect we’ll have a new marketing tie in. In the rest of the world, let me just suggest that having played the new game, you’ll want to get a copy and dust off your old equipment.
And get ready for some stuff that is just going to blow your mind – now and over the next 12 months – from my friends at Harmonix in Boston.