At Foundry Group, one of our investment themes is Glue. We’ve done a handful of investments in this area, including Gnip . Since Gnip’s launch last month, it’s been put into production in a number of cases – some obvious, some subtle. Part of the fun is watching the adoption of it evolve rapidly as we continue to build out the core capabilities of the what Gnip can do.
I had a long conversation with a VC I work closely with about the value Gnip ultimately provides to its various constituencies (data providers, data consumers, and end users) and how / where it expects to get paid in the long term. During the conversation, we covered a number of different potential areas, but I realized that my thinking could be much crisper. That’s normal for this stage of a startup as Gnip is still very early stage (we’ve done one seed round of investment and are gearing up for the next financing) but the exercise of defining a clear business endgame (vs. just a technology endgame) is extremely helpful and self referential, as it creates more focus on what we should actually be building.
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