Foundry

[]<-‘Foundry Group Raises $225 Million Early Stage VC Fund’ If you recognize the syntax above, you’ll recognize the first programming language I ever used. 10 PRINT “Foundry Group Raises $225 Million Early Stage VC Fund” That would be the second language I coded in. program FoundryLaunches(output); begin WriteLn(‘Foundry Group Raises $225 Million Early Stage VC Fund’); end. And that would be the third. These three examples are minor derivations of everyone’s first program – also known as “Hello World ” – written in APL, Basic, and Pascal for the non-nerds among you. ...

I love it when companies I’m an investor in use an acquisition strategy. My good friend and long time co-investor Fred Wilson calls it a “venture rollup .” It’s very different than a traditional “rollup” or “consolidation” (which is typically revenue based.) Fred described it really well when talking about NewsGator’s acquisition of FeedDemon in 2005. When he (Feld) finds a sector where he’s early in the development of the market, he gets in, figures it out, builds a management team, and then gets busy convicing others to join the party. That’s the play book for the venture rollup. ...

We recently made another Foundry Group investment in the Zynga Game Network . Brad Stone wrote a great article about Zynga in the NYTimes about it titled More Than Games, a Net to Snare Social Networkers . One of my co-investors – Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures – wrote a nice overview of how he came to make this investment. I vividly remember seeing my long time friend Mark Pincus’ name pop up as the author of Texas Hold’em on Facebook one day over the summer and thinking “hmmm – what’s Mark up to?” ...

I love when we find magic technology that just does what it is supposed to. That – plus a handful of amazing people – are the underpinnings of the investment we just led in Memeo . My partner Ryan McIntyre – who joined the board – has a detailed post up titled Foundry Group Invests in Memeo. I’ve been searching for brainless backup and sync software for a long time. I’ve never been happy. I am now. I’m using Memeo to keep five Vista machines (going on seven) in sync and it just automagically happens. Oh – and my server is a Mac – how fun is that? ...

An interview with my partner Jason Mendelson is up on the web. Jason gives some hints about what Foundry Group will be doing. Look for more after the holidays.