Distribution

Amy and I spent the last week in Tuscany with some friends, including Howard Lindzon . Howard is the CEO of StockTwits , a company we’ve been an investor in for a few years. I was an investor in Howard’s previous company WallStrip , met Howard through an introduction from our mutual friend Fred Wilson (it’s a pretty funny story, as are many things with Howard), and have worked closely together on a bunch of things including TechStars where Howard has been a great mentor and investor since the beginning. ...

We’ve put up a post on the Foundry Group site about a new theme of ours we are calling Distribution . We’ve been investing in this theme for a while but have continued to formulate exactly how we think about it. I’ve talked about our thematic approach to investing many times in the past. Every now and then it feels like it’s worth a quick post on our current themes. They are: ...

We recently invested in a Seattle company called BigDoor Media . The founder/CEO Keith Smith wrote a wonderful love story about the deal which was picked up by the WSJ VC Dispatch in a post titled A Summer Romance Between Founder And Venture Capitalist . Yes, I’ve fallen in love (in a very non-sexual way) with Keith, his co-founder Jeff Malek, and BigDoor. Over the past year I’ve become increasingly obsessed with the idea that the computers are going to take over. I’ve even begun to think that we are already working for them. So – why not have fun while we are at it? By using a light weight API approach, BigDoor enables any non-game publisher to quickly integrate game mechanics such as points, badges, levels, leaderboards, virtual currency, and virtual goods into their web and mobile applications. They’ve already rolled out integrations with Cheezburger Networks and BuddyTV and have a pile of additional publishers launching in the next 90 days. ...