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: ...
Congrats to my friends at Gist for being acquired by RIM. I met TA McCann, the CEO / founder of Gist at the first Defrag Conference when he took me for a pair of runs along the Denver Creek Path and it’s been a blast to work with him and the Gist team ever since. Also, congrats to RIM for picking up an awesome team that’s been thinking about and building software for the intersection of social and email since before talking about it was in vogue.
Today we announced that Foundry Group took a bite out of Cheezburger as we led a $30m financing of the company that started out by bringing you cute cate pictures . Ever since I met Ben Huh 18 months ago via an introduction from Micah Baldwin (see Micah – I do take you seriously – some of the time) I’ve had a major entrepreneur-crush (sort of like a man-crush, but, well, you get the idea) on Ben. C’mon – the guy wears a cheeseburger on his head – how can you not love him. ...
Standing Cloud , which makes it easy to deploy and run apps in the cloud, recently closed a $3m financing led by Rich Levandov at Avalon Ventures. Rich and I have known each other and worked together since the mid-1990’s and more recently have invested together in NewsGator and Zynga . Rich has spend a lot of time in the clouds lately, including his investment in Cloudkick which was acquired yesterday by Rackspace. He got excited about Standing Cloud and their mission to “reimagine hosting” in the context of cloud computing. Shared hosting was a great idea back in 1999 but most users of Web apps today require more control over upgrades, better access to backups, ability to move applications across cloud providers, and extremely high reliability. In addition, deploying apps on most cloud providers continues to be unnecessarily complicated. ...
I’m super proud of my friends at Gnip . Last week they announced that they had closed another $2m investment from Foundry Group and First Round Capital and signed a deal with Twitter to become Twitter’s first authorized data reseller. Via Gnip, you can now get three new premium Twitter feeds in real time for non-display use: Twitter Halfhose (50% of the full firehose) Twitter Decahose (10% of the full firehose) Twitter Mentionhose (all @replies and retweets that mention a user) Gnip provides access to over 100 other social media feeds but has spent a lot of time in the past six months optimizing and tuning their system for Twitter-related data. ...
I’m at Newark Airport waiting for my plane to take me to Quebec for the Quebec City Conference where I’m being interviewed at the end of the day by Rob Cox of Reuters Breakingviews. Yesterday Rob and I had a short call so he could get to know me a little better. As he was probing me about Foundry Group and what makes us tick, we started talking about what we refer to as “deeply held beliefs.” In my first company (Feld Technologies) we referred to these as “precepts” As we were talking through them, I realized that they defined us, and how we work, extremely well. ...
This summer I made two new friends who completely blew my mind – Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson. I met them through TechStars – they were founders of Orbotix , one of the 11 teams to go through this TechStars Boulder this summer. Today, Foundry Group announced that it has led an investment in Orbotix . I’m always on the lookout for what I consider to be genius level software engineering talent. As an MIT graduate, I’ve been around plenty of it, but I also know that it shows up in unexpected places. A few weeks into TechStars, I realized that not only was I hanging out with genius level software talent but that Ian and Adam thought about hardware and the combination of hardware and software in unique ways. For example, take a look at a robotic ball controlled by a smart phone. ...
My partner Seth Levine has a detailed post up today titled Trada – from the beginning that describes the creation and financing of Trada. Foundry Group is the seed investor in Trada and Seth’s post describes one example of what I think is effective VC seed investing. The meat of the funding story follows: “Of course coming up with the idea is the easy part. Executing against that idea is another matter. In this case neither Niel (nor I) had any interest in creating a traditional syndicate to fund the company. Instead we quickly put our heads together about a financing (we like to say it was over beers, but the truth is more mundane – we hammered out the details in a 10 minute conversation in the conference room of the Foundry office). We decided that we wanted to bring in some experts to help us with the business and together flew around pitching the business to a small handful of strategic angel investors to pull together a small syndicate that became the initial Trada investor base. Niel and I hammered out a second financing in similar fashion (again around the Foundry conference table, this time without the need for an angel roadshow). It’s a great example of how we like to work with entrepreneurs – especially those that we have a long history with. We like to be involved early (in this case before an idea for a business even existed) and we think of our angel investments as a down payment on a subsequent investment in the business (we’ realize that we need to give early businesses some time to develop).” ...
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. ...
I’ve always enjoyed hanging out with Om Malik . We’ve had a handful of nice, relaxed discussions about some deep stuff. Last week I took a break from Google I/O and spent an hour and a half with him. We spent about an hour talking about life and some very personal things and then did a thirty minute interview which includes a really nice post on GigaOm about me and Foundry Group . ...