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In a few hours I’ll be en route to Seattle, spending the day in Redmond for a bunch of meetings with Microsoft Research and MSN folks. Come and say hi if you see me hanging out at one of the coffee places of the campus. Then off to the Gnomedex kick-off party. Friday and Saturday will then be about juggling between the conference and the games, especially that very promising France-Brazil.
Looking forward to all that.
This is essentially the theme developed by VC Bart Schachter in his guest post on PE Week Wire. It is indeed not uncommon for CEOs leaving the top spot to do a stint in VC firms as EIRs, venture partners or GPs. Bart pictures it:
Imagine that, instead of taking refuge in the pages the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Bill would have set his sights on becoming (the horror) a venture capitalist. Consider that, in a moment of blissful bridge fantasy, instead of seeking to remedy the injustices of the third world, he might have opted instead to set up shop as a budding VC. Consider the high points of the billgventures.com home page: Operating experience, Value-added Investing, an Eye to Company-Building, Unequaled Access to Global Business Leaders, and in case you missed the first bullet, CEO Experience.
Would Bill Gates have made a successful VC ? We’ll never know, but it is clear that he has been doing an admirable job at the Gates Foundation, which has become the largest foundation ever with the recent pledge of tens of billions of dollars from Warren Buffet.
Very slow posting week ahead, at least until Gnomedex, but I have to congratulate Rafat Ali for his scoring an investment from Alan Patricof and his new firm, Greycroft Partners. PaidContent has been one of the first blogs I have started reading 3 years ago, and I have always appreciated Rafat's unique take on the world of media, old and new. Rafat offered the following comment on the (undisclosed amount of) funding he received:
ContentNext Media, the parent company of our three sites – paidContent.org, MocoNews.net and ContentSutra — has received its first round of investment from Alan Patricof’s new venture firm Greycroft Partners. [...]
Alan, as most of you know, has helped define the venture-capital industry in the U.S., having helped provide early stage financing for companies such as Apple, AOL, New York Magazine, Audible, Cellular Communications, NTL, Office Depot, Harman Intl. and more recently Zinio, Handmark and The Newsmarket. He is a co-founder of Apax Partners, a private investment firm he started in 1969 that has now evolved into one of the largest PE firms with more than $20 billion under management and advice.
Greycroft is his vehicle for going back to his roots: investing in startups at the intersection of techology and media. Alan’s team approached me in January, and when I met him in New York later that month, within 20 minutes of us talking, he instinctively got it … the issues, the challenges, the opportunities … that’s what amazed me. Out of everyone hovering around us (and I really mean everyone), this made the most sense.
Our opportunity is to take some money, organize and solidify, choose the right partners, and expand/accelerate what we’re doing. In the end, keep our heads down and keep doing what we do best: write, report, bring the industry together to discuss and help them do business…in other words, keeping it real.
It is an awesome development for Rafat, Staci Kramer and their colleagues, and I wish them the best in scaling their operation. It is also amusing that Rafat's announcement comes just a week after his close friend Om Malik disclosed his own financing of GigaOmniMedia Inc. The Wall Street Journal Online has more on the story.
[Photo credit: JD Lasica]
Tags: paidcontent
Busy week: another of my recent investments was announced this morning. I have joined First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman and my Search SIG co-chair Dave Mc Clure as founding investor of Mashery, Inc., a software infrastructure startup. We will actually not disclose much more than what Oren Michels, the CEO, has mentioned on his blog– but the company is essentially developing a much needed piece of functionality of the web services and mashups economy.
Our Mashery will be a resource for developers, API providers and mashup users. Over the next six months, we will release a range of services that will make it easier to develop, deploy and use mashups and other "user generated services"
I am excited to work with Oren again, who was the VP of Business Development of Feedster – of which Josh, Dave and I all were Angel investors.
Just to clarify by the way: it just so happens that four investments closed in the same week (last week, and yes there is one more to announce), but they have all been progressing at different pace and speeds over the past few weeks. The fact that they all closed within a few days of each others is pure coincidence. Don’t start assuming that I am doing 4 investments per week 
. And if you check out Josh’s post announcing his investment, you’ll see that he has been pretty darn busy as well.
Tags: mashery
A few days ago, Don Dodge reported on a panel he did at TiECon East with KP's Ajit Nazre, during which Ajit mentioned the 7 rules that enterprise software startups must meet in order to be considered for an investment:
Friend Jeff Nolan reminded me that these rules were actually introduced by Ray Lane, a Kleiner Perkins Partner, during his keynote of MR Rangaswami's conference, Software 2006. I actually recommend listening to the podcast and reading through the presentation.
What is interesting is that these rules seemed to be focusing on enterprise software companies, and upon reading them they were really fitting consumer-facing services. Yet another data point showing that Consumer and Enterprise 2.0 are getting closer and closer in the way they are built and marketed. Ben Barren from down under had a similar thought.
During my keynote to the Web 2.0 Irish Conference, I talked about similar things - in the form of the key questions that I ask myself when meeting a prospective investment:
What is interesting is that fundamental aspects like the the Team and the Plan are not covered by the 7 rules, so I would posit that there were other aspects being discussed.
Tag: enterprise2.0
I was meant to mention it much earlier but last week went by so fast! I have joined the investors syndicate behind the Series A of Rapleaf, the startup headed by my friend Auren Hoffman. Rapleaf is looking at developing a comprehensive portable reputation system for Internet communication and commerce - a major piece of infrastructure that is yet to be built, and I am excited to be involved in that project. Matt Marshall has more about the funding, and the TechCrunch review is here.
Another investment that just closed (yes, I have done quite a few recently – more to be announced) is the initial round of financing of Wikio, a European startup that has developed a news search engine bringing together a number of functionality included in Google News, Topix.net, Digg and Memeorandum. I had written about it when the service entered a closed beta (and before I investigated a potential investment). It is now open to everyone… who speaks French. The English, German, Spanish and Italian versions of the service will be available later in the summer. I am pleased to do join my friends Loic Le Meur and Martin Varsavsky in this syndicate, backing Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo that he sold to Yahoo in 2004 for $600M) and a great product team led by Wikio founder Laurent Binard.
Just saw this on my friend Brad Feld's blog: NewsGator for Windows Mobile Beta Available, and decided to give it a try.
To be honest, I am not too sure that I want to be hooked to my Cingular 8125 much more than I already am, but I might like to check a few feeds every now and then.
You can download the program through a Windows EXE file that installs a .cab on your device, or you can download the .cab directly on your phone. A few remarks about the (beta) product:
Don't get me wrong though, it is a good first step and without these navigation glitches, that product is going to be very useful. I just hope that it will be priced more sensibly than the previous Mobile HTML reader that was bundled with a lot of other things, which made it too expensive given the functionality.
Wassup with you people ? After Scoble, Penchina, Fletcher and Tara Hunt who left their gigs to start new adventures, it is the turn of da man – Om Malik – to leave his full time editor position at Business 2.0 in order to focus on GigaOM – his renowned blog – and turn it into a business. He will be supported by Phil Black from True Ventures, a new VC firm co-founded by Phil who was also involved in Blacksmith Capital, an investor in Automattic and Sphere.
Because many things in the Valley start when hanging out, let’s get back to the genesis of that hopefully very fruitful relationship.
T’was a nice dinner at Tony Conrad (CEO of Sphere, ex-VC backer of Oddpost, and good friend of mine) that saw Om and Phil meet for the first time – as shown by this picture taken by Flickr’s Caterina Fake featuring Tony, yours truly, Phil and Om (though Phil is paying more attention to his Crackberry than Om – but that is a common trait of many of us).
It is amusing that I was a (clueless) witness of that encounter as Om and I had discussed about what it would mean to turn GigaOM into a full time business. I am really happy for Om who is an awesome dude, and a good friend, and I look forward to seeing him working his tail off the evolutions of GigaOM.
Of note: for someone who scooped so many news, he got punk’ed by Valleywag. Hilarious.
Matt Marshall has a nice background piece following a discussion he had earlier tonight with Om. Can’t help wondering when Matt will start itching 
. Note that Matt was also at that dinner, as this other picture of Caterina shows (Matt is on Om's left).
Mike is reflecting on his first year writing TechCrunch, which is just a tremendous example of the power blogs give to individual voices. A year ago, that ex-lawyer dude started a site to review Web 2.0 companies, and wrote with passion hundreds of profiles and becoming the number one launchpad for the next generation of startups, and large Internet companies as well.
I looked back in my email archive to see when Mike and I started interacting and found our first email exchange, in which he said:
I'd like to put profiles of both up at techcrunch. We have about 500 uniques per day now after being up for only a week and a half.
Both was referring to two of my companies I recommended Mike to take a look at: Buzznet and Userplane. I then offered Mike a pass to attend VerticalLeap, the conference that Dave McClure and I organized, and then turned into the Search SIG (which is taking a bit of a break due to total overflow on my part). We then kept on bumping into each other at conferences like BarCamp, TagCamp and the likes, and I had the privilege of being one of the 15 hamburger eaters at that Sept 15th BBQ party that became TechCrunch One. And then I got involved in Edgeio, Mike and Keith Teare’s startup. The rest is history, as chronicled by our blogs.
Not only have you become a key player in our industry, you have also become a great friend. I have to thank you for both.
Happy birthday to TechCrunch, and looking forward to Year 2!
I came back to my hotel room late last night from a fantastic dinner with great company (thanks again Will) and crashed before checking my feeds. What a tidal wave! The news about Robert moving to PodTech.net has completely taken over Memeorandum (and temporarily crashed PodTech's servers because of the traffic)!
What I find almost hilarious is that Robert’s move has leaked as a rumor that the tech bloggers have immediately jumped on (“Rumor”, ”might”, ”may”, ”will”, ”is going to”, ”50%”, ”100%”), before Robert and John had actually crafted their announcement:
I looked at my cell phone and I think there was a call from Om Malik that I ignored (sorry, Om, I didn't know you were calling about THAT). Then the email started coming in. Oh, crud. It was out.
It also means that the reasons and circumstances of Robert’s leaving were subjects to rumors and supputations, so much so that Robert had to counter most of them in Correcting the Record about Microsoft.
I don’t think that Microsoft is going to suffer the setbacks that some posts are predicting, first because the changes that Robert and the other 3000 bloggers of the company have helped kick in gear are already under way, and second because other bloggers (like Niall Kennedy, yes buddy, yours to fill the gap now) have an opportunity to make a similar impact.
I just spoke to Robert for a few minutes ago to congratulate him and Maryam for the move, and I need to do did the same with John who has scored yet another coup by luring the most well known corporate blogger to his startup. I look forward to hearing more about Robert’s new role at PodTech, but what is clear is that he will contribute to getting podcasting, and I would bet video-blogging, to its next milestone, using his footprint in the both the corporate and consumer worlds to evangelize it.
There will be more news coming in the next few days, especially since we only heard one side of the story (cryptic statement that will make sense later this week). And I can't wait for the leaving party (or parties) that will take place around Gnomedex since Robert's official starting date is July 1st.
Update: Dan Farber reports on his meeting both Robert and John at Vloggercon.
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