Jeff Clavier's Software Only

One of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web. Moi?

Well, I would certainly not have claimed it, but BusinessWeek has when putting together this list of usual, and not so usual, suspects that includes yours truly.

You see, what always troubles me having investors being “celebrated” is that our job is to help and support entrepreneurs, and make sure that the attention is focused on them, not us. Like I said when the list of 13 Web 2.0 Kingmakers was published, I feel that I have been extremely lucky to work with a number of really smart entrepreneurs, some (5) who sold their companies in early yet very profitable exits, a few (4) who failed, and a lot (close to 40) who are still working very hard at it at different stages of financing. But four years into investing in consumer Internet, they - collectively - and I still have everything to prove, especially in these most challenging times.

So thanks to BusinessWeek for the attention, and let's hope that in a few years I will have proven them right. It is obviously very nice to share the investor spot with peeps like Peter Thiel and Paul Graham. And many congratulations to my friends Loic "The Communicator", Ev "The Blogger", Matt "The Publisher", Joi "The Adviser", Kevin "The Poster Boy" and Gabe "The Traffic Driver" for this well deserved recognition.

While I am at it, many people have complained to me, over and again, that I had abandoned my blog. As I explained in this post a few months ago, I sort of have - in an extended sabbatical kind of way - but you can always find my rumblings of all kinds on Twitter.

Tags: evanwilliams, gaberivera, joiito, kevinrose, loiclemeur, mattmullenweg, jeffclavier

At, On and In Seesmic

Even though it is still in closed alpha, Seesmic has started generating a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley, in France and in the Social Media ecosystem. I remember clearly when its founder, my dear friend Loic Le Meur, told me months ago about the idea of a video community that would be able to interact and exchange using short form videos - sort of a “Twitter for Video”. I don't recall if my initial reaction was “Doh”, “Yukh” or “Pfffh”. Then, mid October, I had access to the very cut of the product. It was still pretty raw, or at least medium rare, but definitely showed a lot of potential for creating conversations through short form videos on Seesmic itself, but also the on other services that videos can be posted or linked on. I also saw the initial frenzy - that we are used to - around the release of the first set of keys to access the application, and the increasing number of videos created by the first few hundreds of test users. For a group that size, they create a *lot* of video content, and we can see conversations happening around these videos on twitter, youtube or individual blogs.

So yesterday I was at Seesmic, visiting the office - great space I must say, just a puppy promenade away from Dogster's headquarter - where the previously announced recording studio is being built. This gave me the opportunity to be on Seesmic, in show #40 which also featured the inaugural Seesmic logo, aka “The Racoon”. And finally, on that video, I briefly announced that SoftTech VC was investing in Seesmic, joining a list of prestigious investors.

So thank you Loic for giving me the opportunity of being at, on and in Seesmic! And yes, from now on, you will be referred to as “Number 8”, since Seesmic is the 8th investment of the fund. Those paying attention will point out that I had announced 4 investments to date - correctly so. It is just that investments #5, #6 and #7 have not been disclosed yet. They will at the right time in the near future.

I have embedded show #40 in this post, but if you want to suffer watch the full segment we taped, you will find it here.

Finally, I announced on the show that I had a few Seesmic invites, feel free to leave comments, link to this post or message me on twitter (@jeffclavier), and I will send you an invite code.

Tags: seesmic

Announcing SoftTech VC’s $12M seed fund – the Return to the Dark Side

After 3 years of angel investing in 20+ Consumer Internet startups (and profitably selling 5 of them), I am very excited, and humbled, to announce the launch of my very own VC fund, SoftTech VC II, L.P. Some of you may wonder what is actually the difference between what I have been doing until now – after all I am still referred to as a VC by many – and this new $12M fund.

One major difference: I have taken the step (back to the Dark Side ☺) and have raised outside capital, from a mix of fantastic institutional and private investors. Angels invest their own money, VCs invest capital they have raised from others - as well as their own since it is market practice that Fund Managers also contribute to the fund’s capital. In most cases, it is extremely difficult to raise the first fund of a new firm. Despite great individual track records, it might take a year or two of effort to assemble a syndicate of Limited Partners (this is how people investing in VC funds are referred to) willing to back a new team.

When I left my previous fund (Reuters Venture Capital), I wanted none of that: my passion was working with early stage entrepreneurs, supporting them with time, cash and connections. And since I had zero track record in the consumer internet space, thinking that I could raise outside capital in 2004 would have been a total fantasy. That’s why, like so many entrepreneurs, I decided to bootstrap my own startup – using some of the family’s savings and generating cashflows from a few consulting gigs. It just so happens that the “market” I had decided to enter was early stage investing… in other startups. Last June, serendipity helped me decide, and eventually secure, the next logical step for SoftTech VC. As many friends in the angel and VC community were asking me whether I was thinking of joining an existing firm, or raise my own fund at some point, a few people hinted that they would be really interested in investing in a fund if I was to start one.

A few more discussions and one PowerPoint, later the core foundation of my new fund was there:

• invest in 30 to 40 seed stage startups
• average “bite size” of $250K, ranging from $100K to $500K
• able to lead, co-lead or follow other firms or angel syndicates
• focusing on consumer Internet, but with a great flexibility to enter new sectors opportunistically • open to a few non Silicon Valley deals
• capital efficiency, great teams, differentiated ideas and flexibility on “how big it can become” will be common characteristics shared by the companies we invest in
• working hand in hand with the best firms in Silicon Valley, and the usual suspects in the acquisition gang, to build a successful outcome for everyone involved
• I would be the sole Fund Manager of the fund, with the support of a fantastic advisory board: my friends Jon Miller, Josh Kopelman and Reid Hoffman

The actual size of the fund was the subject of an interesting discussions, tossing around different numbers that all would have made sense: $5M, $10M, $20M,… A number of factors led us (my investors and myself) to decide that $12M was the right amount, and a significant portion of the fund was subscribed in just a few days, with final allocations having been made a short time thereafter. You have two ways to look at how long it took to raise the fund: 3 ½ years of hard work since I started investing, or a few weeks. All this would not have happened without the support and wisdom of the great investors who decided to follow me in this adventure: Jon Miller, Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Geoff Ralston, Jim Bankoff, Mark Fletcher, MR Rangaswami, Loic Le Meur, Brad Feld, Frank Caufield and his firm Darwin Ventures, Tim Chang and the whole Norwest Venture Partners team. And no, I am not naming everyone – some investors want to remain “stealth” and I obviously will respect it. But thanks to ALL of you.

I am used to always direct any bit of attention I get from the media to the real heroes: the entrepreneurs I have the privilege to work with, building great companies, capturing markets and having fun at the same time. I am therefore super psyched to introduce the first four investments of SoftTech VC II. Yes, four. Been busy this summer, between forming the fund, selling two companies (Yay Kaboodle and Maya’s Mom!), and getting these four to the finish lines.

I will write a post about the fund’s investment areas of interest later this week, and want to share a quick background to these new investments:

• SocialMedia.com was co-founded by my good friend Seth Goldstein, and has been building an infrastructure and an ad network targeted at social network application developers. The company will help these developers manage, market and monetize their applications.  After just a few weeks, last Friday’s revenue on Facebook alone, was over $10K - most of which was distributed to independent developers.
• Active Athlete Media’s focus is active consumers who participate in sports, and the advertisers desiring to reach this passionate audience engaged in the sports they love, on thousands of mid to long tail websites. To date, I had been reluctant to jump into a sport-centric community (passion centric communities will still have a strong representation in the new portfolio). However a monetization solution like Active Athlete’s, which has been steadily growing and generating revenues, became very attractive in order to set foot in the category.
• Satisfaction Unlimited announced its funding mentioning me as an angel investor just last week, but I am pleased to point out that it is actually SoftTech VC II that made this investment. I have known the co-founders of the company, Thor and Lane, for a long time, and saw their concept of a People-Powered Customer Service being refined and improved over the course of several meetings through the summer, and could not pass on it.
• Grouply is one of these “The World Needs” companies where one day I decide that a product or service needs a fresh start. There are hundreds of millions of users of message boards, email lists, forums and online groups products like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, and they have not evolved for a long long time. Grouply will help solve that by enabling users to easily adopt a richer and more powerful experience for their existing online groups.

One of the key factors that have influenced my decision to get on this journey is the sheer number and quality of many of the companies that I have had a chance to be introduced to. I feel extremely lucky to have the best job in the world, and to be given the opportunity to take my passion to the next level.

Turning to page 40

It took me a few minutes to start writing something after putting in this title “Turning to page 40”. I re-read the many emails, Facebook private and wall messages, skype IMs, SMSs, twitter messages and greeting e-cards I received over the past 24 hours. I am grateful for all of these, a big Thank You to you all. One of my journalist friends nailed it: “Just wanted to chime in and wish you a great year ... and decade, I suppose!”. A great decade is what I am wishing myself today, I guess for the first time. I only have a vague souvenir of my turning 20, I remember the 30 transition because of the great wines (and the headaches) we had, but for some reason I find that turning 40 is a bigger deal. Sort of not being old yet, but not being young any more. My good friend Reid Hoffman took the same turn a few weeks ago, and I'll have to confer with him on his thoughts on the matter (happy belated birthday to you Reid :-).

This new decade coincides with two other important milestones. One is personal: in 2 weeks, my beloved wife Bernadette and I will have been married for 15 years, and I have to send a big shout and much love to that beautiful, wonderful and wicked smart woman for having put up with me for such a long time. And for having supported my sort of unpredictable career moves - from being a CTO in France to becoming a VC in Silicon Valley 7 years ago, and then leaving the comforts of the “dark side” to launch SoftTech VC, kinda my own startup.

That is my second milestone: about 3 years ago (and a few months), I decided to start this firm and invest my time and our family's money into early stage startups, more precisely consumer internet startups located in Silicon Valley. Web 2.0 did not exist per se then, nor was it as obvious as today that there was a tremendous opportunity to help launch capital efficient consumer services that would leverage a more mature Internet, one that was widely available, and where monetization opportunities were real (at least in my mind). Three years, 25 deals and 5 successful M&A exits later (Truveo/AOL, Userplane/AOL, MyBlogLog/Yahoo, Kaboodle/Hearst, Maya's Mom/J&J's BabyCenter), I am still very bullish about the myriad of early stage investment opportunities that are in front of us. Yes, there are pockets of over-invested areas in the consumer space, and yes, some valuations got me to wonder wtf some investors were thinking (*), but that does not mean that we are entering Bubble 2.0. That's what I am betting in getting ready to make my next batch of 25 early stage investments in the next few years. And I hope that I will have the same sheer luck of meeting exceptional, smart and passionate entrepreneurs - some of which I decided to join and support, and others I wished best of luck to.

(*) I remember distinctly hearing these same discussions when KP & Sequoia invested in Google, and when Accel Partners invested in Facebook. So these valuations do make sense sometimes...

So thanks again to all for your kind wishes, and cheers to the new decade :-). I am off to a meeting with my lawyers now, writing some of the first paragraphs of... page 40.

Photo Credit: Jeremiah Owyang (congrats on the new gig Dude :-).

Tags: turning40

Introducing Kongregate - my first investment in the gaming space

My most recent investment, Kongregate, announced its beta launch last night alongside the closing of a $1M seed financing. I am delighted to be part of a strong syndicate of angel investors, led by my good friend Reid Hoffman, backing gaming veteran Jim Greer and his team. Even though I don’t like these types of analogy, you could argue that Kongregate is a YouTube for casual games developed in Flash (today).

Developers will be able to upload their work on the site – maintaining all IP, rights, etc. – and will get exposed to the community who will review, rate and eventually rank the game based on how much it is being played. They will eventually get a cut of the advertising revenue generated by Kongregate, though in the short term exposure, user feedback and popularity will be the most significant benefit they extract. One of the hooks offered by Kongregate is a set of APIs that allows developers to create contests and statistics that will be saved in the player’s profile.

To date, during the alpha phase of the service, about 300 games have been uploaded.

Users don’t need to be registered to play, but some of the more advanced features like maintaining personal statistics, chat rooms and contests participation are reserved to site members (membership being of course free). In an interview with Red Herring’s Ryan Olson, I mentioned that one of the motivations for gamers is ego/bragging rights about beating a level, hitting challenges and being on the top score leaderboard (the need for consumer services to satisfy one of the seven sins is a notion I learnt from Accel Partner’s Kevin Efrusy) . There is also the opportunity to hang out online in one of the many chat rooms available on the service, where you can interact with other gamers as you are playing.

The screenshot below shows one of the popular games of the moment, The Fancy Pants Adventures (which has been played over 50,000 times). You can also see the live chat on the right hand-side, and if you scroll below the game, you find all the rating, reviews/comments and recommendations about other games that might be of interest.

I have been looking into the different segments of the gaming space for a few months, trying to understand the trends and opportunities that my kind of investing might have. I have been fortunate to meet and discuss with a number of CEOs in the space, including the talented CEO of Boonty, Mathieu Nouzareth, who gave me a great primer on this industry a few months ago. Kongregate was almost the ideal first investment opportunity for me since it bridges the gap between gaming and passion-centric communities, one of my main area of interest. I am very excited to announce that first dip in the gaming space, which has proven to be fascinating so far – even if traditionally it has not been one to generate spectacular returns for investors. We shall see!

I have been asked if users would develop games "for real", therefore increasing the amount of content on the site. My answer is essentially that 1) based on the current set of uploads, we see a lot of amateur game developers uploading interesting demos or actual games, and 2) a user will typically play a given game over and over (and over) in order to beat levels or succeed on challenges. The need to massive daily uploads is therefore less critical than on an audio or video site. Traffic and usage patterns will have the final word on that question at the end of the day.

 

More:

• The official press release
• A great interview of Jim Greer in Gamasutra
• Coverage from TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Reuters,…

Looking back at three years of Web 2.0 investing

Almost three years ago, I left the fund I was a general partner of and decided to switch my investment focus from mid-stage enterprise software to (very) early stage consumer Internet. Dotcoms as they were, since the Web 2.0 meme had not been cornered yet. Since I had limited investment track record in that space, it was clear that raising a fund – may it be from traditional limited partners or high net worth individuals – would be impossible, or so close to it that it was not worth trying. The alternative (like any bootstrapped startup) was to start investing our own cash in some of the companies that were building a new generation of services for the consumer.

Why the consumer? Because I still could not figure out how to make angel-type investments provide any meaningful leverage/return in the enterprise software space, whereas interesting things were being built for the consumer on a capital efficient basis. So efficient that these companies sometimes managed to launch their service and even generate revenues on very limited outside investment - because hardware, bandwidth and (open source) software costs had decreased by one to three orders of magnitude. And since the burst of the first Internet bubble had drastically lowered salary expectations of early stage startup employees, overall startup costs decreased to a point that a friends and family, or angel, financing of a few hundreds of thousands dollars allowed a company to reach a number of key milestones.

Three years ago, we were busy inviting the same group of friends to a bunch of social networks. Some people were reading blogs directly on web sites or through the first generation of feed aggregators, and all VC bloggers could sit around a dining table. My initial interest in user generated content – text, pictures, audio and the very beginnings of video – led to my involvement in Buzznet (photo sharing), Truveo (video search) and Feedster (RSS search). Around the same time, I came across Userplane (private instant messaging network) for the first time – but did not engage for almost a year. I also made a conscious decision to attend a lot of conferences, events and other geek dinners. This allowed me to meet casually a number of the CEOs I would end up investing in: Dogster’s Ted Rheingold, Edgeio’s Keith Teare, Rapleaf’s Auren Hoffman,… And this blog – started in June 2004 – led me to meet another group of entrepreneurs: Kaboodle’s Manish Chandra, Maya’s Mom’s Ann Crady and Wikio’s Pierre Chappaz just to name a few. A large number of deals also came through referrals from angel investors or firms I have worked with several times.

And then there is the strategy that brings it altogether, putting each companies in a nice set of well defined buckets. I started with 3 buckets: Search, Social Media, Infrastructure. And evolved each bucket with the investments I made, and the ones I passed on. But that will be the subject of other posts in the next couple of days.

The slide below is a list of the companies I have invested in, most in cash, a few in kind, sometimes both. I have also listed two advisory boards I am/was part of: Netvibes, that I met a few days after they had closed their angel round, and MyBlogLog, that was acquired by Yahoo in January 2007 before we closed the angel round that was in the works. Were also acquired – by AOL – Truveo and Userplane, respectively in January and August 2006.

It is common practice for startups these days to keep a stealthy profile even several months after raising a round of financing, and this has delayed the (almost) full disclosure of my portfolio until… tonight. I want to point out however that I have always made these disclosure in private when required, for example when an entrepreneur has contacted me about a company that would be overlapping or competitive to one of  mine.

PS: Peter Rip has an interesting piece: Web 2.0 - Over and Out, in which he suggests that the Web 2.0 hype has peaked, and now the real work begins. We'll also address that aspect in future posts.

No I never left the building, I was just busy working in the basement

My friend and European VC blogger Fred Destin made an amusing comment in one of his blog entries: Jeff Clavier has left the building, following a discussion I had had with Rick Segal at StartupCamp in the midst of the three sessions I led that day. I basically told Rick that I was in need of recapturing part of my life/time and blogging - both reading and writing - had been the elected victim. So yes, and I have to apologize to my readers, I had largely left the building because of a number of (good) things going on with my portfolio companies and my own business. And my reading had been limited to a few feeds (TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, PaidContent) integrated in my Netvibes home page, providing me with the key info regarding my industry.

So thanks to all having emailed me, or blogged, about their concerns: all is well, just incredibly busy with my work, investing and then working with my companies, as well as spending a lot of time speaking at, and attending, conferences. Just as a reference point, four of my investments officially launched their service in the past 10 days.

Oh yeah, and when you are busy and try and make so many things at the same time, you f..k up, like I did last week: I was getting out of my car - on the phone with a company, typing an email (on the phone) to another, and picked up my bag which was in the trunk of my car. In said bag, which was open because I got a call as I was taking something off of it and forgot to close it, my 3 month old MacBook Pro - which flew off the bag to implode on the floor of the parking lot of my office. Fixing the Mac would have cost about $1,500 so decided to get the brand new MacBook Pro for just a bit more money: faster, larger disk and most importantly: it does not burn your b...s when you are using the machine on your lap. The only downside is that Apple seems to have changed the keyboard which now has a very bizarre touch when you type, and makes an annoying squeeky noise.

AOL acquires Userplane to expand AIM network

A brief interruption of my holiday schedule to announce a great news: portfolio co Userplane has been acquired by AOL LLC a couple of weeks ago, and I just heard that the official press release is now up there. I started working with the three founders of the company, Mike Jones, Nate Thelen and Jave Hall, over a year ago, and it is really with delight that I am congratulating them, and the whole team, for such a great outcome (that I will not give any detail about, as AOL has elected not to disclose any financial information about the deal). So let’s just say: a great outcome for all involved.

Userplane is in the business of powering online communities with a suite of communication tools: Instant Messaging, Chat rooms, A/V Recorder – on a white label basis. The original model was to license these tools to very large social networking and dating sites (MySpace, Friendster, Date.com,…), to which a free ad-supported version was added in June 2005. Now, about 120,000 communities use this suite of zero-install, zero-download communication products reaching millions of users in 25+ countries. The ad-supported version recently broke the billion monthly ad impressions, adding meaningful revenues to the bottom line of the company which had been profitable for a long time. A lot has happened indeed since that initial TechCrunch profile.

Userplane is joining the AIM group, inside the AOL Audience Business Unit, and will be overseen by Marcien Jenckes – the head of the AIM team, and Tina Sharkey – who runs IM and Social Media at AOL. Tina and Marcien are both based on the East Coast, but the whole team of 12 – and the 6 or 7 additional resources they will need to hire in the short term to build the business to a new scale, will remain in Los Angeles.

Ever since I met Mike Jones at BlogOn 2004, Userplane’s founders had earned my respect for having built a sustainable business purely on cashflows, without ever taking outside investment capital. They had been approached numerous times by potential acquirers and VCs, and decided to stay the course until the right offer came: a great termsheet, from the right firm, a Tier 1 VC from Sand Hill Road that could really help the business grow. But it just so happens that someone “high up” at AOL had decided that Userplane was a strategic asset, and pushed for an acquisition to happen swiftly. This was a very smart move.

It is always a moment of mixed feeling to have one of your companies acquired. On one side, it is a tremendous achievement for the team, and the just reward for the hard work the founders have put in over the past 5 years. On the other hand, I really had a blast working with these guys – and there is always the question of what (and how much ) could have been achieved by building the company further. I am however really happy for my friends Mike, Nate and Jave - and have to thank Marcien, Tina, Tom, John U, Christine, Stephen, Laura, Mark, Jorge, Jim and Jon – and all the AOL people I have not mentioned – for all their efforts in making this happen. As I said – a very smart move.

Investment of the day: Mashery

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

 

Two new investments: Rapleaf and Wikio

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.

Tags: rapleaf, wikio