Jeff Clavier's Software Only

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.

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.

GoogTube is happening for $1.65B - and I understand why Chad could not attend tomorrow's Search SIG

It is all over the news so you don’t need a rehash: the rumors were true and Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65B in GOOG stock. There are several remarkable facts in this acquisition, and I only have a few minutes in between meetings (before meeting a company involved in online video something, just as it happens) to mention them:

• Copyright issues, pirated content and YouTube often appear in the same sentence – and now that Google owns the company, you can only bet that they will be solved one way or another.
• Google gets another foot in content hosting, after Gmail, Blogger and GoogleBase. They are not only about organizing the world’s information anymore – just in case you wondered.
• YouTube will remain a separate operation, even physically, which seems to indicate that the risk of messing up the secret sauce post-acquisition has been considered.
• From a pure deal perspective, Sequoia Capital (which also backed YHOO and GOOG) adds another icon to the list of successful exits they have had. Their 30% investment in YouTube for $11.5M has turned into $500M in less than two years – a 43x multiple, or more if the GOOG stock gets a pop over the next 30 days.
• Now that the leader (46% of the online video market) has been taken out, I can’t wait to see what happens next – especially as Yahoo was rumored to be involved in the deal until the last minute, and I am sure that Fox, Viacom, AOL and the others were not too far behind.

I have had a lot of questions over the past 48 hours regarding the timing of tomorrow night’s Search SIG on The growing online video ecosystem. No, I was not aware of anything going down but I thought it was a good time to step back and discuss the developments of that industry. And I am not surprised that Chad Hurley declined to join us because of "his crazy schedule" . I look forward to seeing you all planning to attend, and have a great conversation about what happens next with Om and the rest of our panel.

PS:

• Best logo goes to my friends at PaidContent
• The official Google statement is here

Mo' money to build a bigger Dogster niche

A year ago (give or take 10 days) I wrote about Dogster Inc. – the maker of the highly popular dogster.com and catster.com – turning profitable, an unusual fate among Web 2.0 companies. It was still a very small business, but gave co-founders Ted Rheingold, John Vars and Steven Reading a foundation to grow their company at the pace free cashflows were being generated. Up until then I had considered Dogster as an amusing parody of other social networking sites, and suddenly realized that there might be much more than met the eye.

A few metrics caught my attention: the size of the user base, the consistent growth, a promising ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and a CPM which was higher than I expected, thanks to an advertising program that was more than pure banner and text ads. These metrics doubled in a few months, allowing the company to scale its operation to 10 salaried employees while increasing its cash balance. The other thing increasing was the list of brand advertisers interested in reaching out to this thriving community of passionate dogs and cats lovers, including the likes of Disney, Target, PetSmart, Clorox/FreshStep, Gap/Old Navy, Warner Brothers, Nintendo and VPI Pet Insurance.

As the company turned in its first six-figure revenue month, it became clear that the small Dogster “niche” was turning into a real business. The economics of that market are indeed significant: 63% of US households have cats or dogs (160M pets total), yearly spending is around $36B, and advertising budgets on pet products are in the billions of USD. It also became clear that the solid organic, and profitable, growth of Dogster could sustain a bit of a booster in the form of an outside financing – which leads to today’s news.

A couple of hours ago, CEO Ted Rheingold announced on the Dogster blog that the company had closed a $1M Series A financing from a roster of angel investors – mixing successful Internet entrepreneurs and experienced investors. As a matter of disclosure, but you already guessed, I am thrilled to be involved in this great syndicate (*). Joining the Dogster board as the representative of Series A investors is Michael Parekh, an active angel investor – and blogger, who in a previous life founded the Internet Research activity of Goldman Sachs. The official press release is here.

Dogster will be using these funds to accelerate the development of new features, hire a number of new employees including a kick-ass Marketing Director, launch a number of new properties in -ster, build new distribution partnerships like the VideoEgg or Userplane one, and more generally have additional means to engage and support our users.

Staying true to the values of the community as it grows 4 to 5–fold over the next 12 months is certainly going to be challenging for the team, but I have total confidence in their ability to bring the company to the next level. Congratulations for the success to date, best of luck for the future.

Now, esteemed reader, give us a hand: think of 5 of your favorites dogs and/or cats, and point their owners to the registration pages of Dogster and Catster.

And yes: Woof!

Oh, I was SO waiting for that headline: “the bubble is back, the new sock puppet got funded”. Greg (Linden), have you noticed the “profitable for 3 quarters”, “positive cashflows”, “making money” mentions ?

(*) Just to list a few of these angel investors: Joshua Schachter - del.icio.us./Yahoo, Adam Beguelin - Truveo/AOL, Michael Tanne – Wink, Jim Young – hotornot, Mike Arrington – TechCrunch, Mike Jones - Userplane/AOL, George Sarlo - Walden Funds, Frank Caufield - Darwin VC, Aydin Senkut - Felicis Ventures, Robert Simon - Alta Partners, Brad Feld – Mobius Ventures,… and more.

More:

• Yes, it is true that Dogster had several funding avenues, and the team elected to only raise a $1M round that ended up being oversubscribed (a lot).
• A great coverage is developing: Matt Marshall on VentureBeat, Liz Gaines on GigaOm, Dan Farber on ZDNet, Bambi Francisco, Tom Taulli on BloggingStocks.
• Rafat is already betting on a CNet take-out. Dude, please let me pay long term capital gains on an exit for once.
• Here is the TechMeme thread.

Bye bye SiliconBeat, Welcome VentureBeat

It is now official! Matt Marshall has removed the password of his new blog/site and has announced the launch of his own independent venture: VentureBeat. He will keep on covering the venture capital and startup world that he had covered with a lot of talent over the past few years - as a newly minted entrepreneur. I had lunch with Matt last Friday and he was both excited and nervous as he was putting the final touches of this launch. In his inaugural post on the site, Matt clarifies his motivation for going solo and some elements of his plans:

On Friday, I will serve my last day at the San Jose Mercury News and will no longer be blogging at SiliconBeat. VentureBeat has become my sole occupation and focus.

My Mercury News colleague Michael Bazeley and I launched SiliconBeat.com almost two years ago, in an effort to respond to the new reality of online media. The blog began as an experiment, taking up an hour or so of my day. Soon, it became much more: Baze and I found ourselves spending several hours daily on a blog that was supposed to be outside of our day jobs at the Merc. Baze, showing more sanity, pulled back from SiliconBeat and has taken a job managing the Mercury News’ Web site. For me, SiliconBeat continued as a labor of love, a way to filter the goings-on of this fascinating place we call Silicon Valley. Yet I was doing too much. So I approached the Mercury News, and told them I wanted to go out on my own.

To my delight, the Mercury News has become my first customer. It will syndicate the content I produce here. It has the right to run it in the paper, and to put it on their Web site. For me, it is a great deal. The Merc is the valley’s paper of record. It is my first read in the morning, and what I do here at VentureBeat is linked with the Merc’s mission. Like most of the people at the Merc, I care about the community in a broader sense. That is why I’m covering things from a geographical standpoint, as opposed to an industry niche.

As I said in my comment on the “old” SiliconBeat: Smile Matt, you are now an entrepreneur like the startup guys that you have been covering. Congratulations for the move!.

Update: in irony, poor Matt is facing one of the worst nightmares of the startup CEO whose service is launching and ends up being taken down by traffic or bugs. VentureBeat.com has been down since this morning, and shows no sign of immediate recovery. I was with David Hornik this afternoon and he could help but chuckle “That's why people host their blogs on TypePad” - which is also going down sometimes, but that's another story.

Tags: siliconbeat, venturebeat

Trends in Venture Financing - 2Q06 Data

The 2Q06 compilation produced by Fenwick and West regarding vc financing trends in Silcon Valley has just been released, and it continues to show strength in activity and valuation. The most notable point, which needs to be confirmed in the next couple of quarters to really be meaningful, is that valuations have grown by a lower factor than in Q106 and Q405. Other data points listed in the report (statistics are provided by Dow Jones VentureOne):

• The Fenwick & West Venture Capital Barometer™ showed a 34% average price increase for Silicon Valley companies receiving venture capital in 2Q06 compared to such companies’ previous financing round. Although this was a significant increase, it was less of an increase than in the prior four quarters.
• The amount invested by venture capitalists in the U.S. in 2Q06 was approximately $6.7 billion, an increase over $6.4 billion in 2Q05 and $6.2 billion in 1Q06. The combined total of $12.9 billion for the first half of 2006 puts the
• The industry on pace for its largest investing year since 2001. We seem to be on track for a $25B to $28B total invested capital this year. Acquisitions of venture backed companies in the U.S. in 2Q06 was approximately $7.1 billion in 92 transactions. This was a decline from $8.5 billion/97 transactions and $8.4 billion/103 transactions in 2Q05 and 1Q06, respectively, although the combined total of $15.5 billion/195 transactions for the first half of 2006 puts the industry on pace for its best acquisitions year since 2000.
• There were 16 IPOs of venture backed companies in the U.S. in 2Q06, of which 10 were health care companies. These IPOs raised $1.3 billion. This was an improvement over 13 IPOs raising $.6 billion in 1Q06 and the combined total of 29 IPOs raising $1.9 billion in the first half of 2006 puts the industry on pace to have its best IPO year since 2000, other than 2004 when 67 IPOs raised $5 billion.
• Just to add an additional perspective, VC funds have raised close to $12B in 2Q06 (and about $18B since the beginning of year), according to the Merc. Two funds (Oak and NEA) have raised about $2.5B each, which tends to skew the numbers, but still, it is a lot of capital to deploy in a market that sees companies building much more efficiently.

These statistics cover a large spectrum of deals, from seed to very late stage. What I can say on the early stage is that 1) there is a lot of activity - both in terms of startups looking for financing, and 2) financing rounds actually closing. I will try and dig more quantitative info for that sector (any pointer would be appreciated).

Congratulations to Netvibes on their $15M raise

I am late to it (been busy with the aftermath of my own news) but I have to congratulate my friends Tariq Krim, Pierre Chappaz and Freddy Mini for closing Netvibes’ Series B of 12M EUR (or $15M). Per TechCrunch:

NetVibes, a Paris/London based company, will announce a $15 million round of financing on Monday. Existing investor Index Ventures joined new investor Accel to lead the investment, which is one of the largest this year for a European company. The valuation was not disclosed.

I missed the angel financing round that involved Index Ventures, Pierre, Marc Andreessen and Martin Varsavsky but Tariq has since asked me to join his advisory board. The growth of Netvibes in users and traffic has been stunning, and I am delighted to be involved in helping build the company.

Actually, Freddy – the COO and future expat in the Valley to build the co’s business in the US –  is going to attend the forthcoming TechCrunch party this Friday. Feel free to look him up and say hi if you want to chat with a Netviber. Or send me an email and I will introduce you to Freddy. Just to make it easy, a picture of Freddy is on the right of this post.

Don’t look for me at TechCrunch VII. Unfortunately (well not that unfortunate), I will still be on hols for a few days when it takes place. Have fun, you all 700+ lucky bastards attendees.

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.

MashupCamp II: Startup Financing - Tips, Tricks and Tales

I have led a session on or around that topic at BarCamp, TagCamp and the first MashupCamp – and was hesitating as to whether I should suggest it again. And then Rick Segal, Brad Feld and I did something slightly different at Gnomedex during which we (softly) critiqued host Chris Pirillo’s pitch on TagJag. The feedback on the session was really positive, just because it gave many people their first glimpse at how investors, Angels or VCs, look at investment opportunities – and how they should be presented.

I am therefore planning to lead that discussion again at MashupCamp II, inviting fellow investors (I have spotted Ken Gullicksen and Peter Rip on the list) to join me in answering the questions that MashupCamp attendees might have on the vast topic of Startup Financing. And it will be an unsession, i.e we’ll probe people joining us on their areas of interest, and will build the content accordingly.

I am not sure yet whether this will happen on Wednesday or Thursday morning. I will update this post when the time is set.

Hope to see you there if you are a MashupCamp-er. Feel free to leave comments on this post, or send me an email to jeff [dot] clavier [at] gmail [dot] com, if you want to suggest questions/topics.

I am also looking forward to the session led by Mashery's CEO Oren Michels (my latest investment).

Tags: mashupcamp