John Cook broke the news earlier this week about our investment in Untitled Startup. Andy led the deal for us and has been closely working with Damon and Aviel for several months now, but I wanted to take a minute to publicly welcome Untitled Startup to the Founder’s Co-op family and share some of the continue…
I’m a data geek and love the idea of mining my personal data for patterns. A while back I got excited about where EMC might go with Decho (their acquisition of personal cloud data storage provider Mozy), but after a rebranding push and some teaser-y PR, they’ve reverted to the Mozy brand and plain vanilla storage continue…
I’m a huge fan of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s lifetime business partner. I’ve written previously about his distillation of behavioral psychology principles for business, but in today’s Slate piece he covers a much bigger topic: where the U.S. economy went wrong and how unlikely it is (given the dominant influence of monied interests on politics) continue…
I’m excited to announce that Founder’s Co-op just completed an investment in Urban Airship, a new mobile infrastructure company that’s making it radically easier for smartphone developers to implement core features like push messaging and in-app transactions. The deal is is a first for us in several ways: it’s our first significant investment outside Seattle continue…
As regular readers know I’m fascinated with behavioral psychology – especially as manifested in software development and user experience design (related posts here, here and here). The most successful web + mobile applications (from biggies like Facebook + Twitter to up-and-comers like Foursquare) are masters at exploiting behavioral triggers and game mechanics to drive customer continue…
Last September we announced our investment in Nearlyweds!, a two-year-old provider of beautifully-designed wedding websites. At the time, we hinted that they were working on some “secret sauce” that would bring some exciting new ideas to the wedding services ecosystem (a $71 billion marketplace, per this snazzy infographic from BridePop). The Nearlyweds team still has continue…
I picked up an interesting factoid this week from AppStoreHQ – a Founder’s Co-op portfolio company that offers iPhone app search, discovery and social recommendations. In addition to their consumer-facing site, the company also owns and operates iPhoneDevSDK, the leading independent community site for iPhone developers. iPhoneDevSDK has over 20,000 registered members, but also picks continue…
I had the opportunity last week to speak at a Seattle Tech Startups meetup. The topic of the meeting was: “Where’s the Money in 2010?”, and I put together some slides describing how Founders’ Co-op is thinking about the early-stage landscape here in the Pacific Northwest. John Cook, a friend and local tech journalist, was continue…
Twitter is a mind-blowingly huge platform for sharing personal opinion. John Borthwick recently shared some stats about the Twitter ecosystem that give a rough sense for the sheer velocity: Twitter: Jan 11th was the highest usage day ever (source: @ev via techcrunch) Tweetdeck: did 4,143,687 updates on Jan 8, yep 4m. Or, 48 per second continue…
Yesterday I shared an email exchange with someone claiming to be Jon Atherton, creator of Wobble iBoobs. Today I received the following comment on that post: see techcrunch – this is my response to their article. I’m afraid you have been duped by an impersonator Jack. 1. Did you call the number mentioned above? If continue…