I’ve had this idea bouncing around in my head for a while now – I’m hoping that writing it down will help me see the pattern more clearly. First, a few facts: DST offers $150K in seed funding on ridiculously friendly terms to *any* Y-Combinator company Salesforce pays $250MM for Heroku (or around 80x rumored sales) continue…
Seattle’s newest technology blog – GeekWire – just broke the story this morning: we’re delighted to announce our investment in Highlighter, a social commenting, sharing and note-taking platform for digital publishers (including this blog – just select any text in this post to see how it works). Co-founders Josh Mullineaux, Matt Blancarte and Nate Whitehill continue…
Step 1: From Team + Opportunity to Company Just over a year ago Founders Co-op invested in a new company called Untitled Startup. The co-founders, Aviel Ginzburg and Damon Cortesi, were well-known hackers in the social media community. They knew that social media marketing was headed for the mainstream and had a long list of continue…
Today the White House announced Startup America, a new economic initiative to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. I’m proud to announce that Founders Co-op is a launch partner for this initiative as a charter member of the TechStars Network. Andy and I started Founders Co-op to help the best local technology continue…
It may not be as moving and important as Dr. King’s, but I also have a dream… I’ve been investing other people’s money (alongside my own) in early-stage software companies for almost three years now — not very long in career terms, but long enough for it to have more or less become my professional continue…
Dan Shapiro isn’t ready to spill the beans on what he’s up to just yet, but word is already on the street that he’s rounded up a great group of folks to back him on his next venture: Sparkbuy. Dan was previously CEO of Ontela, acquired by Photobucket about a year ago). We think the continue…
When it rains, it pours… TechCrunch just broke the news of our investment in Estately alongside 500 Startups, Founders Fund, Jeff Clavier and AngelList’s Naval Ravikant. We’ve been tracking CEO Galen Ward’s progress for a while and just love how he thinks about building an online business. He’s now raised slightly more than $1MM in continue…
There’s plenty of news out about the deal (see here, here, and here) but I wanted to pile on with a quick shout-out to the Nearlyweds! team on their acquisition of Chicago-based OneWed. The company has been executing like crazy on their core business since we first invested a year ago, striking deals with some of continue…
That quote jumped out at me in an announcement this week from Ireland-based NewBay that they’ve decided to set up their US headquarters here in Seattle. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of NewBay before this news found its way into my feed reader, and I can’t vouch for the quality of their “digital lifestyle continue…
Almost 15 years ago I headed up the effort to build outdoor retailer Patagonia’s first online retail store. About 20 minutes ago the company released its first native iPhone app, offering a full branded retail experience on the world’s coolest smartphone. Best of all, the app was built by the rockstars at Sprella, a mobile continue…