I had a great conversation with a friend today (Sree Nagarajan, founder + CEO at social media research platform Colligent) that gave me a new handle on the threat that Facebook poses to Google. We were talking about what Colligent does, which is to allow any brand to measure and track their relative affinity with continue…
A lifetime ago (actually in the mid-1990’s) I worked for an outdoor apparel company called Patagonia, running several of their product lines and leading their first foray into online retailing. The company was (and is) still owned and the original founder, Yvon Chouinard. Yvon is a brilliant entrepreneur who defies easy classification: a gifted capitalist continue…
If you’ve been following our recent investment activity here at Founders Co-op, you know we love social games (e.g., Big Door, Massively Fun) and developer platforms (e.g., Urban Airship, PHP Fog). Today we’re excited to announce an investment that takes these themes to a whole new level: Zipline Games. The mobile games business is exploding: depending continue…
Mike Arrington got wind of this one last night so we’re making it official as well: we’re delighted to announce that Thinkfuse (TechStars Seattle 2010) is a recent addition to the Founders Co-op family of companies. The company is still in private beta so they aren’t saying much about what they’re up to yet, but continue…
I just finished reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (I know, I’m a little late to the party) and among the many ideas now rattling around in my head is that of the “commonplace book“: a 17th Century habit of maintaing a written personal idea log. As Johnson describes in a related blog continue…
One of Seattle’s best (and least-known) entrepreneurs isn’t in the software business. Dave Lahaie is the President and founder of Evergreen Recycling, a global company that matches industrial waste products from one industry with raw materials supply chains in another. By matching waste outputs with manufacturing inputs, Dave’s company saves millions of tons of material continue…
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…