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…
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while (more on that below) but now that TechCrunch and Mashable have let the cat out of the bag I can finally share it here as well: Portland-based PHP Fog has just raised $1.8MM in a Series A led by Madrona Venture Group with support from First 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…
If you’ve been paying attention to the massive disruption underway in the mobile ecosystem (think iPhone, iPad, Android, app stores + platform wars) you’ve probably gotten the message that carriers aren’t what moves the market any longer. Operating systems (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Phone 7, etc) and the app ecosystems they support are where continue…
One of Andy’s favorite expression around Founders Co-op is “GFA” (Get Fucking Aggressive). Here’s a mini-case study on that from the past 24 hours: Yesterday afternoon FC portfolio company AppStoreHQ reached out to Jolie O’Dell at Mashable to get her take on AppESP, an on-device personalized app discovery engine for Android they’d just released to public 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…
I was out for the past two weeks so TechCrunch beat me to the punch, but just before I left town we closed an investment in SPARQCode (the company has been operating as MSKYNET but is rebranding to match their flagship product name). I think of SPARQCode as “Bit.ly for the real world” – a drop-dead easy way continue…