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August 08, 2005
We Just Took A $5.5mm Investment
Why have billions when you can have...meelions...
Good news: We just closed a Series A round of VC financing for $5.5mm. The round was split between two great firms, Avalon Ventures in San Diego and Masthead Venture Partners in Boston. These are great firms and really great people to work with, and we regard them as true partners, not just investors.
I cannot say enough good things about our investors. They understand the billion-dollar opportunity here, but are also pragmatic about building value incrementally, every week along the way. On a recent flight to Boston, Steve from Avalon gave me an essay, How To Start A Startup, by Paul Graham in which he said that aside from certain rockstar VC firms that can bring some kind of mythical added value, “Basically, a VC is a source of money. I'd be inclined to go with whoever offered the most money the soonest with the least strings attached.” It is difficult to argue with that logic, but I think there is one more thing that matters the most and that is the ability to believe in your vision.
Our vision is to build a populist media company. We want to reverse the flow of content, distribute it via a series of overlapping personal networks, empower people as producers, enable them on a location-aware grid and redefine media from something that is produced and pushed to consumers in a series of monetization windows to something that is discovered, added to, borrowed from, shared, redistributed and discovered again all to the benefit of millions of people with mobile-connected PMDs in their pockets.
While it happens to be true that Steve at Avalon was the first VC we talked to and we happened to settle on a deal that we thought was fairly founder-friendly, I think the reason for this is that Steve believes in our vision. He introduced us to Masthead, and the guys we met there, Brady, Rich and Dave, all immediately believed in our vision, as well, and we really hit it off. Once we all had alignment on the vision and the path to get there, it was a relatively easy and quick process to get the cash in the bank. (Around 30 days.) VCs are rightfully a skeptical bunch, so having so many more people around the table who are fully committed to delivering on our vision just added a ton of horsepower.
And there’s the money - that adds horsepower, too, and will help us go much faster now. We have several products in development, we are improving Rabble and have a bunch of relationships to deliver on. I know I mentioned before that we are hiring in a big way, but now we can actually afford to pay people. ;-) We hired three people last week, and we have several more positions open in core engineering, handset engineering, product management and business development. We aren’t building a huge team, but we definitely need more exceptionally talented people. If you believe in our vision and want to join us, please drop me a note.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at August 8, 2005 09:09 AM
Comments
congratulations.
and you have a good attitude towards your investors.
Posted by: charlie at August 27, 2005 01:02 PM
Thanks, Charlie. I would recommend Avalon and Masthead to any entrepreneur looking not just for money but also a really good group of guys to hang out with. I didn't mention it in my blog post, but the thing that really won us over was when the Masthead guys broke out the nice wine for a late meeting we had at their offices. ;-)
Posted by: Shawn Conahan at August 27, 2005 04:48 PM