Archive for March, 2007
We’re big supporters of Peter Cooper and FeedDigest and I use it on several of my sites. My partner Adrian Hanauer and I even put a small bit of money into the company through Curious Office because I believe in Peter and his entrepreneurial spirit. Try it out! Allow me to just plagiarize his site and tell you all the good reasons you should play with the system:
Show items from feeds on your site
Want a headline bar? Want automatically updating content? You got it.
»
Mix multiple feeds into a single feed
There are too many reasons why you might do this!
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Keep your site updated constantly
With Feed Digest, your site can seem more alive with regularly updating content.
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Show off your del.icio.us items
Syndicate del.icio.us links onto your site
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Create a news “dashboard”
Build pages that present all the latest news on any topic you like
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Let others syndicate your blog
Give your fans code to link from their own sites to your latest blog posts.
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Foreign language / Unicode support
Multiple alphabets and character sets in your feed items? No problem.
»
Digest to Cellphone
View your feeds on any WAP-capable cellphone.
I take a lot of pictures. I share a lot of pictures on my personal site at http://www.kellysmith.com. I post a lot of pictures on Flickr. I even built a fast growing platform that lets users sell images as actual wall art over at Imagekind.
It was with great interest that I met the 19 year old developer and founder of Zooomr, Kristopher Tate, down in San Francisco some weeks back. I was curious about him, his approach and their strategy to compete with other photo sharing services like Flickr. I left very intrigued. He and his new CEO partner Thomas Hawk are really onto something here with their upcoming Mark III release of Zooomr. There are reportedly over 250 new features and they are enabling the ability for users to sell their image as stock.
I’ve long been a Flickr fan and I “believe” that Flickr is also thinking about enabling a stock image sales paradigm for their users. It’s just fascinating that a two person company got there first. I’ve had the pleasure to work with and meet Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield several times and I’m quite certain that he’d be the first to tell you that small, nimble organizations can often be more effective and innovative than big, deep pocketed organizations. In the case of Zooomr, Kris has really hammered the point home. Will I move all my images from Flickr to Zooomr? Well, probably not. That’s because I’m interested in business that I am exploring with Yahoo (another long story). But do I wish Kris and Thomas success and I’ll try the service. They are building a business the way I like to see it done. Lean, innovative, nimble and fast. And I honestly think they are going to be successful. Very successful. Great job guys.
Kelly
Since our latest investment in Shelfari I’ve gotten a lot of emails from various entreprenuers asking how we structure our deals. Well, because we’re small we just don’t do that many deals. So far we’ve only done Shelfari, FeedDigest and Imagekind. There will be more. But we don’t have any pressure to do anything until we find something we’re excited about.
Anyway, I thought maybe this email exchange with a Stanford Law School student could shed some more light.
—————-
Hey Jon,
Thanks for writing.
Our investment is all private equity so we don’t have the same stringent requirements as a traditional VC fund as it relates to size of investments. But, in general it’s somewhere between $25,000 - $250,000.
The terms of our investment vary too depending on whether there is already a lead investor. For example, I recently invested in a Series A with Amazon and others.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/305227_shelfari27.html
In that case Amazon led the round and dictated the terms.
In the case of FeedDigest we negotiated with the entrepreneur for all of the things you mentioned.
We don’t have any hard and fast rules. We let our hearts and the spirit of the entrepreneur or team help guide us and our level of enthusiasm dictates how hard we’ll negotiate to get what we think we need to have some adequate level of protection. First round investing is VERY risky so the key thing is to believe that you have some ability to really pick winners. In our case, we’re using a lot of actual operating experience in the technology industry as well as our trusted network of successful tech entrepreneurs to guide our senses. Having a VERY good sounding board of successful technology veterans at your disposal to discuss and debate possible investments has been critical for us.
Because we don’t have limited partners and large pension funds behind us we’re able to have a great deal of flexibility in how we structure deals.
I hope this helps.
Kelly Smith
Founder
Curious Office Partners
76 S. Washington St.
Seattle, WA
98104
MOBILE: +1 206 972 6600
—–Original Message—–
From: On Behalf Of Jon Novotny
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 9:24 PM
To: info@curiousoffice.com
Subject: inquiry from Stanford Law Student
Hello,
I am a second-year law student at Stanford, and I’m writing a paper
for a venture capital course about seed funding firms that invest
primarily in software startups. I am particularly interested in the
innovative software lab model of Curious Office, and I’d like to learn
more about the program than is available on your web site.
The “Approach” page on your web site indicates that when you make an
investment in a company, you provide a variety of resources to the
company. However, the page does not indicate the size of your typical
investment or the terms under which you invest (such as rights to
participate in future equity rounds, anti-dilution preferences, etc.).
Would it be possible for you to share with me more information about
these topics?
I have found no academic articles about combination seed funding
firms/incubators such as yours, and I am excited to be writing the
first article in this space. Any assistance you may be willing to
provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Jon Novotny
Standford
I’m pleased to be able to announce support for another fellow RealNetworks alumn in that we have announced an investment in Shelfari this week along with Amazon.com and others. This article points out the approximate investment of about $1 million. Shelfari also announced the formation of its advisory board, which includes Alex Algard of WhitePages.com; Brad Feld of Foundry Group; Geoff Entress of Madrona Venture Group; Andy Sack of Judy’s Book; and (me) Kelly Smith of Curious Office.
Congrats to Josh and team for a great job getting over this important hurdle.
Well I’m a bit late in posting this but it is true. The first company we developed internally at Curious Office (and where I am the CEO) just raised a pile of money.
The round was led by German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck though there was also participation from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Crosslink Capital.
Seattle angel investors — including former Expedia Chief Executive Erik Blachford, PhotoDisc co-founder Tom Hughes and Second Avenue Partners co-founder Nick Hanauer — also participated. As did the European Founders Fund, the venture firm created by the German brothers who sold Alando.de to eBay in 1999.
Pretty exciting huh? Here’s to a big 2007.
Kelly Smith
