How we invest
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
comments
-
Curious Office Companies
Inkd
Inkd is our latest internally developed concept. We raised our $1.7 million seed round on September 22 and are backed by Second Avenue Partners and a variety of tremendous angel investors. We are developing the World's First Market for Original Print Design.
-
CafePress
Cafepress acquired Imagekind in July 2008. CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic. -
Imagekind
Curious Office started Imagekind in 2006 and it is the world's fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale. Imagekind gives consumers limitless options to purchase museum-quality framed and poster art from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists. -
SEOmoz.org
Curious Office invested in SEOmoz along with Ignition Partners in 2007. SEOmoz serves as one of the largest online hubs for search marketers worldwide by providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help make every SEO the best they can be. -
Shelfari
Amazon.com acquired Shelfari in September 2008. Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers -
Fanzter
Fanzter is headquartered in Collinsville, Connecticut and are the creators of the wildly popular celebrity style and entertainment platform Coolspotters.com, which launched in May 2008. Fanzter secured $2 Million In Series B Funding Led By Steamboat Ventures in March 2009. -
Wishpot
-
netConcepts
-
Rouxbe
-
RocketVox
-
FeedDigest
