Curious Office currently has 6 companies in its portfolio to include: Imagekind, Shelfari, CoolSpotters, SEOmoz, FeedDigest and Wishpot.
Conceived in 2005, Curious Office was established in recognition of a new trend emerging in web development. Increasingly, small teams using emerging development frameworks, better tools and web services could deploy game changing new applications on small budgets and within extremely short periods of time. Around the same time, the term “Web 2.0″ became synonymous for this evolution and for the ever increasingly popularity of user-generated content that drove all manner of new social networks built on these applications.
Having developed companies themselves, Curious Officer Partners (Kelly Smith and Adrian Hanauer) observed that the traditional venture capital model was often times not well suited to make seed stage investments of just a few hundred thousand dollars - an amount often requested for developers to develop early proofs of concept.
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has since written a great piece which attempts to summarize some of the paradigm shifts that have taken place in technology over the last few years. He writes:
“When Brad and I sat down in mid 2003 to write a business plan for Union Square Ventures, we listed the trends we saw developing in the technology business. These are some of the big ones:
1 - commodization of the core infrastructure of the technology business
2 - community powered development environments - ie open source
3 - software delivered as a service over the internet
4 - a movement toward lightweight web services - ie web 2.0
5 - the globalization of technology development and consumption”
Curious Office was formed to provide seed stage investment as well as assistance in the following areas:
- Software development
- Graphic design
- Marketing
- Business plan development
- Subsequent fund raising assistance
Curious Office has incubated Imagekind internally with its own investment and development staff. Besides this company, the founders have developed other businesses, have raised millions of dollars, delivered countless business plan presentations and have endured all the same challenges that another entrepreneur faces while building their own company. Working with Curious Office, you’ll find we try to help in a very three dimensional way. We help refine the story, we help priortize all aspects of execution and we help with financing and partnerships.
