So much going on at our portfolio companies this week.
I don’t know how just 2 guys – Danel and Jason – do it, but they are everywhere. Disqus just plain rocks for commenting and conversation across platforms. Just this week they:
1. Added GRAVATAR Support – basically all you yutz’s without a face shot can just grab a Gravatar for your disqus profile. Get on it already.
This week, BTR was a Webware recipient. They are in some pretty cool company. Here are the 100 Winners !
BTR also got a great plug on WNBC. here is the video:
TubeMogul
Web Video shows and clip use continues along an insane growth path. I will have a detailed thought post up on the weekend. In the meantime, Tubemogul is rocking and just this week added HowCast to it’s toolset . The product received lot’s of good press this week as well and their blog is becoming a great source of information on web video trends. They are starting to post very regularly so if you are interested in web video trends and developments, you should subscribe to their blog.
Posted on April 25th, 2008 | Category: VC, Venture Capital | Comments Off
I am happy to formally announce my partnership with my good friend and mentor Kenny Finkelstein with Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners . It is an $80 million private equity fund. The head office is Toronto, but I will continue to scour for opportunities in Phoenix and New York as well as summers in Toronto of course. If you read this blog you know how I feel about my hometown of Toronto and the opportunities north of the border.
I met Kenny when he founded Ride snowboards and I was an early entrepreneur with The Gripp. They tried to buy our business and we unfortunately turned it down. Kenny was also one of the founders of GSI Commerce (NASD – GSIC).
We have been busy for sure . The fund is more opportunistic in it’s strategy. I anticipate 5-10 percent of the assets to be allocated towards internet angel and VC investments. I have not had the opportunity to talk much about all the activity. I will be pushing Kenny to post to the KBC blog on deal structure and turnarounds and some different topics. He is an operating and investing magician.
To keep things simple, we have also purchased the General Partner interests of my one year old fund Biltmore Ventures . The investments to date are Lifelock.com, MyTrade.com, vSocial.com, AdaptiveBlue.com and CopperKey. The Fund has been renamed as Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners Internet Fund. We will continue to make investments in the internet space with the assets in the fund.
Too much free shit on the web and too many ‘Business Development’ people. If you call someone business development, you are giving them free reign to social network all day and take meetings. That’s just wrong at this point.
If you are starting a web business today, how about a ‘Chief Revenue Officer’ and ‘Chief of Burn Rate Control’ – that reports to the founder and investors
Too many biz plans with ‘free’ as the basis for building a business around eyeballs that will some day lead to ads that nobody clicks on.
I am not saying that ‘Freemium ‘, as Fred calls it, is dead. BUT, if you don’t have MAJOR VC backing or lightning strikes your genius application, than really, why bother.
I don’t have the energy anymore to start or back a business that relies on building eyeballs first and no click throughs later.
If Wordpress had a ‘Chief Revenue Officer’, someone could at least be ‘FIRED ‘ for not calling me to ask me to pay SOMETHING, ANYTHING (I will pay $240 if someone from Wordpress just picks up the phone and calls me to ask for it) for all the wonderfullnessessisness that this software has brought to me. If they are just expecting to me to pick up the phone and donate, I won’t.
Waaaaay to much revenue being left on the table by Web 2.0 companies and way too many Web 2.0 companies being started and funded without revenue number one on their mind. It is really time to start caring if you are a founder and a VC.
I am just an entrepreneur, investor and consumer so the US Dollar slide has been ‘beddy beddy’ good to me.
As an entrepreneur, there is massive deflation in startup costs. Let’s just call that one GOOD. Shit…GREAT!
As an investor, the massive printing of money has surely crowded the private equity market of late, but I am a small investor and a rising tide lifts all/most boats. I will call that good (at least for me), but dangerous. I believe it’s dangerous because it is inevitable to make way more of my investment choices expensive. I have too much education for me to be comfortable with that, even as a trend follower. Maybe this time it’s different .
As a US consumer that consumes way too much, it has been SPECTACULICIOUS because I have been fortunate enough to be able to afford the fuel increases, travel and leisure cost increases and food price increases and buy more basic goods at lower prices because of the whole ‘China Thing’. A trip to London would probably change my opinion of what is affordable.
Back to the investor thing…who is making the real MONEY off this trade? Can it and/or will it continue?
Today the Canadian Dollar rose to 92 cents. You Americans could care less. Where the hell is Canada on the map anyways. The trend followers have been printing money. There is money in this trade still. The decline may well accelerate. I posted on the trade in February and it has been a good one. With oil still likely to go much higher, the Canadian dollar should follow suit. A simple view, but one I believe in.
The US Dollar is so weak that even tiny Israel has seen their currency – The Shekel – rise to 15 year highs against the US Dollar. It can’t be oil, Israel is the only country in the region without it. The investor in me considers this a wacky thing considering the daily danger of having most of your neighbors hating you. Seems like the last currency I would want to own on a fundamental basis.
While most of the world’s currency are rising sharply against the US dollar, the Chinese Wan stands relatively still. How? Why? Should we care? The ‘experts’ will tell you we should care. The manipulation is masking the deterioration and stress on the financial system. They say something has to give. I tend to agree with the experts, but when?
My ‘tell’ is oil. As oil prices stay strong, there is mucho stress on the system. The price of oil is priced in US Dollars so we are seing a rise in price for sure, but not nearly what it could be. I still consider it cheap and us lucky so far. The Europeans have had a strong Euro so the big price increase has been in US dollar pricing and their currency appreciation has masked the price increase. I don’t trust that one at all, but a trend is a trend.
In China something has to give. By keeping the Wan closely pegged to the dollar, the rising price of oil will surely work it’s way into higher prices for Chinese goods. So far, the ‘forces’ have kept this one at bay.
Here is what I had to say in his comments about what an anti-VC would look like:
“The anti-VC will actually pay you to get in the deal for the sheer joy of the stress and aggravation of building something great. It’s worth it I think.
The anti VC is willing to “whack” troublesome angels and/or hire a hit.
Than, they ask not to be recognized after a successful exit and pays AGAIN for the joy of having been involved.
I may be on to something”.
I have thought further about this and come up with a simple rewards program for entrepreneurs that sweetens the deal on a payoff for the risk of having an anti-VC – whatever it might really stand for.
Entrepreneur Rewards:
Just like Bridal Showers and Wedding Registries, entrepreneurs will register their reward choices at EntrepreneurRewards.com. If the deal is a success, the Angels and Venture Capitalists will be required to buy gifts for the Founder(s) based on their returns.
For 100 baggers – Planes, Homes
For 10 baggers – Ferrari’s, Porsches, Yachts
For 5 baggers – Scion’s, Appliances, Furniture
For a Double – Gift Certificate’s to Apple Store and Chipotle (Long both) .
…Bessemer Ventures and little know Biltmore Ventures (that’s me, Morris and Adam). We are small but pesky people and appreciate the opportunity to make our first fund investment with a few legends. I am double excited as an angel investor in the Company. Here is the deal:
LifeLock Announces $6.85 Million Series B Funding
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Leads Group of Venture Capital Firms Investing In LifeLock
TEMPE, AZ — (April 26, 2007) — LifeLock today announced that it has secured $6.85 million in Series B funding from a trio of prominent venture capital firms led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. LifeLock will use the funding to support the company’s dramatic growth and further its mission to increase consumer awareness and adoption of LifeLock’s guaranteed services.
“We see significant potential for LifeLock given its unique and guaranteed offering,” said Ted Schlein, KPCB partner. “Increasingly innovative criminals, the digitization of society and the rapid growth of the Internet will fuel the need for the effective and sophisticated services that LifeLock will deliver for years to come.”
Along with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the additional investors included Series A lead investor Bessemer Venture Partners and new investor, Phoenix-based Biltmore Ventures.
“This investment provides financial strength that will allow us to sustain our rapid growth and solidify our position as the industry leader in protecting Americans from identity thieves,” said Todd Davis, CEO of LifeLock. “We will use these funds to improve service for our existing customers and to connect with the millions of potential customers who believe they may be at risk of identity theft. We thank Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bessemer Venture Partners and Biltmore Ventures for their investment and commitment to helping us combat one of the fastest growing crimes in the U.S.”
LifeLock (www.lifelock.com) was founded in 2005 by seasoned veterans of the banking, payment, credit and security industries. These individuals have set out to defend American citizens from the onslaught of identity theft at a time when personal information is increasingly compromised through low-tech fraud, security breaches and the Internet. The founders crafted a simple, proactive service that can help prevent identity theft that is offered to the public for just $10 per month or $110 per year. To date, more than 100,000 adults and children have already enrolled in the service.
LifeLock helps consumers to render their personal information useless to thieves, backing up its service with a million-dollar guarantee. Located in a secure facility in Tempe, Arizona, LifeLock is a private company registered with Dun & Bradstreet, Verisign, ScanAlert, HackerSafe, and the BBBOnline Reliability Program, and is a corporate sponsor of the National Crime Prevention Council. Recently LifeLock was named to the Red Herring 200, as one of the 200 most innovative and promising private ventures in the United States and Canada.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Since its founding in 1972, KPCB (www.kpcb.com) has backed entrepreneurs in over 475 ventures, including AOL, Align Technology, Amazon.com, Citrix, Compaq Computer, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Genomic Health, Google, IDEC Pharmaceuticals, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Lotus, LSI Logic, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign and Xilinx. More than 150 of the firm’s portfolio companies have gone public. Many other ventures have achieved success through mergers and acquisitions.
About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners (www.bvp.com) is the oldest venture capital practice in the United States, carrying on a tradition of hands-on, active investing that has continued since 1911. The firm manages two billion dollars of venture funds from offices in Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, Shanghai, and Mumbai. Over 100 Bessemer companies have gone public, including Blue Nile, Ciena, Gartner Group, Ingersoll Rand, International Paper, Maxim, Parametric, Perseptive Biosystems, Staples, VeriSign, Veritas and W.R. Grace.
About Biltmore Ventures
Biltmore Ventures is a Phoenix-based venture firm chartered to grow the Arizona private capital marketplace. The firm provides capital to local entrepreneurs focusing on high-growth businesses with an integral Internet component. The Biltmore team has over 50 years experience as entrepreneurs, investors, architects, and team builders.
. The next reader of the blog to integrate disqus onto their blog and let me know can have a cool t-shirt from the guys. 
