AllThingsD » angel investor

Academic Social Network Raises Cash From Former Facebook Exec and Others

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:57:13 +0000

New York-based Coursekit, a social network for instructors to manage courses and interact with students, has raised $5 million in a first round. The round was led by Social+Capital Partnership, a firm started by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. Existing investor IA Ventures and new angel investors also participated. Coursekit, which became available in November, was founded by Joseph Cohen, 20, and two other undergraduate students at University of Pennsylvania.

You Sold Your Company, What Did You Buy First? Here's What I Did.

Jason Hirschhorn — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 18:01:48 +0000

Having some money all of a sudden is a weird thing. I’ve always wondered what entrepreneurs do when they hit it. What do they buy, if at all? How do they react to newfound ducats?

Does life become a 90s rap video? Cham’ bustin’ 24/7?

I basically had no money in my twenties.

I was luckier than most, my parents helped with the rent and I had spending cash via the Web design firm I started in 1995, Mischief New Media. My clients were “major” record labels and I designed Web sites for their artists. I wasn’t that great and as soon as the Web started taking off they brought those things in-house. But I had a knack for product development and saw an opening for better uber-music destinations in a landscape that had few good ones. So on the side, I started building music sites I would use. RockOnTV, MusicNewsWire and MusicStation, just to name a few.

I got lucky and five years later sold my company to MTV Networks. All those sites were rolled into SonicNet.com, the biggest music site around at the time. Now all defunct!

All of a sudden, I had some money.

What did I do first?

While in my lawyer’s office I made a copy of the check. Then I found what I thought to be the mailing address of the principal that kicked me out of school before my senior year. I wrote “F*CK YOU” on the check and mailed it. I don’t know if she ever got it. But 11 years after high school graduation, I finally had some closure. Yes, I held a grudge, but now I was over it. It’s a long story of trust, betrayal, power gone mad, evils of authority and not for this post. :-) She represented all the people that didn’t believe in me. Deep breath and now back to the story …

The money. What did I do with the money?

Two things I remember vividly.

First, I called my mom up and said something like this:

Me: It’s done. I just sold the company to MTV.

Mom: Oh, my god! Oh, my god! I’m so proud of you!

Me: Bring every bill, everything you owe over to my place tonight. We’re gonna write some checks.

Mom: Are you serious? (SCREAMING)

Me: Yes, see you later.

So, Mom did just that. And for about an hour that night we wrote checks for credit card bills, rent, school, personal loans … you name it.

Buying things is certainly a lot of fun. Travel, cars, all that big pimpin’ stuff. But at the end of the day, if you can help or give back to those that did the same for you … well, that rocks. It’s a great feeling. More importantly, my mom was directly responsible for my product chops. When I was about 3 years old, she bought me a huge box of building blocks. Simple, made of wood, lots of shapes. There is no doubt in my mind that playing with those blocks shaped my creativity. They made me think about structure, balance, systems and more. She always made sure we had what we needed; she went without and worked hard to provide for us.

To this day, it’s the proudest moment of my life.

The second thing? Well, let me step back here …

When you’re an entrepreneur putting it all on the line, as least with me, I worked constantly. For five years. Eighteen-hour days. Getting out very little. Always thinking about work. Work, work, work. When you have one of these events, like selling, you can go a little crazy for a second. It’s not over, there is more to do to realize the dream. But it’s a moment where you get dizzy for a second. And I sort of reverted back to childhood for a few weeks. How so? I went on eBay and bought what I remember to be thousands of Matchbox cars. Why? Who the f*ck knows. I liked them when I was five years old. My mom used to buy me one a week. It was a good memory from simpler times. Now? I was a man-child with cash and clearly no idea what to do with it.

So, I’m sitting in my apartment and these boxes start coming in. I mean tons of them. Unopened collections of f*cking Matchbox cars. I opened one, took a deep breath and just started laughing. What the hell was I thinking? There was no way I was able to return these. My small apartment was filled with toy cars. What now?

I went out to get something to eat a few days later and I noticed the lobby of my building had these huge bins for a children’s toy drive. I turned around, got the wheely pushcart in the lobby and went back to my apartment. I loaded the boxes of cars up and within a few trips had given all of them away. Mostly unopened. In these digital times, needy kids probably thought … what moron is giving me a miniature car? I want Nintendo DS!

And so goes my few weeks of reverting to childhood nuttiness.

Yes, I ended up getting the car and the home. I’ve bought hundreds of pairs of sneakers that put Quincy Smith’s collection to shame. I’ve traveled to all sorts of great places. I love buying stuff for my nieces and nephew. I’ve pretended to be an angel investor. … And yes, of course, I’ve donated to causes (I’m not totally selfish), mostly having to do with education (see www.cfy.org). But these are the two things I remember most.

So what did you do? Tell your stories …

-JH

Jason Hirschhorn is an entrepreneur most comfortable at the intersection between entertainment and technology. He was formerly CEO of his first venture, Mischief New Media, Chief Digital Officer of MTV Networks, President of Sling Media and most recently Co-President of Myspace. Jason is also an investor in Howcast, Buzz Media, 5 to 1 and other startups. You can follow him on Twitter @JasonHirschhorn or via his widely read Media ReDEFined newsletter (@MediaReDEF or http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=mediaredef)

AOL Officially Adds 5Min to Its Roster. Next?

Peter Kafka — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:25:52 +0000

Here’s the official press release announcing AOL’s acquisition of 5Min Media. Sources familiar with the transaction tell me it’s an all-cash deal at the high end of the $50 million to $65 million range I reported earlier today. So let’s call it $65 million.

That’s a nice outcome for 5Min’s team, and for its investors, who put in $13 million, including Globespan Capital Partners and Spark Capital. (I mistakenly identified Scott Kurnit as an angel investor in the company. He was not.) Interesting that AOL (AOL), which has extensive reach already, felt it needed to invest in a distribution play, but you can read CEO Tim Armstrong’s explanation below.

And perhaps someone can ask him about it if he makes another acquisition announcement in the near future.

AOL ACQUIRES 5MIN MEDIA, WEB’S LARGEST VIDEO CONTENT SYNDICATION PLATFORM

Combination of 5min Media and AOL’s Video Capabilities Creates Powerful
End-to-End Offering

New York, NY, September 28, 2010 – AOL Inc. [NYSE: AOL] today announced it has acquired 5min Media, the Web’s largest video syndication platform.* The acquisition allows AOL to significantly expand its consumer offering of contextually relevant, high-quality video across its sites, increasing the AOL Network’s appeal to advertisers and is expected to further enhance the distribution and monetization of AOL-produced original video content throughout the Web.** Deal terms were not disclosed.

“Our acquisition of 5min Media is the latest in a number of steps we have taken this year to better position AOL to capture the growing video opportunity on the Web,” said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AOL. “AOL is building a video ecosystem for the next decade. 5min Media is the perfect complement to our powerful video capabilities — it provides a missing piece in the AOL value chain that completes our end-to-end video offering from content creation through syndication and distribution to the consumer experience and monetization.”

“AOL and 5min Media share the same excitement about the direction our industry is taking, and our complementary video capabilities make us a compelling fit and an attractive combination for content creators and publishers,” said Ran Harnevo, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, 5min Media. “We’ve seen rapid and successful growth as an independent organization and becoming part of AOL is a natural next step. We’re confident that AOL’s organizational horsepower, combined with the vast library, audience and syndication capabilities 5min Media offers, present compelling opportunities for AOL as well as the content creators we work with and the publishers we serve.”

Leading Video Syndication Network and Library to Enhance AOL’s Properties

5min Media is the world’s leading video syndication network with a library of more than 200,000 categorized, tagged and rated videos from more than 1,000 of the world’s largest media companies and professional independent video producers. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in New York City with offices in Tel Aviv, 5min Media has been named the largest U.S. independent video property by comScore, with more than 20 million unique viewers and more than 130 million video streams (including ad and content videos) in the U.S. in August 2010. 5min Media’s growing network of 800 partner sites allows content creators to reach this audience of targeted viewers across 21 different verticals, including six verticals – Home, Food, Beauty / Fashion, Health, Travel and Pets – that lead their categories, according to comScore Video Metrix, August 2010. VideoSeed, 5min Media’s proprietary semantic technology, contextually matches the most relevant videos with a partner site’s text content to enhance the consumer experience and increase monetization rates.

AOL has already begun to integrate 5min Media’s video content on its sites through a commercial agreement executed prior to the acquisition. “With 5min Media we’ll be able to add more video inventory to our pages. Importantly, we’ll also be able to identify video content holes among our sites, tap our StudioNow capabilities to fill those needs and create a truly ‘demand informed’ video library,” Armstrong said.

Combination Completes Next Step in AOL’s Value Chain

With the addition of 5min Media, AOL will significantly increase its consumer offering in video programming and connect consumers with high-quality video. In January, AOL acquired StudioNow, the premier online platform for quality video content creation and distribution. With StudioNow, AOL has formed a fully functional platform to produce high-quality video content in a rapid, cost-effective and scalable way for both AOL as well as third-party publishers. In addition, AOL is forging exciting new partnerships to provide relevant content to specific audiences, including partnering with: The Ellen DeGeneres Show; Marlo Thomas; The Jonas Group and MGX Lab to found Cambio (www.cambio.com); and A Squared Entertainment LLC to create children’s content featuring Warren Buffett, Gisele Bündchen, Martha Stewart and the late Carl Sagan.

Another Ad Exchange Player: Microsoft Vet Jeff Green Launches The Trade Desk

Peter Kafka — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:30:41 +0000

Last fall Jeff Green left his job running AdECN, Microsoft’s (MSFT) entry into the real-time ad-exchange business. He didn’t go far. Green is building The Trade Desk, a start-up designed to help marketers buy advertising from exchanges like the one he left.

Green has rounded up about $2.5 million in financing for the Ventura, Calif.-based company. Founder Collective and Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures led the company’s first round; angel investors include Josh Stylman, a co-founder of Interpublic’s Reprise Media, and Omnicom vet Jerry Neumann.

The Trade Desk is one of a growing number of “demand-side platforms” that are supposed to help ad buyers grab inventory from exchanges like AdECN and Google’s AdX. The idea is that the exchanges, which churn through a staggering number of ad impressions at very fast speeds, require ad buyers to use specialized software and services if they want to make the most of them.

It’s still unclear if ad buyers and publishers will embrace the exchanges. But investors love the notion, as well as the idea that the big ad holding companies, or perhaps even Google (GOOG), will want to buy a DSP or three. So the market for this stuff is beginning to get a bit frothy.

That’s one of the reasons Green is reluctant to use the word DSP to describe his seven-man company. But given that his team is still building the product and that he doesn’t want to talk about it until it’s up and running, we’ll have to use that term for now. You can get just a bit more info here.

A Father and Son Team That Founds Web Start-Ups Wants to Finance Them, Too: Ken and Ben Lerer Get Their Own Fund

Peter Kafka — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:30:25 +0000

Are you cobbling together a start-up in New York City and looking for cash? Good news: A lot of wealthy and wired people want to write you a check.

Meet the newest batch: Lerer Media Ventures, a new fund run by Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and his son, Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer.

The two men say they’re closing the fund’s first round in the next few days. When they’re done, they will have around $7 million to put into angel/early-stage investments–primarily in New York tech/media companies, though they intend to play on the West Coast too.

If you want a sense of what the Lerers are looking for, check out deals they’ve already done, like Hot Potato, Paperless Post, and GDGT.

Their investors include a number of bold-faced names, at least by tech/media standards. Among them: Pilot Group’s Bob Pittman, ZelnickMedia’s Strauss Zelnick, SoftBank Capital partner Mike Perlis, Hunch co-founder (and prolific blogger) Chris Dixon, uber-angel investor Ron Conway and Lerer’s Huffington Post co-founder, Arianna Huffington.

The Lerers join the ranks of other investors interested in New York start-ups, including early-stage venture capital shops Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and First Round Capital, and a set of smaller funds like IA Capital Partners, Betaworks and Founder Collective.

The fact that the last two funds are directly connected to the Lerers–Ken is an investor in Betaworks (and shares office space with it), and Chris Dixon is an investor in Founder Collective–shows just how interlinked the New York start-up scene is. The same players seem to invest in the same deals, and now they’re investing in one another.

For instance: Check out the investor list for Brooklyn-based Hot Potato, which looks a lot like the Lerers’ group.

Or consider the fact that Pittman once worked with Ken Lerer at AOL (AOL) and now funds Ben Lerer’s newsletter company. Or the fact that Perlis, via SoftBank, is a Huffington Post investor and that former SoftBank partner and current Huffpo CEO Eric Hippeau will be an adviser to the new fund. Etc.

If you’re a cynic, you might call such familiarity overly cozy. And you might worry about the chances for a start-up that doesn’t find favor with the collective. If you’re an optimist, you’d say there’s nothing wrong with like-minded investors who like to collaborate.

No surprise what side Ken Lerer is on. And what about the growing number of people who want to invest in Web start-ups again? Not a problem, either.

“In angel investing, you don’t really have competitors. You go ahead and do your thing,” Lerer insists. “I don’t look at Internet or Internet investing as competitive, generally.”

Fair enough. If anyone feels otherwise, sound off in the comments below.

And in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll note that even I have the faintest of links to this group, though it’s mainly aspirational. Ken Lerer was an early backer of my former employer, Silicon Alley Insider, and I have the tiniest of investments in that company, too.

[Image credit: Tony the Misfit]

Hot Potato Is Ready to Eat: Do Twitter, Facebook Users Want Another Real-Time Chatter Service?

Peter Kafka — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:25:03 +0000

Last month I told you about Hot Potato, one of the buzziest start-ups in the very buzzy “real time” sector. Now you can check out the service yourself. But not really.

The New York-based service opened its doors last week, but it won’t really kick into gear until Apple (AAPL) signs off on its iPhone app, and that’s taking a bit longer than the company expected. Founder Justin Shaffer still thinks he’ll be up and running on Apple’s platform in a few days, but until then, you can check out this video interview I shot with him yesterday, where you can get a sense of how the app will work.

[ See post to watch video ]

Or if you’re impatient, here it is in a nutshell: The service is supposed to let users converse in real-time about “events”–whether a football game, business conference or maybe even a really good house party.

You can already do that on Twitter and Facebook, but the pitch is that Hot Potato will help “curate” the chatter, so you will end up talking to both your friends and interesting people you don’t know–and that’s something Twitter and Facebook don’t do well right now.

If it works, there are some obvious advertising/sponsorship opportunities available for the service: The NFL could sponsor chatter about its games, for instance. Or someone who isn’t related to the football league could sponsor chatter about the games–since this is user-generated content in its purest form, Hot Potato isn’t required to get the go-ahead from anyone before it creates a conversational stream.

In any case, Hot Potato now has a pile of money to help it figure this stuff out. Last week, the company closed its first funding round of $1.4 million (I had originally reported that it was raising “about $1 million”), and in addition to VC backers First Round Capital and RRE Ventures, the start-up has an array of high-profile angel investors who have pitched in.

Here’s the roster: Super-angel investor Ron Conway; real-time start-up incubator Betaworks; Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and his son Ben Lerer, who runs Thrillist; New York Observer owner Jared Kushner and his brother, Josh Kushner; ZelnickMedia’s Strauss Zelnick; Hunch and Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon; About.com co-founder Scott Kurnit; Facebook executive (and Apple vet) Dave Morin; Boxee’s Zach Klein; angel investor Allen Morgan; and entrepreneurs and investors Scott and Cyan Banister.

Angel Group Likes Lights, Camera and Action of Indie Films

Tomio Geron — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:31:34 +0000

As an experienced tech entrepreneur and angel investor, Rizwan Virk was happy to see a solid return on one of his recent investments after just one year.

But the exit didn’t come from a software start-up or social media company finding a corporate acquirer. Instead, Virk’s quick payoff came from an independent film.

Virk is a member of FilmAngels, a Silicon Valley group whose members back film productions–mostly small, independent projects. Founded in 2005, FilmAngels is made up mostly of tech executives and investors who apply their business and venture capital experience to the filmmaking world.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Loïc Le Meur Speaks About New (and Improved?) Seesmic!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:11:21 +0000

When BoomTown went to visit serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur early last year at his San Francisco HQ, he was stoked about the prospects of his “video conversation” community start-up called Seesmic.

That was especially due to the influx of $6 million into his bank account by high-profile angel investors like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and others.

Fast-forward to today and the entire business plan of Seesmic has been upended, with the video part pretty much junked.

Now, Le Meur is focused almost entirely on his social media desktop client, as well as Web and mobile versions, which began as a dashboard for Twitter called twhirl.

If at first you don’t succeed, dump and change again–the motto of Silicon Valley!

Seesmic has added a lot more Web services to the client to make it stickier, such as announcing yesterday that it would allow users to access and manage Facebook Pages.

The idea behind Seesmic, as well as competitors such as TweetDeck, is to allow users to manage their various social media tools much like their email accounts.

And while the service’s desktop client software has been a focus, Le Meur is also pushing its Web and mobile versions, all in the hopes that the newest innovation is the right one.

Here’s a tour I did of Seesmic’s new HQ and a video interview I did with Le Meur about all the changes:

[ See post to watch video ]

Gadget Gods Peter Rojas and Ryan Block Finally Unveil their Newest Gadget Site: Gdgt. Get it?

Peter Kafka — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:00:42 +0000

Does the world need another gadget site? Yes, say two of the gadget world’s biggest stars, who are launching gdgt.com today.

The site is the work of Peter Rojas, who helped build Gizmodo and Engadget, and Ryan Block, who took the torch from Rojas after he moved on. Gizmodo and Engadget are the best known and most powerful of the new generation of gadget sites, which makes Rojas and Block revered by the gadget gang. That’s why we’ve been hearing about gdgt, in dribs and drabs, for many many months.

But as well known as Rojas and Block are, they’re still going to have to work hard to make a dent in the crowded field. In addition to the two blogs they created, the gadget spectrum includes everyone from staid players like CBS’s (CBS) CNET to rumor sites for Apple (APPL) obsessives, like MacRumors, to sites for real obsessives, like the handful of people who still own Palm (PALM) Treos. (And, of course, there’s All Things Digital’s Walt Mossberg, who bestrides all of this like the colossus he is, and is also my boss. Hi, Walt!)

Rojas and Block argue that their site is different because it’s not going to be driven by editors but by the site’s users, who will gather there to swap info, stories, rumors, opinions, etc. In other words, Facebook for gadgets, though I gather they’d recoil if they heard that. The other pitch, though they won’t spell this out, either: Their site takes a bunch of features and content that you can find other places and presents them in a better way.

There’s a bunch of nifty features, like a gadget-finder that lets you find products via specs instead of brands, and the site seems to be pretty slick. But it’s better if you have a look yourself instead of having me describe it. And gdgt.com won’t really hit its stride until actual users start using it. I look forward to hearing what they have to say about my upcoming phone dilemma: iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre or Blackberry Tour?

But as much as Rojas and Block argue that this is a community site, it’s their names and reps that have people interested in the project. And that’s what has convinced investors to plow money into an ad-supported Web site in an era when the economy sucks and there are way too many ad-supported Web sites.

The duo won’t discuss funding, but I’m told that last fall they were discussing investments of up to $1 million, but ended up taking less than that via a group of VCs and angel investors. I don’t have a complete list of investors, but people familiar with the company tell me that early-stage investor True Ventures led the round, which also included New York-based incubator Betaworks and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis’s name will resonate with longtime followers of the tech blog world: He was one of the founders of Weblogs Inc., which created Engadget as a rival to Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, and hired Rojas away from Gizmodo. Calacanis eventually sold Weblogs Inc. to Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL for a decent pile of cash, some of which I believe ended up in Rojas’s lap.

Click the image below to see a screenshot of what gdgt’s homepage ought to look like.

BoomTown's Annual Chat With Silicon Valley Angel Investor Ron Conway!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:20:24 +0000

BoomTown likes to get together every year with well-known Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway for a chat about what’s up.

This year, Conway drilled down on something he is dubbing “persistent data,” which has all to do with Twitter, the hot microblogging service in which he is an investor.

Because of innovations like that, things seem to be looking up in the tech investing space, he said, and he is even predicting IPOs at some point.

Maybe Facebook, the social-networking site in which Conway is also an investor?

When I talked to Conway last fall, it was a different story, since he had just sent a stink bomb of an email to start-ups he had invested in, as the econalypse worsened.

And the year before that, I spoke with him about a wide range of topics, centering on the need for accountability among entrepreneurs.

Here is my latest video with him and, below it, are the other videos from the two previous years–think of my Conway interviews as vintages.

Ron, 2009:

[ See post to watch video ]

Ron, 2008:

[ See post to watch video ]

Ron, 2007:

[ See post to watch video ]

Here to Save Iceland, Start-Ups: Björk

Peter Kafka — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:27:39 +0000

The econalypse is about to crush a slew of start-ups. Which could make it an excellent time to invest in start-ups. If this logic makes sense to you, you may be:

A very successful angel investor, who conveyed this logic to me this morning from the confines of a very, very nice Manhattan apartment (I’ve only seen views of Central Park like that from an airplane).
Or Björk, the Icelandic sort-of popstar.

More info on the latter: Björk has announced the creation of a new venture fund, named…BJÖRK.

It is “intended for investors seeking investment opportunities in new venture creation and the business development of small companies with the objective of catalyzing the recovery of the Icelandic economy,” and will invest in companies “that create value through the uniqueness of Iceland’s nature and culture,” according to Audur Capital, an Icelandic financial services company that will manage the fund.

It’s not clear whether Björk has contributed anything to the fund beyond her name. Audur is putting up the initial seed investment of 100 million Icelandic kronur, which these days is the equivalent of $826,000. Audur describes itself thusly: “We are aware of risk and social responsibility, and we are unafraid to put feminine values into finance…. If you are looking for an investor or an advisor who can bring not just financial capital, but also emotional capital, we may be just your partner.”

[Image Credit: The TripWireNYC]