AllThingsD » Polaris Ventures

Special Delivery for All: Message Bus Launches Email Service

Liz Gannes — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:15:15 +0000

The co-founders of Webshots and Twitter’s early infrastructure and operations lead have started a new email services company called Message Bus that’s already backed with more than $3 million from True Ventures and Polaris Ventures.

Message Bus, which is coming out of stealth today, helps businesses deliver emails.

Web companies these days often enlist infrastructure service providers like Chargify, Twilio, SimpleGeo to implement their billing systems, voice and SMS services, databases of places, and other projects. Start-ups don’t have to spend as many precious resources hiring specialists and building things from scratch that aren’t their main product, and afterwards can more easily scale as they grow. Some people call this phenomenon “infrastructure apps,” and many of the providers are themselves built on top of Amazon Web Services.

Message Bus is not the first or only company to apply this concept to email; for instance, there are already start-up SendGrid (see our video interview) and Amazon Simple Email Service.

However, Message Bus aims to be different by providing live analytics about what happens to emails (similar to Chartbeat for Web site monitoring), by not requiring users to set up their own email servers, and by dynamically scaling to match customers’ needs, said co-founder Narendra Rocherolle in an interview last week.

Message Bus is run by Rocherolle (as president) and his long-time business partner Nick Wilder (as CEO). Its CTO is Twitter Director of Operations Jeremy LaTrasse, who had been with Twitter since it started at Odeo until leaving last spring. While being responsible for Twitter’s infrastructure might not always be something to brag about, LaTrasse had among other things built the Twitter system that sends users notification emails, a direct precedent for Message Bus.

Message Bus was founded out of Rocherolle and Wilder’s Start Project incubator in Mill Valley, Calif. Its technology team is currently working out of Pivotal Labs in San Francisco.

Rocherolle said he wants Message Bus to ultimately be “an agnostic messaging architecture,” calling this “Twitter’s road not taken.” He explained, “You used to hear Twitter talk about all these objects communicating– even parking meters are going to have tweets–but now they are much more concerned with the content.”

Rocherolle added that Message Bus hopes to get approval from major email providers to eliminate relaying email through SMTP from certain senders, and to add other forms of messaging like SMS.

Hey Start-Ups! These Guys Have Checkbooks. Just Ask Them!

Peter Kafka — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:19:35 +0000

You can debate whether we’re in a “bubble” or simply seeing “storm clouds.” Or perhaps we’re just in the midst of some harmless exuberance, egged on by Facebook and Google‘s apparent willingness to buy everything, at nearly any price.

All I know is that you definitely don’t see this sort of thing when times are tough: Investors with open checkbooks, piled into a room to show off for start-ups and hoping to land the next Twitter, or Foursquare, or Tumblr. Or at least the next GroupMe.

That’s the agenda for next week’s “VC Demo Day,” hosted by AOL and a bevy of VCs and angels in New York. I dropped by the first one of these, in July, and I can’t tell if any checks got written as a result of the pitch sessions.

But it’s definitely a good place to bump into a lot of deal-hungry investors. If you’re into that kind of thing.

On Wednesday’s agenda: Presentations from Polaris Ventures, Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Rho Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Flybridge Capital and GRP Partners.

Also, free beer. As I recall, the last one had a keg of something pretty good.

What Shall BoomTown Ask the Twits–Oops, I Mean Twitter-Loving VCs–at Chirp Today?

Kara Swisher — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:21:08 +0000

Later today at Twitter’s Chirp conference in San Francisco, BoomTown is moderating a panel titled “Investing in the Ecosystem.”

Or as I like to call it, “How Do You VCs Come Up With Those Crazy Valuations: Magic 8 Ball? Ouiji Board? Darts?”

I have a choice group of dudes–of course, they are all dudes–for the panel, all of whom have invested in a range of start-ups, including Twitter.

They include: Polaris Ventures’ Mike Hirshland, Venrock’s David Pakman, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, and Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton.

Presumably, the group of venture capitalists will give the audience the 411 on what goes into finding, feeding and nurturing the many innovative start-ups that populate the Twitterverse.

That is, until you actually try to compete with Twitter or make some dough without its sanction, wherein all the nice Whos-down-in-Whoville sweetness of the folks who run Twitter turns into the backroom at the Bada Bing with Tony Soprano and the boys.

(You can see Twitter COO Dick Costolo here, in fact, giving us his best Don Corleone in this video interview with MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka.)

The tensions of late between Twitter and the many third-party developers circling it are perhaps going to add some frisson to the two-day event at the Palace of Fine Arts, which costs $469 to attend. Twitter also just announced its advertising platform plan.

The first day is all talk, from Costolo, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams, co-founder Biz Stone and others. The second day is 24-hour hackathon.

For those not there, Twitter will be streaming the event live with the help of Justin.tv.

And, of course, there will be tweets–lots and lots of tweets.

[Sticker image courtesy of Zazzle.com]

Series Seed Documents Legal Guru Ted Wang Speaks! (Plus Get Your Free Term Sheet Here)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:30:38 +0000

BoomTown finally got to meet Silicon Valley lawyer Ted Wang today, which was kind of a thrill since most tight-lipped attorneys run in the other direction when they see me coming.

But Wang–who works for Fenwick & West and is a popular legal adviser to a spate of digital start-ups, such as Facebook, Aardvark and Twitter–has a lot to talk about with the launch of a new Web site called Series Seed Documents earlier this week.

It’s a laudable effort at simplifying the complex–especially since most lawyers mostly like to complexify the simple.

Instead, Wang has made templated but flexible legal documents available for free for entrepreneurs to use in seed-stage deals, and his effort is getting support from the top venture and angel investors in the arena, such as Andreessen Horowitz.

The point: So new companies don’t waste time and money negotiating often unnecessarily complicated–but usually standard–legal papers.

Wrote Wang in a blog post on the Series Seed site, titled “For the Faithful”:

Up until now, various smart people have talked or blogged about reducing the transaction costs associated with seed stage investment without rallying around a particular attack. Of course both entrepreneurs and investors would rather see their investment dollars used toward developing a new product and bringing it to market than toward what are usually routine transaction costs. The problem has been crafting a set of documents that provide adequate protections without being unduly burdensome. While traditional financing documents give broader rights and protections to investors, for a seed stage investment the benefits of simplification in the Series Seed documents outweigh the value of these additional rights and protections…

This endeavor will only be successful if the Documents gain widespread adoption–and that will require lawyers to get out of their comfort zones and think about the trade-offs suggested in the Documents. It will not be easy, but once a practitioner takes the plunge and makes the effort to think through the changes, I am convinced that a well thought-through standard set of seed documents will emerge. Moreover, if folks in our line of business do not come up with a set of documents that enable seed financings at a reasonable cost, the market is going to solve this problem in another way. To quote Gen Shinseki “[i]f you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.”

Andreessen Horowitz, which was the first to agree to use Series Seed Documents, has been joined by a spate of high-profile angel and early-stage venture investors.

The group includes SV Angel’s Ron Conway, First Round Capital, “micro-cap” investor Mike Maples, SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier, True Ventures, Polaris Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Harrison Metal.

For a legal look-see, I embedded the four documents from Seed Series Documents below, which include: A Restated Certificate of Incorporation, an Investors’ Rights Agreement, a Series Seed Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement, and a Terms for Private Placement of Series Seed Preferred Stock of [Insert Company Name], Inc.

And here’s Wang talking about the effort–which he has been blogging about since 2007, actually–at Fenwick’s Mountain View, Calif., offices, with an impressive range of legal tomes behind him:

[ See post to watch video ]

SeriesSeedFormCOI

SeriesSeedIRA

SeriesSeedFormSPA

SeriesSeedTermSheet-1

Series Seed Documents–With an Assist From Andreessen Horowitz–To Help Entrepreneurs With Legal Hairballs

Kara Swisher — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:03:48 +0000

Series Seed Documents, templated documents for entrepreneurs to use for seed-stage deals, will be launched today, part of an effort by Silicon Valley lawyer Ted Wang and pushed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The point: So new entrepreneurs don’t waste time and money negotiating often unnecessarily complex legal papers.

Series Seed Documents was planning its announcement tonight, after briefing reporters. But BoomTown was alerted to the move by a tweet last week from Fenwick & West lawyer Wang that read: “Excited about launching Series Seed documents next week.”

Oops!

The Twitter post has since been taken down (but here is an image of it, below, natch!).

“Who even knew that a corporate attorney would have a Twitter account?” joked Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz in an interview this morning.

Actually, Wang (pictured here) is Twitter’s lawyer!

His practice, which focuses on representation of “emerging companies,” as noted on his Fenwick & West Web site, also includes Aardvark, Billshrink, Clicker, Facebook, Flixster and Widgetbox.

Andreessen Horowitz, which was the first to agree to use Series Seed Documents, will be joined by a spate of high-profile angel and early-stage investors.

“We want to make the process as transparent as possible, which is to say, we want to take all the mystery out it,” said Andreessen. “And it is online for everyone to understand.”

Of course, noted Andreessen, the price for the round is still open to negotiation, but wrangling over typically standard legal issues often hurts deals.

“The big reason we are doing it is that we think for these early stage round, bashing over these terms does damage only brings mistrust,” he said.

Andreessen noted that this template approach is only appropriate for small, early rounds of about $500,000 to $1 million.

“VCs who do angel rounds should be acting like a VC in a VC round and acting like an angel in an angel round,” he said. “The problems come when VCs act like VCs in angel rounds.”

Andreessen said using Series Seed Documents would cost start-ups about $7,000 compared with a low of $15,000 and up to $100,000 in many similar deals.

“It helps streamline the process and makes starting a company easier and more efficient,” said Conway of SV Angel, who is a well-known angel investor. “And cheaper–all in all, it is a benefit to both the entrepreneur and the investor.”

The Guardian's Changing Media Summit in London: No Answers There Either!

Kara Swisher — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:33:19 +0000

On BoomTown’s recent grand tour of Europe, I paid a visit a week ago to London to moderate some sessions at Media Guardian’s Changing Media Summit 2009.

As in the U.S., a lot of the same questions were asked there about when and how the new media business would cross the Rubicon to transform into a strongly profitable and sustainable enterprise.

Via advertising? Subscriptions? Product placement?

“We’ve got to get to a place where we’re going to become an industrialized-sized business,” said one panelist at a session on monetizing such media, in what was a common question.

Well, considering how small the revenues in new media still are compared to traditional media, along with the recent negative impact of the econalypse, even a profitable popcorn stand would be an admirable achievement right about now.

Still, the room was packed at the Park Plaza Riverbank Hotel overlooking the Thames River and Big Ben, as people searched for answers.

One of the panels I moderated had the much-too-vaunted title of “The Future of Media: Capturing the Essence of Reinvention in the New Age.”

The panelists talked about what the media company of tomorrow looks like, as well as discussing the Next Big Thing.

The group included Ashley Highfield, managing director and VP, consumer and online for Microsoft (MSFT); Larry Kramer, former president of CBS (CBS) Digital and senior adviser to Polaris Ventures; Peter Smith, president of GE (GE) NBC Universal’s international unit; and Mike Volpi, CEO of video start-up Joost.

Here’s a video of interviews I did talking about all this and more while at the Guardian Media Group’s new digital-heavy offices in London.

It includes Volpi and Kramer, as well as Guardian-owned paidContent.org head Rafat Ali and the BBC’s tech news correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones:

[ See post to watch video ]

Kara Visits Larry Kramer

Kara Swisher — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:03:54 +0000

I have known Larry Kramer since I was a college student in Washington, D.C., and he hired me as a stringer for the Washington Post’s Metro section–even after I insulted him about the newspaper’s terrible coverage of students. At the time, Kramer was running the section.

Since then–back in the dark ages and after a stint at the San Francisco Examiner–he has spent a lot of his time over the past decade building the financial news site MarketWatch, which was owned in large part by CBS and then sold to Dow Jones (owner of this site) in 2005.

He stayed on for a bit at CBS, working on its digital initiatives, but recently signed on as a senior adviser to Boston-based Polaris Ventures. There, he’ll be advising them on digital-media issues and helping their portfolio of companies.

Kramer has always had a lot of fast-forward opinions about the changes–or, more accurately, the turmoil–suffered by old-media companies in the wake of the digital onslaught. He talks about all that here, as well as making a prediction about the end of search as the big power in the sector.

Here is the video:

[ See post to watch video ]