AllThingsD » SoftTechVC

Start-Up Byliner Thinks the Digital Ink Isn't Dry on Long-Form Writing

Drake Martinet — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:23:16 +0000

There are at least a few of long-form writing’s elite who don’t believe the Internet is out to kill the written word. In fact, they’ve gotten together and built Byliner, a discovery platform for fans of long reads to chat about at their next wine, cheese and turtleneck party.

Byliner aims to become the new hub of authors, fans and the writing that connects them.

To do so, it has collected links and excerpts of contemporary non-fiction of greater than 1,500 words — pieces a reader could get through in a sitting or two.

Then, around the writing and associated metadata, Byliner has built a free platform for discovering other works and sharing them with people both on and off of Byliner.

“We think of it as the Pandora for writers,” said author John Tayman, Byliner’s CEO.

So far, Byliner has raised venture funding from Josh Felser of Freestyle Capital and SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, with a recently closed $1 million seed round.

But it’s not a new model: Aggregate links provide a service on top of the stuff other people create and try to draw a user base around it. That said, it hasn’t been applied to this particular form of writing before.

With a database that now spans more than 40,000 articles, Byliner’s long-term vision is to become the hub for this type of content on the Web.

The site features the chunky fonts, shades of grey and conspicuous white space typically found in a coffee table book about design. Like those coffee table books, the site is also free of advertising.

All of Tayman’s talk of discovery and readability ultimately left open a fairly important question: How will it make money?

That’s where Byliner Originals come in, and where the funding model starts to look a little more like a regular publisher.

The Originals are written works available only through Byliner, purchasable through the site and transmitted to your device, or delivered to you on paper, for a few dollars.

Early figures on sales of the Originals seem promising. A high-profile riveting exposé by Jon Krakauer on Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson sold 100,000 copies in the first two weeks in an exclusive deal with Amazon.

Byliner’s COO Ted Barnett thinks that modern devices have opened a hole in the market — and in readers’ attention spans — that is large enough to cram in one of Byliner’s exclusive works.

“Before [modern reading devices], it only made sense for someone to publish a book that took 10 hours to read,” he said. “But these devices have made the purchase and delivery of individual works of this length possible.”

Still, the site has a way to go if it wants to become a true platform.

As of today, for example, integration with the popular Read it Later service and the usual panoply of social network sharing buttons are all Byliner has mustered in the social category.

But, according to Tayman, Byliner doesn’t have to do much to be the leader.

“Short of doing some power-Googling, there is no other place to do deep cross-discovery around longer articles and writers,” he said.

He said as much, and a little more, about Byliner’s core mission during my recent visit to their HQ in San Francisco’s Presidio district:

[ See post to watch video ]

Fab.com Launches as Deal Site for Designed (Not Designer) Goods

Drake Martinet — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:59:13 +0000

No longer just another pretty domain name, Fab.com launches today as a new deal site for designed goods.

Led by CEO Jason Goldberg, the site’s opening offers are on the sorts of things one might find at a design museum gift shop — fancy plastic chairs, fancy energy-saving light bulbs and fancy signed posters.

With future deals appearing to include personal electronics and apparel, Fab.com is entering a space currently dominated by Gilt Groupe, which offers deals on luxury goods in several categories through its Web site and apps.

In an email, Goldberg said the launch was made possible by a new round of seed funding that included the likes of Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade fund, SoftTechVC and First Round Capital, the Washington Post Company, and Baroda Ventures.

While the amount of the round was not disclosed, Goldberg added that Kutcher will advise the company.

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.”

Debating the "Real-Time" Web at Stanford University

Kara Swisher — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:15:46 +0000

Last night, BoomTown was invited to moderate a panel for MIT/Stanford Venture Lab at Stanford University’s Business School on the topic of lifecasting.

In other words, the digital version of TMI (too much information!).

Called “Lifestreaming: The Real-time Web,” it was aimed at debating the trend toward “sharing our lives with others as they happen,” with three entrepreneurs and a venture capitalist in the space.

The panel included Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of FriendFeed; Seesmic Founder Loic Le Meur; Pownce Co-Founder Leah Culver; and SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier.

It was a lively discussion, which was also focused on monetization–or lack thereof–issues in the instant Internet space, in which users share every detail of their lives with friends and family in a digital millisecond.

Like I said, MTMI (much too much information!!).

In any case, here’s a video I did of the event, including snippets of the company presentations, as well as interviews with all the panelists:

[ See post to watch video ]