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Monthly Archive for March 2009

nice piece on Eric & James, ha…

March 26, 2009

nice piece on Eric & James, hardware capital efficiency and Fitbit on Wired: http://is.gd/p2gS

Start@Spark

March 25, 2009

Our friends at Spark today announced Start@Spark, a seed program designed to support earliest stage entrepreneurs. We applaud Santo, Bijan and the team at Spark for this move. This is a fantastic development for earliest stage entrepreneurs, because Spark is a talented group of people that bring real value to their companies. We’re co-investors together at SendMe, and we like and respect the folks at Spark a ton. They are a welcomed addition to the earliest stage ecosystem, that (in our opinion) needs more capital and attention.

True has long been dedicated to the seed stage model because often, the best entrepreneurs need just a few drops of capital to get started. Smaller checks free up entrepreneurs to think more creatively, because for many reasons, the psychological expectations of a few hundred thousand dollars are so much less than a few million. This creates excellent alignment between investor and entrepreneur, provided the investment fund is large enough that the small check can be viewed and treated like extremely high risk capital. What’s more, today’s capital efficiency means that any dollar in the hands of a sharp team goes very, very far.

At True, we seek to maximize market, product and timing risk to create outstanding investment returns. We do this by investing small amounts of capital up front with people we know and trust. These teams are empowered to take dramatic product, market, timing risk, and to change courses mid-stream, because success is never a straight line.

We think the seed model is essential to reinventing venture capital because it encourages and structurally enables entrepreneurs to take the kinds of risks that our world and economy need right now.

For all of these reasons, we applaud the arrival of Spark to the earliest stage market. This is a great development for entrepreneurs.

Welcome to the group Gerry! R…

March 24, 2009

Welcome to the group Gerry! RT @tonysphere: congrats @gfcampbell on your new gig with Collecta – http://luckyrobot.com/

Bernard Lunn of @RWW spoke wit…

March 17, 2009

Bernard Lunn of @RWW spoke with @mrvelvet about early stage venture: http://tinyurl.com/dkzyz4

Good Sleep Hygiene

March 15, 2009

How much are you sleeping? Do you actually know? What is your sleep quality?

According to Dr. Neubauer of John Hopkins, “We should keep track of our sleep. Many people would be surprised at how little they are getting.” With the Fitbit Tracker, you can track your sleep and more. Read about Fitbit in The New York Times.

Some Killer New Designs to Pim…

March 12, 2009

Some Killer New Designs to Pimp your iPhone, Computer and Your Car Too – Infectious Habits! http://www.infectious.com/

appssavvy CEO/ Founder @appssa…

March 9, 2009

appssavvy CEO/ Founder @appssavvyceo (Chris Cunningham) shares his top 10 Tips for Apps http://bit.ly/1akxIl

Welcome BackType

March 6, 2009

We are thrilled to welcome BackType to the True family. They are leaders in the emerging area of conversation tracking – keeping track of what’s being said by a person or about a topic or article across many different places like WordPress, Twitter, Blogger, and FriendFeed. Mike and Chris have built a great product with limited resources and we’re excited to back them in their ambitious plans to expand their company.

BackType has been getting strong early reviews. Here’s a sampling of people talking about today’s news:

TechCrunch: BackType Gets More Conversation Tracking Features, Seed Funding

VentureBeat: Backtype launches comment-tracking tools, gets seeded

PaidContent: BackType Nabs $300K Seed Round For Comment-Tracking

True Entrepreneur Corps

March 5, 2009

tec-slider-image
True Entrepreneur Corps (TEC) is True Ventures’ first program partnering undergraduate students with some of our portfolio companies for a summer of learning and innovation. Our hope is that this one small effort can build resources for the early stage ecosystem and foster the spirit of possibility in tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.

The application deadline is April 15, 2009. To apply, click here.

Announcing The True Entrepreneur Corps

March 5, 2009

We’ve spent considerable time internally (and on this blog here and here) talking about the importance of innovation for the long term recovery of our country and world. Our team has wrestled with the overall decline in resources for early stage entrepreneurs in the current downturn, and we recently turned to our portfolio company Founders to ask what we can do to help.

We’re introducing the True Entrepreneur Corps (TEC) in hopes that one small effort can build resources for the early stage ecosystem and foster the spirit of possibility in tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.

TEC is a program for 20 college students to join True and our portfolio for the summer. Students will work directly at one of our companies for the summer, and they will participate in a robust program of speakers designed to expose TEC participants to the top trends, methods, and innovators in the early stage markets. TEC participants will be hand picked from universities across the US and matched to specific and identified needs in our portfolio. True covers the cost of the TEC folks for our companies, so for the portfolio founders this is a source of free, very talented, motivated labor. For the students, we hope that our platform can expose them to the world of startups and innovation early-on in their education. Our goal is to provide aspiring entrepreneurs with experience and resources that could impact their career at an early age.

True was founded with the belief that the entrepreneur is the protagonist and creative hero in the technology world. Since our beginning, we’ve made every decision with the viewpoint that the early stage, founding entrepreneur is our customer. While we can only invest in a very few entrepreneurs each year, we believe it’s our duty and responsibility to help support all entrepreneurs in their quest to create a better tomorrow. Creating TEC enables us to do two things: build resources for our portfolio at a time when they’re needed most and provide a valuable service to True’s future customers and our country’s great hope: the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

We have created a new section of our site with additional detail and we’ll keep you all posted on our progress. Please contact us if you would like to participate with this program in any way.

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