Skip to content

True Ventures

News

Category Archive for Portfolio

Om Speaks to BC’s Tech Trek

March 1, 2010

This evening Professor John Gallaugher of Boston College and his Tech Trek students visited the GigaOm offices in San Francisco to hear Om Malik speak on founding GigaOm, venture investing at True Ventures, and reporting on the high tech industry. It was a great group of students, who asked excellent questions and many of whom plan to apply to TEC 2010!
BC Tech Trek

Urban Airship Secures $1.1m in Funding

February 16, 2010

Huge congrats to Founders Scott Kveton, Steven Osborn, Michael Richardson, and Adam Lowry for their new round of funding for Urban Airship. We could not be more excited about partnering with such a visionary group. Their traction since starting a little over nine months ago has been nothing short of impressive – 1500 customers, over 100 million messages pushed, and over 10 million devices served!

The official press release is here in addition to the company’s blog post.

With the introduction of the iPhone and Android, the mobile landscape has changed dramatically, creating robust new platforms for innovation. Most of the talk has been about the wave of cool new apps and deservedly so. We seemingly hear about a new app store being created at every turn.

What has received less attention is the underlying software infrastructure required to enhance these very applications and enable them to run reliably and with scale. At True, we are strong believers in the next wave of mobile infrastructure with Urban Airship playing right at the center of this massive opportunity.

We look forward to continued innovation as the company expands across multiple platforms and form factors including the iPad, augments and to some extent reinvents the SMS experience, and brings more rich, relevant content to the mobile user.

More importantly, we look forward to working together with such a great group of entrepreneurs!

Jive Software Acquires FiltrBox

January 7, 2010

Today Jive Software announced the acquisition of Filtrbox. True seed funded Ari Newman and Tom Chikoore in the winter of 2008, and we have worked closely with Ari and his team as Filtrbox developed a market leading product in the real-time social media monitoring marketplace.

We’re extraordinarily proud of Ari, Tom, Patrick and the rest of the team at Filtrbox for this fantastic outcome. Filtrbox will become Jive’s Boulder, Colorado team, and the Filtrbox products will enable Jive to “drill deeper to drive business value from the real-time web with unique applications to bridge related internal activities and market-facing activities.”

This is a terrific outcome for everyone involved, and we’re particularly proud of the way Ari and his team navigated the waters of the social media landscape over the past two years. The team built a robust and powerful product that rapidly distinguished itself in a competitive and rapidly changing marketplace.

Ari and Tom are a shining examples of the types of entrepreneur we strive to work with at True. Starting on day one, they diligently and rapidly built a solid product, launched it early and often, and attracted customers to the platform. Filtrbox exemplified agility, as the team kept their eyes and ears close to their customers and tuned and iterated their sales process and business model to stay ahead of a rapidly growing market.

Ari and his team worked incredibly hard to build Filtrbox, and we really love the way that they always found time to contribute meaningfully to the True Founder family.

We are immensely grateful for the team’s efforts and dedication over the past two years, and we look forward to supporting Ari and Filtrbox on the next leg of their journey.

Looking Back on 2009

January 5, 2010

It was the worst of times. It was the best of times. 2009 was a year to remember.

We’ve been reflecting a lot during the past few days on 2009, and the past year was by far our busiest and most impactful year in our firm’s four-year life. Like the rest of the industry, we entered early 2009 with questions and doubt. It was a scary, unnerving time with venture firms publicly announcing no new investments, and everywhere you looked were reminders or admonishments to let “good times rest in peace.”

Both sides of the venture capital equation, investors (limited partners) and entrepreneurs, were under tremendous financial stress as the world around us all had changed. For True, the timing of the meltdown created opportunity and significant risk, because we had just successfully closed our second fund in September 2008, literally 48 hours before Lehman Brothers failed. Although we were incredibly lucky because we were in a position to invest, expectations and tensions were high given that the financial world had changed so dramatically.

As a young start-up ourselves, we knew that the path of least resistance would be to follow the crowd and play it safe while the downturn worked its way through the economy, but what would be the opportunity cost for that strategy? In order to figure this out, we went straight to the very heart our model: our Founders. After spending considerable time with each of our Founders and their teams, it became abundantly clear that despite the global economic turmoil, our sector (very early stage technology) was undergoing a fundamental resurgence. The largest trends in technology were creating substantial new markets, in which start-ups had significant opportunity, and these trends were minimally impacted by the global credit/liquidity crisis.

Core innovations in internet-based technologies over the previous ten years were beginning to manifest themselves into large segments. These segments included the social and real-time web, cloud computing infrastructure, mobile products and services, enterprise 2.0 and even new computing devices and hardware. Though a prolonged recession and curtailed consumer spending would eventually impact these segments, in reality these markets were extremely nascent, and, in our view, it was time to build for the future.

We thought 2009 was particularly timely for True because of our very early stage strategy. It’s basic, but it’s true: early stage venture capital has a 5-10 year investment period, which means today’s investments are not directly correlated with current market conditions. The idea of an early stage venture firm cutting its investment in 2009 made no sense to us. For example, it just didn’t stand to reason that because the world was reeling from a (severe) housing and credit crunch, enterprise IT wouldn’t undergo massive re-architecting over the next six years.

As we concluded our research, we formed a thesis: our strategy of investing behind truly great entrepreneurs in early stage technology businesses who are highly capital efficient was well timed for the 2009 market.

We took a deep breath and decided to double down. In January 2009, we doubled our forecast for new deals, and we encouraged our portfolio to become more aggressive in the downturn.

For new deals, True closed 21 new investments in 2009, which compares to 14 in 2008 and 10 in 2007. We can be judged by the company that we keep, and we are fortunate to have invested with an incredible group of entrepreneurs such as Tim Young at SocialCast, Peter Rojas & Ryan Block at GDGT, Howard Lindzon & Soren Macbeth at StockTwits and Jack Abraham at Milo.
(Click here to see a full list of our portfolio.)

Simply making more new investments, however, was not enough. We also had a large portfolio of existing companies that could use our dollars to make the downturn their advantage. We set aside approximately $20 million of our reserve capital to invest in the existing portfolio with an emphasis on making the strong stronger. We believed 2009 would be a good time for our break-out companies to further their lead. Many of these companies took advantage of our reserve capital to acquire competitors (who were distressed), grow market share, deepen product teams, and hire sales folks. We structured our investments as friendly bridges to future rounds, as our intent was not to take advantage of the timing to buy more equity but rather enable our strong companies to get stronger.

We’ll know the real results from our actions in 2009 over the next 5+ years, but the early results of these moves look incredibly promising.

To cap off a big year for the firm, we were recently nominated for the Crunchies for Best VC Firm of 2009, and two of our portfolio companies, Milo and StockTwits were nominated for Best Startup or Product and Best Social App, respectively. We are honored to have been nominated by the industry, and we think this is really a reflection of the great entrepreneurs in the True family. Our mission at True is to help make an entrepreneur’s dream come true, and we founded our firm on the core belief that all power, creativity, and energy in the venture capital ecosystem starts (and ends) with the entrepreneur. We have a total of 51 investments in the portfolio, which equates to 92 Founders and 483 employees. This is an incredible group of people, and each of them has endowed us with their faith and confidence. Our Founders are our biggest source of inspiration for our firm, and their efforts and energies are most responsible for our success.

Thank you to everyone who helped our efforts in 2009. It was a very busy year, and as entrepreneurs ourselves, building True has been and continues to be incredibly gratifying.

Now is not the time to rest on our laurels. Venture capital needs more innovation, and we have an ambitious agenda for the years ahead.

We look forward to working hard for you in 2010 and beyond.

Happy company building!

Its All About the Data . . .

December 23, 2009

We hear the phrase all the time and deservedly so given the explosion in digital data. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have helped consumers gain a certain level of context around the data by enabling us to search the past, find out what’s happening now, and connect with our friends.  We are also continuing to see a whole slew of new services that are innovating and providing more context to the end user.

One of the bigger questions that remains, however, is where is the equivalent on the IT side?  The traditional enterprise search market has matured, is consolidating, and primarily focused on structured data.  We believe there is a huge opportunity with the “dark matter” in the IT world, which exists in raw log files generated from web, application, and database servers.  It’s a massive amount of data – in aggregate far more than what exists on the web – that still needs to be indexed, searched, and better understood.  It is data that actually pre-dates the Internet and is as old as any computer system but without any affordable search solution until now . . .

We are extremely excited to announce our recent investment in Loggly, a SaaS solution for storing, reporting, and alerting around log data.  Loggly will provide developers and admins a way to easily and affordably search log data.  The true value will be in being able to correlate data across your back-end in near real time for application debugging, operations monitoring, security auditing, analytics, and a whole bunch of applications we haven’t even thought of.  Think Twitter for your IT machines with the appropriate context added.

Loggly founders Kord, Raffy, and Jon bring a wealth of experience around log data, search, and building great product.  We are excited to partner with them and look forward to learning more about their discoveries!

Also, see Loggly’s blog on the funding announcement.

.

Next

November 4, 2009

It has been almost five years now since Martin Remy, Steve Neiker, Toni Schneider, and I started working on Sphere. For me, it is around 10% of a life. It is also the time when I find myself thinking a lot about a particular question: What do I want to do next?

In 2005, I had the good fortune of being on the founding team of Sphere and joining True Ventures simultaneously. I always thought that I would eventually focus all of my attention on one or the other, but both were too much fun and I guess I’m selfish in that way. As time passed, I went deeper into each role, and I never got around to choosing one or the other. It worked out nicely. True is on its second fund, and Sphere had a successful sale to AOL in 2008. Most importantly, Sphere’s business and team are both thriving within AOL. While I am proud of my contributions to both, the heroes in this equation are Martin, Steve, Toni, Shea Di Donna, Braughm Ricke, Om Malik, Puneet Agarwal, John Burke, Phil Black, Jon Callaghan, Marty Moe, Bill Wilson, and AOL – they trusted and empowered me to pursue both. I am extremely grateful.

As I’ve thought through the question of what is next, I’ve realized that I love the complementary perspectives acquired from building a company as an entrepreneur and investor. They are symbiotic roles, and it is really hard to say which has influenced me more. While my role at True as a Venture Partner will continue to deepen (because there is nothing more rewarding than working with people you admire and trust), I also find myself with a burning need to start another company. I have discovered my formula and doing both makes me happiest.

As for my next company, I’m not sure what the answer to that question is, but I’ve decided that I need to move on from Sphere (now Surphace) to figure it out. This may feel like old news as I’ve been working to make myself obsolete as Josh Guttman transitioned into the CEO role. My decision is easy as I know that Surphace is in excellent hands. I would not feel comfortable leaving if I didn’t believe that Josh was the right leader for the business today. He is a natural leader and has a strategy for the future that I believe is going to accelerate growth for Surphace and AOL. I couldn’t be more pleased for Josh and excited for the Surphace team.

As for my thoughts about Surphace and AOL’s future, I’m more optimistic than ever. We joined AOL at an opportune time. AOL is doing what great, sustainable businesses do every so often – they’re reinventing themselves. As the business model of the oldest and one of the biggest Internet businesses evolves, Sphere/Surphace has become an important piece of their strategy to reach across and engage the web. In the past year, we have had an insiders view into how AOL’s new leadership team has moved aggressively to engage their audience (new vertical focused web-sites; a focus on engagement and not page-views for page-views sake; hiring leading journalistic talent when others downsized; acquisitions in the local content space; shorter development cycles with an emphasis on release, iterate and release). There is nothing like winning, and the AOL publishing business is winning. As a result, I’m pleased to also announce that I’ve agreed to serve as a Special Advisor to AOL Ventures as they reinvent themselves. I am thrilled at this opportunity to evolve my relationship.

I want to give a huge thanks to the people who’ve made the last few years what they were: my family tops the list, an entrepreneur is only as good as their support system and this is my secret sauce. My co-founders, Martin and Steve, who trusted me to play a role in helping them get the tech they invented the exposure it deserved. Toni and Phil who taught me about generosity at a moment when I was able to learn. Matt Mullenweg who opened up my thinking of how a start-up operates. Marty and Bill who have been consistently supportive since Day One – I can’t underscore enough how much I appreciate the manner in which they’ve empowered Sphere to thrive in an appropriately independent environment. They have treated me (and the Sphere team) with enormous respect for which I am both thankful and flattered. The original Sphere team, the current Surphace team, who have embraced AOL. Our investors and advisors who supported and helped shape our vision. The True team and entrepreneurs who have taught me about sacrifice, vision, execution, and the value of pursuing your dreams — and, of course, Lewis Dvorkin, Kevin Lockland, and Bill who paid us the nicest compliment of all in offering to acquire our company and then doing so.

It has been a thrilling, at times difficult, always rewarding, and lucky ride I’ve been on. Thanks to all.

Spectrum Bridge Creates First White Space Wireless Broadband Network

October 28, 2009

Claudville.
The beginning of the end of the rural digital divide.

This is what kept running through my mind as I sat in room 2103 of the Rayburn office building next to the US Capital. I sat spellbound listening to the school children in Claudville, Virginia, sandwiched between FCC commissioners, members of the press, representatives of Dell and Microsoft, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), Chairman of the House Communications, Technology, and the Internet Subcommittee, and, of course, folks from Spectrum Bridge and the TDF Foundation.

It seemed this was the beginning of the end of the great digital divide for the un-served and under-served populations of this country. An affordable, reliable wireless broadband alternative to dial-up for the rest of America.

Spectrum Bridge successfully created the first white space wireless broadband network and connected the Appalachian community of Claudville, VA to the rest of the internet. Utilizing the spectrum abandoned by the digital TV transition, they were able to deliver a reliable broadband wireless connection of around 8 MB per second while transmitting the signal over 1.5 mile between antennas.

This was financially possible thanks to a generous grant from a foundation set up by our very good friends and co-investors at TD Fund. Additionally, Microsoft and Dell provided the computer hardware to run the network and provided six laptops to the school. Finally, the years of a slow, painful dial-up connection were finally over for the residents of Claudville.

While that may in itself have been interesting, it was the way the network was constructed that is truly revolutionary. Spectrum Bridge, utilizing their White Space database and proprietary spectrum management systems, constructed the wireless network over the white space spectrum, which has never been done before. They were able to give a licensed spectrum experience to the students and residents of Claudville, over the spectrum previously used by analog TV transmission.

This new technology from Spectrum Bridge will finally allow rural areas previously under- or un-served with high speed broadband connectivity to be connected at an affordable cost. As I listened to the school children excitedly discuss how this was going to help them in school as well as in life and how the administrator of the school was going to now be able to reach all the students in the outlying areas with distance learning programs, I could not be more proud of what Spectrum Bridge had accomplished.

What others are saying:
Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM

Chris Jacob at Gizmodo

Erica Naone at MIT Technology Review

Congressman Rick Boucher

Lynette Luna at FierceWireless

Simple Spectrum Bridge schematic

The Democratization of Art

October 21, 2009

(Limited Editions x Low Prices) + The Internet = 20×200

It is time to say hello to the democratization of Art.

Shortly after the 2000 tech melt-down, Jen Bekman left San Francisco behind and moved to New York to start an art gallery. She may have left the West Coast, but she could not leave the Silicon Valley state of mind. And then Jen had an idea in September, 2007: (Limited Editions x Low Prices) + The Internet = Art for Everyone.

And what an idea it is – in just two years since bootstrapping a now cash flow positive 20×200, the site has won the hearts of art lovers, selling over 50,000 prints to date, to a customer list that includes artists, celebrities, and respected collectors from around the world. 20×200’s approach is to sell limited-edition prints and photography at prices low enough to attract first-time collectors, starting at $20 for a print from a run of 200. If you want to start collecting, 20×200 is an awesome place to start. Prints are beautifully produced, packaged, and priced inexpensively. If you are an artist looking to take advantage of the reach of the Internet, 20×200 is the place to reach a deeply engaged, large community of new and experienced art collectors.

Beginning of this year, a friend told me about 20×200 and offered to make an introduction. I declined, it is the “Art space” after all, and we all know that Art and venture capital has historically been challenging . . . but I kept hearing about 20×200 from people I respect (Sarah Lacy, Bryan Mason, Anil Dash, David Mahoney) and from Artists who partner with 20×200 to make their works of art available on the Internet (Mike Monteiro, Geoffrey Ellis, Lisa Congdon). When we finally met this past summer, I was immediately wowed by the potential of Jen’s vision to leverage the Internet to lower the velvet rope to the Art world and make collecting accessible to everyone. Shortly thereafter, Jon, Om, and I went to New York, and we met with Jen at Taralucci e Vino near Union Square. When we left that coffee shop, we had the feeling that we had just met the perfect person to disrupt the staid art world.

Today, we are extremely happy to announce our lead investment in 20×200. Of the few industries that have resisted taking part in new media, few are more glamorous than Art. Long the product of mysterious galleries and opaque pricing schemes, art has historically been accessible only to a privileged few. In starting a company, as in life, timing is everything, and it is often said that being too early is the same as being wrong, so we have stayed out of the Art market until now. We think the timing is finally right for a company like 20×200 to make Art available to everyone, and 20×200 is today’s catalyst in ushering the Art market into the digital age.

We are also excited about our co-investors, as we believe one of the first signs of great companies is the type of entrepreneurs and angel investors they are able to get in their corner. Jen has brought together an experienced group including: Caterina Fake (CEO Hunch, co-Founder Flickr), Chris Dixon (Founder Hunch & SiteAdvisor), Zach Klein (Boxee & lots of impressive stuff), James Joaquin (CEO Xmarks & former CEO of Ofoto), Scott Heiferman (CEO/Founder Meetup), David Mahoney (SFMOMA Board of Trustees member & super angel investor), Nion McEvoy (CEO of Chronicle Books & SFMOMA Board of Trustees member), and Brendan McGovern (CFO Meetup).

True strives to work with passionate and talented visionaries, and Jen is the latest great example of the type of people we admire and respect. She is tenacious and her deep domain expertise gives 20×200 a unique perspective that we believe translates into an unfair advantage. We are honored that 20×200 chose True Ventures as an investor, given that this team had no shortage of options when it came to raising their Series A funding.

It is a big idea. One built of a lot of little pieces.

True Partners

October 6, 2009

Guest blog post by Amit Kumar, Founder & CEO, Palaran:

Over the last few months, we met with a lot of potential investors – friends and family, mentors and ex-bosses, institutional angels and, yes, VCs of all hue. A strong team, a robust idea, and an actual business model meant we got a good hearing – and a good shake too. Then came the time to make a decision – who should we partner with to turn our vision into reality?

Today, I’m happy to announce we’ve closed our first round of funding with True Ventures. We’re honored to join their portfolio companies like Automattic (think WordPress), gdgt, GigaOM, Brightroll, and Bloomspot (full list here).

So, how did we make this momentous decision? Here’s what we looked for, and found with True. We thought we’d post the list in case it helps other entrepreneurs, too!

* Respect: Are the VCs ‘pitching’ themselves, as much as listening to your own ‘pitch’? If not, there’s a power relationship here that doesn’t augur well.
* Speed: How quickly do the VCs move? True got back to us in less than 1 working day – now that’s quick (and probably an outlier) – but you get the idea.
* Trust: Does the VC inspire trust? Do you feel they will back you as a founder through thick and thin?
* Openness: Dealmaking is tricky, and things will be touch-and-go at times – do your potential partners listen well? Are they upfront?
* Pragmatism: Early-stage startups are hard work indeed. Will your VCs be pragmatic about when to intervene, when to help, and when to merely observe?
* Experience: Different firms have different strengths – we appreciate True’s deep bench of Entrepreneur-turned-partners – but you might have a different perspective.
* Reputation: Early stage VC firms don’t have a long historical record, but there are clear trends and experiences you can extrapolate from.
* Personal Rapport: Yes, it’s intangible, but it’s critical nevertheless! And, it’s the key to any successful long-term relationship. As they say, choose your partner wisely! ;-)

This is, of course, just the start of the Palaran journey. We’re glad to have great partners, and a solid team to execute on our vision – stay tuned for more! (no, Joseph, it’s not time for us to share yet!)

- Amit

Fortune Favors the Bold

October 5, 2009

I have always loved that quote from Virgil. My partner, Jon Callaghan, and I grew up with that quote indelibly inked in our mind after our years at Summit Partners because that was the firm’s tagline. It is as true today, though, as it was back in 40 B.C. when Virgil probably first said it. It’s a little uncouth to mash that quote with something crude and unelegant as ‘Size Matters’, but those are the two themes which jumped to my mind as one of our portfolio companies, Kurtosys Systems, acquired FundWorks two weeks ago.

Kurtosys and FundWorks are both high quality vendors of financial technology software and services targeting the asset management industry. Do you remember how dark the days were in March of 2009 for the financial world and the financial technology firms that sold to them? It was only six months ago, but it seems like six years. It was during this period that we looked at the portfolio for True Ventures and asked ourselves about how we could help any of our companies complete a transformational event. We had amply reserved capital, and we urged certain entrepreneurs to be very bold during the market downturn so that they could emerge much stronger and larger when the liquidity crisis was resolved and their underlying markets returned.

Enter FundWorks. Both companies are in London (Wimbledon to be exact for Kurtosys); both companies have good customer bases, good products, and good people. On paper, each company is strong where the other was weak. By combining forces, the new Kurtosys has scale, product/services breadth, a complete management team, and the ever important profitability. We provided the financing to complete the acquisition and believe that Kurtosys is set to grow much more rapidly in an industry that appears to be recovering and is in significant need of new information technology to address the business and regulatory needs of a more global and transparent financial marketplace.

Good luck to the new and larger, Kurtosys, and welcome to all the folks at FundWorks. It should be an exciting time for everyone and we are very excited to be partners with you all!

The announcement for the merger can be found here.

Next Page »