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The Importance of Ron

April 9, 2010

I woke up this morning to see venture capitalist Ben Horowitz and Mike Arrington are focusing on Ron Conway’s importance to the start-up ecosystem. Ron is an angel investor whom I have known forever — there is hardly a start-up that hasn’t met him at some point or the other. I first met Ron in the early days of Google. However, it was during the heyday of Red Herring I really got to hang with him, especially in Tahoe. He was, as he is, still the same — jovial, generous and ever smiling.

While others might focus on Ron’s start-up chops, my most vivid memory has nothing to do with start-ups or his investments. In fact, it had nothing to do with tech. Instead, it is about his charities. When I was hospitalized after my heart attack, upon recovery I saw the image of Ron on one of the walls of the UCSF Hospital. For a minute I thought I was hallucinating. My friend Pooj said I was not. We had a laugh about it — agreeing that there is but one Ron and he is everywhere. Ron is one of the biggest supporters of UCSF and has helped establish what is one of the premier cardiac facilities on the West Coast. In many ways that facility and its magnificent doctors are the reason I live to write this post today. Forget everything else, Ron has taught me the meaning of giving back. It is not how much, but how willing you are. I have a modest goal — to raise $50,000 for UCSF this year. We are well on our way. We have had help from friends like Hooman Khalili at Alice.FM — who helped raise the profile on my tiny cause. Since then he has gotten me involved with other projects at UCSF — and I am a better for it.

To sum up Ron, I quote Peyton Conrad March.

“There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life — happiness, freedom, and peace of mind — are always attained by giving them to someone else.”

UCSF, like many of our esteemed institutions, needs our support, and I was hoping that you would join me in helping raise funds for the hospital. My target is pretty modest: Help them raise $50,000 in 2010.

Make the check to: UCSF Foundation. In the notes area of the check, write “OM/Cardiovascular Research Initiative.”

Mail the check to: UCSF Foundation, UCSF Box 0248, San Francisco, CA 94143-0248. ATTN: Kevin McAteer, Director of Development

If you have time, please take a moment and learn more about heart and vascular diseases, how to prevent them, and how to figure out if you have a problem. Visit the UCSF web site.

~ Om

Join Us For A Glass or Three To Celebrate True’s Best VC Crunchies Nomination

January 6, 2010

As you may know, True has been nominated for a Crunchie Award as the Best Venture Capital firm – you can vote for us here if you like how we operate:

The award ceremonies are on Friday. Prior to the festivities, the True gang will be celebrating at the Absinthe Brasserie & Bar – if you’re in the neighborhood, we’d love for you to join us for a drink – just stop by the bar, we’ll be there @ 5:30! The address is 398 Hayes Street (at Gough).

StockTwits Closes a $3M Round

December 2, 2009

Congrats to Soren Macbeth, Howard Lindzon and the StockTwits team on their well deserved new round of capital.

Mike Arrington at Techcrunch broke the story this morning that StockTwits has added $3 Million in capital from our good friends at Foundry Group with continued strong participation from True Ventures and seasoned Wall Street executive and investor Roger Ehrenberg .

Since launching a year ago, StockTwits has been moving very quickly to build a real time financial media company amid a landscape of transformation within the industry. With tens of thousands of users, StockTwits’ success is a testament to the power of the real-time web, where users customize their experience rather than simply accept destinations as-is. We are extremely happy to see their impressive traction and fast growth recognized.

One of the things we prioritize at True is partnering with entrepreneurs and investor groups with whom we’ve worked with in the past. Thus, we could not be more thrilled to add Foundry Group to the mix. We’ve worked closely with Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre and Brad Feld for a very long time and we love the added perspective and energy they bring to the table.

You can read Howard’s and Seth’s thoughts on the investment here and here. Congrats to all.

Happy Thanksgiving from True

November 26, 2009

As we reflect on the phenomenal and memorable 2009, we’re thankful for so many things: health, family, friends, opportunity, human kindness, and the relative peace of the past year.

One other thing that we are especially thankful for is the sheer creative power of the entrepreneurial mind that we are so fortunate to witness everyday in our business. This energy inspires us at True each day to work harder to fulfill our commitment to each team in which we invest.

Thank you to our entrepreneurs, their teams and most of all of the families in our portfolio for their tireless efforts to move our world faster into the future.

Best wishes for a healthy and peaceful Thanksgiving from all of us at True.

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.

Fitbit to Break Out in 2009

March 3, 2009

According to Condé Nast Portfolio magazine, Fitbit is predicted to be a break-out device for 2009.

More on Friedman, Connie’s got the right take at PEHub

February 24, 2009

Funny how one column can create such a big controversy in venture, and the week’s only one day in.

Connie has a great take on the Thomas Friedman vs. venture capital debate raging over here on PEHub. Thank you Connie!

We’re perplexed as to why so many in the venture business are seemingly against more resources for entrepreneurs. We believe in creative destruction. We believe that the power of a small, very talented entrepreneurial team can topple an entire industry full of the status quo. While we’re not directly advocating the government get into the venture business, we completely agree with Tom Friedman that stimulus dollars would be better invested with early stage entrepreneurs than into ailing auto companies.

Let’s spend some of that valuable stimulus time, attention and dollars on making a real impact on our future: foster innovation by repealing SOX, revitalizing the SBA, creating sensible tax policy to encourage early stage and angel investment. There’s loads of value that stimulus time and attention could provide the early stage entrepreneur.

Your Ideas to Help Us Avert the Innovation Crisis

February 9, 2009

We’re having a quarterly strategy meeting tomorrow in SF (not really offsite but we still call it that). Our team will be meeting to cover topics that revolve around events and activities in the coming year, and what True needs to do to provide better products and services to our customer, the entrepreneur.

Our customers include existing portfolio CEOs and Founders, new prospective Founders, but importantly, our customers extend beyond our family to include all entrepreneurs contemplating starting or in the early stages of starting their own company. We’ve got a full agenda and lots of stuff working, but we’d like your ideas and feedback.

Now more than ever, the early stage needs to be robust. Let’s face it: this is a dark and dangerous time for innovation. The macro-economic meltdown is bad, and even worse, it has the potential to start a devastating innovation crisis. Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay, Google have RIF’d incredibly talented people. Pfizer recently laid off researchers and startups are prioritizing survival. Mainstream VC has grown large over the past decade, and now mostly emphasizes risk mitigation and bigger deals, exactly at a time when startups are capital efficient and money needs to back very risky endeavors.

We need lots of startups funded today because these are the companies will fuel our recovery and growth over the next 5-10 years. When the meltdown of 2007-2010 begins to ease, IT companies of all shapes and sizes will be on the lookout for promising young companies to fill gaps in product lines of fuel growth. We need to foster a climate where the most talented are encouraged to take the leap and start a project today, or are emboldened to innovate in their garage.

All of us can help in our own way, but at True we feel like we have a particularly powerful platform to address this issue, create more opportunity for entrepreneurs everywhere, and build a stronger set of resources along the way.

Let us know what’s missing in the environment that could help entrepreneurs. What products and services can we provide? What elements of the early stage ecosystem aren’t functioning well?

Please comment below or send your ideas to ideas at trueventures dot com and we’ll incorporate them into our discussion tomorrow.

Thank you.

Filtrbox on Web Worker Daily and The App Gap

July 17, 2008

In full disclosure True is an investor in both GigaOm and FiltrBox, but this is a really thorough review of the Filtrbox product on Web Worker Daily.

Also a nice post detailing the company origins and product here on the App Gap.

Congrats to Ari and Tom on a great launch. The app looks terrific and is beginning to get noticed by users like Aliza.

http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/07/15/filtrbox-dials-the-noise-way-down/

WuChess – Congrats Patrick and Chesspark

June 2, 2008

Word just got out on our close friend Patrick’s latest project, WuChess.

Congratulations to the incredibly talented and dedicated team at Chesspark and OGG. We have a sense that they’re about to have an interesting summer with lots of other interesting things to come.

Let the games begin.

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