True Ventures

Welcoming Apply Financial

Phil — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:35:32 +0000

Cross-border trade is growing rapidly as more companies source goods and services overseas. Most cross-border trade payments are handled through correspondent banking relationships. As volume continues to grow, pressure is being exerted on financial institutions and payment systems to improve the cross-border payment process. Currently, few among us would use the words “simple” and “painless” when thinking of this process, and even today’s “improved” services are really the same old tired business models and approach to business technology.

Apply Financial thinks there is a better way to do business in today’s global economy, and is providing a fresh perspective on e-banking and cross-border payments. Apply Financial is focused on delivering cloud-based solutions that automate complex manual processes. The company’s two solutions—Apply Payments Portal and Validate—deliver simple financial services across all financial verticals to some of the world’s largest financial institutions. Validate, launching today, is the first global payments validation solution to be offered to both corporations and financial institutions as a cloud-based, self-service solution. The payments portal removes the need for costly manual intervention and can be provided as a mobile or desktop solution, cloud-based or in-house.

It’s a bold undertaking to disrupt banking, but Apply Financial Founder and CEO Mark Bradbury’s 30 years of experience working in and running financial solutions providers, from risk platforms to enterprise integration solutions, make him well-suited to the task. Mark knows what businesses need to run smoothly, and he knows how to bring the “simple” and “painless” back to financial processes (he also knows good wine, but that’s another blog post).

We’re thrilled to welcome Mark and his team to True, and look forward to seeing Apply Financial create significant cost-saving and operational benefits for any business making cross-border payments.

Welcoming Runscope

adam — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:52:34 +0000

I am incredibly pleased to announce True’s investment in Runscope, an infrastructure company focused on helping developers build better API-driven applications.

Over the past few years, the number of web and mobile applications driven by web service APIs has exploded. This includes not only the many well-known open public APIs and infrastructure services, but a growing number of private, internal APIs, as more and more companies shift over to a service-oriented architecture. As a result of this shift, there is a growing need for new tools to give application developers better visibility into how their applications are working with the services they rely on.

When we met Runscope Co-Founders John Sheehan and Frank Stratton late last year, many of our companies were hacking together these tools internally—taking multiple engineers away from product to focus on better understanding their underlying infrastructure. As part of our process, we introduced John and Frank to different companies in our portfolio. All of them signed up for Runscope’s service, and many of them are already using the product today.

The Runscope team is uniquely suited to attack the API management challenge. John and Frank were early employees at Twilio, one of the first modern infrastructure service companies, where John was the first developer evangelist and Frank was the technical lead for the Twillio API team. After Twillio, John was the Platform lead at IFTT working with API providers to create new channels, and is a well-known thought leader in the API ecosystem.

Runscope’s initial product offers a solution to a very real pain point, which, combined with the team’s deep expertise, will significantly impact how developers work with APIs. We couldn’t be more pleased to be leading Runscope’s Seed round.

John, Frank and the entire Runscope team, welcome to True!

MessageMe Announces Funding, Growth Stats

True — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:39:31 +0000

True portfolio company MessageMe announced this morning a $10 million round led by John Lilly of Greylock Partners, with participation from True, Social+Capital and others. MessageMe has experienced tremendous growth since its launch in March, posting the stats below on their blog this morning:

We couldn’t be more thrilled for the continued development of MessageMe’s rich communication platform. Congratulations Arjun, Alexander, Justin, Vivek and the MessageMe team!

Read more in AllThingsD, The Next Web and VentureBeat.

Welcoming Orchestrate.io

Puneet — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:38:51 +0000

At True, we believe the best Founders will drive us into the largest market opportunities and become the category leaders of the future. In short, we look beyond just features and functionality—we look for “Founders of Movements.”

We see this potential in our latest investment, Orchestrate.io, which is pioneering the latest big shift in the database infrastructure world—the next leap from NoSQL to NoDB. The company has set out to solve the database problem by simply eliminating it, creating a cloud-agnostic service that unifies all the queries needed to build interactive applications, such as geospatial, time-series, graph, full-text search, key-value queries and more through a single API. Freed from the burden of multiple databases, developers can focus on building better applications. The result will be the democratization of more engaging, feature-rich and interactive applications.

It’s an incredibly ambitious idea, the kind we love to fund, with a team uniquely suited to address the problem.

Co-Founder Tony Falco is an infrastructure rock star, having previously served as Co-Founder and COO of Basho Technologies, the creators of the NoSQL database Riak. Prior to that, Tony was VP of Product Management and Technical Services at Akamai Technologies. We liken Tony to other Founders of Movements, like Luke Kanies, creator of Puppet and Founder of Puppet Labs; Josh McKenty, co-creator of OpenStack and Founder of Piston Cloud; Derek Collison, who designed and architected the industry’s first Open PaaS, Cloud Foundry, and later founded Apcera; and Avinash Lakshman, who created Cassandra at Facebook and later founded Hedvig.

Tony was first introduced to us by Luke Kanies, continuing the trend of Founders introducing new Founders into the portfolio. Moreover, Orchestrate joins True’s quickly growing family of Portland-based portfolio companies, including Puppet Labs, Urban Airship and Glider.

Tony and the entire Orchestrate.io team, welcome to True!

You can see this morning’s funding announcement here.

Fundraising Tips: The Power of Context and Story

adam — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:33:47 +0000

On Tuesday, the True team spent the afternoon at the World’s Largest Office Hours, part of the National Venture Capital Association’s VentureScape annual conference. The goal of these office hours was to bring hundreds of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs together in one room for an afternoon of networking, mentoring and idea exchange. As a member of the NVCA and supporters of innovation and entrepreneurship in general, we were extremely happy to participate.

Our team had a series of six meetings with Founders of companies who were seeking our feedback and advice on their business and pitch. As we worked through each session, we began to see a pattern emerging. Specifically, within the first minute of sitting down, the Founder would launch directly into describing the product or show a demo of the product.

In each case, we would slow the Founder down and ask a series of questions designed to provide background and context to the broader story.

In general, those questions were:

- Who are you?
- Why did you decide to work on this project?
- How and why is this team working together?
- How much money have you raised?
- How much are you raising now?
- How has the business evolved since the initial inception?

In music, they say that you have been writing your first album your entire life. In startups, it’s the same. As a Founder, you have been with your business from day one. Your product is an extension of you, based on a problem that you identified through your set of unique experiences. Therefore, any time you want to show people your product or talk about your business, they really need the broader context of your background and how you ended up starting this company to truly appreciate what it means. (And long-term, the final product will look very different from where it is today.)

Especially at the seed stage, investors are investing in the people and how they see the world—not the product or business you’ve built today. Knowing that, Founders should spend 80% or more of their time talking about their background, their values and how they see the world, because this information is what gets an investor excited about potentially joining their journey.

For more fundraising tips, check out a presentation Christiaan and I gave last year on more inside tips on raising venture capital financing.

Welcoming Glider

adam — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:25:50 +0000

Over the past decade, as we’ve moved documents and workflow online, many of the steps related to process—requesting approvals, getting signatures, revising negotiation documents—have not evolved at the same rate. Today, you can open up a document, photo or file anywhere in the world, but to share notes, get signatures or ask for approval, in many cases you’re still required to print out a document and physically deliver it.

Glider, which launched today at TechCrunch Disrupt, started with a product for sales and legal documents with the idea of bringing the same transparency, visibility and process that we have in the physical world to online workflow in today’s paperless office. This level of online engagement has not yet been achieved, and we think there is a tremendous, long-term opportunity in bringing data transparency to online workflow that we have never seen before.

When we met Glider initially, not only were we super impressed with the product, but we had also heard extensive praise for Co-Founders Justin Thiele and Eli Rubel from other True founders who had spent time with them in Portland, where Glider is based. For us, the Glider team is the type of team we love to fund. First, other True Founders wanted them to be part of the family, and second, when we met them they had early mock-ups and product and were voraciously talking to customers in the space. We led their seed round because we believed in the scope of their vision and their ability to execute against it.

We’re excited to be working alongside CrunchFund, TechStars, Portland Seed Fund, and a group of top-tier angel investors in support of this awesome team. Justin and Eli, congratulations on your launch!

Welcoming Amy Errett and Madison Color

Jon — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:20:23 +0000

Founders of movements. They are the visionaries who look at the world today and see a better tomorrow. They are the innovators identifying industries ripe for disruption and bringing big ideas to life. They are the leaders who are shaping what our everyday lives will look like in 10, 20, 50 years. These are the creative founders who inspired us to start True in 2005, and today we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Amy Errett and her team at Madison Color.

Amy Errett is an exceptionally talented and experienced Founder. With a multifaceted career that has ranged from senior management at E*Trade, to CEO of lifestyle company Olivia (where she was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California), to General Partner at venture capital firm Maveron, Amy Errett has excelled at every turn. She is a born leader—her dynamic leadership style reminds us of Danny Shader of PayNearMe, another rock star in the True family of Founders. She has boundless energy, likely because she is, in her own words, a horseback riding, fly fishing, black diamond snowboarding, wine collecting, SF Giants loving Californian. And, most important to the entrepreneurial experience, Amy has the smarts to know when a particular industry is ready for a shake-up.

Which brings us to Amy’s new company, Madison Color, which announced their funding by True Ventures and Maveron this morning. Madison Color is reinventing the $3 billion home hair coloring business by producing a non-ammonia-based, professional-grade home hair color system that will be delivered directly to consumers on a subscription basis. In the U.S., over 40 million women (and millions of men as well) color their hair at home using drugstore kits that are toxic and full of chemicals: bad for the environment, and bad for people. They are also one-dimensional, relegating color choices to pre-fab formulas. Madison color is revolutionizing the home hair coloring experience by developing photo-based apps for color matching and an extensively trained call center, turning what is currently a terrible consumer experience into a consumer delight point, and bringing technology to a business that has thus far had zero innovation.

Amy’s vision is possible today because of the enormous wave of capital efficiency that continues to erode barriers across all industries. The ongoing force of web and mobile web is changing the way consumers experience and interact with the world everyday, and enabling software based startups to create new and valuable consumer experiences.

Madison Color has captured our imagination, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with Amy. In addition to leading her Series A round, we have asked Amy to join the True team as a Special Advisor. We love working with visionaries and great leaders, and we are constantly inspired and motivated by the creativity and talent of Founders like Amy.

Amy and the Madison Color team, welcome to True!

High Fidelity’s New Virtual World

tony — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:04:37 +0000

In 2003, Philip Rosedale founded a company called Second Life, a 3D world where everyone you see is a real person and every place you visit is built by actual users. Today, Second Life serves over 1 million users, all engaged in a rich, virtual experience that simulates the intricacies of real life in a sky’s-the-limit imaginary world.

Philip is truly a Founder of a movement—his passion for authenticity in our virtual interactions is unparalleled. So it stands to reason that his most recent company, High Fidelity, is building a next-generation virtual world enabling even richer avatar interactions, driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users. Together with Co-Founders Fred Heiberger and Ryan Karpf, the High Fidelity team is creating a version of the SETI system, but with computers powering a tiny piece of the virtual world rather than folding proteins or looking for aliens.

Their vision for High Fidelity—like those of so many True Founders—is mind-blowing in scope and incredibly authentic and real. The engineering requirements necessary to achieve a real-time virtual environment are daunting, to say the least, but we believe the High Fidelity team are some of the few people in the world who can pull it off.

We’re incredibly excited about the High Fidelity team’s vision and capabilities, and thrilled to be leading their Series A round with participation from Google Ventures and a number of angel investors. We think Philip is one of the most creative and visionary entrepreneurs of our generation, and we couldn’t be more pleased to support him, Fred, Ryan and the High Fidelity team in achieving their vision.

Welcoming Neon

John — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:11:32 +0000

We all know that certain images—from a photo of a family member to a house on fire—can inspire a feeling, be it love, fear or a host of other emotions. But how do we feel about the objects we encounter on a daily basis, like water bottles and notebooks?

Neuroscientist Dr. Sophie Lebrecht has been studying the human brain’s positive or negative reactions to images for seven years. Through her PhD and post-doctorate research at Brown and Carnegie Mellon Universities, Sophie has uncovered that the brain computes a very rough, very rapid and automatic snapshot of perception in order to estimate the likability of an object. Sophie quickly realized that her team had discovered a way to predict the images people would be most attracted to, and that image discovery had huge market potential—anytime there is an image, and you want a human to relate to that image, the research is applicable.

Sophie’s team first focused on online video and predicting the video thumbnails that people would be most compelled to click. She called the burgeoning company Neon, and applied to the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps, where I am an instructor along with Jon Feiber and Steve Blank, and was accepted into the second cohort at Stanford. The I-Corps program consists of 25 teams from top universities and was created to prepare scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the marketplace.

Even among an elite group of the most innovative scientists and engineers in the country, Sophie was clearly at the top of her class. Her passion was palpable, and her ability to articulate her vision for Neon set her apart. It should come as no surprise, then, that all three of us instructors jumped at the chance to invest in Neon. Sophie was also very fortunate to have teamed up with Co-Founder Sunil Mallya, who also completed his graduate work at Brown and received a Masters in Computer Science. Sunil specializes in large-scale system engineering and previously worked at Zynga building core components of their infrastructure.

While Neon is currently developing a product that gets more people watching video by selecting frames from within the video to be used as the thumbnails, they are looking forward to applying the hard science of image selection to new applications, such as e-commerce, photo sharing, UX for connected TV, app icons and advertising.

Neon helps people discover the world through images, and we couldn’t be more excited to be on board.

Sophie, Sunil and the rest of the Neon team, welcome to True!

A new chapter for Goodreads

Jon — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:47:02 +0000

Reading. It’s fundamental. It is essential to thought and understanding. It’s the foundation of human-to-human knowledge transfer in the modern world. There is no other input mechanism that allows us to process complex ideas, rich histories and tragically emotional stories. It inspires us to engage like few other activities can: we regularly commit multiple hours per day to reading for work, for pleasure, for life. Reading is reflexive, innate. The pen is indeed far mightier than the sword, and the written word has been a rich source of beauty and pain since the beginning of society.

Passion. It is one of the most important characteristics of all great Founders. It’s the thing that inspires us to relentlessly pursue a vision. It’s what’s required to build an idea (even a brilliant idea) into a business. It doesn’t always pay off, but it is almost always worth it. Otis Chandler is passionate about the power of books, and seven years ago, he had a vision that was both simple and incredibly grand: unite the world’s readers. Gather people to talk about books and the ideas they contain. Talk about what these words and thoughts mean to you. Talk about what Dostoevsky, Poe, Hemingway or Franzen taught you. Talk about how authors make you feel. Connect, discuss, and share the joy, pain and exaltation of the human condition. Connect on a fundamentally human level.

What started as a simple idea in 2006 captured the world’s imagination and became a very large company indeed. Otis and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler embarked on the journey called Goodreads and built it into the world’s largest community of passionate readers, which is now the world’s largest online source of independent book reviews. Goodreads connects book lovers around the globe and connects authors to their global readers, enabling expression of appreciation, understanding and (importantly) enjoyment of the written word. Goodreads solves “discoverability,” one problem that plagues today’s literary landscape. The site catalogues more than 360 million books, with 22 million (and climbing) added per month, and receives about 140 million monthly page views and 22 million monthly unique visitors. Recently featured in The New York Times, Goodreads is widely considered by publishers and the media to be the clear leader in book reviews and discovery.

The newest addition to Goodreads’ impressive list of credentials was just announced today: Goodreads has been acquired by Amazon. It has been a beautiful thing to see Otis and Elizabeth’s passion for reading ignite millions of voracious readers around the world. And it’s a beautiful thing that their reach will now extend even further.

The story of Goodreads is a True story. We seed funded Goodreads with $105,000 in 2007 after being introduced to Otis by two entrepreneurs we love: James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky, Co-Founders of Ooga Labs. James and Stan have been incredible friends to us personally and also to True. They are both brilliant and prolific entrepreneurs, and they are the best of partners. We believe in and trust the judgment of great entrepreneurs when they tell us about other great entrepreneurs, so it didn’t take us very long to see what they loved about Otis. He was full of passion and drive, and his idea was big in impact and very capital efficient. We saw Otis as a missionary. Otis wanted to start a movement. Otis genuinely wanted to change the world, and he was driven by great values, tons of energy and boundless depths of passion. Otis inspired us.

Empowering this kind of Founder is why we started True in 2005. Was there a business? We weren’t sure. Was there a need for this connection in our world? Of that, we have never been more certain. We were committed to reading the last word as soon as we saw the cover, and to that end, we invested significant, additional capital in the summer of 2009 when liquidity in the early stage venture market was essentially non-existent due to the financial crisis of 2008. Today, in 2013, True is very proud to be the largest non-Founder shareholder in Goodreads as they complete their sale to Amazon.

We couldn’t be happier to see a company we believed in from the beginning take this next step to impact the world for good. To our friends at Amazon, congratulations.

To Otis, Elizabeth and the Goodreads team, we are thrilled for your success. It has been an honor to be a part of the Goodreads story. Thank you for believing in True, and thank you for inspiring all of us who love knowledge and who endeavor to make the world a better place.

Read more on Amazon, Goodreads, TechCrunch and AllThingsD.