VMWare Friends SocialCast! Congrats, Tim Young!

VMWare of Palo Alto Calif., has acquired SocialCast, a True portfolio company. Congratulations to Tim & Carrie Young! True led Series A funding in April, 2009 and I joined the board as part of the investment. In March 2010, the company raised an additional $8 million from True and Menlo Ventures. SocialCast is a remarkable company — it is one of the new breed of enterprise software companies that embraces consumer behaviors, marries them to the needs of a modern enterprise and its needs for security and scalability. Today such expectations are norm, but Tim was clearly ahead of the curve.

About three-and-half years ago in a column for now defunct Business 2.0 magazine, I wrote about how concept of communication had to change and adapt to incorporate newer channels of conversing – Instant Messaging, VoIP, Twitter and what not. Tim Young, founder of EventRobot, then a white-label social networking company, then based in Southern California read that post. He asked Hiten Shah, co-founder and CEO of True portfolio company, Kissmetrics, to make an introduction. We met outside my favorite Starbucks, guzzled endless cups of espresso and talked about what communications would look like in the future.

Tim went away. Few months later I fell sick. We lost touch. At the tailend of Summer of 2008, he pinged me. He wanted to give me an update. Event Robot had gone from being a white label MySpace to an enterprise centric messaging system, that focused on the idea of “real-time interactions” between team members. Tim wanted to tap the “dark knowledge” that gets stuck inside email and is never really exposed to the rest of the company. He wanted to build the future of work.

I had just joined True as a venture partner and when Tim mentioned he was looking for funding, I suggested him meeting rest of the True team. Over next few months we stayed in touch and he met with everyone on the team. Tony, Toni, Phil, John, Jon, Shea, and Braughm all had one response — Tim is special.

I concurred — intellectually curious, near obsessive about customer-happiness, product-centric and a workaholic, Tim was indeed special. It took a few months and lot of convincing, but in the end he did become part of the True family. He introduced us to Milo and he teamed up with Tony for About.me. Since then he has become a key part of the True social fabric, often speaking at our Founder Camp(s).

On a personal note, Tim has become a close friend. Endless cups of coffee at Sightglass, often talking about the social web have been some of the best memories from this brief journey. As Tim joins VMware, these random interactions and conversations are the one’s I am going to miss the most.

Tim, Carrie, Lars, Ryan, Sean, Mitch, Van, Monica, Jess, Camy, Mark, Michelle, Scott, Matt and Monica Wilkinson and everyone else at the company – thank you on behalf of the True Ventures family. Your gift of knowledge has contributed to our collective betterment.

If you would like to read more about SocialCast’s acquisition you can read about it from Tim, from VMWare, and Knowledge is Social.

PS: Hiten, you are the real deal, thanks for bringing Tim into True family.