Month: October 2010

Angel investor Dave McClure has added a roster of mentors and advisors to the team at his recently launched seed fund/incubator 500 Startups — a group that he has decided to call (not surprisingly) 500 Mentors. Although there aren’t actually 500 people on the list, it is a fairly impressive collection of talent that McClure says will be available to help the startups that he is investing in, some of which include Foodspotting and Flowtown. The mentors include Google’s “open advocate” Chris Messina, Josh Elman of Twitter, Slideshare CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare and Hunter Walk of YouTube.

Playing on the recent AngelGate furore — in which McClure played a role after being singled out for mention in super-angel Ron Conway’s leaked email on the topic — the startup investor described the mentor team as “a super-secret society of powerful tech-heads [that is] gathering their forces even as we speak, coming together with a shared mission of world domination – er, no, wait, we mean souped-up startup support.” McClure said that while many of the mentors come from the Bay Area, others come from a range of cities, including Seattle, Boston, New York, Vancouver, Tokyo and Paris. The advisors will be available for one-on-one discussions as well as presentations and advice, and some will even be working from 500 Startups headquarters, he said.

The full list of mentors is embedded below. McClure also named another group of “venture advisors” that is much smaller, including Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Radar, Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, Dave Schappell of TeachStreet, Sean Ellis of Startup Marketing and Hiten Shah of KISSMetrics.

I had a chance to talk with Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson this morning, both during and after a meeting he had with half a dozen startups at the offices of Extreme Venture Partners, a fund and incubator with dual headquarters in Toronto and San Francisco. Wilson — whose firm has a stake in a few companies you may have heard of, such as Twitter, Foursquare and Zynga — came to town in order to meet with both venture investors and startups with a view towards possibly investing in some Canadian companies, and said afterwards that the Toronto startup environment “reminds me a lot of New York.”

I’m going to write a separate post about some of the companies that Wilson met with and his thoughts on the local startup ecosystem, but during our conversation the venture investor also had some comments about the recent “AngelGate” clash between “super-angels” and traditional VCs, as well as some advice about what some of the big trends are online that he is thinking about as he makes investments for Union Square.

On AngelGate:

The reality is that that market has changed a lot in the last two or three years. There’s a lot more money out there, it’s gotten very competitive. And usually what happens when things get competitive is prices get bid up, terms change, and the early participants feel it — they can’t win every deal, they can’t be in every deal and I think people start to get nervous. I think that’s largely what you’re seeing. You’re seeing people who’ve been in the market for a long time worrying about the fact that their market position isn’t what it used to be.

Is there too much money? I think it depends who you ask. Certainly for entrepreneurs there’s not too much money. But for people who used to be able to get into every deal at really great valuations, yeah there’s too much money for them — but for the market as a whole I’m not that worried about it. It’s certainly a good thing for me as an investor because more opportunities are getting funded, and it’s certainly good for entrepreneurs because more of them getting funded, so I think largely it’s a good thing.

Wilson also talks in the video about whether the so-called AngelGate meeting represented “collusion,” and whether some of what happened was a result of personal egos getting out of joint. During the startup meeting he attended, when asked about the “super-angel” phenomenon, Wilson said that he thinks on balance it can be a very positive thing for VCs like Union Square. “If someone wants to put in $250K and work as hard as I do, even though I’ve invested a lot more? I say bring it on,” Wilson said. “That’s a home run for me and a home run for the entrepreneur.” Among the super-angels who take this approach is Ron Conway of the SV Angel fund, Wilson said — “he works that hard for everyone, regardless of how much he has put in.”

Trends to be aware of:

Globalization is a huge trend. If you look at FB, Twitter, Google — 75 to 80 percent of their users are outside the U.S., so globalization of web services at scale is something I’m really interested in. There are entrepreneurs all over the world creating new web services that are as interesting as those getting created in the traditional tech centres like the Valley, Boston, New York. So globalization is probably the number one thing I’ve been thinking about.

Wilson also talked about the implications of mobility and how he is thinking about that in terms of his investments — and not just mobile with respect to specific devices or services, but how people can participate online from anywhere, and how more and more data is being produced because mobile devices have sensors that can change your experience or add value to it.

What he is thinking about now:

I’m really interested in the intersection between reputation, identity and knowledge — so things like Quora and StackOverflow (a Union Square Ventures portfolio company). These kinds of services use social media in a narrower and maybe higher value way to help people, and that’s really interesting to me. If you look at StackOverflow, developers who do the best job of generating answers to software development issues have their reputations rise in the system, and on the back side of StackOverflow is a job board, and so employers can come in and hire people and see what their reputation is. So when you think about how a Q&A site flows into a job board and how reputation is the key connective tissue there, I think that’s a really fascinating thing.

When it comes to live-blogging news events, plenty of bloggers and journalism outlets use their own in-house tools — but more and more news organizations are turning to all-in-one, cloud-based solutions such as ScribbleLive, a service that sees itself as more than just a live-blogging tool for the Academy Awards or a keynote by Steve Jobs. “We see ourselves as becoming a fully fledged content-management system,” ScribbleLive founder Michael De Monte said during a recent interview in San Francisco.

The company’s software allows news outlets to quickly set up a liveblog that looks and feels like a regular page on their website, complete with all of their branding and sidebar widgets or whatever else is on the page, says De Monte. Other solutions that provide similar live-blogging or live-discussion features — such as Cover It Live, which is owned in part by Demand Media through its Pluck division — restrict the content within a widget or window that can’t be indexed by search engines or easily converted to other formats, De Monte says.

ScribbleLive, which is based in Toronto, recently launched the next generation of its content-management tools, which add a number of different ways of getting content into the live-blog or news discussion. In addition to pulling in Twitter accounts or keywords automatically (which can be filtered to include or exclude specific phrases), the software also allows reporters to contribute their comments via email, SMS, voice-mail or the ScribbleLive web interface, which can be accessed either on the site or via an iPhone app.

During the G20 demonstrations earlier this year in Toronto, for example, De Monte says that one of Canada’s major broadcasters kept a running update of what was happening during the riots by calling a voice-mail number and leaving a message, which the system imported automatically as an audio file. Not all reporters are comfortable with Twitter or SMS, the ScribbleLive founder says, “so we provide whatever means they can feel comfortable with for them to provide their analysis and perspectives on the news.”

The company’s software is used by Reuters and Hearst Television in the U.S., as well as several other news organizations, and has also been used by a number of non-media entities such as Greenpeace, which used ScribbleLive to report on the live demonstration over an oil well. After the event, the searchable pages remain available so that anyone looking for information about that even will be able to find and review the live-blog. “ScribbleLive changes the traditional linear flow of the newsroom to a more dynamic, collaborative process that empowers real-time reporting and audience engagement while ensuring editorial control and journalistic integrity,” De Monte said.

The company was bootstrapped for the first year or so of its development — while De Monte and his partner worked at CTV, a large Canadian media network — then got seed funding from Rogers Ventures in 2009. ScribbleLive just closed a second round of seed financing from Rogers, De Monte says, and is currently looking to raise a Series A round of funding.

The race to create filters for real-time social media — so that companies in particular can track what is being said about them — continues to heat up. In an attempt to stay ahead of the curve, analytics service Trendrr today launched a new version of its social-media dashboard that incorporates location along with the usual Twitter tracking. The service now pulls in data from Foursquare and Gowalla, as well as aggregating “like” activity via Facebook’s open-graph protocol and reputation scores via Klout. But these services don’t come cheap: access to the dashboard starts at $499 a month and goes as high as $2,499 a month for the “enterprise” edition.

The company — which originally launched in 2006 and is a subsidiary of New York-based social-media marketing firm Wiredset — says that it has re-engineered its platform to handle more real-time services such as Facebook and Foursquare. The service competes with other social-media dashboard offerings such as those from Radian6 (which charges $600 a month for an entry-level account) as well as Sysomos and HootSuite. And new analytical services are emerging as well: Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead launched a data-mining product called Tweetbeat at the Disrupt conference last week that also allows for in-depth tracking of social-media content via semantic analysis, sentiment rankings and reputation scores.

At least for now, Trendrr’s incorporation of location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla could set the service apart from some of its competitors. Users can track real-time check-ins, badges, mayorships and other rewards through a local dashboard, and can filter those results based on a user’s gender and other demographic info if available. Customers using the dashboard can respond from within the service, and can see the content from the most influential users first, or create their own ranked lists of influencers. Trendrr also has a built-in sentiment analysis feature that allows corporate users to track responses to their brands and products based on attitudes.

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Trendrr says that its dashboard features allow “marketers to identify swarm behavior in real-time and provides the communications mechanism that will drive transactions and insert brands into conversations around hot topics,” and pitches its service as a tool for what it calls “Chief Listening Officers” who monitor social media for their companies.