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Changes and An Innovative Constant

kent — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:00:56 +0000

This spring marks another anniversary of my time with First Round Capital. These milestones have always been an occasion for me to look back and reflect. In doing so, one thing was clear: the first half of 2008 was the beginning of a tectonic shift. Back then, Facebook Beacon was feeling some growing pains, you could “fan” companies, and Facebook Connect did not exist. The iPhone 3G had not been launched. The iOS SDK was in it’s infancy. The App Store hadn’t been turned on. The original iPad was still two years away. If you focused only on the then current capabilities and uses of these products (or suffered from financial calamity myopia), it was difficult to imagine the landscape that would shortly emerge.

Today, there is the Facebook Open Graph, “Likes” are the attention currency, and Facebook is the de facto online identity. Every company has an iOS plan. Some businesses are built entirely on mobile users. Companies like Path, Uber, Square, Task Rabbit, Hotel Tonight, Flurry and so many others were difficult to conceive of in Spring 2008. Back then, it was easy to think of BazaarVoice as a nice, little reviews company rather than one of the earliest social commerce companies. Today it trades on the Nasdaq.

As these changes were taking root, Phin Barnes and I joined First Round as Principals. The team had just raised their first institutional fund. There was an office outside Philadelphia and a small space in San Francisco. Our Platform effort was led by a single summer intern. Folks in the industry thought our smallish $135m fund was “cute.” We had never held Office Hours nor had we released a holiday video. Super Angels were still just the domain of Christmas pageants.

Things look different now. We have national offices in San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia. Our Platform Team is now 6 people. We’ve raised some more capital. We’ve danced, sung, showered and auto-tuned. We’ve been called Super Angels. And today, Phin and I are now joining Josh, Howard, Chris and Rob as Partners.

Amidst the changes and growth at First Round, it is a constant that I find most innovative. We remain solely focused on building the world’s best seed fund and working with the greatest Founders. We seek people who build their business for the long-term, as we do with our firm. We challenge ourselves to innovate and rethink the ways in which we can assist Founders. We’re passionate about starting companies and think of our ourselves as entrepreneurs. We are a start-up. We just happen to be a fund too.

I still pinch myself everyday that I get to do what I do with the people I do it with, colleagues, founders and co-investors alike. Congratulations to Phin. Thank you Josh, Howard, Chris and Rob. I’m thrilled to be working with you and our community of Founders for years to come.

Filed under: internet, technology, venture capital Tagged: #frc, first round capital, kent goldman, seed capital, vc, venture capital

A Short Big Data Story

kent — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:09:22 +0000

A quick story to share. Some time back, the First Round team was having some difficulty getting our email delivered. Our messages weren’t winding up in Junk folders, they weren’t showing up at all. So, I reached out to former colleagues who were now with the major webmail brands. I wanted to know whether or not we had somehow been blacklisted. I also connected with our service provider and ran through our set-up with them. On all fronts, things seemed to check out. Except our messages were hitting the floor. No fail notifications. Nothing. Was this some sort of VC email karma? For the better part of a week, we had no idea whether or not our messages were being received. We turned into those guys, who send emails and immediately follow-up with a phone call, “Did you get my message?”

Luckily, this was right around the time I met with Patrick Peterson. Pat has a long history in email. He was one of the earliest people at IronPort and later, after the company was acquired, became one of 13 Cisco Fellows. Before Pat could even begin his pitch, I had begun pleading with him for some free advice about our email predicament. It turned out, that was all the pitch he needed.

Email is an opportunity for big data. Think of the information each message contains. To, From, Subject, Time, IP address, DKIM, SPF, server data, the message itself. And now multiply that by the volume of messages sent every second. Pat recognized that this data could be used to protect not just consumers, but brands too.With Pat’s help, and the help of billions of email messages, we were able to identify and shut down a spammer who had hijacked our domain.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that after that, First Round went back to business as usual and along with Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners, invested in Pat and his company, Agari.

Filed under: internet, start-ups, technology, venture capital Tagged: #frc, first round capital

Who Owns the Future?

kent — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:46:15 +0000

It turns out that Clay Shirky has made quite a bit of impact on me the past few months. It was his post on the television habits that jump started my renewed commitment to reading books. And of course, as part of that syllabus, I included his new work, Here Comes Everybody on the nexus of technology and sociology. I just finished it. What a terrific read. It may be best described as Malcom Gladwell meets the Internet. Read it.

My favorite line, “[T]he future belongs to those who take the present for granted.” This will be running through my head for weeks to come.