The Cornice » venture capital

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

Brand Is More Than Pixels

kent — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:49:10 +0000

The best fashion sites have style. They feel luxurious. They offer outstanding service. These are foundational elements. They make the goods being sold that much more alluring. They grant shoppers an experience to go along with their items. Within our portfolio, this has worked particularly well at Fab.com, One Kings Lane and Birchbox. All three have paired value with style & service to create new luxury in online commerce.

However, these elements remain absent from a huge part of online commerce: marketplaces. Take a look at women’s clothing on eBay. The UI is nearly the same as it was over a decade ago. It doesn’t feel luxurious. It feels disjointed. Yet, despite the experience, this is a massive category globally. There is readily available supply from boutiques, designers and fashionistas. There is huge demand from shoppers. Marketplace shopping is ready to be transformed. At First Round Capital, we think Thre ad fl ip will lead the way.

Threadflip is a marketplace for women’s clothing and accessories. The items for sale may come from small boutiques, vintage stores or another shopper’s closet. The concept behind Threadflip isn’t new but the execution is. Co-Founders Manik Singh and Jeff Shiau set out to build an experience that made shopping online as fun and as social as heading to a clothing swap or second hand store but as seamless as a trip to Nordstrom. They began with great design and a site crafted with style. They added social elements so you can see who you are buying from, so you can follow both the purchases and sales of stylish people, and they introduced a feed to give a sense of vitality to the site. But what really impressed me was what they did next.

Shopping is an end to end experience. While a great UI can set the tone for a site, it’s not enough to build a brand. Brand is more than just pixels. This is one of the areas where the Threadflip team paid great attention to detail. For example, they’ve designed custom packaging for everything sold on the site. When an item is sold or “flipped” the seller can use the custom designed box, labels and packaging to remove much of the hassle from shipping (or go a step further and check out the White Glove Service). The buyer receives their package in a Threadflip branded box rather than a FedEx envelope. Importantly, the experience is consistent for the buyer. This little touch makes the Threadflip easier for sellers and builds trust & delight for buyers. The team has more of these touches coming in the next few months, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

First Round is thrilled to welcome Threadflip to our community of Founders and to be working with Baseline Ventures, Andreesen Horowitz Seed Fund, Forerunner Ventures, Greylock Discovery and Slow Ventures to help Manik & Jeff build a great company.

Filed under: start-ups, technology, venture capital Tagged: ecommerce, fashion, first round capital, marketplaces, threadflip

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

Tap Tap Tap Tap

kent — Tue, 10 May 2011 18:54:04 +0000

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. That’s not Morse Code. That’s the sound of great product design.

That’s also the sound a registered user makes when booking a hotel with HotelTonight. All the sound a user makes. Four taps and done. Try doing the same with Orbitz. 60+ taps. Priceline? 70+ taps. Travelocity? 80+ taps. Hotels.com? 100+ taps.

The reason that HotelTonight could create such an improved user experience is that unlike the other online travel companies, Founder & CEO Sam Shank, built it from the ground up for a mobile world. Mobile products work best when they are designed “mobile first.” Compare an iPhone with your computer. The screen is smaller. The keyboard is worse. The Internet connection is slower. For mobile experiences, this means that each pixel matters more, every inputs needs to simpler and anything which slows the experience needs to be eliminated. Every step, every delay has the potential to become a user offramp.

When these design needs are combined with a big market, the stakes become enormous. $50B worth of hotels booked online annually. A significant portion of this amount is rapidly shifting from desktop browsers to mobile browsers / apps. Every extra tap, every extra input, every extra second, creates a window for a user to walk through and away from a booking. HotelTonight solves this in brilliant, award-winning fashion.

So, it’s not surprising that as soon as the First Round team met with Sam and saw HotelTonight, we immediately wanted to invest. Today, along with Battery Ventures and Accel Partners, we’re thrilled to be part of a the company’s $3.25 Series A financing. First Round has had some good luck with some of our other “mobile first” investments, like Uber and Path. We’re excited to help HotelTonight continue the trend.

Filed under: start-ups, venture capital Tagged: #frc, first round capital, firstround, kentgoldman, start-ups

Storenvy: The Retailer’s Gutenberg

kent — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:01:54 +0000

It’s pretty exciting to announce a new retail investment on the same day Amazon.com, announces it’s first $10B quarter. It’s a nice marker for how much online retail has evolved and how much further it has to go, so I wanted to share some thoughts on why First Round Capital is thrilled to be part of the syndicate investing $1.5M in Storenvy.

For the first 550 years after Gutenberg invented the printing press, it remained pretty difficult for individuals to publish and share their ideas. Writing and editorial remained in the province of broadcasting corporations, family newspaper dynasties and book publishers. Of course, the Internet changed that. Blogging services like WordPress, SixApart and Tumblr made it simple and free for anyone to share their ideas with the world and to build a personal brand.

As much as commerce has evolved in the past few years, it hasn’t kept pace with the forces which shaped modern publishing. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to open a store, it meant you had to rent a physical space and apply for business permits down at city hall. There was a significant expense and to seeing whether or not a retail idea would be welcomed into the world. The experience was daunting. In the mid-1990′s, Amazon launched and opened the world to e-commerce. In the early part of this millenium, platforms like Magento have made building an online retail presence easier, but my no means easy. Ebay and Etsy have been available as lower cost alternatives, but the experience was still analogous to taking out a classifieds ad. The UX didn’t belong to the person doing the selling. The retailer had as much control over their brand as they did over the font in their newspaper ads.

Storenvy changes this. It brings the blogging revolution to retail. FREE branded online stores for everyone. A sense of community for the buyers and the sellers. An easy way for merchants to sell on Facebook. Much the way GigaOm and TechCrunch operate on wordpress.com, Storenvy will have it’s share of larger merchants like indie record lable, Lil’ Chief Records. But, what gets me most excited is that now anyone can be a retail entrepreneur. In fact, the t-shirt to appearing on the left of this post, well, it hasn’t been produced yet. Amore Apparel, the Storenvy merchant behind the design can test some designs and see which ones generate the most interest. Even the smallest retailer can test the appeal of their product before committing to inventory. Retail has never been more democratized.

We’re thrilled to be working with founders Jon & Janette Crawford, Spark Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Charles River Ventures. We know with terrific advisers like Jeffrey, David and Willo, there will be lots of gorgeous (and funnel effective) stores blooming.

BTW, if you’re as excited by this as we are, you should know that Storenvy is looking for a few good hires.

Filed under: start-ups, technology, venture capital Tagged: #frc, ecommerce, kentgoldman, retail, storenvy