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.

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.

There are few multi-billion dollar industries that have yet to harness the power of the Internet. At First Round, we thought car services was one of them and we were lucky enough to seed Uber. We later saw that the hospitality industry was ready to embrace the mobile web and we were thrilled to invest in HotelTonight. We think the ski industry will be the next massive market to embrace the Internet. We’re thrilled to be investing in Liftopia along with Chris Sacca, Dave Morin, and Erik Blachford,.

Even as a lifelong skier, I’ve taken the business of skiing for granted. It wasn’t until I met with Liftopia’s Founders, Evan Reece and Ron Schneidermann, that I wrapped my head around the scale of the industry. It’s massive. In the US alone, lift ticket sales are $2.6B annually. Lessons and rentals are another $1B. Ancillary on mountain spend is yet another $1.6B. In the US alone, that’s $5.2B before lodging, transportation, soft goods or hard goods. The Japanese market is roughly the same size. Europe is larger still.

And yet, ask a skier about the last time they used the Internet to plan a ski trip and they’ll most likely give you a quizzical stare. They’ll probably tell you that they were able to book their airfare and lodging online but purchased their lift tickets in person. Think about it. You pick a resort you want to visit. You book your flight online. You book your lodging online. But the the core elements of your trip - your lift tickets, lessons and rentals – you wait in line to purchase these after you arrive. Or, maybe if you’re savvy, you buy discounted tickets at a convenience store near the mountain. This is insane.

Step back and wonder what the world would be like if the other aspects of your vacation were handled in the same way. A walk-up airfare? Walk-up lodging? Airlines and hotels provide customers with better rates in exchange for a commitment from consumers that they will spend. This results in better demand forecasting for the service providers and better pricing for consumers. Liftopia lets ski resorts do the same and the results are powerful. Liftopia customers ski more days, spend more money on mountain, and explore more resorts. So if you’re daydreaming of a trip to a place like Mammoth, Sun Valley, Park City, Deer Valley, The Canyons, Kirkwood, Alpine Meadows, Killington, Stowe, Mount Snow, Keystone, Snowbird or just about any mountain in the US, check out Liftopia. You’ll save time, money and have more fun.

Every chairlift should be heard, profitable and generating smiles.

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.