ff Venture Capital - Latest entries

Our Team Sweats the Details

Alex — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:49:39 -0400

Alex Katz, Partner and CFO at ff Venture Capital, was named the Financier of the Year as part of the New Jersey Technology Council 2013 CFO Awards on June 12, 2013. Below is the edited text of his speech:

I have been with ff Venture Capital almost since its inception in 2008. In that 5-year period, we have completed 143 investments in 60 companies, or one investment every 11.5 days. We have grown our firm from 2 of us in 2008 to 17 now. Our metrics put us in the top quartile in terms of returns as compared to similarly situated funds, and we are attracting exciting new investment opportunities every day.

And I believe that we have achieved this success because we sweat the details.

I am often surprised by a couple of things that seem to cross my desk almost every day: the number of times some people don’t read the documents that they are signing and the all-encompassing fear of math that seems to grip some of those in the VC world. Both of these things have in common a lack of appreciation for the importance of tending to the details in our work. I believe that a firm’s success is built on a careful understanding of the details. That is true in a venture capital firm and in a company in which we would invest.

Of course we need the visionaries. John Frankel, the Founder of ff Venture Capital and the visionary in our firm, is unique in his ability to identify pain points that others do not yet see and to pick management teams that will be able to address those pain points. We invest in less than 2% of the deals we look at each year, and John can look through the noise of all those business plans and identify the winners.

But every firm needs the rest of us to implement the plan and to be sure that the vision is enacted. We sweat the details.

So I was at Whole Foods a couple of months ago and the charge came to $13.54. The cashier asked me if I wanted to contribute $1.00 to the Whole Earth campaign to help some worthy cause somewhere in the world. As a soft touch, I of course said yes and agreed to contribute $1.46. The cashier asked me why that amount. So I said, “Let’s find out,” and to her surprise, the total bill came to an even $15.00. How did I know that would happen?

My cashier was the visionary, looking to heal the World $1.46 at a time, and I was her detail guy.

As was said earlier, we provide finance and accounting services to many of our portfolio companies. We often say that as early stage investors, we will invest in a company as early as two guys and an idea. You can bet, though, that one of those guys is not the CFO. So with our help, our companies can

· understand the metrics that will drive their success,

· manage cash flow so they can effectively manage to their next financing round,

· meet their reporting obligations to the Board and investors, and

· effectively manage their books and records so that when Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz or another later stage VC fund leads the next round, the company won’t have any due diligence hiccups along the way.

We are sweating the details, allowing our CEOs and CTOs

· to build the next generation of enterprise security software in our portfolio company Ionic Security or

· to build a stunningly beautiful consumer-facing photography web site that is growing in leaps and bounds every day in 500px or

· to grow a Voice over IP phone company that provides unrivaled functionality to small and medium sized businesses in Phone.com, which is located right here in New Jersey.

Of course, we manage to do this because we have put together a top flight team, with top flight advisers.

After all, at the end of the day, I get to stand here and receive this Financier of the Year award, but it is because of the team we have in place and our attention to the details of what we do.

Thoughts On The Future of iPhone Camera

500px — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:04:52 -0400

How the new iPhone can change the way we think about professional photography forever.

On the heels of WWDC, my thoughts keep coming back to the heated debate with my friends about the future of photography.

Let me step back for a second. Marissa Mayer declared a few weeks ago that there’s no such thing as professional photography anymore. The internet rage followed, she apologized, saying that what she meant is that we all take photos now. And it’s true. Nothing has revolutionized photography to make it truly global as Apple’s iPhone.

I think that hundreds of millions of consumers have been fooled by Apple. They came in stores to get a phone, but what they got instead was a decent camera that was always with them.

It’s hard to look back to 2007 and see the first iPhone with its mediocre — compared to more advanced competition at the time — 2 megapixel camera and see the future.

But the thought that I keep coming back to takes the same approach — what if we look at iPhone 5 with its marvelous camera and see where we will be in 5 years from now?

Interestingly enough, I’m almost sure that professional photographers take more iPhone photos than they do with a professional DSLR’s and such. I do, for one.

Carrying around 15 kilos (that’s 33 pounds for those on imperial system) of equipment is not fun, especially if it’s a regular day and you are just walking around your city. But the one single feature that is missing from iPhone 5 to truly break the market and create chaos is a RAW ≈ support.

Simply put, JPGs from iPhone are fine. You can put an Instagram filter on it, and in the process, lose all quality, or you can take expensive DSLR and shoot in RAW format and get all the details, colors and preserve the quality while editing. It’s the holy grail of professional photography.

So why doesn’t iPhone have RAW support? For one, Apple has a famous closed ecosystem, where the company prefers to control all the aspects of hardware and software for the best experience. However, we are starting to see hints that Apple might be opening up, getting more access for interoperability within apps, and it might happen soon,

The second point is that RAW requires a lot more storage capacity - usually around 10x as much. So instead of approximately 5,000 shots on a 16Gb iPhone 5, you can only store 500. But with cloud storage, cheaper memory (and thus, rumored, and inevitable, 128Gb iPhone), it should be sufficient for professional photographers.

The third point, which probably made RAW support simply impossible before, is the CPU power. Processing RAW files is not a breeze, so it’s definitely not consumer-ready (but I would argue that it’s pro-ready, since professionals would be willing to sacrifice time or battery life for that).

So why is it a big deal? Heavy DSLR’s forced professional photographers to seek alternative options — cameras that offer large sensors in small bodies and also boast RAW support — such as Fuji X100s, Sony NEX-series cameras, Canon EOS M, and many more. It’s a huge market, as photographers realize that mobility and accessibility is crucial — that is, having a camera with you is more important than having a pro camera, but at home.

Having the iPhone do all that would mean proliferation of mobile phones in the places we have never seen before — professional underwater photography, professional extreme sport photography, even professional landscape photography — all that could be done with a future iPhone.

That will mean faster innovation in the sector, lower prices and even more amazing accessories for future iPhones.

If Apple opens up APIs to access RAW data of its Camera app, we will also see thousands of developers creating innovative tools, which will undoubtedly empower current and future generations of photographers to push their creativity to new heights.

iPhone camera has been through a great evolution over the years, but opening up RAW capabilities is what will make a real photo revolution.

Contributed by Evgeny Tchebotarev, COO at 500px

Hey! A moving van just pulled up...

Katie — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 10:32:51 -0400

Guests to our office are often surprised by the large 500px prints hanging on our walls, the conversations over Phone.com phones, and various heated debates on who has the higher Klout score. We genuinely utilize our portfolio companies' services and products here, and because of this, we are starting a new series of blog posts by ff Venture Capital employees and their personal experience with various companies in our portfolio.

Have you ever had a migraine-inducing, regretful, furniture devastating moving experience? I know I have.

Back in 2011, Hurricane Irene soaked my apartment, and I had to move. My new apartment was less than 10 minutes away, but I had a lot of furniture to move, so I decided to spare myself (and friends) the pain and use a moving service for the first time.

The first search I had to do was to find a reliable and trustworthy mover. You would think that this process would be easy. I spent 5 days trawling through multiple sites and reading countless reviews before I finally found a company that could move within my given time-frame and quoted what seemed like a reasonable price. I was left exhausted by the process.

Soon, the day came to move and I waited. Hours later, the movers arrived, without an apology or sympathy for my wait. Everything was packed into the van in a great hurry. During the unpacking process, I could not find one piece of furniture that had not been dented, stained, scratched or broken in some way by the moving company. They even had the nerve to try and charge me additional money for the move. Months later, I was still fighting the moving company for the insurance money they owned me to fix my broken furniture.

After my experience, I learned from my friends and family that I was not the only person who had a terrible moving experience. My friends told me about their nightmare stories of moving companies and trying to manage a move with our moving companies. At the time I felt that there was no solution.

In early 2013, it was time to move again, and my previous experience made me anxious to relive the process. This time, I was not moving around the corner, but across state lines. I spent a lot of time considering if I was going to move everything myself, or if I was brave enough to hire another moving company. This time around, though, I used Moveline, which at the time was a new ff Venture Capital portfolio company. Moveline has an iPhone app that lets people take a video of their belongings, and receive guaranteed quotes from verified moving companies. Instead of spending time listing all of my inventory, and trying to figure out if something was a cabinet or dresser, I used the Moveline app. In addition, I got a dedicated 'move captain' or moving customer service representative who would help me with the entire process. After my previous move, the idea of having a customer service rep on my side was an additional comfort.

So, instead of writing a long list of all of my furniture, and making endless calls to moving companies, I just had to take a short video on an app and in return, received three quotations. This saved me significant time, the quote I picked was half of my original budget, and cheaper than my previous 10 minute move. However, price was not the only factor. I also looked at the reviews that Moveline had curated on the site – this moving company had 38 previous happy customers, which eased my fears.

A day before my move, I realized that in the video I had not included one TV that I was also moving. I sent an email to Moveline, expecting a headache, and additional charges. A few moments later I got an email from my Moveline “move captain” saying that she had contacted the moving company and that their would be no additional charge. I was ecstatic!

On the day of this second move, the moving company that Moveline helped me find showed up on time and with a positive attitude. This time, nothing was broken or damaged in any way. During the move, my Moveline "move captain" was my advocate, and emailed me right afterwards to ensure that everything went as planned, which it had.

My personal experience with Moveline saved me both time and money, but more importantly, was an overall great experience. In August, I may be moving again and this time, I am not dreading moving day, because I know I will have my 'move captain' from Moveline on my side.

H.E.L.M. Program - NYC

Katie — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:19:25 -0400

Silicon Alley is expanding, which makes our team here at ff Venture Capital very happy.

We were recently briefed on a new initiative called the H.E.L.M program, which is designed to support businesses located in or moving to Lower Manhattan. The program is supported by Newmark Grubb Knight Frank and the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

So what is the H.E.L.M. Program?

Eligibility: If you’re a technology, design, media, fashion, architecture, or other creative company you’re eligible·

Location: You must either be considering/planning, expanding, or entering a lease in Lower Manhattan to apply·

Size: Companies of all sizes are encouraged to apply. If you’re a startup with less than three years under your belt, The H.E.L.M will help you establish an office in Lower Manhattan·

Prizes: Up to Four $250,000 prizes, Four $50,000 prizes, twelve $10,000 prizes·

Evaluation: The Selection committee will determine which companies will receive the prize money based on the capacity to bring the best and brightest to Lower Manhattan, the ability to promote lower Manhattan, and the quality of the submission

With these incentives, and the terrific opportunities in Lower Manhattan, you should certainly consider it. Applications are due on July 15th.

For more information, contact Alex Leopold at aleopold@ngkf.com

Klout and Sony Take Influencers on a Photography Adventure

Klout — Thu, 30 May 2013 11:45:53 -0400

[Photo credit: Caryn Bailey]

We love rewarding our influencers with exclusive products and experiences. For a recent Klout Perk, we partnered with Sony to take food, travel and outdoor sports influencers on an exclusive photography adventure in San Diego.

Sony helped influencers get hands-on with the advanced features of the Sony NEX-3N and Sony HD Action Cam throughout the day. Participants had the opportunity to visually capture the beautiful San Diego coastline, marine life at the Birch Aquarium, and an exciting paragliding experience!

The group was also given a presentation with pro-tips from Jeff Berlin, a professional Sony photographer, to help them take the best shots possible with their Sony NEX-3N and Sony HD Action Cam, which they took home after their adventure-filled day.

One participant shares, “[This adventure] was the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done.”

We are always looking to expand and offer new Perks. The best way to be selected to participate in these kinds of experiences is to register for Klout and create engaging content on social media. To stay eligible for Perks, please be sure to keep your settings up to date.

Contributed by Sahana Ullagaddi, Community Manager and Desa Fernandez Account management at Klout

Flashpoint NYC Demo Day 2013 and ff Venture Capital

Katie — Tue, 28 May 2013 14:26:14 -0400

ff Venture Capital is happy to announce that once again we are co-sponsoring Flashpoint’s upcoming New York Demo Day, on Friday, June 14, 2013, 9:30 AM to 11:30 AM. The event will be held at SUNY Global Center. Additional sponsors will include The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and The Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York. Flashpoint is a startup accelerator based out of Georgia Tech.

Presenting companies include:

EnhanceWorks
Excelegrade
LandSpec Pro
MedMatch
PhysiHome
Synapp.io
Telesofia Medical
ThundrLizard

If you’re interested in learning more about the teams and attending the event, please click here.

About Flashpoint
Flashpoint is a startup accelerator at Georgia Tech that creates better startups, faster. It welcomes committed founders with domain knowledge and a passion for responding to the needs of their customers and helps them shape startups with true market/product fit, reduced risks, lower costs, and a better chance of high quality success. Flashpoint is a rigorous management and education program that works closely with founders to create companies. Since its inception last year, Flashpoint companies have attracted close to $35 MM in commitments from angels and investors, including ff Venture Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Andreesen Horowitz, Sigma Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and New World Ventures.

Is Mobile the Trojan Horse of Social-Email Integration?

MovableInk — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:16:26 -0400

There has been plenty of discourse on “mobile-email” and “social-email” integration, but are marketers taking full advantage of the opportunity to tightly integrate all three?

As our infographic from March 2013 revealed, as many as 69% of B2C enterprise email marketing campaigns are viewed on smartphones or tablets, with desktop representing just 31% of total opens. In addition, recent research from Forrester forecasts that by 2018, the number of U.S. social media users accessing Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn on mobile devices will exceed 200 million (to put that number in perspective, the total U.S. population is currently about 315 million). Forrester also noted that the share of time spent on mobile social networking apps continues to increase, and social media apps are among the top apps that smartphone users use.

So how can marketers make all three of these popular digital channels—mobile, social, and email—integrate more seamlessly?

Forward-thinking email marketers are doing this by deep-linking to mobile apps. We covered deep-linking last month (check out the blog post: “Deep Linking in Email Marketing: How it Works, and Why it Rocks!”), and shared a few examples of how brands like Comedy Central, Seamless, and American Eagle Outfitters have used deep-linking to promote downloads and usage of their brand’s own mobile apps in email campaigns, and have seen great results.

But the macro-trends point to another, major untapped opportunity: Deep-linking in email to native-installed social media apps that are ubiquitous on most users’ mobile devices—like Facebook and Twitter. The chances of these apps being on your users’ phones is greater than your own mobile app being installed, after all.

How it works: A mobile email user can click on the Facebook icon next to your logo, and be brought directly to your company’s page inside his or her installed Facebook mobile app, as opposed to prompting www.facebook.com to open in their mobile browser. Yet, if they opened the same exact email on a desktop, www.facebook.com would open. Movable Ink’s technology can detect the open device and check for mobile app installs all within milliseconds, allowing for an optimal user experience.

Twitter stands out as a unique social media use case for deep-linking. We’ve helped leading consumer brands enable pre-populated tweets in email by using deep-linking to the Twitter app. For example, an email recipient can “click to tweet” and if on a mobile device, their Twitter app will open with a pre-populated tweet of the marketer’s choosing. If the recipient opens the same email on a desktop, www.twitter.com is loaded with the same pre-populated tweet ready to send out. Customers can more easily engage with brands on Twitter, and marketers can prompt consumers to share specific language, links, or hashtags.

We’re excited about the ability to deep-link to social media apps on mobile, and see this innovation as a game changer for marketers who are hoping to integrate their digital channels. Let us know what you think in the comments below, or reach out to us at contact@movableink.com with any questions or thoughts.

Contributed by Brooke Burdge, Marketing Manager at Movable Ink

Google+ Meets Voxy - The Next Step to Integrating Language Learning into Daily Life

Voxy — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:51:45 -0400

Voxy is pleased to announce that it is bringing Google+ to its millions of language learners worldwide to provide them with a seamless experience as they learn from content that is relevant to their interests and goals. Our learners will now have the ability to sign-in, interact, and take One-on-One Live Tutoring Sessions powered by Google+ and Google+ Hangouts.

Voxy chose Hangouts due to its robust features, ability to operate in low-bandwidth situations (including mobile) and ease of customization which ultimately benefit both Voxy users and tutors. In fact, Voxy’s highly trained and certified English language tutors are excited about delivering focused and productive live tutoring sessions via Google+ Hangouts, as they can leverage Hangouts’ video, audio and text features while in live sessions with students.

Keeping with Voxy’s core mission of bringing language learning into a user’s daily life, learners now also have the ability to share their lesson scores with friends, family and co-workers in their Google+ network. Google+’s unique interactive posts feature allows anyone to accept the challenge to beat their friend’s score leveraging the same real-world interactive music, conversation, image or article content Voxy uses for teaching English.

And just as Voxy users begin discovering these new features over the upcoming days, they will also be demonstrated for Google I/O conference participants at the Developer Sandbox portion of the conference from May 15th - 17th. As a Developer Sandbox partner, Voxy was invited to showcase its applications that are based on, or incorporate technologies and products that are featured at the conference and share with over 5000 other developers the next step to integrating language learning into daily life.

Contributed by Aimee Styler Special Projects Manager at Voxy

Ryan's Dating Secrets Revealed: HowAboutWe Couples

Ryan — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:13:28 -0400

One of the first things I did when I joined ffVC was dig through the portfolio to find all of the products and services that I wanted to use. There was one in particular that piqued my interest, but I couldn’t bring myself to try: HowAboutWe. I didn’t see anything wrong with online dating; I had previously used OKCupid. The issue was that I had recently begun dating my girlfriend and didn’t feel right actively looking for others. After a while, I started hearing rumblings of a HowAboutWe for Couples, a sort of subscription date service. I’ll admit, at first I was skeptical. One, I just didn’t think I needed help coming up with fun dates, and two, I foresaw looking cheap during the dreaded coupon exchange.

As we spoke further to Brian and Aaron at HowAboutWe, we learned more about the details and my worries began to subside. The service sounded pretty interesting, and perhaps, if I withheld from my girlfriend the fact that I joined, HowAboutWe Couples could become the greatest technological advancement in dating laziness since the Eater Heat Map began telling me the restaurants to book reservations at. Not being nearly as cunning as I would like to imagine, I showed Couples to my girlfriend and she intelligently pointed out that if we joined right then we could get two tickets to the Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park (she had hinted multiple times about wanting to go ice skating) and get a two for one Fandango coupon for a movie that evening (we were already planning on going to the movies that night). With $45 in immediate value for a $20 membership fee, I figured it was time to give it a try. I think we ended up seeing Skyfall that night, and followed that up a few weekends later with a relaxing Saturday afternoon skate around Central Park.

Since then, we have continued to use the service. In the heart of winter we had an amazing 4-course meal of steaming ramen and sake tasting at Dassara in Cobble Hill, got way too full from delicious cake cups and coffee at Bee's Knees Baking Company in the West Village, and slurped oysters and sipped cocktails at Le Comptoir in Williamsburg. Looking forward, we have a distillery tour/whiskey tasting at The Noble Experiment and two seats to a private supper club dinner in Tribeca booked and ready to go.

Through Couples, I have learned that I am not nearly as date-creative as I thought I was, which is fine, because I now have Couples for that. More importantly I have not yet had an embarrassing coupon exchange. In fact the companies seem happy to be involved in Couples; they have been excited to see us, and in fact, I have yet to need an actual, physical coupon.

A solid side effect of joining Couples is the conversations that it brings up with my girlfriend. Every couple days, Couples sends us an email with new dates, and we often throw a few notes back and forth on what we would/wouldn’t like. As we talk about the various dates, I am able to get a nice idea of what types of events she likes. For example, I thought every woman that has seen Ghost would want to try a pottery class at some point, turns on this isn’t true – glad I didn’t book that one.

One final note I will make about Couples: We have been happy with our experience using the service, so I am more than glad o promote this to all of my coupled friends. The girlfriends love the idea almost unanimously, and almost unanimously the boyfriends seem to play it off, reminding me of my hesitancy about joining. Maybe we can get HowAboutWe to share some of the stats on which partner is signing up and booking more dates...now that could be some interesting data.

ff VC is Proudly Leaning In. Are you?

Katie — Wed, 15 May 2013 10:17:26 -0400

ff Venture Capital is proud to announce our partnership with Lean In, a not-for-profit organization committed to offering women ongoing inspiration and support to achieve their entrepreneurial goals. ffVC has a number of dynamic female entrepreneurs in our portfolio, including Sharmeen Mitha, CEO of AppyCouple, Kelly Eidson, Co-founder and Head of Product and Marketing of Moveline, Karen Bantuveris, CEO of VolunteerSpot, Kathy Leake, President and Co-founder of LocalResponse, Ariel Garten, CEO of InteraXon, and many more.

As our Founding Partner John Frankel says,"ff VC is leaning in because we champion dynamic entrepreneurs—regardless of gender, race, or creed. We are proud to have invested in female founders of exciting, disruptive startups. We are thrilled to continue supporting passionate entrepreneurs who think big and dream even bigger."

Check out ff VC's Lean In partner page there. Additionally, there is a slew of great educational material and programs on www.leanin.org. with valuable information on topics such as creating successful teams and combating the negative effects of gender bias. On leanin.org, you can:

Read Lean In Stories of women and men “leaning in” and “leaning back” at different moments in their careers. You can share your favorite stories and add your own.
Read an excerpt of Lean In: Women, Work & the Will to Lead, by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and download guides to discuss the book with friends and co-workers.
Watch short video lectures on topics that will improve your communication and leadership skills, such as how to negotiate for better results and how to exude onfidence in any situation.
Form a Lean In Circle, where 8 to 10 peers meet monthly to discuss, learn and grow together.

Finally, “Like” Lean In on Facebook to join the conversation and receive daily inspiration, ideas and insight from the Lean In Community.

ff VC is proudly leaning in! Are you?