...a slight interruption in the ongoing story about how Jangl got started.

We learned from our friend Shel Israel, that people blog, not companies. That said, he credited that point to a peer blog author. We are going to make what is now my blog page, a directory of blogs for any Jangl employee that has a blog. Should be fun. Once that's complete, my directory listing will point here. I'll post there going forward.

-MC

In continuation of the prior post:

So VC Randy Haykin proceeded to make an introduction to Bessemer's Dave Cowan, for investment consideration. Randy might co-invest if Dave got excited. The first meeting with Dave would be by phone. We knew we'd show better in person, but we liked Dave's sense of interest so we jumped on the opportunity to talk by phone. My co-founder Ben and I did the phone call from Studio C behind my house, on my Vonage line which wasn't the most reliable at the time. Dave was on his mobile phone, doing the call from Disneyland! So picture Ben and I hovering around a speaker phone and Dave on a mobile next to Mickey. Dave was quiet at first, so it was hard to read. There were some struggling moments in trying to tell our story, since we were talking sequentially thru slides, which Dave didn't have privy to. After a few minutes of pitching, Dave chimed in saying "How much are you looking to raise?"

We told him $5 million. At that point he told replied saying "This sounds more like a $2 million deal to me."

I was intrigued by how quickly he was able to make that assessment (which coincidentally would be the funding amount we would eventually raise for series A). That's what happen in the big leagues.

A week later, we went to see Dave in person, and his admin brought in sandwiches. We wanted to do the slide show, but he just wanted to see the service working. So Ben busted out his giant laptop and got on their wifi network, and showed what little of the service we had in place. Dave had some insightful thoughts about user experience, but ultimately thought we should raise less and get it out into consumers hands.

There is a lot to say for technology service companies raising little money, putting a service together, getting people to use it, and THEN going to raise more money, for build out and scale. That way more questions are answers and assumptions validated. Sounds good, except we required a technology integration between our platform, a VoIP network and a call platform. This all requires more money than a typical web 2.0 service.

We would have to move on and see what other VCs have to say. We never had interaction with Dave again, so he wasn't chasing us nor vice versa. It was early in the season, so we had to play the field some more anyway.

Lessons learned:

1. If your story is complicated, avoid starting off with a phone call. Then figure out how to make it sound simple enough for a phone call.
2. Make sure your demo is as good as your slides, because you might not get to pitch your slides.
3. Don't leave it to the VC to tell you your fund raise amount is this or that. Make sure your story has enough answers in it to warrant the amount of money you're raising.
4. Disneyland isn't your best place to be pitching someone:)

Next post will cover our meeting with Benchmark Capital.

-MC

Technorati Tags: Bessemer Ventures, Buzzage, Disneyland, Jangl, puppy, Randy Haykin

If you're just tuning in, I'm making this post a continuation story of the prior few posts. I'm talking about how Jangl (then dubbed Buzzage) began it's fund raising process and ultimately got its start.

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When we sat down with TK in March and April of 2005 (that's Tim Koogle if you're just tuning in), our idea would revolve around 877-BUZZAGE. Users would get extensions off of that number to interact with. Those extensions, i.e. 12344 or coolguy, would link callers to one of the 15+ services. After getting his head around our idea, TK asked "How does this scale and how quickly can you get to market?" (He learned during the Friendster experience that this was a critical ingredient to anything that takes hold).

We could scale because we weren't using real phone numbers, we were using extensions and addresses which would invoke these services. And unlike just a few years prior, we could rent our VoIP infrastructure from someone like Level 3 or Global Crossing. This would give us a real-time ability to scale. Had we attempted this just a few years earlier, we would have had to build out the VoIP network ourselves, which would have required us to raise huge money. Here, we were just looking for $5 million, enough to get our service to market and start building the business.

After several weeks of meetings and phone calls, TK ultimately decided he didn't have the cycles to get involved in another tech project. Ben and I wouldn't be the next David and Jerry. I really enjoyed meeting TK. He is a great guy. I make a pilgrimage to the Puerto Vallarta area each year so my son Evan can sell jewelry on the beach with his vendor buddies. When I go, I wonder if I'm going to run into TK surfing the swells in Sayulita. Maybe one of these days.

Oh well, for every closed door another opens. (And closes, and opens and closes).

Randy Haykin, the VC that introduced us to TK, proceeded to introduce us to Bessemer, Benchmark, USVP, Venrock and Canaan Partners.

Let the games begin. To be continued next post.

Ben Dean, my co-founder and I incorporated Buzzage (now called Jangl) on March 16, 2005. We began to tighten our plan. We both agreed that the kinds of services we would offer should be more about people than technology. We weren't doing this for technology's sake. We were bringing a new generation of telephony to people.

There would be a big VoIP element in what we were planning, but we agreed the best place for VoIP to be was on the back end of the service, rather than on the front end where consumers had to do something out of the ordinary (like buy a piece of hardware and install it or download software and play for months.

Around the same time, I assisted a small venture fund called Outlook Ventures, with diligence on a couple companies. (I think it was Sean Parker who introduced me to Outlook in a prior life). One of the partners there named Randy Haykin asked me what I was doing next, so I talked a little about Buzzage. He was interested in taking a peek at it, as a friendly sort of review. I didn't know Randy well, but I knew he was an early VP of marketing at Yahoo!. We weren't quite ready to fund raise yet, but we took him up on his offer anyway.

I pitched Randy. He took a fast interest. He asked if he could introduce us into some other VC firms that they like to work with, under the guise that we might just close a round quickly. (I called Ben in Jersey and asked if he was ready for the ride of his life. He was. He got on the next Jetblue flight to Oakland). I could see where this was going. Randy wanted dibbs on the deal. There is a scarcity factor on good deals from a VCs perspective. He wanted to take us into some other firms he knew to validate the deal and potentially syndicate it. Not a bad strategy if you're a VC and you see something has legs.

Before turning us on to his close network of VC brethren, Randy introduced us to the great Tim Koogle (TK), former CEO of Yahoo!. TK, since leaving Y! was sitting on boards and doing a little investing in companies like Friendster. He was also spending a lot of time doing real estate developments in Punta Mita, an area outside of Puerto Vallarta, so it wasn't clear he had the cycles nor the interest in another tech startup. In our imaginations, Ben and I sheepishly asked ourselves, "Gee, could we be the next Jerry Yang and David Filo?"

We met TK at the law firm of Cooley Godward Kronish in Palo Alto. In an attempt to come up with a proxy for Buzzage that TK might relate to, we came up with "geocities for phones". Just as geocities made it easy for consumers to publish content to the web, we would make it easy for consumers to publish content to phones.

{I must sleep now, after a day with my family and Ben's family, baking holiday stuff. More tomorrow}.

Technorati Tags: Buzzage, Jangl, Punta Mita, Randy Haykin, Sean Parker, Tim Koogle, VoIP

So Ben flew out West from Jersey quite often between February 2005 and September 2005. We have this little guest cottage by the pool where Ben would stay. We'd spend most of our time in "Studio C" which is behind the house. That's the home office/incubator/music studio. (I incubated The Yoga Company and Ooma there and recorded over 80 songs there). We worked there by day, and jammed with the band at night. It was important to have fun as we embarked down this long road. As serious of a risk/opportunity starting this company was, we had to find ways to not take it too seriously.

In January 2005, there were about 15 different things Ben's platform could be optimized to deliver. (I just started to write some of them down, but then I found an old slide:

Ok so maybe there were more than 15 things;) We made progress very quickly and came to new conclusions. The chemistry was better than I'd ever experienced. At first we refined ideas, and refined the way we presented them. I had just read The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki and Presenting to Win by Jerry Weissman, so I was feeling good about tackling our pitch. Little did I know I would spend the coming 8 months refining it. Were we doing the right thing?

The following blogs will be more personalized, back to where we started our blogs in the beginning of Jangl/Buzzage. I, for some reason thought as we grew, that I couldn't say what I wanted to say. I realized after having lunch with Pat Phelan and Shel Israel, that my thought was probably wrong.

Anyway, get ready to read the people aspect of all this... I've kept a blog now for one year. I've failed in getting it connected. So, in a sense, it has merely been my personal, private diary. But lately, I've been working with a coach to get it connected, and to make it even more relevent. At the same time, Jangl -- the third of my two children -- has gone farther than I could've ever imagined. Some great VCs, a great partnership, some great press awareness, a great team. . . .It can be a bit overwhelming, even for a guy like me who's been focused on this for years.

But as I step into it, I simultaneaously step backward, like a camera pull moving outward, and I get the odd luxury of seeing a bigger picture. So let me try to paint that picture, in my own humble words.

It was January 2005. I was mulling over what was what. I realized that during the 1990s, I had been a part of building the Internet. No, I wasn't Al Gore, but I was at companies that were providing infrastructure to build the Internet. I was finding succcess, learning the ropes, understanding networks and business models of my customers. The web boom was also in full effect, which pulled a lot of my Internet plumbing into play. I was with Netopia, then Livingston, which Lucent acquired, then Redback. All was groovy. Commissions and stock were great. I was able to pay my student loans, buy a home for my family and even buy all the musical instruments I always wanted. I was making dreams come true.

Then, all of a sudden, all the customers I thought I had, consolidated. I tried one more networking infrastructure company, but I didn't feel the mojo. On 9/11, I was supposed to fly on United to Denver to see Qwest, but the planes were grounded. I would be done with infrastructure for a while.

I went and opened The Yoga Company, and brought in about 4000 new yoga students. I learned about people relevance and culture. I even became a yoga teacher myself.

Then an old colleague from Redback (Dan Simone) was starting Trapeze Networks. I did that for a couple years, and reverted to my entrepreneurial track.

Me and a friend started a VoIP company that didn't come together all too well, although they are still swinging today. And unfortunately he's no longer a friend.

I found myself trying to figure out who I was, and where my value lied. I knew I was a great sales guy. My placks proved it. I thought I was a great business development guy too. And I felt like an entrepreneur.

David Beckemeyer contacted me to work with him on Televolution. I did for a few months.

Then I sold some software for a few months.

Then one night, I found myself in a crisis. What to do next? Most of us find ourselves here once in a while. I was surfing the Internet at about 3am and was looking for jobs and other opps. I saw a Craigslist ad in Seattle for a VoIP partner/CEO for a new company. It had my name written all over it. I responded saying, "hey I'm your guy, but can't play right now".

Ben Dean, the poster responded and we engaged in dialogue. I offered to review his slide deck and intro him to some VCs, but made it clear I wasn't the guy for now.

After a couple months, we grew closer and spent more time talking. Ben was in New Jersey and I out West. Ben played keyboards, and my band had needed a good keyboard player for years. So Ben flew out with his wife and met us, talked shop, felt another out, like dogs sniffing another. We all felt good enough to make a run at the American dream. Ben had an idea, I had the contacts and the business piece, so let's roll. ...to be continued.

There's a lot of traffic today here in Jangl land. I'd bet it's due to the USA Today coverage in today's paper. Plenty of my friends have IM'd me to give me crap about this bit from the story:

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"Jangl could be used as a verb as well as a noun," Cerda says. (As in "Can I Jangl you?")

"It's what Google became eventually," Cerda says. "We have big plans here."

---

But hey, it's true... how many times have you said "I google'd it"?

I think people are starting to get what we do and why we do it. The most obvious fit for Jangl in today's format is in the online personals and social networking spaces. Mark Brooks pointed out that anonymous calling capability is inevitable in online personals sites. We think so too. It's also a perfect fit for places like eBay and Craigslist. Jangl actually applies anywhere there's an online means which yields an offline relationship. Heck, some people in the professional web 2 environment are using Jangl on their business cards.

Jangl is in many ways like IM was in the beginning when you think about it. It's a communications utility that allows you to communicate in a way you weren't able to before, leveraging existing online presence. The key inflection here though, is that we're porting relationships that were just online, out to a phone. And as I've always said, phones are more ubiquitous since we ALWAYS have them in hand.

BTW, we're in open beta now with a service you can play with today. Come and get a Jangl ID.

Jangl me sometime.

-MC

So...the cat is finally out of the bag - yes we are in partnership with Match.com. It was written about here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Thanks to those in the blogosphere who covered this accurately. While we are going into open beta with the Jangl branded service any day now, we have been in production with Match.com across the U.S. for a week, and prior to now had been in a tri-city pilot for the last four months.

I won't forget our first in-person meeting with Match. It was about a year ago with Jim and Thomas (CEO and COO), in West L.A., on the set of a commercial with Dr. Phil. There was even a Dr. Phil look-a-like who sat in for Dr. Phil, when the camera crew were setting up for the take. (Ben and I were wondering just what the look-a-like did for a living before Dr. Phil became a celebrity). Anyway, we went for a sandwich over at Jerry's Famous Deli to discuss our approach for what is now dubbed "MatchTalk". It was clear in that meeting, that Match would only implement a voice solution if it was brutally simple, worked with everyday phones, used normal looking phone number schemes, and kept the relationship anonymous in both directions. In other words, it couldn't be the typical softphone solution or phone number + extension solution. So Ben came up with our bidirectional, anonymous number approach. We called that relationship based numbering technology "flink" at the time, but when we went to TM it, it wasn't available. This became the basis of how we would move forward, so we called it "jangl" and ultimately named the company "Jangl".

For those who don't know, in Match.com there is a user behavioral flow that takes place. People wink, then they e-mail, both without revealing their e-mail addresses. (This same flow happens on many other sites too. Some sites call wink a "poke"). Well, the next thing they need to do is talk before going on a date. As it turns out, that's a very large gap. That's where MatchTalk comes into play. Joe hits a "Talk to her" button and Suzie receives an e-mail asking if she's up for a talk with Joe. If she responds with a "Yes", a MatchTalk phone number is e-mailed to both Joe and Suzie. That MatchTalk phone number is a regular 10-digit phone number, typically in their area code. Joe calls it, and it auto-forwards to Suzie's phone of choice (home, office, mobile, etc). The first time he calls her, a "Call Screening" function takes place. Joe is asked by the MatchTalk audio prompt to introduce himself, so he says "yo it's Joe". While he holds, Suzie's phone rings and the audio prompt says "You have a MatchTalk call, here's the callers introduction", then she hears "yo it's Joe". "Press 1 to accept this call or 2 to decline". She presses 1 and they're talking. Suzie decides to keep the love alive with Joe, and maybe call him tomorrow. She calls the same number he dialed. The number is relationship-based, meaning it's assigned to Joe + Suzie. That means it's *their number*. Isn't that sweet? Like they have *their song*, and now have *their number*:). Either of them can discontinue the number at any time, to never be reached again by another, if they aren't feeling the love. Oh, another cool thing... let's say Suzie called Joe and it goes to voice mail. Well, since we're forwarding the call to his phone of choice, his phone of choice voice mail is where the call ends up. We'll mask Joe's voice mail greeting, and only then prompt Suzie to leave a message, thereby keeping things private. When Joe goes to check his voice mail later, the message he gets from Suzie will be prefaced by a MatchTalk earcon, which will help him know the origin of the call. So all this takes a paragraph to explain, however it's very intuitive to the users, because it functions in their normal behavioral flow.

We've always been focused on building the company for consumer lifestyles, as opposed to building technology for technology's sake.

Anyway, we're pretty damn excited about all this. To have one of the largest online dating sites in the world running our service is both an honor and validation.

-MC

Here are some pics from a party we had with some family, friends, partners, and associates:

-mc

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=janglme

-mc