Redeye VC

Six months in Philly

2013-03-19T13:00:00-04:00

It’s been a little over six months since we moved our headquarters into the city of Philadelphia. And boy has a lot happened since then:

We announced the Dorm Room Fund here in Philadelphia. We received interest from over 700 students to serve on the investment committee. We selected 11 students. And they have already begun to make investments at a rapid pace! So far they’ve committed over $150K for investment into 8 companies founded by Philadelphia-area students. We’re so happy with the traction that we’re seeing here in Philadelphia, that we’re even expanding the Dorm Room Fund to other cities.
We’ve hired over a dozen interns from Penn and Drexel, including six Portfolio Consultants – who have completed over 30 consulting engagements for our portfolio in the last month!
We’ve hosted thousands of people at dozens of events in our new space. These events help bring us closer to the Philadelphia tech ecosystem. From meetings to help plan Philly Tech Week, to Open Angel Forum meetings, to Startup Corps weekly mentorship meetings, to Girl Develop It Philadelphia meetings, to Good Company Ventures Investor Day -- we’ve met some really incredible people.
And in the last six months we’ve been thrilled to see other investors step up to support Philadelphia entrepreneurs. Goldman Sachs committed $10 million in loans to Philadelphia startups. Blackstone (in partnership with Temple University, Philadelphia University, and the University City Science Center) announced a $3M LaunchPad program to provide mentorship and venture consultation to entrepreneurs, Drexel University unveiled plans for a new fund -- Drexel Ventures -- which will provide seed funding for technology startups. The University of Pennsylvania Healthcare System, Blue Cross and DreamIt Ventures teamed up to launch DreamIt Health – an accelerator that provides investment, mentoring, and customer-access to healthcare entrepreneurs. And we’ve been approached by several suburban venture firms who are contemplating moving to the city!

Finally, today we are excited to announce that First Round Capital has been selected by the City of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) to manage the Startup PHL Seed Fund, a new fund announced by Mayor Michael Nutter to increase the availability of investment capital for Philadelphia-based startups. This fund will be a co-investment fund – where the PIDC has allocated $3 million to be invested alongside $3 million from First Round Capital in qualified, Philadelphia-based startups. We’re hoping that this fund will result in more companies starting – and staying – in Philadelphia.

It’s been a busy six months – and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next six!

First Round Capital is Hiring: Platform Experience and Operations Manager

2013-03-04T11:03:57-05:00

First Round Capital is an entirely new kind of venture firm built from the ground up to help the world's best entrepreneurs build better companies. One of our key tools to deliver on this promise is crafting incredible in person experiences for the entrepreneurs we work with – it's something we now do over 50 times per year. We're creating a new role at First Round, a Platform Experience and Operations Manager, to help us take these events to the next level, continue to innovate and create experiences we haven't even thought of yet – and build systems and process to allow our entire Platform team to scale.

As a Platform Experience and Operations Manager you will be responsible for running and innovating on all aspects of our in person experiences that range from intimate dinners with the most influential names in technology through CEO and CTO Summit, our internal conferences that bring together the leadership teams from our 170+ companies. You will have the opportunity to work with the entire First Round team as well as directly with the founders and companies in our portfolio. In addition, you'll help our 7 person Platform team scale through innovative systems and processes. This team includes business development, recruiting, learning and research.

The qualities we care most about:

Relentlessly resourceful – you need to be able to see a project from idea stage through successful completion – and whatever it takes to make it a success. You're looking for an opportunity to take on huge responsibility and grow in a high velocity work environment.
Get things done – this role will require you to get an incredible amount of work done in very short time periods. We bias towards action.
Curious – you're interested in learning new things and can learn very quickly.
Pixel perfect – in everything we do, we try to bring care and thoughtfulness to our work. So while the big ideas matter – we care deeply about the details.
No ego – you're willing to do anything and the phrase "that's not my job" is not something you'd ever say. Ever.
Passion for technology – everyone on our team is passionate about technology, startups and company construction – and you need to be too.

We're looking for someone with anywhere from 0-3 years of professional experience. The position is based out of our San Francisco office.

If you're interested in joining First Round and helping us turn venture capital upside down – email resourceful@firstround.com with 3 specific examples of when you were relentlessly resourceful and your résumé.

Hiring Female Engineers

2013-02-06T16:45:48-05:00

We host 50+ events for our portfolio companies a year -- and historically we've held off on sharing the content widely, since we viewed it as a benefit that came from being a member of the First Round Capital community. But some talks are so good they are meant to be shared with the world. So today we released a talk that Kellan Elliott-McCrea (the CTO of Etsy) gave at our last CTO Summit entitled "How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by 500% in One Year". After witnessing first-hand how challenging it can be to attract women engineers, Kellan shares lessons in building a process and culture to attract female engineers. Really compelling stuff -- on a very important topic...

On Civilized Discourse...

2013-02-06T08:51:21-05:00

When you have the opportunity to partner with Jeff Atwood (aka Coding Horror) on a new company, it's hard to say "no". And when you learn his new company is reinventing forum software, a product that hasn't seen change in a couple decades, it becomes a pretty easy "yes".

I was recently looking around online and found my very first forum post (Usenet post from 1993) on the topic of Prodigy pricing changes. You can see that post here. What you quickly realize from reading this brief exchange (besides for my age) is that online forums as we know them have been relatively unchanged for the past couple decades. It's one of the last areas of the web that hasn't been touched by modern software or product thinking. Blogs have changed substantially with Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr. Connecting with friends has been rethought with Facebook and news and information flow has been forever altered with Twitter. But forums, an area of the internet that still produces massive amounts of content and valuable knowledge, haven't been touched. In Jeff's recent post on his new company, he throws out just a few examples of the robustness (and sometimes quirkiness) of online forums today:

A 12 year old girl who finds a forum community of rabid enthusiasts willing to help her rebuild a Fiero from scratch? Check.
The most obsessive breakdown of Lego collectible minifig kits you'll find anywhere on the Internet? Check.
Some of the most practical information on stunt kiting in the world? Check.
The only place I could find with scarily powerful squirt gun instructions and advice? Check.
The underlying research for a New Yorker article outing a potential serial marathon cheater? Check.

There are few better people on earth to take on this huge challenge than Jeff Atwood. Jeff has spent a majority of his life thinking about text exchange on the web. When we first starting talking, it was clear that the "exchange of paragraphs" as he calls it was something deeply important to him. And that it was very different from his last company, Stack Exchange, a Q&A platform that allows domain experts to share answers with one another (without the free-form dialog that occurs in forums). He's also built an incredible following on his blog, Coding Horror, where he explores everything from technology to the judicial system (if you haven't read his post on being on a jury called "Somebody is to Blame for This" - please do it now.)

So with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Jeff and Discourse to the First Round Community and can't wait to be a part of the next two decades of online forums! Try out the beta here...

Looking back at 2012

2013-01-25T12:30:00-05:00

I’m a startup guy. And from day one, we’ve always viewed First Round Capital as a startup. We're building First Round Capital just like any entrepreneur would build their business. We are a company - not a “firm” or a collection of independent partners that come together for Monday meetings. We have customers (our entrepreneurs) and shareholders (our Limited Partners). In every part of our business, we try our hardest to innovate and delight our customers - and think differently about what a venture fund could be. Whether it's public initiatives like Dorm Room Fund or internal products like our propriety online collaboration tool, FRC Network, which connects the 7,000+ employees across our investments - we try to push ourselves every year to move faster and faster - and come to the office willing to invent (and to fail).

As each year comes to an end, we do our best to take stock and plan for the future. As companies mature, they often begin to solidify this process in an annual report - where they publicly share what happened in the previous year. For the first time ever, we're choosing to do the same thing. To open up our community and share where we've been and what we've done.

In the process of crunching the data and reflecting on the year, it's clear it was a busy one. This year was filled with 37 new companies in our Community, the addition of 5 new members to the First Round team, more than 50 new software product features built and shipped for our proprietary FRC Network, 55+ company only events, a ton of additional services, thousands of new relationships and one new fund.

You can find more details on all of those key milestones in our 2012 Annual Report (a huge thank you to our design partner on this project, Alice Lee - she really helped turn data into beauty) - and also some really interesting data - here are a few of our favorites:

First Round Capital companies raised a total of $910,000,000 in 2012
5.5% of all dollars invested in Tech/IT companies by every venture firm in the country went to a FRC company
The First Round Capital companies that exited (through M&A or IPO) in 2012 were worth 2,500,000,000+ at the time of exit
The most common CEO name in our Community is David - there are 11 Davids
The First Round Capital Holiday Video was viewed over 100,000 times, that's 164.2 days of human attention
Every dollar First Round initially invests in a company is typically followed by $36 of follow-on capital from other VCs
2012 was the first year in our history where consumer companies represented less than 50% of our initial investment dollars
Our partnership flew over 480,000 miles in 2012

So as we start 2013, we sincerely thank the 7,000+ employees across our community who worked millions of hours to help our 300+ founders build industry changing companies. We're excited to have the opportunity to support you in the year to come.

You can see our entire Annual Report here: www.firstround.com/annualreport2012 (and be sure to check out the premier of "The Making of Call Me First Round Style" at the very bottom).

Announcing our latest investment, Flatiron Health

2013-01-15T09:00:00-05:00

It's always exciting to get the chance to publicly share a new investment - but today is even more exciting given this is the second time we've partnered with serial entrepreneurs Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg. Nat was one of First Round Capital's first interns ever and built our very first website. He then went onto intern at a First Round company, then called VideoEgg (now Say Media) and soon after, with Zach, came up with the idea for a company focused on algorithms and ad targeting called Invite Media (acquired by Google in 2010).

Nat and Zach are the kinds of founders we love to partner with, they're heat seeking missiles. With Invite Media they pivoted away from their original product and essentially invented what is now known as a Demand Side Platform. They are insanely effective executors and learners, resourceful and constantly curious. For example, while they were not ad tech domain experts when they founded Invite Media, they immersed themselves in the space, accumulated as much knowledge as possible and ultimately discovered an opening in the market at the right time and rapidly grew the company before exiting.

So when the guys told us they left Google to dive into an entirely new space -- healthcare -- we were instantly excited and thrilled to participate in their initial round of financing. Their new company is called Flatiron Health and it's focused on bringing the power of big data to the healthcare space.

I always seem to hear how a ‘cure for cancer’ is right around the corner, but the clinical trials to bring drugs to market is such a long process that 'the corner seems' seems to retreat farther and farther away. Or, to be more precise, eight years away – the time it takes to test each potential cure. While part of this time period is required (it can take years before we see the results of a cancer treatment), there has to be a way to make this process quicker. In other industries, we've seen Big Data help buyers, sellers and everyone in between make more efficient decisions. Yet Big Data has only just started to make it's way into MedTech.

Flatiron Health, based in New York City, is building an “oncology data platform”, which allows cancer care providers to aggregate, structure and mine their clinical oncology data (they call it "making cancer data actionable"). Flatiron’s platform integrates a cancer center’s disparate data systems to provide a truly longitudinal and comprehensive view of the patient population. Through the platform, administrators and clinicians gain deep analytics for business and clinical intelligence, resource utilization, treatment patterns, network management and research. Cancer centers can also monitor their adherence to national cancer care guidelines and benchmark their performance. Flatiron is currently in private beta.

Nat and Zach join a number of other First Round companies focused on the healthcare IT space - including DNAnexus, Mango Health and Sherpaa. Please join me in welcoming Nat, Zach and the entire Flatiron Health team back into the First Round Capital Community.

Oh, and if you're interested in joining the team and changing the world for the better, they're hiring for insanely good engineers and product managers - you can learn more here: http://www.flatiron.com/careers/open.html

Happy Holidays

2012-12-19T12:30:00-05:00

As many of you know, this time of the year is one of our favorite at First Round Capital - and not just because it's the holiday season. But rather because it's time to fire up our camera, polish up our writing skills, dust off our dancing shoes, practicing our singing and prepare for our holiday video.

We hope this annual tradition shows that even though startups are a serious business - we don't take ourselves too seriously. Our holiday video also gives us the chance to get together with the amazing entrepreneurs we work with to sing and dance, celebrate like it’s Friday, and end the year with a bit of Spice.

As our portfolio has gotten bigger, so too has our video – and it is a “labor of love” for our entire team. Phin wrote the lyrics, CeCe scouted locations, secured costumes and handled the choreography (you should have seen how bad we were before she coached us), and Brett continues to amaze us all with his direction and production.

So without any more delay, we're thrilled to share with you, the First Round Capital Holiday Video 2012.

We really hope it puts a smile on your face.

Student Engineers: Apply to work at 170+ startups with one Common Application

2012-12-14T13:00:00-05:00

We've talked a lot recently about the amazing amount of talent that exists in universities across the country – and one of the main reasons we launched the Dorm Room Fund was to create a new and more efficient way for capital to flow onto campuses and into the best and brightest entrepreneurs. But we realize that not everyone wants to start a company; many students, instead, would love to join one. But it’s often really hard for students to find the perfect startup jobs. Startups typically don’t recruit/interview on college campuses. And they rarely post job openings for internships. Too often, it is often based on who you know. So a lot of top university talent simply end up taking an internship or full-time job at Google or Microsoft. We don't think this makes sense.

Last year, we quietly launched an experiment called the First Round Capital Common Application. It was a simple idea: allow engineering students to fill out one application and get matched with the perfect startup from across our 170 companies. That tiny experiment lead to some incredible matches. Will Drevo, undergraduate CS student (and winner of the Autonomous Robotics Competition) at MIT said, "Applying for an internship through First Round Capital unexpectedly landed me a dream internship at a cutting-edge stealth startup of 12 employees - ToyTalk, Inc. It was honestly the best work experience I've had to date and I worked with a truly amazing and fun-loving team. I got to walk into work every day and talk with the CEO and CTO - I really felt like part of the team. But I never would have heard about ToyTalk unless I applied through First Round Capital."

So we’re super excited to launch this year's Common Application for university students. With this one application, engineering students can apply for summer internships or full-time jobs at over 170 amazing startup companies. Maybe you're an algorithms and data junkie looking to work on insanely tough problems with a small team in SF, or perhaps you're more interested in doing iOS development for an eCommerce company in NYC – just tell us about yourself, your interests and desired location and we'll take care of the rest. If you're a student, you can apply here now.

Once you complete your application, our Talent Team will review your submission and if you're a fit, we'll follow up directly and connect you with relevant companies. You'll receive a number of introductions so you can choose the opportunity and company you are most excited about.

We hope our Common Application continues to make it easier for the most talented students to have the opportunity to work at small startups with big ambitions. The only way to learn how to build great companies is to be a part of them - and we hope more students have that opportunity in 2013.

Why First Round Capital funded a lawsuit

2012-12-05T16:25:45-05:00

You can imagine the scene in the board room.

The CEO of our portfolio company, Techforward, is discussing a “make the company opportunity" -- Best Buy wants us to to power their nation-wide buyback program. And Best Buy is talking about launching it with a Super Bowl commercial! We had just finished a pilot test in several Best Buy stores and the results were very strong – and now, before we moved forward with the national rollout, Best Buy was asking us to provide them with access to our proprietary analytical model. This model was our crown jewels -- we had invested years and millions of dollars building it. But we had signed a non-disclosure agreement with Best Buy – and they had assured us the information would remain confidential and was critical to moving forward. The board ultimately agreed to share the model – knowing we were protected by our confidentiality agreement.

Fast forward a few months and many more meetings in Minneapolis. Best Buy abruptly tells Techforward that it is not moving forward with them – but rather, they are moving forward themselves. They launch a Super Bowl commercial staring Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber to promote their program. And Best Buy goes on to generate over $140M in revenues through this program.

Now imagine the scene in the Techforward board room. Although the company had been providing services for other retailers (like Radio Shack and Dell), the company had invested well over a year’s effort to get the Best Buy deal underway. And Best Buy’s last minute actions posed a fatal blow. Techforward sued Best Buy – but it would take a very long time before the case made it through trial. And since Techforward had invested so much money working on the Best Buy deal, the cash position of the company was not looking good. The board ultimately had to make a horrible choice – they sold Techforward’s assets to a third party. BUT – they did not sell the lawsuit. Instead, First Round Capital (along with our co-investor, NEA) decided to keep funding the lawsuit. And over the last 18 months, we and NEA gave the lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the suit going. This wasn’t an easy decision. We are in the business of funding companies – not lawsuits. But my partner, Howard Morgan, was a board member of Techforward – and he sat in those board meetings. And Howard was convinced that Best Buy shouldn’t get away with their behavior. We needed to send a message to Best Buy – and every other large company – that they can’t blatantly violate agreements and steal ideas from startups. And if big companies believe they can violate agreements with immunity because a startup can’t afford to sue them, it is bad news for every startup in the ecosystem.

Today Howard is smiling. Because after 18 months in court, a nine-person jury found Best Buy liable for misappropriation of TechForward’s trade secrets and breach of contract, and returned a verdict of $22 million in favor of TechForward. And the jury also found by clear and convincing evidence that Best Buy did so willfully and maliciously, so the judge awarded an additional $5 million in punitive damages.

As we saw the information that was produced by Best Buy during the trial (some of which is summarized here), I was amazed by their brazenness. Best Buy had:

Internal emails that acknowledged that it would “...be a couple of years before we [Best Buy] have a model that is up and running…” and “...I’m not convinced we’d be able to organically duplicate Tech Forward’s model in a reasonable period of time…” so they “…wanted an opportunity to peek under the hood a little bit at their [Tech Forward’s] modeling…”
The models which Best Buy did build internally were virtually identical to the models that Techforward had provided them. And there were internal Best Buy emails asking Best Buy employees to “…remove the Techforward reference in the file names…”
While Best Buy promised to build a “brick wall” to protect the information that Techforward provided them, they acknowledged that they did not do so. And in fact, the same people that reviewed Techforward’s model were the ones who built Best Buy’s model.
My favorite email is one from a Best Buy employee (I am using all my willpower to not put his name here) who argued in favor of running the program internally, saying that “I don’t think we should be making this company [Techforward] rich…”

This has been an educational process for me. I had (naively) assumed that senior-level employees of a $50B company would know right from wrong. (And this is a company that recently launched a “College Innovators Fund” to help discover innovative ideas on college campuses… Applicants beware ;-) Going forward, I won’t be as trusting. This should be turned into a case study that every major company should make their business development people read.

I also learned that our justice system, while slow and imperfect, does work. And while the outcome here is still not what we had expected when we funded the company initially, it’s nice to turn a money-losing outcome into a money-making one. And I am thrilled for the founders of Techforward - Jade Van Doren and Marc Lebovitz - who finally have vindication after doggedly pursuing justice for almost two years.

I hope that going forward we can stop funding lawsuits – and just fund companies. And I won’t be shopping at Best Buy this holiday season.

25 First Round Capital Cyber Monday Deals

2012-11-26T08:10:00-05:00

At First Round Capital, we’ve been big believers in the future of online commerce - and over the past few years have invested in many eCommerce companies, all at the seed stage. These companies have now gone on to to raise over $350,000,000 in follow-on capital and will be shipping hundreds of thousands of products this holiday season to customers all over the world. Whether it’s Birchbox with discovery through subscription, Fab with curation, Warby Parker building a vertically integrated brand, or Modcloth inverting the supply chain, these companies have set out to redefine traditional eCommerce models while building a product consumers truly love - and we couldn't be more excited.

Today I'm thrilled to announce that over 25 of our portfolio companies have come together to make gift giving just a bit easier and cheaper this holiday season. And we put together a small site showcasing these exclusive Cyber Monday offers. We hope you’ll take advantage these offers today – before it’s too late. Go check it out and give a more unique gift to your loved ones this holiday season: gifts.firstround.com

And no - this isn't meant to replace our annual holiday video. Stay tuned ;-)