Author: Gregory T. Huang

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Looking to start a technology company in this era of small teams, lean cost structures, and fast times to market? You might want to check out Venture Mechanics in Seattle. It’s basically an outfit of four experienced startup executives who are trying to reinvent the process of launching tech companies. They held an open-house launch party last night in downtown Seattle, and they’ve just started to spill the beans about what they’ve been working on for almost a year now.

Venture Mechanics is not an investment fund. It’s also not an incubator, an accelerator, an angel investor network, or a mentorship program for entrepreneurs. That makes it different from Founder’s Co-op, TechStars, Founder Institute, Northwest Entrepreneur Network, or any number of angel groups around town that are also focused on early-stage companies.

It’s more like a “sandbox for serial entrepreneurs,” according to the website. But what does that mean? Forced to describe his new organization in one word, Venture Mechanics head Ron Wiener calls it a “Berkubator.” That means it takes some key elements of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment model, and applies them to a portfolio of startups rather than acquisitions of established companies, he says.

Here are a few words of wisdom from Buffett that are applicable, says Wiener. “Buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.” And, “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.” And lastly, “Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1.”

Wiener, the co-founder and former CEO of Earth Class Mail (and five other tech companies), has assembled a team of “mechanics” that includes Peter Weiss, a 30-year veteran of finance and a prominent angel investor (he invested in Earth Class Mail); John Vogel, a longtime senior engineer with GoAhead Software, Tideworks Technology, and OneCommand; and Doug Choi, a lawyer and entrepreneur with leadership experience from Isilon Systems, F5 Networks, and Concur Technologies.

The word “mechanics” implies two things about the new venture. The first is that it will …Next Page »

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Gregory T. Huang wrote:

How did Geoff Entress become Seattle’s go-to tech investor and startup guru? For those outside the local technology community, Entress is an angel investor who has put his own money to work in more than 35 startup companies, most of them software-based and in the Northwest. They range from firms that are now well-established like Isilon Systems (NASDAQ: ISLN), Seadragon Software (bought by Microsoft), and The Coffee Equipment Company (bought by Starbucks), to fast-rising stars like Bonanzle, Cheezburger Network, Dashwire, Swype, and Elemental Technologies.

But that only scratches the surface of the impact Entress has had in the business community. He is a trusted advisor to scores of local entrepreneurs. He’s also well-known and trusted by the VCs on the other side of the table, having worked as a venture partner at two of Seattle’s premier tech VC firms, Madrona Venture Group and Voyager Capital.

Just yesterday, Entress, 46, found another way to weave himself deeper into the fabric of the Seattle startup community. He announced he has joined Seattle-based Founder’s Co-op as a managing partner. This means he will help run the seed-stage investment fund and startup mentorship program as an equal partner along with co-founders Chris DeVore and Andy Sack. Entress had been a limited partner of the firm for the past couple of years. As if his new role won’t keep him busy enough, Entress is also retaining his position at Voyager Capital, where he will continue to advise startups and evaluate investment deals.

Overall, the move solidifies Entress’s standing as one of the most connected and successful early-stage tech investors in the country. He has been called the “Ron Conway of Seattle” (after the Silicon Valley early-stage angel investor in Google and PayPal) often enough that the comparison feels like a cliche. But to understand what Entress’s move to Founder’s Co-op really means—and what the long-term impact could be on the startup and venture capital ecosystem—you need to know more about where he came from, and where he’s going in life.

Entress is one of those guys whose track record as a boy wonder boggles the mind. He grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of an oral surgeon with the U.S. Navy who “pulled the wisdom teeth of all my friends in high school,” he says. He went to college at the University of Notre Dame, and returned to his hometown to do a master’s in industrial administration at Carnegie Mellon University. Fresh out of business school in the mid-1980s, when he was in his early 20s, he ran a hedge fund with his father. The fund was successful enough that its sale to Duquesne Capital Management helped launch Entress’s career as an angel investor.

But before he found his golden touch for startups in Seattle, he had to complete a couple more steps in the journey. He learned the ways of Wall Street in various jobs in finance, sales, and …Next Page »

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Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Rob Glaser, the founder, chairman, and former CEO of Seattle-based RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), announced yesterday that he has joined Accel Partners, the Silicon Valley-based VC firm, as a part-time venture partner. Glaser will focus on digital media, social media, and mobile service investments—and he’ll do it from the Seattle area.

Accel invested in RealNetworks back in 1995, so the two have a longstanding relationship. In an interview with Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, Glaser gushed, “I have never seen a more entrepreneurially aligned venture firm.”

In a more in-depth chat with Dan Primack of PE Hub, Glaser said, “My sector focus will be on social media and the social intersection of mobile with physical location and other characteristics. The second element of my focus is that I’m Seattle-based, so I hope to introduce Accel to lots of great local entrepreneurs. There are four major mobile companies here—T-Mobile is headquartered here and AT&T is about half here—and we have a great tradition of mobile entrepreneurship like McCaw and others. Plus Microsoft—of which I’m an alum—Real, and Amazon.” (Check out the interview for tidbits on Glaser’s departure from Real, VC pitfalls, and political aspirations.)

In any case, hiring Glaser seems like a shrewd move by a venture firm that, like all its competitors, needs to bolster its entrepreneurial talent, connections, and horsepower in a very challenging time for VC returns. If there’s anyone who might have a unique take on the opportunities at the intersection of mobile technology, physical location, and social media, it’s Glaser.

Prior to RealNetworks, Glaser was a 10-year Microsoft veteran and, before that, the founder of Ivy Research, a maker of games for IBM personal computers (in 1981, while he was an undergrad at Yale University). Glaser has also been an early-stage angel investor in companies including TellMe, PlanetOut, and SmileBox.

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Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Twine.com is officially no more. As of Friday, the semantic and social news service has been discontinued, and most of its features have been folded into Evri.com, the Seattle-based semantic information discovery site. Both companies were backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, and in February, Evri acquired Twine (Radar Networks, based in San Francisco) for an undisclosed amount.

All along, we’ve been saying the real story is about how semantic and social search are converging, with the goal of giving consumers better ways to discover the news and information they’re looking for. The “semantic” technology involves trying to understand the meaning of search queries, and drawing connections between online entities like people, places, and products. So how are things moving forward at Evri?

Last week, I spoke with CEO Will Hunsinger, who gave me an update on the company and its plans. He says, “We wanted to be as mindful as we possibly could about the Twine user base.” That means preserving the Twine data, including users’ bookmarks, and letting customers port their data over to Evri by downloading Web links and text commentary, he says. Twine has several hundred thousand registered users and hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month, Hunsinger says.

The main difference between the two sites, as Hunsinger puts it, is Twine let you bookmark topics and follow areas of interest, while Evri uses semantic technology to “search the Web for you, distill it for you, and it’s up to us to deliver” the relevant information. If you want to follow the latest news on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, you don’t have to do repeated searches for different keywords or set up new Google news alerts. The idea is that Evri understands what Web content is related to the oil spill at a deeper level, and tries to serve it up for you. “We can disambiguate who the players are,” Hunsinger says. “We know that BP is connected to Halliburton.”

The next release of Evri’s software, in the next few weeks, will let people “follow any topic on the Web,” Hunsinger says. And the next step after that will be to “allow users to curate and personalize their experience, and create their own content channel.”

In another interesting move, Evri has just released a technology news reader application for Android phones called Evri Thing Tech. (The company also has an iPhone app currently being reviewed.)

The tech news channel, a free app, lets you follow developments in areas like venture capital, big corporations, and social media (see screen shot left). This is the company’s first “vertical” mobile app, but Hunsinger says, “We intend to be in dozens of verticals.”

“We think it’s a huge opportunity for us,” Hunsinger says. He adds that the launch of Apple’s iPad and the rising consumption of Internet content and services on mobile devices is giving companies the ability to reach consumers wherever they are—while taking the train to work, say, or waiting for their flight. “It’s hard to search on a mobile device, so why not have someone pushing content to you?” he says.

Lastly, I asked what specific feedback Paul Allen has given the Evri team lately. Hunsinger wouldn’t bite, saying only that “the entire board is excited by the push into mobile.”

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