Monday, June 15, 2009

VC Larry Cheng on the Facebook Investment That Didn't Happen

Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, serves up a blog post well worth reading today, about the early days of Facebook -- and his initial 2004 meeting with Facebook's two founders at Henrietta's Table in Cambridge.

Cheng writes:

    Mark [Zuckerberg] and Eduardo [Saverin] had a complementary aspect to their partnership. Mark struck me as the alpha male. He had a profound confidence about him that exceeded his youth. He exuded killer instinct. He was not shy about sharing his aspirations of dominating the college market. He was also the technical visionary behind the scenes. Eduardo was polite and unassuming. He could have been your college roommate. He was jovial, relational, and likeable. He seemed to be the fast follower. He was also apparently the business mind. While both exuded a certain naivete, they were both convinced that they were going to change the world. They were right.


As far as I can tell, Cheng was the first VC in Boston to talk to the founders of Facebook while they were still at Harvard, and the firm he was at at the time, Battery Ventures, may have been the only Boston area firm to have had a chance to invest in Facebook. I wrote about what happened in September, 2007.

But the biggest unanswered questions remain unanswered by Cheng's blog post: why exactly didn't Battery invest in Facebook? And if they had invested, would Facebook have stayed in Massachusetts -- or was Zuckerberg determined to build his company in the Valley?

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

New Blog from Larry Cheng, Fidelity Ventures VC

Larry Cheng of Fidelity Ventures (and formerly Battery Ventures) has a new blog: Thinking About Thinking (it's named after his favorite course at Harvard.) Larry has also been tweeting for a while now.

Do let me know if there are any other entrepreneur or VC or tech exec blogs related to New England that should be added to the list...

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Friday, October 26, 2007

And the final number is...

Just to update an earlier post: General Catalyst's fifth fund has topped out at $714 million. That's up there with some of the biggest funds raised this year, like Battery Ventures' $750 million fund (#8 for the Waltham collosus.)

Other VCs in Boston regard General Catalyst as a marketing machine, pulling in money from limited partners at an incredible pace. The exits, though, have been scarce thus far: GC's biggest hit has been M-Qube, a wireless marketing company in Watertown, MA. That was a 6x return for investors when it was acquired last year by Verisign for $250 million.

(Mass High Tech had this fun story earlier in the year, about M-Qube execs going off to start new companies, like Mobicious and Matchmine.)

Lately, GC has been betting big on video: its portfolio includes Maven Networks, Brightcove, Visible Measures, Everyzing, ViTrue, and ScanScout.

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Sunday, September 9, 2007

Today's Globe column: Why Facebook Went West

Ever since I moved back to Boston from San Francisco, I've been wondering about the story behind why Facebook was started at Harvard but has been based in Palo Alto, CA ever since the summer of 2004. So that's the topic of today's Globe column. Here's the opener:

    In April of 2004, two Harvard undergrads walked into the Charles Hotel for a meeting with a venture capitalist. What happened next either highlights Boston's deficiencies as a greenhouse for a new generation of Web start-ups, or illustrates the incredible magnetism of Silicon Valley - or a bit of both.

I didn't get to talk with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the piece, unfortunately, but pretty much everyone I spoke to said that he had his heart set on going to Silicon Valley for the summer after his sophomore year. (I do believe that for aspiring techies, Silicon Valley exerts a powerful pull the way Hollywood does for aspiring actors.) Scott Tobin of Battery Ventures, the one VC firm I could find that was aware of Facebook in early 2004, wrote in an e-mail:

    Zuckerberg was into going out to Palo Alto for the summer if I remember correctly, however it’s impossible to tell if whether he had influential advisors in NY or Boston working with him & suggesting to him that Boston was his place – that he would have considered doing so.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook, said:

    I think there was a sense that it made sense to start an Internet company from California. It was seen as a friendlier environment. It is really amazing that people in Boston missed out on it, even though it was a very risky deal, with lots of open questions.

David Sze, a partner at Greylock, said, "There is definitely an ecosystem advantage [in Silicon Valley]. There isn't a history for consumer Internet on the east coast, and I think Mark sensed that and wanted to have every advantage."

I mention the large number of local companies now building Facebook apps in the story....while I don't want to try to be comprehensive here, there are apps from Kayak.com (just launched today - a nifty one that lets you spin an animated Globe and then answer travel trivia), Tourfilter, Fafarazzi, TripAdvisor, StyleFeeder, OurStage, Finetune, GoLoco, Geezeo, and Plum.com.

The video that accompanies this week's column is an interview with Stephen Kaufer, co-founder and CEO of TripAdvisor, a Web 2.0 company founded here in Boston that stayed. In it, he talks about raising money, building a team, and staying flexible enough to find a business model that would work. (TripAdvisor was acquired a few years back by InterActiveCorp for $200 million.)

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