Monday, March 30, 2009

Charles River Ventures' New Fund (and the Twitter Back-Story)

Charles River Ventures just closed a new $320 million fund, its fourteenth. The firm has had some big liquidity events over the past two years, generating about $600 million in returns, including the IPOs of local start-ups Virtusa and Netezza, and acquisitions of EqualLogic, Compete.com, and Acopia Networks.

Among CRV's more recent investments they list in the official press release are Nantero, Scribd, Vlingo, and Twitter.

Curious story about Twitter... CRV only has about $250K in that company, which has raised $55 million in total. CRV had invested in Twitter founder Evan Williams' earlier venture, Odeo, which didn't take off. Williams decided to repay the investors and go off and do Twitter. (The technology for it had been an offshoot of Odeo.) When Twitter started raising funds, Charles River put in that quarter-million early on, but hasn't participated in any rounds since, and doesn't have a board seat. (But Twitter is listed as one of CRV partner George Zachary's investments.)

Also interesting that TechCrunch lists CRV as a Menlo Park firm. While a lot of its activity has been out West, five of the eight investing partners for this new fund are based in Waltham, Mass. (all but Bill Tai, George Zachary and Saar Gur.)

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Thursday, February 26, 2009

$26 Million In, $3 Million Out

This is one of those deals all the VCs involved would probably rather forget: putting $26 million into Tizor Systems of Maynard ($8.3 million as recently as last February), and then selling it to Netezza for $3.1 million in cash. Tizor makes software for securing and auditing the information stored in data centers.

Who was involved in this one? Longworth, Navigator Technology Ventures, Common Angels, and Masthead Venture Partners locally, and Hummer Winblad on the West Coast, according to PEHub.

I wrote earlier this month about the rising number of these fire sales of struggling tech companies. And a while back, I wrote about firms like Masthead and Longworth trying to raise new funds. Neither has.

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Saturday, July 21, 2007

Interview with George Zachary of Charles River Ventures

Charles River Ventures is a 37-year old venture capital firm headquartered in Waltham, MA. The firm has a west coast office in Silicon Valley, on the same street where all the big VC firms huddle: Sand Hill Road. And one of their portfolio companies, Netezza, just went public on Friday.

On June 28, I sat down with George Zachary, a partner who works in the firm's Silicon Valley office. Many of his investments, like GoTV and Areae, are consumer-oriented Internet plays -- the topic of my first "Innovation Economy" column this Sunday. Here's a video excerpt from our conversation -- followed by a list of five things Boston could do to help foster more consumer-oriented tech companies.



Five Things Boston Could Do to Encourage More Consumer-Oriented Tech Activity

1. Fly a banner over the Bay Colony Center in Waltham (home to most of New England's VC firms) that says, "Stop investing in the tried-and-true 50-year old alumni of DEC, Wang, and Lotus." VCs need to stop equating experience in the world of enterprise technology with bankability.

2. More people interested in consumer-oriented concepts ought to know about and attend gatherings like Web Innovators Group, OpenCoffee, Mobile Mondays, and tastybytes -- and start events of their own.

3. We need more blogs about consumer tech and Web 2.0, located all around New England.

4. We need more visibility from the few execs here with consumer experience -- they need to serve as poster children. Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com (and now of Eons), already does a great job of this. Bob Davis, back when he was CEO of Lycos and when Lycos was a standalone company, did well, too. And I never thought I'd sing this, but "Where have you gone, David Wetherell?"

(Avid Technology has a number of consumer products...but its recently-departed CEO, David Krall, lived on the west coast (even though the firm is headquartered in Tewksbury.) Privately-held Bose Corp. is a big consumer tech player, but its founder, Amar Bose, doesn't often show up anywhere other than Framingham -- and doesn't allow any of the company's younger execs to do much speaking or schmoozing at local tech events.)

5. We need to stop taking ourselves so seriously. Not all technology needs to solve a business problem or address a pain point.

James Currier, the founder of Tickle, told me a great story this week. His company was founded in Cambridge, and later moved to San Francisco. He raised $9 million in funding, and later sold the company, which focuses on online tests and quizzes, to Monster.com for $100 million. Here's what he said:

    We started Emode [Tickle's original name] seriously. We had tests about depression and anxiety, which had been vetted by the American Psychological Association. But no one cared. The APA thought we were doing it right, and the people at Harvard respected it, but it wasn’t until we launched totally superficial quizzes like "what breed of dog are you?" and "who is your celebrity match?" that the site took off. It was totally flippant. But we had gotten to the point where we were off salary and about to go out of business. So we said, "What the hell, let’s try this. Maybe people will respond to fun." And they did.

Currier's new venture is called Ooga Labs -- and it is working on several start-up ideas simultaneously (the sort of thing people used to call an incubator). His first new site is GoodTree.

"Business in Boston is professional and trustworthy," Currier says. "People are deep technologists, and when it comes to building a new kind of networking switch, that's great. But all this digital media or consumer Internet stuff tends to be more creative and optimistic. You have to believe that people are going to want to do all this crazy stuff online."

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