Spark to Boston: Let Us Buy You a Beer, At Least

The party thrown at Cambridge Brewing Company last night by Spark Capital was loud, crowded, and fun. You couldn't actually move around the room much, but I managed to bump into Dave Balter of BzzAgent, Doug Levin, Chris Marstall of tourfilter, Eric Giler of WiTricity, Wade Roush of Xconomy, Jon Radoff of GamerDNA, Misha Katz of AdHarmonics, Nabeel Hyatt of Conduit Labs, Jon Pierce of Betahouse, and Dennis Miller, Rob Go, Bijan Sabet, and Todd Dagres of Spark. Dagres, in a short speech to the assembled crowd, plugged Spark's investment in Twitter, as well as its new Start@Spark seed funding initiative.

What was interesting about the party, full as it was of entrepreneurs, was how few of them were Spark-backed entrepreneurs. One guy, founder of NYC-based AdMeld, took the mic for a couple minutes to talk about how Spark helped him get the company going.

In looking at Spark's portfolio this morning, what I noticed (and maybe I'm just slow to pick up on this) is that just one of their current investments, VeriVue, is located in Massachusetts. The bulk of the companies are in NYC, LA, Silicon Valley, and Texas.

So while Spark is making some great moves to be more supportive of entrepreneurship here in Boston, with Start@Spark, TechStars Boston, and the Alliance for Open Competition, the bulk of their bucks so far have gone elsewhere. This is a relatively new dynamic in venture capital... in the olden days, you'll recall that VCs often said that if they couldn't drive to a company (and get back) within a day to attend a board meeting, they wouldn't invest. Spark (which has just one office, in Boston) clearly doesn't mind racking up some frequent flier miles.

(In the photo at right is Spark founder Todd Dagres welcoming party-goers last night.)