Posts Tagged ‘horowitz’
Foursquare Closes $20 Million Series B From Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square, And O’Reilly
Foursquare, the geo-mobile startup everybody tried to invest in or buy, now has officially closed its Series B funding round. The “wire transfer heard ’round the world,” as board member Bryce Roberts puts it, was for $20 million, giving the company a $95 million pre-money valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, as previously reported, with existing investors Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating.
CEO Dennis Crowley says the fundraising was “a lot of work” and plans to use the money to staff up and keep adding to the product. “It’s all about building a team that can churn out new product,” he tells me. “We’ve been dreaming up these things for the past 10 years and now we have the opportunity to build them all.” The money will also help pay for more office space. His 27 employees are already too big for the startup’s current New York City offices, and Foursquare is about to move into new digs upstairs in the same building. “It’s awesome,” he says, “we can hear them building it upstairs right now!” He plans on hiring a lot more engineers.
The whole funding process has been drawn out. Crowley was deciding between suitors last Spring, when buyout interest started to come, first from Yahoo, and then from Facebook. The VC deal was put on hold. But Andreessen Horowitz felt so yanked around by the process that partner Ben Horowitz very publicly “withdrew” from the bidding. That turned out to be nothing more than a rebuke. And now Horowitz says of course they invested. Foursquare has a “great Founder/CEO,” a “killer product,” and is going after a “gigantic market.” In Crowley, specifically, Horowitz sees the leadership traits they like to invest in: a CEO who is a “keeper of the product vision.”
Selling to Yahoo would have been a mistake. Facebook would have been more interesting. In any case, Foursquare will go it alone for now, and develop the product unencumbered by a larger organization with a different set of goals. But remember, Marc Andreessen is on Facebook’s board, so that avenue is not entirely shut off.
Leaving Foursquare independent will allow it to find its own way. The geo check-in service that lets you broadcast your location to all your friends is hitting a nice growth curve, adding 15,000 users a day. It is now up to 1.8 million registered users, up from one million just last April. Why mess up a good thing when you can buy it later?
Horowitz dismisses the notion that Crowley picked them to get to Facebook later. “I think that is reading too much into it,” he says. “Dennis has a primary relationship with Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn’t need us or Marc to do that. The reason for them going with us, at least in my belief, is that they thought we would help them go from a great product to a great company.”
Foursquare Requests Now Much More Useful With “Friends In Common”
Big news from Foursquare today. No, not that news (just yet). And okay, not really that big. Still, very useful.
Foursquare has given its friend request emails a nice upgrade today. Previously, all you would see is a text note that someone wanted to be your friend. If you wanted to learn anything about them, you had to click-through to their profile page on foursquare.com. But starting today, Foursquare has a new notification email system that includes the user’s profile picture and more importantly, an area noting what friends you have in common.
Right above the button to add that person as a friend (which takes you to your pending friend requests page), you’ll see a new area that reads “Also, it looks like you have some friends in common:” Below that, you’ll see a picture of the friends you have in common. This is very helpful for a service like Foursquare because you’re likely only going to want to follow people you really know. And friends in common is a great way to tell that — something which Facebook uses to great effect as well.
Of course, not everyone uses Foursquare that way. For example, Robert Scoble has about 8,500 stalkers (I mean, “friends”). Not surprisingly, the first new Foursquare notification I received showed that we had Scoble in common as a friend. So basically, Scoble may have broken this system before it even started.
Salesforce Chatterizes 10,000 Of Its Customers First Week After Public Launch
Unsurprisingly, Salesforce is seeing rapid adoption of its social collaboration platform Chatter among its existing customers after launching to the public last week. In its first week of general availability, Chatter has been integrated by 10,000 of Salesforce’s 77,300 existing customers, or 13 percent of Salesforce’s customer base.
Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said in a statement: “We’ve never seen this kind of excitement around a product release before.” Chatter was made available to the public last week after four months in private beta. Announced last November, Chatter leverages what Benioff calls the Cloud 2, delivering realtime access to data and information, using social sources, such as YouTube and Twitter. 
Google Taps The Buzz Keg For More Social Search Brew
Google Social Search is a good idea. You take regular Google search results and intertwine them with related elements that your contacts have shared on various social networks. But there’s one big barrier to entry. In order for your contacts to automatically share elements, they have to link up their various social profiles to their Google Profile page. A lot of people are simply not going to do that. So Google is changing things up a bit and making it easier to get at social data.
Starting today and rolling out over the cource of this week, Google will begin looking at items you share on Buzz and crawling elements from those social networks to use in Social Search as well. For example, if you link up your Twitter feed to your Buzz page, even if you haven’t linked it to your Google Profile, you’ll now start seeing results from your Twitter social graph in the results.
Obviously, Google is just going to be crawling public information. And if you want them to stop crawling something, you can simply unlink it from your Buzz account (just as you can unlink it from your Google Profile). Though this unlinking may take a little bit of time due to the crawlers, I’m told.
“It’s a win for users because it creates more value in Social Search,” Google’s Matt Cutts tells us. I asked Cutts where most of the Social Search data comes in from, and while he didn’t have any hard data, he said that Twitter was obviously one of the biggies (though there is still the Twitter/Buzz disconnect). FriendFeed also remains a valuable source of data, he says.
But now that anything you share in Buzz can be pulled into these Social Search results, hopefully there will be even more diverse data — and more of it overall. While it’s not happening just yet, Cutts envisioned a time when searching in a particular area (known from geolocation in your browser) would pull in results from your Foursquare social graph, for example.
Kontagent Raises $4.5 Million For Facebook Analytics Platform
Only a few months after the company raised $1 million in funding, Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analytics platform, has raised $4.5 million in new funding. We’ve confirmed the funding with Kontagent’s co-founder, Albert Lai. The round was led by Altos Ventures and Maverick Capital, with participation from Larry Braitman, cofounder of FlyCast and Adify. This brings the total amount raised by Kontagent to nearly $6 million dollars to date.
Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social interaction and other variables. The platform provides powerful A/B testing across any viral channel (a button, an invite or a notification) that sits inside Facebook.
Kontagent also offers developers viral optimization tools to track the virality of the application on Facebook. And Kontagent offers these analytics to iPhone and web applications using Facebook Connect. Currently Kontagent’s deep analytics track over 60 million monthly active users with its analytics.
The company plans to use this additional capital to build out sales and marketing capacities as well as for research and development. Kontagent is currently actively hiring and expanding its engineering, sales and marketing teams in both its San Francisco and Toronto offices.
Foursquare Board Approves The “Wire Transfer Heard ‘Round The World”
The long dalliance between investors and Foursquare appears to almost be consummated. According to a Tweet by Foursquare board member Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, about an hour ago he was “approving the wire transfer heard ’round the world.”
That would be the wire transfer from the new group of investors led by Andreessen Horowiitz, as we reported a few weeks ago. Despite being one of the hottest startups around, or perhaps because of it, Foursquare took along time to close this round. Mostly that was because the company got distracted by acquisition talks with Yahoo and Facebook. When I asked Foursquare CEo Dennis Crowley about this drawn out process ten days ago, he responded, “You don’t have to rush through it.”
There is still no official announcement yet from Foursquare on the funding, the exact amount raised or other investors involved, but I am pretty sure more details will be forthcoming shortly. Sometimes VCs get so excited they like to break news themselves, I guess.
Twitter Slashes API Rate Limits In Half Across The Board To Deal With Capacity Issues
As you may have noticed, Twitter has been having a rough month. Due in part to traffic from the World Cup, Twitter has had its worst month in terms of uptime in a year. The Fail Whale has been out in full force, and it’s partially Twitter’s own fault as they’re trying to overhaul their internal network during this time of high traffic. And today they’ve announced another move to help deal with network strain: an API rate limit cut.
And this isn’t a minor rate limit cut either. Twitter is taking the default limit from 350 and cutting it to 175. And they’re slashing the rates in half across the board. This means that everyone from the smallest Twitter sites to those whitelisted will be affected. Even Twitter’s own mobile properties (which use the same API) are being forced to deal with this cut.
“To ensure fairness to all users of the API, the reduced rate limit is proportional to that application or users’ allowance rather than a fixed value of requests,” Twitter notes on its FAQ site for the cut.
“Reducing the API rate-limit is not the
Andreessen Horowitz To Win The Foursquare Investor Badge
A months long fundraising process for Foursquare is in its last stages, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and Andreessen Horowitz looks to be preparing to check-in to Foursquare to take an investor badge.
The company has delayed committing to new venture capital as they considered buyout offers – negotiations went deep with both Yahoo and Facebook, and possibly Microsoft. The Yahoo discussions ended weeks ago, and Facebook passed on an acquisition earlier this week, we’ve heard.
That means the company is raising that big new round of financing. And a slew of venture capitalists, including Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital and First Round Capital were all competing heavily for inclusion despite the $80 million or so valuation, say our sources.
Andreessen Horowitz, despite rumors that they were pulling out of discussions with the company weeks ago over concerns that too much information was leaking to the press, is the last venture capitalist standing. The fact that founding partner Marc Andreessen is on the board of directors of Facebook, a key partner or competitor of Foursquare, may be the factor that put them over the top.
Existing investors OATV and Union Square Ventures will also participate heavily in the new round, we’ve heard. In the meantime they’ve likely already loaned additional capital to the company.
It’s not clear if the final terms of the round have been set, or who’s putting in how much money.
We sat down with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley two weeks ago at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about his vision for the company. Watch that interview here.
Tweets In Buzz: It’s Complicated — Well, Maybe Political
Yesterday, I moderated a panel at TiEcon featuring the heads of product for Google, Twitter, and Facebook — an interesting group, obviously. It was a good, long discussion (hopefully I’ll have the full video to post soon). But definitely one of the most interesting points of the discussion was when I asked Bradley Horowitz, a Vice President of product management at Google, why Google Buzz doesn’t import tweets in real time? His answer was, well, interesting.
Users of Google Buzz will know that the service is awful at importing tweets. Currently, the import is done in bulk at the end of each day, resulting in a barrage of tweets in streams. It’s so bad, that many users unsubscribe from others who set their Buzz account to auto-import tweets. So why does Google do this? Well, it’s complicated.
It seems logical that Google Buzz would do exactly what FriendFeed (prior to its acquisition by Facebook) would do, which is pull in tweets in realtime. After all, from what I’ve heard from multiple sources, Google does have full access to Twitter’s firehose. This makes sense considering that Google uses the Twitter firehose to populate its search results with tweets baked into them. So why the delay for tweets in Buzz?
When I asked Horowitz this question, he immediately passed the microphone to Twitter’s director of product, Jason Goldman. Goldman immediately passed the microphone back to Horowitz without saying anything. At this point, the audience was getting into it — what’s the answer? Horowitz would only say that Google is working closely with Twitter to come up with the best solution to import tweets.
That, of course, is bullshit.
I pressed, but Horowitz wouldn’t give me anything. So all I can do at this point is speculate based on what I know. Twitter is giving Google full access to its firehose per its agreement for search results. But Buzz may not want to use this data presumably because it would overwhelm Buzz — much like tweets overwhelm FriendFeed. If you’re trying to start a service, it makes sense that you wouldn’t want it to be overrun with data from a competing service. But still, tweets in realtime in Buzz would make it much more useful than it currently is. It would make it, well, FriendFeed.
In other words, I think this is all political. Google doesn’t want Buzz to become yet another Twitter client. And it’s hard to blame them.
Horowitz noted that we’d be hearing more about how Buzz can be used as a platform during Google I/O next week — so hopefully they’ll have more to share about Buzz in general. For now, unfortunately, all of us must suffer through this half-assed approach Buzz takes towards tweets. It makes it the social service that is sort of social.
Google VP Bradley Horowitz Talks Buzz’s Future, Gmail Innovation, And More (Video)
Last night dozens of entrepreneurs and investors met up in Palo Alto for Startup2Startup, a program founded by Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser that’s meant to help new entrepreneurs connect with their peers, and perhaps meet some potential investors. Each month, Startup2Startup invites a seasoned entrepreneur or tech executive to speak to the attendees; this month’s guest was Google VP Product for Google Apps Bradley Horowitz, who is charged with managing a big chunk of Google’s services, including Docs, Gmail, Calendar, Voice, and more. We’ve embedded the full video of the talk below.
During his talk, Horowitz spoke at length about Google’s new Apps Marketplace, which allows businesses using Google Apps to easily sign up for a variety of third party services like TripIt and Aviary, directly linking them to their Google accounts. He then sat down for a fireside chat with Dave McClure, who asked him about a variety of issues pertaining to Buzz, Gmail, and other topics.
Here are some of my notes from the fireside chat:
- Horowitz says the Buzz team accomplished “extraordinary” feats in the first 48 hours after Buzz’s release to deal with the initial concerns
- The launch of Buzz and the experiences of the team are extending not just to the Buzz and Gmail teams, but to all of Google as they think about the opportunity that social brings.
- Google is thinking about how to make following less Boolean (either on or off). Wouldn’t it be great if there was a personal relevance, that allows me to get the parts of your life that I’m interested in, and filter out other parts. Google is really good at relevance and ranking. It’s one of our core competencies, and it’s something we want to bring to this space.”
- “I ought to be able to follow nodes in an attention graph that aren’t just people, but imagine following a product, a place, a brand.” Twitter has done a great job at this in the sense that their profile is a proxy for an entity.
- “Ultimately we’d like to provide something that is a tool for managing attention.” There are too many inboxes (several Email, social network silos, etc.).
- Through the course of 2010, the lines between Google’s Docs products will continue to blur as they work better in tandem.
- With regard to payments, Google has a lot of different marketplaces (Apps Marketplace, Android, etc.) and there’s an opportunity for Google to re-factor them, build more trust with users, allow users to pay in situ. There’s also opportunities in being open, allowing users to pay with whatever methodology they’re comfortable with.
- With regard to policing applications on the App Marketplace (users on Google Apps can now hand their data over to third party apps using OAuth, and there’s a risk that they could be hacked or do something malicious), Horowitz says that Google “hasn’t ironed out all the eventualities in this process that might occur”. But administrators are given choice over what data they are handing over. It’s possible that this data could be abused/hacked. “In many ways you’re only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.” Companies will have to establish reputations with how they handle data and get better at disclosure. “We need to get better as an industry with helping users understand the flow of data”.
- Number two app on the Apps Marketplace is Aviary, the free image editor, which surprised Horowitz
- App Stores on mobile seem obvious, and until there’s a way to compile for all these devices, there’s going to be these different flavors of App Store. The opportunity to get beyond that is HTML5 and web apps.
Here’s the Horowitz’s full talk and the fireside chat, broken into two parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Here’s a one on one interview McClure and Horowitz conducted before the talk:
