Our Portfolio

You will find here a more formal description of our portfolio of investments in the next few days, and in the meantime here is the "narrative" about our first four deals. Since we expect to do 30 to 40 deals out of this fund, the diagram on the right will become very cluttered in its current form, but it will do for now.

Portfolio_3

  • SocialMedia.com was co-founded by my good friend Seth Goldstein, and has been building an infrastructure and an ad network targeted at social network application developers. The company will help these developers manage, market and monetize their applications.  After just a few weeks, last Friday’s revenue on Facebook alone, was over $10K - most of which was distributed to independent developers.
  • Active Athlete Media’s focus is active consumers who participate in sports, and the advertisers desiring to reach this passionate audience engaged in the sports they love, on thousands of mid to long tail websites. To date, I had been reluctant to jump into a sport-centric community (passion centric communities will still have a strong representation in the new portfolio). However a monetization solution like Active Athlete’s, which has been steadily growing and generating revenues, became very attractive in order to set foot in the category.
  • Satisfaction Unlimited announced its funding mentioning me as an angel investor just last week, but I am pleased to point out that it is actually SoftTech VC II that made this investment. I have known the co-founders of the company, Thor and Lane, for a long time, and saw their concept of a People-Powered Customer Service being refined and improved over the course of several meetings through the summer, and could not pass on it.
  • Grouply is one of these “The World Needs” companies where one day I decide that a product or service needs a fresh start. There are hundreds of millions of users of message boards, email lists, forums and online groups products like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, and they have not evolved for a long long time. Grouply will help solve that by enabling users to easily adopt a richer and more powerful experience for their existing online groups.

Softtech_vc_i_portfolio

For reference, and disclosure, here are the Web 2.0 companies that we have angel invested in, and advised, since 2004.

To date, that portfolio has had 5 successful M&A exits:

  • Truveo sold to AOL (Jan 06)
  • Userplane sold to AOL (Aug 06)
  • MyBlogLog sold to Yahoo (Jan 07)
  • Kaboodle sold to Hearst Interactive (Aug 07)
  • Maya’s Mom sold to J&J’s BabyCenter (Aug 07)