It’s funny how things have a way of working out. I wrote recently of our experience with SEOMoz – from initial meeting a few years ago to finally investing in them earlier this month. Today we announced our investment in Mocavo – a genealogy search platform that provides users with the best tools available to find information on their ancestors. More specifics on the business in a minute but the year long journey from TechStars to Foundry investment is worth noting. I first met Mocavo at the start of last year’s TechStars Boulder. I liked founder Cliff Shaw a lot and appreciated (although at the time didn’t share) his passion for genealogy. When he asked me to mentor them through the program…
Archives / May, 2012
California, Massachusetts, New York, Colorado
California, Massachusetts, New York, Colorado. That’s the order of states with the greatest dollar value of seed and early stage investment according to a PWC MoneyTree study that my partner Jason blogged about today. $290M invested in 41 companies based in Colorado in 2011. Compare that with 2006 when Colorado ranked 12th on the list with just under $90M invested in 32 companies. That’s an incredible achievement and says a lot about the state of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Colorado and our rising profile on the national stage. I’ve written extensively on why Boulder specifically, and Colorado in general, are great start-up markets (see here, for example). And these data show that the work and effort of many people in…
Getting it Right the 2nd Time (our investment in SEOMoz)
It’s not often in this business that you get a second bite at the proverbial apple, but with our funding of SEOMoz announced today we got just that. I first met SEOMoz founder and CEO Rand Fishkin in late 2008. It was a pretty memorable meeting in the lobby of the Vitale. At the time I was deep into the SEM side of the search world and was thinking about whether we wanted to place a bet on the organic side of search (aided at the time by what seemed like a large number of SEO agencies trying to productize their service into some kind of software package). It was clearly a big opportunity. I liked Rand a lot and…