Tag | chris-dixon
HeyZap Lands Another $3 Million In Funding
HeyZap , a startup that distributes casual and social games across the web through a set of APIs, applications, and widgets, has closed another $3 million in funding from Union Square Ventures, with participation from Naval Ravikant (Hitforge) and Chris Dixon (Founder Collective). Ravikant and Albert Wenger of USV will be joining the board. HeyZap previously received funding from Y Combinator , followed by a $650K seed round from Union Square Ventures, Joshua Schachter, and other angels in May 2009. HeyZap distributes 30,000 games across 220,000 websites, and has 4,000 developers signed up for its platform. It first launched in early 2009 as a YouTube For Flash Games , making it easy to access a library of casual Flash gaming titles from one widget. Since then it has added quite a few features that developers can tap into, including an achievement system , micropayments , and analytics . It has shifted its focus toward helping social games expand beyond social networks like Facebook. It also recently scored a deal with Ning, which is making it easy for Ning network creators to add HeyZap to their sites. The company says it will be using the money to add to its team of engineers and to expand its business development efforts. CrunchBase Information Heyzap Information provided by CrunchBase
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HeyZap Lands Another $3 Million In Funding
Investors, Entrepreneurs Discuss NYC’s Rapidly Growing Seed Funding Community
Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt , some of New York City’s most notable investors and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about New York City’s seed funding situation. The title of Startup Mecca still clearly belongs to Silicon Valley, but as panel moderator Erick Schonfeld noted, the number of startups making their way to the Big Apple is on the rise and dealflow in New York is quickly heating up. The conversation touched on quite a few subjects, including what kind of companies tend to do best in New York. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick posited that many of the startups doing well in NYC — Tumblr for example — tend to focus largely on the UI and user experience. He says that many of the web’s building blocks (AWS, etc) are already in place, and many of the services that will do well are building off of those. Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack agreed with this, saying that we no longer have to classify all web companies as “technology companies”. Rather, they can be media companies leveraging online content. Jalak Jobanputra, SVP at the New York City Investment Fund, says that while a lot of the infrastructure has been built, there is still much work to do in mobile. She also noted that many people were coming out of Wall Street to start their own ventures. Chris Dixon, who has blogged extensively on raising money and other topics, says he doesn’t like to think about investing in terms of NY vs Silicon Valley (though he does wish there were more startups instead of lawyers in NYC). Rather, he wants to bring an SV-like ecosystem to New York. He also said that the notion that finding real estate in NYC was an issue was a red herring (Hudack added that if you can’t handle the real estate, you shouldn’t be doing a startup). Regarding the trend of taking seeding funding from large VCs, most of the panelists seemed to think that it was a bad idea, namely because it could lead to issues down the road if your VC does not decide to follow on. For more, check out my live notes below and the video of the talk. Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com Here are my notes from the talk: John Borthwick , CEO, betaworks Chris Dixon , CEO, Hunch & Angel Investor Mike Hudack , Co-founder & CEO, Blip.tv Jalak Jobanputra, SVP, New York City Investment Fund Erick – Percentage of companies we’ve covered that were from NY increased in the last 18 months. JB: Betaworks is a holding company. We’re not a fund. We biuld stuff and we invest. Everything we’re doing is focused on the social, realtime web. This concept that there’s an emerging connected set of companies — we view it as a loosely coupled network of companies. We think a lot of the groundwork has been lain – AWS, etc. We think lightweight apps — they can be huge — where a lot of the emphasis is on front end, UI, initial experience. A lot related to media business, advertising business and the like. Why in New York? CD: I think if you look at the 90′s, the big heavy companies were actually in Boston. JB – We learn so much from the west coast. MH- To the point about building blocks being bulit… A lot of businesses that are interesting are media, publishing, and communications.You don’t need to think of every company as web as technology company. Blip doesn’t think of itself as a tech company, it’ s a media company. JJ-I think that with mobile, there is still a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built. I do think New York’s hard technology scene is still growing. Erick: What about recruiting, office space in NYC? What are the things you need to know about balding a startup in NYC? CD — I think the real estate thing is a red herring. Basically all these expenses are salaries for smart people. I think NY is similar to Silicon Valley in that almost nobody working there actually came from there. We recruit a lot of people MIT, CMU, Penn. MH- Real estate is relatively easy. We found our first office on Craigslist. JB – We went to a startup that had taken a space that was bigger than their existing capcaity and just rented some desks. If you can’t sort out real estate you shouldn’t be entrepreneur. JB – We’ve been inspirred by West coast investors who understand value of syndicates. The value of of bringing in great investors, people who will help you at different times, different stages. Erick – Is seed funding really challenging venture model? CD – I think venture firms freaked out back in the 90s. Yale/Harvard was really succesful, and then everyone copied it, and there were a ton of bad funds. People really dont need that much money. These days we have more educated entrepreneur. They think about net dilution over time. There’s tons of issues with taking early money from big VCs. Biggest is that if they dont follow on you’re basically toast. Because if Sequoia gave you 500k, and they aren’t involved later, people wonder what’s going on — it’s the same signal is if I just got fired and want to find a new job, people are wondering what went wrong. MH- I wouldn’t take that money.. Similar issues if you take a strategic investment and then aren’t acquired. People are asking what your strategic is doing. Let’s talk about what each of you guys are doing . JJ- I’m with the NYC investment fund. About a third of what we do is venture. I joined two years ago. We’ve set up our seed fund in response there being a dearth of seed money. We’d looking to help seed the entire ecosystem. CD- The Founder Collective is a $40ish million seed venture fund. There’s about $15 million from entreneurs in the local area. Our thesis is that we’d rather have entrepreneurs betting on entrepreneurs rather than bankers. The advantage is that they can probably see the value better. JB – Our model is a little different. We aren’t a fund, we’re a holding company. From investment standpoint, what we’re looking at has to be in beta — we want something we can look and feel and touch. I don’t like the abstraction of ideas, I like the real product. We love to see data, even if it’s from 50 users. What about the second, third tier areas? Say, Pittsburg with CMU. Do you invest in any startups in those cities? CD- Thing is, you need the critical mass. MH- When we started Blip people had the same complaint about NYC. They said we had to move to Sf. That was only a few years ago. I dont see any reason why can’t happen in any of these cities. but it does take time. JJ- I’m seeing a lot of entrepreneurs from secondary cities who actually are thinking of moving to NY, which does have critical mass. JB – There’s a lot of great stuff happening in NY. Great stuff in London, Asia, and even out in the Middle East. What is happening is the wave of innovation from the first 10/15 years of Internet, which is washing through the rest of the world. What do you think about if a VC will follow-on if they do participate in a seed round? CD – I’ve sat in VC meetings, listened to the LPs. We’re doing this to get options. MH-With the amount of money sunk in a seed round, your company is an option, but it isn’t a major sunk cost. They can drop you. CD- That said, if Fred Wilson does a lot of diligence and invests 500k i think he will want to follow on. It’s the VC who meets an entrepreneur for 5 min and gives 20k — that’s bad. Erick – If you have a first time entrepreneur, what are you looking for? JB- At the end of the day, a lot comes down to the individual’s passion for what they’re building. Their belief in it, and understanding of the product and market. There’s a difference between someone who has had and is solving problem vs someone who comes top down, decides to look for a problem based on marketsize without having had it themselves.
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Investors, Entrepreneurs Discuss NYC’s Rapidly Growing Seed Funding Community
Are Like Buttons Evil? The Open Web Reacts To Facebook’s Not-So-Open Graph
The tech community is still digesting the implications of Facebook’s plans to spread its “Like” buttons everywhere and take over the Web with its so-called Open Graph. The Open Graph is a hugely ambitious project to build social hooks into every Website. It aims to add a layer of social connections and instant personalization based on people’s interests and “likes” on every single page on the Web. It is also the basis for a Web-wide identity system based on Facebook IDs. The Open Graph is open only in name. It is a Facebook-controlled protocol and set of APIs. Facebook takes the data but doesn’t give back in the same degree. It is open, says Kevin Marks , as in “open your underwear drawer.” All Of Your Likes Are Belong To Us. Already, advocates of the open Web are stirring and rallying against this proposed social hegemony. Hunch founder/seed investor Chris Dixon and a ragtag crew of other New York City technologists are arguing for a counterweight in the form of the OpenLike protocol, which adds like buttons from other sites beyond Facebook such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Hunch. Dixon Tweets : it’s actually open! not open in the opengraphprotocol zuck will decide sense but you-can-do-whatever-you-want open!! Chris Messina (aka, Mr. OpenID) explains his objection in a blog post : Here’s the rub though: those Like buttons only work against Facebook. I can’t just be signed in to any social web provider… it’s got to be Facebook. And on top of that, whenever I “like” something, I’m sending a signal back to Facebook that gets recorded on both my profile, and in my activity stream. Ok, not a big deal, but think laterally: how about this? What if Larry and Sergey wanted to recreate PageRank today? You know what I bet they wish they could have done? Forced anyone who wanted to add a page to the web to authenticate with them first. . . . Authenticated PageRank where everyone that wants to be listed has to get a Google account first. Sounds kind of smart, right? Except — shucks — there’s one problem with this model: it’s evil. A lot of this boils down to a nerd fight that Zuckerberg is likely to win. After all he has nearly 500 million users on his side, who everyone else wants access to. These open alternatives are starting at zero. However, Facebook cannot be surprised at this reaction. In fact, there is some evidence it anticipated it (one of the color-scheme options for the like button, now since gone, was to set it to “evil” ). It needs to tread carefully, though, and make some goodwill gestures to make the Open Graph actually more open in the sense that it doesn’t just exist on its databases. We should all be able to take our likes with us to Twitter, or Google, or any of a million Websites. Yeah, we all know the chances of that happening. In the meantime, be sure to hit the like button at the top of this post. CrunchBase Information Facebook Chris Messina Chris Dixon Information provided by CrunchBase
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Are Like Buttons Evil? The Open Web Reacts To Facebook’s Not-So-Open Graph
