Last summer, JK and I spent almost five months not only working out the product, but also considering different finance strategies and business partners. We learned that great investors can be your strongest allies in support of your mission.
From corporate investors, venture capitalists, to angels....We talked to them all and once again, what it came down to was people. It may sound obvious, but we looked for investors who will stay engaged and believe in the vision.
What we discovered is that it really is a dating process—we visited Foundation Capital over five months, checking in, showing them our prototypes, consumer research, and product planning ideas while we focused the company plan.
That said, we can't thank enough Charles Moldow at Foundation Capital, who took the lead in our Seed Round and who brought not only the right financial resources but also amazing people to our team. Charles is also behind our cousins over at Powerset, the new natural language search engine. The search engine is wicked and we can't wait for them to bust out as well—they are in private beta right now.
Along side of Foundation Capital, we have number of other awesome investors that include:
- Paul Gauthier - Inktomi's Co-founder/CTO
- Geoff Ralston - former Chief Product Officer at Yahoo
- Michael Dearing - SVP Ebay/Stanford D-School Prof
- Jeremy Verba - CEO of Piczo
- Eric Tilenius - Netcentives, Tilenius Ventures
- Tim Stevens - CEO at Doppelganger
- Bill Trenchard - founder and Chairman of LiveOps
- Jim Everingham - founder and CTO of LiveOps
- Suresh Nihalani - CEO at Clearmesh
- Emil Michael - SVP at Tellme
- Jonny Schuloff - Partner at GTI-LLC
Our investors have been tremendously generous with their time and support. We've brought the investment community together for strategy dinners with the company, 1-1's, and round table discussions. These meetings have been oh-so valuable. Not only that, our community has brought us an air of executive gravitas, which has been very supportive to company as we have been in the throws of creating something from nothing!
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