Announcement: New Platforms Fund

Posted by Darren on Jan 2, 2009 • (Comments)

Happy New Year to everyone!  I want to start 2009 strong by announcing the New Platforms Fund to empower developers of applications on top of platforms such as Twitter, Boxee, AppNexus, Trulia, iPhone, and more.  The goal of the fund is to seed up to 10 cutting edge ideas with both money and human capital to bring them from concept to alpha stage.  New Platforms Fund investments will range from $1-3,000 each.

I woke up this morning to having the news be on the front page of TechCrunch.  While not the ideal headline, it’s still up on TechCrunch.

As many of you know, I LOVE new technologies and rolling up my sleeves to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to reality.  We’ve seen some amazing platforms built in 2007/08 such as the aforementioned and now, we’ve got quite a few applications and layers being built on top of them.  I’m interested in getting my hands dirty here and that’s why we’ve launched this fund.

If you click the link over to the site, you’ll see it’s under Herman blackbook, which is my new personal consulting/advising/investing vehicle.  While it’s being formerly (and legally) created, I’ve run the idea past some amazing and proven entrepreneurs and they loved it.  One of them termed it, “Allen & Co. of tomorrow” - YES.  The network that we’ve assembled for Hb is tremendous and could really help any company in the sweet spot of technology, digital media, marketing, and entertainment.  Don’t be a stranger - check out the site.

Anyway - if you or someone you know is thinking of building something ontop of one of the platforms, we’d love to hear from them.  You can submit your ideas/concepts here.

I’d like to take a minute and thank my wife, Sherri, and my 8 week old son, David, for putting up with me over the past few days as I’ve worked on getting this up and running.  They have been absolutely incredible and my wife has been extremely supportive… she now really knows what marrying an entrepreneur is all about.  (note, she’s also an investor in Path101)

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  • reiboldt
    Darren, cheers to you for taking this step. I have written quite a bit on the changing VC landscape in this current market environment and I think one of the trends you will see emerge is the development of more "micro VC" funds such as this. Needless to say, there are a lot of variables and questions that must be addressed when considering a fund like this (equity stake, valuations, legal fees, dilution, etc), but for an investor such as yourself, this is a good way to take advantage of early stage innovation at low valuations and low prices. You won't be able to retire on the returns, but it could lead to much bigger things. Good job and good luck!

    -Mark (www.reiboldt.com)
  • Mark, I really appreciate your comments. There are a ton of variables here but if we don't play them out, we'll never know. Each funding is unique in it's own right and there is no templated/cookie cutter way to go about it. Heck, even taking pure venture dollars has different types of term sheets and deal terms. I'm keeping my head up and looking for some great innovation... thanks for your kudos.

    D
  • Darren: I also wanted to point out that taking a larger role in providing the "starting a company" services (getting your hands dirty) on top of the investing is a good idea. Scaling is one of the first questions people will raise: but why does it need to scale?

    I've seen the consulting + services model (I'm shying away from calling it the incubator model) start to crop up a bit recently, including the guys at Venture51 (Brandon Zeuner and Ryan Swagar, http://venture51.com/ ) in Scottsdale, AZ. There's a wide range of investment / services models out there, and I'm glad to see a number of people testing the potential.
  • Mark, I'll agree, I'd be amazed if we didn't see more "micro VC" approaches, in the sense of very small VC funds investing small $$ into small ventures. You've hit the nail on the head that while so many technological and cultural trends have made creating micro VC and micro-entrepreneurship a reality, the infrastructural transaction costs (legal, accounting, etc.) and the methods for pricing exchanges of value (e.g. "getting paid") aren't there yet.

    Those are the innovation opportunities in my mind; merely applying the existing VC model to smaller businesses fails to address the real opportunity; ventures like Hb are how we will figure it out. Awesome.
  • Congrats! Exciting.
  • Thanks for the love back at @innonate
  • Is your fund NYC specific or for whomever? Passing the post around here in the great middle-west.
  • Fund is for everywhere. Have been seeing some submissions from Europe. Would love you to pass it on the mid-west
  • Ignite Columbus (Part Deux) is in a few weeks. I'll shoot the info to the organizers and see what interest there is.
  • Thanks Don! No biggie if not :)
  • I like the "blackbook" model a lot. Curious if you have thoughts on how it can scale ("platform for platforms"? ;-)

    (That is, the Hb network is the platform)

    On that very subject, I wrote out some thoughts on the changing relative (and complementary) value of financial and social capital for startups and media buyers here:

    http://www.ethanbauley.com/post/63721066/what-i...

    "it’s likely that, relative to financial capital, connections to nodes on the relevant [human] business networks will become comparatively much more valuable. Startups can create a lot of value with little financial capital, but they need to quickly and easily access social capital at partners, suppliers, complementors, competitors, and of course customers to win."

    There's some good comments in there, too.

    In any event, congratulations on the new ventures and new baby!
  • Ethan, thanks for the comment and welcome to the site! Appreciate it. I haven't spoken much on Hb yet, but that's up next. Think Allen & Co. of 2009.
  • Seni Thomas
    Congratz on the launch! Great idea, and great timing.

    It reminded me of a talk Noah Brier gave on building things on the web at last year's Interesting New York:

    http://www.vimeo.com/2121309

    The above talk inspired me to hole up in my apartment over the holidays with a mountain of PHP, MySQL, and RoR books to relearn programming... It's been awhile. However, it truly is inspiring to see how easy it really is to build apps on top of other web platforms... In fact most of the time it really is just a glorified filter of data pulled of other sources like my new goto social search site: http://www.whostalkin.com/.

    Anyway, having not tinkered with coding in 6 years it is really amazing how much the barriers have come down, and I found it incredibly inspiring and exciting to see an even larger explosion of innovation (Apparently the term is dead now http://tinyurl.com/a3gh6s) with the help of funds like this.

    "Technology inspires creativity, and creativity propels technology"

    -Think it was some guy at TED

    Again, kudos!!

    -Seni
  • Thanks Seni! Glad you picked up your programming books.. nice to get back to things. All about 1's and 0s.
  • Darren - Great idea and props for taking the step to lead change in this area. You always read that some of the best businesses are started during a recession and I could see this fund being behind some of the best new companies. Congrats again and best of luck
  • Dave appreciate the comments! Looking forward to connecting the next time you're in NYC
  • love it. different.
  • by the way...lets be real...who is techcrunch and who the f@$%is robin wauters other than a BAD headline writer. The whole web community needs to stop worrying about what others say and focus on the idea. you are helping build shit. period. focus on that you will be fine
  • Darren, An interesting concept certainly. Will angel investors be interested ? not expected in India- the transaction cost will be a hurdle. We, in government (India) run such a micro fund, but strictly for embedded products. Well, transaction cost is not important for a Government, they can afford it and mobilising creative people is a nationally importantbactivity.

    ASRao
    http://tepp-innovators.blogspot.com/
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