HighContrast

Some of the companies and founders I’ve had the pleasure of working with. More details at FastIgnite.

8th Ring

8th Ring was the third company I helped start and the first company I co-founded while at Polaris. It was an Internet/mobile mashup, a consumer mobile play connecting existing social networks to the mobile ecosystem. This was more than a year before Facebook’s F8, OpenSocial, the iPhone and Android. I helped assemble the founding team, CEO Bill Wittenberg from the Internet space and CTO Ted Wugofski from the mobile space. In a short period of time we solved some very hard technical problems which led to deep conversations with large social networks and mobile operators. Based on the feedback, we determined that despite customer and partner interest the company faced significant development risks and the best choice was to stop operations. By that time we had spent less than a year and just a few hundred thousands. We failed quickly and cheaply, which in my book is considered a minor success (a major success is knocking the ball out of the park). Bill and Ted have gone on to do great things. Bill started a new company. Ted is CTO at Handmark.

Allaire

Forgoing an Economics PhD scholarship at Stanford in order to join Allaire’s founding team was one of the better decisions I’ve made. JJ Allaire invented the de facto standard Web 1.0 programming model–mixing snippets of code with HTML to generate dynamic Web pages. I became the architect of Allaire’s flagship product, the first Web application server ColdFusion. Many thousands of sites run on it–just look for the .cfm extensions. Allaire was bootstrapped on $18k. We raised money from Polaris Venture Partners in 1996, went public in 1999, acquired several companies and merged with Macromedia (now Adobe) in 2001. We built a real business in the middle of Bubble 1.0 with revenues over $100M and positive EBITDA, which was out-of-fashion those days. We also created probably the strongest (at the time) Web developer community, something which many on the founding team are still proud of. We made tons of mistakes also, some of which capped the value of the company under $3B. I learned much about culture, building teams, hypergrowth and layoffs, positioning and shipping products, competing in empty vs. crowded waters, cannibalization and building communities and the costs and benefits of standardizaton and open-sourcing technologies. I have many scars.

Allurent

Allurent is an e-commerce 2.0 platform company started by Joe Chung and Fumi Matsumoto, both of whom come from Art Technology Group (ATG), the leader in Web 1.0 e-commerce. Joe was ATG’s co-founder and Fumi was employee #1. I invested in Allurent in 2006. Joe and Fumi have assembled a stellar team that has created some amazing shopping experiences for the likes of Anthropologie, Borders, UnderArmor and Urban Outfitters. Allurent-powered e-commerce sites not only look better, they also drive better economics. After the crash in 2008 etailers radically slowed down their replatforming efforts. Allurent’s team spun on a dime. In about six months the company restructured its product roadmap and go-to-market strategy to an on-demand offering called Allurent On Demand. Allurent is a great example of how companies can reinvent themselves quickly using cloud computing.

Archivas

Archivas was the first company I helped start while at Polaris Venture Partners. The company developed a software-only content archiving solution that was more capable, significantly faster and much cheaper than the market-leading EMC Centera. NASA’s satellite images and the emails Postini (later acquired by Google) processed are some examples of the types of information that lived on Archivas clusters. Archivas was founded by Andres Rodriguez who used to be CTO at NY Times. Before the days of cheap storage, Andres had to figure out how to put 130 years of past issues of NYT online. It wasn’t easy or cheap. Several years later, the world had changed. Unstructured data had become the fastest-growing content type. Commodity storage and computing prices had dropped to the point where one could tie cheap hardware with smart software to create the world’s most capable, highest performance and cheapest digital archiving platform. I worked closely with Andres for many months prior to the creation of Archivas and the Polaris investment. The power of Archivas was in the original insights that led to a unique architecture: 1/3 distributed database, 1/3 storage system and 1/3 flexible platform for indexing, search & policy management across content types. This enabled the company to create powerful OEM and go-to-market partnerships, which ultimately led to Hitachi Data Systems acquiring Archivas in early 2007 for more than $100M. I learned several important lessons about building and taking to market mission-critical infrastructure. I also learned how a single key strategic mistake can cap the value of a company. Andres has started a new company called Nasuni to go after cloud-based storage.

Better Advertising

I am co-founder and acting CTO of Better Advertising, an online advertising compliance platform company. I am fortunate to be working with CEO Scott Meyer and an exceptional startup team to support the efforts of regulators and the online advertising industry to provide consumers with more transparency and choice in how they are targeted online.

DubMeNow

DubMeNow is great for your address book. The company offers super-easy contact exchange and synchronization across the Web and all the major smartphone platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Nokia). I met DUB’s founder, Manoj Ramnani when I was in DC for Yossi Vardi’s US KinnerNet. I liked Manoj’s vision and joined a few months later as an advisor. Nobody has solved the problem of managing contact information across the many domains our lives intersect: work, home, events, social networks, etc. This is a very hard problem but DUB has a chance to get it right. The product has many features that you’ll love. If you haven’t already tried the app, download it now from your favorite mobile app store.

FastIgnite

FastIgnite is the startup advisory firm I started after seven years at Polaris Venture Partners. I helped start four companies that Polaris invested in (8th Ring, Archivas, Plinky and Veracode), partnering closely with entrepreneurs. FastIgnite is the vehicle through which I continue this work.

Meridio

Meridio was a Belfast-based electronic document and record management (EDRM) company, which closely partnered with Microsoft to develop easy to deploy and use compliance solutions.In 2002 CEO Brian Baird made a big bet by choosing to discontinue cross-platform development and focus the company exclusively on adding value on top of the Microsoft platform and, in particular, SharePoint. It was a gutsy strategic maneuver that would define the future of the company. I invested in 2004. In the coming years following the investment, Meridio became Microsoft’s go-to partner in the compliance space and, together with Microsoft and system integrator partners, went on to win many big deals against much larger competitors such as FileNet/IBM, Documentum/EMC and OpenText, including winning StatOil, ConocoPhillips, Lloyds TSB, US Airforce, The While House and the world’s largest records management deployment at the UK Ministry of Defense. Autonomy acquired Meridio in the fall of 2007. The Meridio experience has taught me valuable lessons about partnering with large platform vendors, managing through cultural differences and M&A strategy in crowded spaces.

Polaris Venture Partners

I joined Polaris in early 2002 from Macromedia. In addition to making traditional venture investments in companies such as Allurent and Meridio, I helped start or co-founded four companies Polaris invested in: 8th Ring, Archivas, Thing Labs and Veracode. The strength of Polaris is rooted in its diversification strategy. The firm invests across industries, areas, geographies and stages. To do this well Polaris built a very diverse investment team. In my 7+ years at the firm, I had the pleasure of working with some extraordinary partners and great entrepreneurs. Doing both traditional investing as well as starting companies gave me a unique perspective of venture capital and entrepreneurship. This is how I developed my own approach to venture creation that eventually led to me starting FastIgnite.

Thing Labs (a.k.a, Plinky)

Plinky, which is now ThingLabs, was the fourth company I started at Polaris. I co-founded the company with former Googler Jason Shellen who was at Pyra Labs, maker of Blogger, with @ev and later created Google Reader. The story is one of serendipity. Jason and I met through my partner Mike Hirshland. Jason had some novel ideas about how to drive consumer engagement by radically changing the experience for creating user-generated content. At the time I had been thinking a lot about UGC monetization in the context of SEO. We hit it off and our ideas meshed nicely. We talked casually about starting something for a few months and in early April of 2008 we decided to go for it. Two months later Polaris, SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier) and some West Coast angels seeded the company. Working with Jason got me deep into the social Web. I was interim CTO at Plinky for a little over a year. After that, the mission of the company expanded and it became Thing Labs. Brizzly, the leading product, is the best Twitter client on the market.

Tollbit

I am a co-founder of Tollbit, a cloud virtualization company that’s still in stealth.

Veracode

Veracode is the leader in on-demand application risk management solutions. Its ultimate goal is to bring the software industry to a higher standard of development, evaluation and procurement of software. Veracode was the second company I helped start while at Polaris. Together with fellow VC Jeff Fagnan and Maria Cirino (who wasn’t a VC then but started .406 Ventures since) I helped lead founds Christien Rioux a.k.a. DilDog and Chris Wysopal a.k.a. Weld Pond (originally from @Stake and the L0pht before) spin out from Symantec and completely revamp their product roadmap and business model. The process took over a year but was well worth it. We made the investment in March of 2006. Maria jumped in as acting CEO. We recruited Matt Moynahan soon after to run the company. Veracode was my first experience with building a technology-leveraged services company with SaaS as the solution delivery vehicle.