Posts tagged ventures
Trada Secures Additional $9M In Funding From Google Ventures & Foundry Group
Jan 5th
Trada, the crowdsourced PPC marketplace, has secured an additional $9 million in funding from their existing investors, Google Ventures and Foundry Group. This additional seed of Series D financing brings the total money raised for Trada to $17 million. Trada basically lets you offload your PPC…
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Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware Back Puppet Labs with $8.5 Million
Nov 29th
Puppet Labs announced today that it is receiving $8.5 million in Series C financing from Google Ventures, Cisco and VMware. The new round of financing brings Puppet Labs up to $15.75 million, which begs the question – what does the IT automation company need with that kind of dosh?
Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs, says that the money is going into development, marketing and sales. Kanies says that the company is looking to grow faster than “organic growth” would carry the company.
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But, Kanies says that the company originally didn’t set out to raise quite as much as they did in this round. According to Kanies, the company happened to find three investors that “get the disruptive trend” of IT automation. VMware and Cisco are using Puppet in their own environments, and seeing customers using Puppet as well.
Google is also using Puppet, but it’s important to understand that Google Ventures is strictly a financial investment arm, not a strategic one. Google Ventures partner Karim Faris says that they look to invest in businesses that are “irrelevant or strategic” as long as they look like a good investment. “They may be strategic [to Google] and that’s great, but that’s not how we look to invest.”
That said, Faris says Google Ventures did take notice of Google’s use of Puppet as well as a “groundswell of support” from engineers for Puppet. “When people you know and trust, engineers, come in and say ‘have you seen this tool?’ that’s what piques my attention.”
Faris says that Google Ventures was “excited about two trends” with Puppet – the flock of enterprises moving to cloud services, and the “rise of DevOps.”
Plans for Puppet
With the additional funding under its belt, expect to see Puppet further building out its sales and marketing efforts in 2012.
I wondered if Puppet might be looking into a hosted model, similar to Opscode’s hosted version. Kanies says no. “We don’t plan on adding a hosting model. It might be an interesting business in three to five years, and it’s a good way for customers to experiment with the product, but we already have good ways to experiment now” with downloadable VMs with Puppet.
Kanies did hint that Puppet would be doing more with the data it collects from hosts. “Understand the insight we bring to the table. Puppet knows more about your infrastructure than anybody else.” For example, Kanies says that Puppet can produce full configuration graphs of every machine it monitors, which can give companies a lot of information about their systems he says they can’t get from other tools.
“Some of the data is monitoring data, but this is much more about configuration data, when you updated a package, changed a user password, added a user… Puppet can give you that very easily, no one else can today.”
In the next few years, Kanies says that Puppet will be “doubling down on insight we can give to customers.”
Puppet is also improving its Windows story, which is crucial for companies that have mixed environments. While the enterprise product does not have a Windows build, Kanies says that the open source release of Puppet does support Windows clients. Puppet Labs will support using the open source client to check into enterprise hosts. So don’t expect to use Windows as a server/host for Puppet anytime soon, but if you need to monitor and work with Windows hosts, he says Puppet can do that today.
Don’t expect to see an IPO in 2012 from Puppet, says Kanies. “We’re not quite at that point yet, hopefully in 2013. This round is about letting us grow faster than we can organically. We are building a company for the long term, not building a company to sell.”
Puppet is in a fairly interesting place, particularly if it expands its features around host data and does more with its Windows integration.
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Groupon’s Chinese Join Ventures Closes 10 Offices, Fires Hundreds, “Changes Strategy”
Sep 13th
Groupon’s Chinese joint venture Gaopeng is not doing so well. It has apparently closed 10 offices and fired at as many as 400 employees over the past three months.
Executives of the Chicago-based daily deals company, which is planning an IPO at some point, say changes are part of a shift in strategy and that that the company will now concentrate on middle-tier and upper-tier cities rather than the smaller cities in more distance reaches of the country.
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Focusing on a larger city means the company will be participating in commercial exchange where the market is more developed and the people are more affluent. Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai – that’s where people spend the extra income. You have to wonder why Groupon even went to the lower tier cities. Though 87% of China’s population lives in so-called “third-tier cities,” things are already cheap there and it’s not particularly clear how effective the online sales methodology would do in cities where mass retail is not a Western invention.
This is not the first time Groupon has tripped up in the world’s largest consumer market. Remember Chinese bloggers’ response to that offensive Super Bowl ad? Yeah. Read some of the Chinese responses in that link.
All this being said, Groupon may be wise to backtrack and focus on the low-hanging fruit. It may have seemed like easy cherry-picking in the lesser developed markets, but it seems they went into it too fast, before the market had a need to be ready for daily deals.
According to reports, Groupon invested $8.6 million for a 40% stake in the GaoPeng joint venture in January. Chinese social networking behemoth Tencent Holdings Ltd. and private-equity firm Yunfeng Capital are principal investors in the strategy.
It does seem that Groupon can’t catch a break in the US, either. The company faces a lawsuit from a group of employees who claim that the company failed to pay them overtime.
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures?
Aug 4th
During this week’s roundtable, we had Inoh Choe from San Jose, California, pitch DemoTunes, a freemium concept. One of the discussions that ensued was about how to bootstrap a freemium venture. I think this is a question on many minds, and we discussed it today as a core topic.
DemoTunes
DemoTunes is proposed to be a LinkedIn of the music industry where a million plus musicians would be uploading music, getting feedback from their community, as well as, and more importantly, from talent scouts and connoisseurs who can help them further their careers.
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In principle, this sounds great. I love the idea. Once there is critical mass, lots of business can, indeed, happen. However, how do you get to critical mass, and how do you finance the period during which this business runs on red ink? How much time do you budget for red ink financing? If there is friends and family money available to you, how far can that take you? How long can you go without a salary? How do you find co-founders who are willing to work for 18 months without getting paid?
These are some of the practical questions. The answers are highly subjective and situation-specific, but as a rule of thumb, I’d say, budgeting at least 18 months of red ink financing is necessary, including going without pay. One middle ground is to keep a job and develop a freemium site on the side, so that you still have your paycheck to pay the bills. Another is to do consulting or offer some other kind of paid service to bring in some money.
Whichever direction you go, please do not assume that some VC is going to finance you during this phase. Even angels like to see some progress so that the length of red ink financing that is simply validation stage work doesn’t happen on their watch.
GoodyTag
Also, Irit Dabby from Tel-Aviv, Israel, discussed GoodyTag, a neat concept about tagging photos of products differently than you would tag or ‘like’ a regular link or photo on social media. Rather, you tag a woman wearing a speedo swimsuit with a Speedo GoodyTag and then encourage your social network to further propagate that as part of an incentivized advertising campaign.
Whichever direction you go, please do not assume that some VC is going to finance you during this phase. Even angels like to see some progress so that the length of red ink financing that is simply validation stage work doesn’t happen on their watch.
I like the concept, and there is already a prototype and a pilot case with an advertiser. Irit, however, needs to think through some of the details of the business model, pricing model, and positioning. For instance, she showed Coca Cola as one of the target brands advertising on the GoodyTag network. She wants to charge $1 per tag that is generated, but Coca Cola is probably not the kind of brand that would pay $1 per tag because their unit price is so low. Speedo may, especially if every tag includes an incentive – a discount coupon – to buy a swimsuit for $300 or some similar large denomination.
My point is, the concept is good. It requires some serious fine-tuning, which will offer guidance on where the best customers are going to be.
You can select the business you like best of those discussed today through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page.
The recording of today’s roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.
I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8:00 a.m. PDT on the following dates:
Thursday, August 11, Register Here.
Thursday, August 25, Register Here.
Thursday, September 1, Register Here.
Thursday, September 8, Register Here.
Thursday, September 15, Register Here.
Thursday, September 22, Register Here.
Thursday, September 29, Register Here.
We will be holding our 100th roundtable on Thursday, October 6, and are planning a special event for that day. You can register to attend here.
And if you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. You can also take the 1M/1M self-assessment test here. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note, that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
Finally, I will be speaking at The Commonwealth Club next Thursday, on August 11, 2011, at 6:30 p.m. You can find more details and register here. Hope to see you there!
About Sramana Mitra
Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant. She writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka, and Uuma. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Boots photo by Northampton Museum
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Social Media Ventures Launches MakeYourSiteNow.com – Sacramento Bee
Jul 13th
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Social Media Ventures Launches MakeYourSiteNow.com
Sacramento Bee MakeYourSiteNow.com) a full-service Web-Design Portal, providing individuals and businesses with cost-effective website development services and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. SMVI's MakeYourSiteNow.com is a full service website creation … |
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Social Media Ventures Launches MakeYourSiteNow.com – PR Newswire (press release)
Jul 13th
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Social Media Ventures Launches MakeYourSiteNow.com
PR Newswire (press release) MakeYourSiteNow.com) a full-service Web-Design Portal, providing individuals and businesses with cost-effective website development services and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. SMVI's MakeYourSiteNow.com is a full service website creation … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Ventures Quietly Invests in Collaborative Toolset for Scientists
Jul 9th
Wingu, a cloud-based collaboration system designed to improve the speed of scientific work, has caught the eye of Google. Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of the search giant, has stealthily invested in the startup.
More About Wingu
Co…
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Ismoip Ventures into SEO Mobile for Better Exposure – Newswire Today (press release)
May 12th
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Ismoip Ventures into SEO Mobile for Better Exposure
Newswire Today (press release) NewswireToday – /newswire/ – Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 05/12/2011 – Ismoip is introducing fresh efforts for SEO mobile to give better exposure to its clients and enhance the credibility of online users – Ismoip.com. … |
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