Notes on three interesting people I met at Stirr Mixer 1.8 and some of the follow up I did: one introduction and an email conversation.
Stirr Mixer 1.8
I dropped by tonight’s Stirr Mixer at Illusions on 260 California Ave in Palo Alto. It’s a better venue for parking and it’s not as loud as the Blue Chalk—-if it’s too loud you are too old? I am certainly at risk for this in the Stirr crowd.
The West Coast team from Charles Rivers Ventures was there to talk about their 250K bridge loan program they announced Nov 1.
Three interesting people I came across
- Jim Rowson, who I last saw at Redwood Design Automation before it was absorbed by Cadence in 1994, is now helming tracking shot, a very interesting site devote to helping you assemble slide shows and put them to music. My only quibbles were that it should not require local storage of the pictures (e.g leverage Flickr and/or Photobucket) and there should be an easy way to provide a voice over narration.
- I had a chance to meet Steve Larsen, CEO of Krugle, after seeing him demo at Office2.0. I followed up with an e-mail to Ira Baxter at Semantic Designs, their Clone Detector offering might be a nice add-in for Krugle. Nothing will likely come of it but you never know
- I had a chance to meet Jeffrey McManus after seeing him demo Approver at Office2.0; alas I confused him with another Web 2.0 startup that had written on the SVASE mojo wire that they were looking for funding so we talked about that instead of how to focus Approver more sharply at a niche. My bad.
Some follow-up back and forth with Jim Rowson over e-mail
Voice over narration is on our list of stuff to do at some juncture. However, we’re thinking at the start that simple, automatic, decent videos from photos and music has a broader appeal. Doing voice overs requires a fair bit of expertise (microphone, etc.).
My thought was that it would allow Tracking Shot to do more “business oriented” stuff because messaging could be added via voice. Folks could also add background narration snippets around a photo, group of photos, or sequence of photos. But I do agree on the recording quality, although with all of the audioblogging going on they might be able to leverage another service and just mix them in.
Update 2025 some follow up links on CRV Quickstart
- Nov-2006 NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/business/01venture.html “Venture firm giving loans a try”
- Nov-2006 https://venturebeat.com/business/charles-river-ventures-introduces-friendly-convertible-seed-round/
- May 2007 TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2007/05/11/charles-river-ventures-angel-experiment-first-nine-investments/
- June 2008 PE Hub https://www.pehub.com/charles-river-ventures-quickstarts-quick-start/ “in its second year, Quickstart looks like it’s achieving real velocity.”
- Feb 2010 https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/charles-river-ventures-quickstart/
- In the program’s first two years, Charles River made 22 QuickStart investments of $250,000 each in convertible notes, Zachary said. Six of those companies made $37 million in revenue during their first year of operation. Of the 16 companies that didn’t generate revenue, three have gone out of business, and one is in a “zombie” state. As Zachary put it: “I can never figure out if any of the founders are working there are not.”
- Judging from these early results, the program will pay off financially for CRV. But the firm has had a hard time keeping up with all the applications. There are as many as 4,000 applications and only one person going through them full-time.
- Feb 2012 Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/02/29/charles-river-ventures-closes-375-million-for-new-fund/
- CRV was also one of the early firms to start a seed investing program in 2006 with its Quick Start program, which typically writes $100,000 checks in new startups. General partners George Zachary and Saar Gur in Silicon Valley mostly handle those investments. That program, which invested in about 60 seed deals in its last fund, has given the firm insight into new emerging companies.
- Feb 2012 TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/28/charles-river-ventures-raises-375-million-for-its-15th-fund/
- The modest firm has the distinction of being the first VC to get into early stage seed investing through its Quick Start program, “We pioneered and successfully delivered on the “venture seed investor” model since 2006,” Zachary tells me, “We were the first and now most other firms have attempted to clone our program when they mocked it.”
It’s also interesting to note I used the term audioblogging, which has now been superseded by podcasting.