Capital Chaos

 Clickability (San Francisco, CA) announced that they just pulled in $8M led by Shasta Ventures with participation from previous investor Convergance Partners.  The company offers its clients an online content management system complete with analytics tools and delivery network so that large publishers can manage their own web sites in a clean and efficient manner.  To date, the company has served over 2.5 billion pages to date and over 300 million pages per month, while managing 400 websites with over 6,000 seat licenses.

Think of Clickability as the WordPress for large content publishers.  Along with managing content, Clickability also offers data management, newsletters, feeds and other services as part of their content management tool.

The company is led by John Girard who is a Stanford graduate that like many other Stanford grads, decided it would be cool to start their own company.  So back in 1999, he and three other buddies put formed clickability and raised $7.3M in 2000 and according to VentureWire has been profitable since 2004.  The new funds are expected to be used to capitalize on the explosive growth of the Web Content Management market, further Clickability’s global leadership position through increased sales and marketing activities, enlarge its innovative product and software infrastructure development, and continue operational expansion worldwide.

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 Shasta Ventures - is an early stage venture group who has invested in over 50 companies and growing.  They have some very distinct focus areas in:

Consumer and Business Services (ECommerce, Marketing Services)
Infrastructure (Bandwidth, Storage, Semiconductors)
Software (Application Development, Security, Next Gen)

Their process is prety straight forward and clean:

First, submit an executive summary or presentation to one of their investment professionals. It is best to direct your information to the partner who appears to be most closely aligned with your sector. They will review your business idea, and reply to you if there is interest.

If there is interest, they request an initial in-person meeting of one hour, during which time they want to learn about:

• The leadership of the company
• Your product (a demonstration is welcome)
• Your target customer
• The problem you solve for your customer
• How you plan to reach your customers
• Competition
• Market opportunity
• Your capital requirements 

After the first meeting, they will determine if it makes sense to continue on diligence.  If there is a fit between the firms, they will have several additional meetings with your team to review the topics below in more detail.

Upon completion of the diligence process, they will talk with you about their interest in moving forward with an investment proposal.

Their typical investment profile is:

The firm does get high marks from those that have been through the process with them.  The key stand out in the organization you want to pitch is Rob Coneybeer (rob@shastaventures.com ) who has a great track record of being honest and real. 

Contact:
2440 Sand Hill Road, Suite 300
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Phone: 650-543-1700
Fax: 650-543-1799