Capital Chaos

Comedy.com (Santa Monica, CA) led by veteran media executive Dean Valentine, announced that he has raised an undisclosed sum of funding from Walden Venture Capital to launch his new venture, Comedy.com.

Valentine currently heads media investment fund Symbolic Action, and was previously president and CEO of United Paramount Network. Before that, he was president of Walt Disney Television, and also served a stint as director of current comedy programming at NBC Entertainment.

According to socalTech, The site, which joins a slew of comedy sites launched in recent weeks, features original, comedy content. A source at Prism Ventures, which was seed investors in the site, told socalTECH that the funding was actually done awhile ago, but only recently came to light due to Comedy.com’s launch.

The whole online comedy space is getting increasingly more crowded with the launch of comedy.com.  Will Ferrel’s site Funny or Die, Damon Wayan’s WayOutTV, MyDamnChannel and many others.  As with any content rich site, the key for comedy.com is going to be to make sure they have fresh, side-splitting content which ends up getting promoted virally online (think, the landlord skit with Will Ferrel that blew up in a matter of days and has almost 54 million views in less than a year!).

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Walden Venture Capital (San Francisco, CA) is an early stage VC which began in 1974 and invests at varius levels of a company’s lifecycle.  There are three main areas the company focuses its investments in:

• Digital Media
• Technology-enabled services
• Internet Commerce

There is not too much known about these guys even though they have been around for 30+ years.  While they have made some interesting investments over the years (Pandora, Creative Labs, Terayon) the shift in investment focus over time has been a bit interesting (They also had been the lead in Gymboree and Buca Di Beppo - an italian restaurant).

The biggest slam on these guys is that they seem to take forever (if at all) to get back to you after you pitch them.  They are not highly regarded for their follow up which is a trend amongst many VC’s but these guys seem to take the cake over others.  The one standout who was highly regarded was John Zeisler but he has left the firm for undisclosed reasons within the past few months.