Capital Chaos

FriendFeed, the social feed aggregator, is finally our of beta and open to the public with a fresh round of funding.  Most of this Series A was invested by the founders, - ex-Googlers (AKA Google Mafia) Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh but also included Benchmark Capital loot. 

The concept of FriendFeed is pretty cool in that it lets users see what people you know or think you know, are doing across many different websites.  So you can be up to date on everything your friends, family etc are sharing over sites such as Amazon Wish List, Digg, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn etc.  While this is very cool and will encourage more “social interaction”, the issue is how you can prevent certain people from getting access to certain data.  While college kid may not mind all that data being shared amongst a wide web of people, I am not sure that someone in business does (why would someone who has info on YouTube or furl, want that same info be seen by their network on LinkedIn?) 

Social aggregating is not new and a lot of companies are jumping on this bandwagon. We profiled MOLI, which uses permission controls to prevent people from having access to all of your doings online and lets you control who sees what.  Companies like Spokeo, Plaxo Pulse, Second Brain and others are all offering the same basic thing.  It wont be long till Facebook comes into the fray as has already been rumored and quite honestly does make a lot of sense.

While more and more ex-Googlers continue to use their new found wealth and invest in various projects, Paul and Sanjeev are also investing in their own which just proves that entrepreneurial spirit can not be doused with a fat pocket.

More power to these guys for going after a very niche space that they could end up selling back to the company that gave them their start to begin with, Google.

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Benchmark Capital(Menlo Park, CA) is a highly regarded VC that has had its share of successes (eBay, AOL, PageFlakes) but also some not so great investments (Webvan, Tristrata).  These guys are very clear about their opinion of what will work and what wont - and are not afraid to express it.  All of the partners are guys who have both operating and financial experience so be prepared to know your stuff because these are not casual investors at all.  Like most Valley VC’s, they primarily invest in their geographic area.

With over $2.5B under management, they are not small.  They typically focus investments in the areas of enterprise software and services, communications and security, semiconductors, and financial services.  These guys want to be the first investor - not a carry on.  The firm’s strategy is to be “the first investor in technology-driven companies that seek to create new markets and have significant growth potential.” 

They seem to gravitate towards more early stage and their investment size ranges from $100k to us much as $15M.  Typical investment size is $3-$5M initially and they do support their investments with greater capital if needed/warranted over the life of the company.

Try to pitch Rich Barton (rbarton@benchmark.com ) if you get the chance,  Young guy with lots of web experience and can be very valuable if he drinks your Kool aid.

Contact:
2480 Sand Hill Road, Suite 200
Menlo Park, California 94025
United States
Telephone: (650) 854 8180