Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC has secured $15 million of a new $35 million, likely SoftTech VC III, according to an SEC filing.
Though Clavier is not commenting on the fund, he did confirm via his blog that Charles Hudson will be joining the firm as a venture partner. A tech veteran that previously served at Gaia Online and Google before that, Hudson most recently served as VP of Business Development for Serious Business, one in a long series of social gaming startups acquired last year by Zynga. Beyond that, he also organizes two social gaming conferences (the Virtual Goods Summit and the Social Gaming Summit.) and works with Justin Smith from Inside Social Games / Inside Facebook on compiling data related to social and gaming.
Clavier also hired Ashley Cravens as his assistant, effectively growing the one-man SoftTech team to three.
This latest fund follows SoftTech VC II, a $15 million fund established in 2007 that had some big successes in GeoAPI, acquired by Twitter; mob.ly, acquired by Groupon; and Tapulous, acquired by Disney. The seed fund aimed to invest between $100,000 and $500,000 in 20 companies per year.
If you’re a startup looking to get funded by Clavier, look no further than a page on SoftTech VC called Investment Strategy and Process. The super angel breaks down, in terms more explicit than I’m used to seeing, exactly what he’s looking for in startups to fund. Here’s the introduction:
Investing in, and working with, great entrepreneurs at the very early stage of development of their companies is what we do, first and foremost. For almost 7 years now, our focus has been the consumer Internet space (dubbed "Web 2.0" since 2004) and we plan to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. By investing in 90+ Web 2.0 startups, we have learned a lot about this market - which has helped us refine our strategy and the sectors that we are interested in. However, like any investor, we are/will remain opportunistic, and we'll do a few deals that are outside of our core area of interest - just because we like the team, the opportunity and we feel it is worth it.
Clavier has actually put together a neat little graph that shows how startups he’s funded fit into his ideal for the right startup to fund.
We’ve reached out to Clavier to learn more about SoftTech VC III and will update this post when we receive reply.
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Steven Loeb
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Tapulous is a Palo Alto, CA based startup building a family of fun and social apps for the iPhone. We are angel funded and have released two apps for the iPhone (as of early August, 2008): Tap Tap Revenge (a music game) and Twinkle (the app that lets you connect with people nearby and your friends on Twitter).
Startup/Business
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
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