We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.
Month: December 2008
Guess who is coming back to Boston!
Just bought our 2 tickets.
Investing in Tumblr
Yesterday, Tumblr announced their Series B financing which came from my firm Spark Capital and our friends at Union Square Ventures. Both firms led the initial financing in the company last summer.
I typically announce on this blog when we make an initial investment in a new company. I’ll also write about new product stuff from our portfolio from time to time.
But I don’t think I’ve ever written about a follow on financing before.
Given the economic climate we are in, I thought I’d share a few things about Tumblr and why were were so excited to invest in David’s company again.
Capital efficient from the start.
When I met David he had just launched Tumblr and started getting some initial traction. He had a web development company called Davidville that had been doing great work for Fred Seibert and the gang that would later form Next New Networks. David bootstrapped Tumblr to start. We then spent months getting to know each other and brainstorming whether it was the right time to leave Davidville behind and start a new company. Many months later in August or so, we invested $350k in the company and so did USV.
Amazing progress.
With less than $750k, David and Marco focused all of their attention on Tumblr. And they kept expenses to a minimum. They’ve added lots of new things to the service while keeping it dead simple. When we intially invested in the company last year, there were about 50k-ish users. Today Tumblr has well over 500k registered users and growing faster than ever. The audience reading Tumblr-powered sites is at 15 million uniques/month worldwide.
The Tumblr community is doing tons of creative stuff. They are building great sites, artists/photographers, musicians are also coming to Tumblr. And I’m loving all of the incredible 3rd party developer applications using the Tumblr api (e.g. Tumblrette).
The best part is that Tumblr users are hyper-active & engaged. Every day you can see the number of new posts/day across Tumblr. As of right now the number of new posts today is over 180k posts. I think that is incredible.
Looking ahead.
With plenty of funding for at least 2 years with a growing team, I’m very excited about all of the new stuff in the Tumblr pipeline. This is still a very early stage company with a lot of work ahead of them. But we really like what’s going on here and we believe in them.
I’m delighted to be an investor in the company.
Kids – The Kooks
I love the original version of this song by MGMT. And this cover works for me too. Happy cover song day on Tumblr.
Everyday interactions we have with other people are definitely contagious, in terms of happiness
I’m in SF today. View from my hotel morning this morning (via bsabet)
Here Comes the Sun – Belle and Sebastian
wonderful.
Deja Vu All Over Again: DirecTV cancels their PC tuner card
In the mid 90s, Microsoft collaborated with DirecTV to bring out a tuner card for a Windows PC.
The idea was that it could turn the desktop PC into a living room media center.
Then WebTV and TiVo convinced the industry that the PC as designed wasn’t the best way to consume TV on the “big screen”. The team at WebTV that I worked with and my friends at TiVo instead built integrated DVRs that had the dual tuners, conditional access, large disks. UltimateTV was a product we built with DirecTV to bring the best of the internet, DVR and satellite programming. The “PC” was too big, too ugly, too noisy and too expensive. And they didn’t look good connected to interlace monitors at the time
So the PC-tuner card was put on ice.
Then it came back again and was announced a few years ago.
Well today, it looks like DirecTV killed that PC-tuner card program again.
Here’s the thing. The defintion of television is changing. TV started with broadcast. Then cable. Then we saw DVRs and VOD. But internet streaming has arrived. It’s not about the box or proprietary formats. We should move beyond that.
I like what Netflix is doing. They have an API and companies like Boxee, Roku, Microsoft and others can disribute Netflix. Netflix isn’t trying to control the end to end system. They are letting individuals and companies innovate on top and around them. That’s smart.
DirecTV needs to do the same thing. They should let 3rd parties build compatible hardware and deliver their content everywhere.
My favorite 10 albums of 2008
This was a fantastic year of new music. We saw a bunch of great shows and fell in love with some great albums.
Here are my favorite albums released this year.
1. Lucky
2. Vampire Weekend
3. How Ya Lookin Southbound – Ben Kweller
4. For Emma, Forever Ago
5. In Rainbows
6. Feed the Animals – Girl Talk
7. Furr
8. The BBC Sessions
9. Narrow Stairs
10. Consolers of the Lonely
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Biggest disappointment this year: “Skeletal Lamping” by Of Montreal. I love this band but I just didn’t get this last record.
Next year is looking to be a great year as well. I’ve already gotten an advanced copy of Ben Kweller’s “Changing Horses” which is awesome. And I can’t wait for “Hazards of Love” by the Decemberists.
Many thanks to all my friends on Tumblr, last.fm and the hype machine for turning me on to so much great music!
Lazy Jane – Belle and Sebastian
From one of my favorite albums released this year, The BBC Sessions.