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Redeye VC

A view of the startup ecosystem from a coastally challenged VC

As we've grown First Round Capital over the last several years, I've come to believe that there are three types of value-add that venture capital firms can add to portfolio companies.

The first is the money. There is no differentation or value-add here. Every investor's money is the same.

The second is the value that the specific people (partners, principals, associates) at a venture firm add. Let's call it "people" value. Can your VC help you with your distribution strategy? Can they help you build your team? Can they connect you with a partner? This value is dependent on the skills and rolodex of the particular VC that a startup is working with -- as well as the amount of time they can allocate to your company.

The third level of value is what I call "structural" value. This is the value that the firm can bring outside of any specific partner interaction -- it is scaleable, institutional value-add. While I think that my colleagues and I add a tremendous amount of "people value", we really spend a great amount of effort trying to add structural value to our portfolio companies.

This is why we hold our annual

The Business of API'sOctober 16

First Round Capital portfolio company, Mashery, will be hosting their third annual Business of APIs conference, coming up on Monday, November 3rd in San Francisco.

As its name suggests, "The Business of APIs" is not a technical conference. It is a place where the people responsible for bringing in revenue, building traffic or building content syndication channels will learn how some of the most prominent and successful media and internet companies are enjoying significant growth through building a web services distribution channel.

In this one-day conference you will learn from companies that have executed API strategies to reinvent their businesses. They will share why and how they did it, what they expected to achieve, and how they are measuring success. It will be a day of real-world advice and lessons learned from many of your peers who are already part of the Web's Industrial Revolution.

Confirmed speakers include:

Heidi Tucker, VP of Business Development, Hoover's
Marc Frons, CTO, New York Times
Mike Hart, Director of Engineering, Web API, Netflix
Daniel Jacboson, Manager of Applica

First Round Capital Office Hours (and Free Coffee)October 14

CORRECTION - My initial post had the wrong date. The correct date is Tuesday, October 21st.

We live in interesting times. Despite the recent doom and gloom forecasts for startup companies, we at First Round Capital are still investing in new companies and actively seeking talented entrepreneurs to back. My colleagues on the west coast are holding our first Office Hours next Tuesday. As Kent wrote in his blog post:

"At Office Hours, we’d love to meet with entrepreneurs, people thinking about becoming entrepreneurs or folks who would like join a start-up. We’ll be available for a bunch of informal ~15 minute chats. There’s no agenda. Ask us what we think of the market environment or share an idea for a company – we’ll be sure to have plenty of napkins available to help draft that first product plan. We’ll listen, share our perspective and pay for the coffee (which

LeaveWallStreetJoinAStartup.comSeptember 15

For years, one of the biggest challenges facing New York city based startup companies has been the competition for technical talent. It was very difficult for a venture-backed startup to compete with the compensation packages offered by the big investment banks. Stock options had a hard-time overcoming oversized cash bonuses.

While no one is happy with the turmoil we're seeing facing the financial services sector, and no one is happy to see mass layoffs, this does represent an opportunity for startup companies to attract seasoned, technical talent. With Bear Stearns laying off over 7,000 employees, Lehman Brothers rumored to layoff over 20,000 employees, and Merrill Lynch expected to layoff thousands after their sale to Bank of America, we're on track to see over 150,000 people lose their jobs this year.

If you are one of those 150,000 employees, you might want to consider joining a startup. These days, startups are more stable than Wall Street (seriously). And while a startup probably won't offer the creature comforts of a job in the financial services industry, startups offer different benefits. You get to partic

Announcing FundingSleuth.comJuly 16

About 10 years ago, I helped create a web service called Company Sleuth. The basic premise was that as a company conducted its business activities, it would leave a "paper trail" online. And Company Sleuth tried to find that trail by automatically searching a variety of public databases (such as the US patent database, trademark database, domain registrations, job listings, etc.) for "clues" about all US public companies activities. Users would tell Company Sleuth the companies they cared about and receive a daily email containing a list of all new "clues" that were found.

The service found some interesting data. For example, while in beta we saw that the domain name "daimlerchrysler.com" was registered by Skadden Arps (Daimler's law firm) days before the deal was announced. And we also noticed that MCI Worldcom re