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Foundry Group

Our Investment in FirstDocsJanuary 6

We are pleased to announce our investment in FirstDocs, Inc. FirstDocs, located in Westwood, MA, is a legal process automation company dedicated to providing business and legal solutions to in-house legal departments and law firms. FirstDocs has developed a software platform that automates much of the creation process for the legal profession’s most commonly used documents.  For law firms, automating this process allows for both faster and more consistent document creation – saving them time and money while increasing quality. For in-house legal groups, the company’s platform allows for unprecedented control and standardization of business documents which allows companies to more quickly meet their customers’ needs. The company brings together a deep understanding of how enterprises create, move, store, retrieve and derive information from their legal documents.

You’ll notice that this company does not neatly fall into one of our typical investment themes. In addition, it’s focused on a single vertical market, which is a characteristic that we usually avoid when investing. That being said, we were very comfortable with Firstdocs given our previous success with the legal-focused e-Discovery provider, Stratify, the large size of the legal market, as well as Jason Mendelson

Topspin's on the RoadJanuary 5

We invested in Topspin Media last summer, and they've been busy cranking out multiple releases of their Artist Manager platform while simultaneously supporting numerous album releases from established and new artists who have adopted Topspin's technology to enable them to release their music direct-to-fan. As a reminder, Topspin provides advanced marketing tools and services to enable recording artists to build successful brands and businesses online.

Many musicians chose to release their music using Topspin's platform in 2008.   The two highest-profile releases to date have been David Byrne and Brian Eno's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today and Paul McCartney's The Fireman. The Fireman's Electric Arguments made The AMG Top 50 Album list for 2008, while the Byrne/Eno album (one of my personal favorites of the year) wound up on a boatload of year's best lists, published by the likes of AMG

The Investments We Made In 2008January 4

We made seven new investments in 2008. Two of the investments were seed rounds, four were first rounds, and one was a second round investment. We invested across three of our themes: Glue, Human Computer Interaction, and Digital Life. We covered plenty of geography with investments in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and Boulder.

While the global economy took a major downtown in 2008, we are strong believers that great companies can be started in any economic environment. We invest in the very early stages of a company’s lifecycle with a view that it will take them three or more years to hit their stride. As a result, we don’t try to time markets. Instead we pace our investments deliberately and strive for a consistent investment pace through the investment period of our fund.

Following is the rundown by month.

March: Gnip is developing an infrastructure service that helps solve the “many to many” API communication scale problems of web services companies. Gnip has launched their data portability service and currently are processing around 10 million transactions a day between dozens of data producers and data co

What Does Foundry Group Invest In?November 9 2008

Of all the questions that we get, this one is the most common: “What do you guys like to invest in?”

Unlike many venture capital firms that invest in certain geographic regions or specific technologies and sectors, Foundry Group’s investing activity is largely driven by a thematic approach. The themes we pursue tend to be horizontal in nature and are often driven by underlying technology protocols and standards or emerging market trends and customer needs. Rather than looking for short-term hits, we focus on themes that have the ability to drive a cycle of innovation (and hence provide multiple investment opportunities) over a period of five to ten years or more. We invest across North America in a multitude of sectors tied to our thematic approach.

Examples of the investment themes we are currently pursuing include Human Computer Interaction, Implicit Web, Email, Glue, and Digital Life. As one might expect, we are always in the process of evaluating our current themes and investigating new ones, but you can alwa

Politics and MusicOctober 1 2008

It’s a scary thing to think of these two spending time together, but the political machine and the music industry have become strange bedfellows as of late. Specifically, we’ve been following the royalty negotiations and legislative actions surrounding Pandora.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Pandora, it’s an Internet music streaming company that allows listeners to discover new music based on what they already like. And best of all, it’s free. Jason wrote a post about his affection for Pandora recently and we all like Pandora here at Foundry Group.

Recently, Pandora has been on the brink of death, due to the threat of increased royalty payments on songs that they play. Now, it may make sense that Pandora should pay for broadcasting music, but keep in mind that traditional radio stations (AM/FM, with no static at all) pay nothing to play tracks. Satellite providers like XM and Sirius pay about 1.6 cents per hour per listener. Pandora, as an “Internet radio station” was due to pay about 2.91 cents for the same songs beginning in 2010. Of more immediate concern, the royalty rates were to go up nearly double by order of a federal panel that would have charged Pandora and other Internet radio stations on a per song basis. As a result, Pandora has been