socalTECH

NOVEMBER 30, 2010

The round was led by GRP Partners and Rincon Venture Partners, and brings the total raised by the company to $7.5M. RingRvenue develops technology which tracks responses to phone calls, allowing calls to be used for affiliate sales and tracking.

GRP Partners 154

GRP Partners Santa Barbara Custom Development Sales 154

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 2, 2012

Los Angeles-based startup Little Black Bag , a new e-commerce startup backed by GRP Partners and DCM, said this week that it has launched its online shopping site--a play on the Japanese concept of "fukobukuro". Little Black Bag is headed by Dan Murillo, and has reportedly scored $2.75M in funding from GRP, DCM, and David Tisch.

GRP Partners 124

GRP Partners Commerce Los Angeles Sales 124

socalTECH

SEPTEMBER 3, 2010

TrueCar uses actual car sales data from local dealers to present car shoppers with information on the actual prices paid for new cars in their neighborhood. The company said the new Best Local Deals feature was specifically launched ahead of Labor Day, which is traditionally one of the largest volume car sales weekends during the year.

Truecar 154

Truecar Pricing Tool Arcturus 154

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2010

He invested $8 million in a company in the computer networking space. Presumably they are talented if they created a company worth $80 million. In 2006, Steven Dietz, a partner at my firm, GRP Partners, had given me $500,000 in a seed in convertible debt when I started my second company, Koral.

Entrepreneur 321

Entrepreneur GRP Partners Venture Capital Invest 321

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 12, 2013

It is with great pleasure that I can finally announce that we have added Greg Bettinelli as a partner at GRP Partners. He shared tons of information about how how they were using marketing to quantitatively make marketing decisions at HauteLook and acquire customers for prices that were far cheaper than similar companies.

Venture Capital 360

Venture Capital GRP Partners Startup Invest 360

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2010

I’m very pleased today to announce that I invested, on behalf of GRP Partners, in Burstly alongside Rincon Venture Partners , an early stage VC in Southern California whith whom we love to work (and were our co-investors on RingRevenue ). I’ll explain in detail below.

Mobile 282

Mobile Invest Company Companies 282

socalTECH

NOVEMBER 11, 2010

in a Series A funding round, the company said this morning. The company's technology allows search marketers to automatically create more relevant search ads, which result in a better response rate than a standard generic ad. DataPop was founded Jason Lehmbeck and John Zimmerman, both of whom have been at Overture and Yahoo!

Yahoo 145

Yahoo Paid Search GRP Partners SoCalTech 145

socalTECH

JULY 9, 2009

Santa Monica-based Zag.com , the online automotive buying firm headed by Scott Painter, announced Thursday that the company has reached an agreement with Mercedes-Benz USA to offer an additional $5000 off pricing of new Mercedes-Benz cars to members of USAA, one of the affinity groups using Zag's auto pricing and purchasing services.

Zag 100

Zag GRP Partners Anthem Santa Monica 100

socalTECH

JULY 8, 2013

We caught up with Michael to learn more about what Gradient X is doing, and why the three have teamed up at the company. Gradient X is backed by Rincon Venture Partners, GRP Partners (now Upfront Ventures), CrossCut Ventures, Founder Collective, Siemer Ventures, Baroda Ventures, and Double M Partners.

Advertising 253

Advertising Mobile OpenX Software Review 253

InfoChachkie

JANUARY 18, 2012

Mark is a Partner at GRP Partners and authors one of the most widely read startup blogs, BothSidesOfTheTable. Number one is sales. Life is sales. Business development is sales. Winning customers is sales. Getting press is sales. Raising money. Hiring employees.

Entrepreneur 272

Entrepreneur Startup Conference Santa Barbara 272

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2010

They often make great team members such as head of products, CTO, head of sales, CFO, etc. Great companies are comprised of great individual point people or functional leaders. There are plenty of great leaders who work really hard and work for big companies. I run the recruiting process for my VC firm, GRP Partners.

Entrepreneur 293

Entrepreneur Startup Venture Capital CTO Hire 293

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

Working hard together at a big company just isn’t the same. Who came in the office at 2am when the servers crashed – even on the night of the big company party. My other partner, Steven Dietz, was on the board of my second company. You’ve heard that a million times. In a way my firm at Upfront is mafia.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Startup CTO Coach Venture Capital 320

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

He calls it his “Tom Sawyer&# company. Scott’s first big foray into industry-changing companies came with CarsDirect, an IdeaLab company where he was the initial founder & CEO. Scott left the company, which eventually IPO’d and became Internet Brands. a fbFund winner. Current round: $4.

Zag 248

Zag Truecar Venture Capital CarsDirect 248

socalTECH

JUNE 20, 2012

We were founded in 2009 by Mark Suster from GRP Partners. For two years, it was a mentorship program, that worked with twenty three different companies, but did not have a fund, did not have an office, and didn't take any equity. Then, it turned out, all of those companies did really well.

Class 261

Class Mentor Startup Santa Monica 261

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 2, 2010

VC’s raise this money from university endowments, public & private pension funds, insurance companies, banks who invest from their balance sheet or that of their wealthy clients, “family offices&# which means money from very wealthy people, etc. And funds also have investments from the partners of the firm.

Venture Capital 269

Venture Capital Funding Invest GRP Partners 269

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2010

Our guest this week on #TWiVC was Dana Settle , partner at Greycroft Partners , a venture capital firm with offices in New York and Los Angeles. It’s always fun debating companies with Dana because she’s always so knowledgeable on deals – particularly those in the digital media, ad-tech and eCommerce spaces. Time will tell.

Venture Capital 240

Venture Capital Startup Platform Technical Review 240

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 29, 2010

We were considering funding one of the players in the category – call them Company A. I knew the CEO of one of their competitors – Company B. Company B had already lined up a significant funding round ($20 million) from some of the most elite VCs on Sand Hill Road but hadn’t signed the term sheet.

Competition 296

Competition Entrepreneur Startup GRP Partners 296

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. Bending over: How to sell to large companies - A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks , May 24, 2010 This is a guest post by Steve Hanov , who blogs about programming and startups. they have purchasing intent ).*. SlideShare: VC signaling in seed rounds.

Startup 248

Startup Venture Capital Conference Social Media 248

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

But trust me when I say that my observations across many startups (and other companies, frankly) is that not enough time goes into thinking. If you’re not taking this zone-out down time I’ll bet you’re not having enough strategic reflection on your job, your company, your strategy. A great team needs all types.

Venture Capital 400

Venture Capital Conference Ideas Entrepreneur 400

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA’s most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz , who as co-founder of Applied Semantics (purchased by pre-IPO Google for $102 million and now Google AdSense) is responsible for a large portion of the Internet’s monetization.

Venture Capital 313

Venture Capital Southern California Google Startup 313

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2010

If I’m interested I get to spend more time with them, if I’m not I don’t have to – A few companies per month come in that have fascinating business ideas that warrant my spending more time trying to understand their people, company, technology and market. I will obviously be judged on my performance.

Venture Capital 312

Venture Capital Technical Review Startup Entrepreneur 312

socalTECH

APRIL 1, 2010

in a venture round from GRP Partners and Rincon Ventures, for the firm's mobile ad management platform. Mark Suster lead GRP's investment in the firm, and Jim Andelman led Rincon's investment. How long has the firm been around, and why did you decide to start the company? Evan Rifkin: We started in Q1 of last year.

Startup 164

Startup Platform Advertising GRP Partners 164

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 21, 2010

My firm, GRP Partners, invested in the company that innovated this entire category – Overture (formerly known as GoTo.com). Which is one of the reasons I invested in Ad.ly – a company that is a market leader in “in-stream advertising.&# The theory is simple: our attention is moving from search to stream.

Advertising 284

Advertising Invest RSS CPC 284

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I just completed an exercise where I went out to hire a new associate for my VC firm, GRP Partners. I say this as somebody who recruited several Harvard, Wharton and similar MBAs at my first company (the one where I acknowledge that I made every mistake in the book). no lost wages) or whose companies sponsored them.

Startup 337

Startup Venture Capital Study Course 337

InfoChachkie

JULY 14, 2011

Value Prop Twitter Style : “Ringrevenue’s call performance marketing platform enables ad networks, agencies, advertisers & publishers to generate more inbound sales calls.”. And for many companies a good deal of their business is still closed over the phone–through their call centers. Those are the two main criteria.

Marketing 209

Marketing Advertising Paid Search Startup 209

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 18, 2009

The agreement was that both sets of investors would fund the combined entity, we would reduce overlapped costs and become a healthier company. We started drafting out plans for what we were going to do in order to have an orderly winding up of the company. That was our first year of sales. But we did $2.1

Entrepreneur 298

Entrepreneur Startup GRP Partners Venture Capital 298

socalTECH

JUNE 19, 2013

We spoke with Ben about how Burstly is now creating a company to help mobile developers create, develop, distribute, and monetize their apps. Burstly is headed by Evan Rifkin, and backed by GRP Partners, Rincon Venture Partners, SoftBank Capital, and Founder Collective. Burstly is located in Santa Monica. What is Burstly?

Startup 262

Startup Mobile Outsource Development Tool 262

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 16, 2010

LP’s who invest in funds are typically university endowments, public & private pension funds, insurance companies, large corporations and very high net worth individuals called “family offices.&# To give you an indication of how bad, for example, university endowments are suffering check out this chart. VC will shrink.

Venture Capital 311

Venture Capital Startup Seed Funding Rustic Canyon 311

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

As any historian of bubbles will tell you – there were periods of bubbles in assets as arcane as tulips , South American trading companies , dot-com bubbles & housing bubbles. The fact that today’s Internet bubble does not represent all companies does not disprove its existence. Many good companies will not get funded.

Pricing 309

Pricing Marketing Startup Venture Capital 309

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 27, 2011

I was meeting regularly with entrepreneurs and offering (for better or for worse) advice on how to run a startup and how to raise venture capital from my experience in doing so at two companies. I know that I have not yet earned these kudos based on investment returns (although my partners have. Do you have sales productivity software?

Blogging 373

Blogging Startup Writing Venture Capital 373

SoCal CTO

JUNE 14, 2008

The topic is: Betting Your Company On An Internet Platform? VRM - his company - goal is to provide a Level 4 platform. Mark Suster Partner GRP Partners He's an ex-Salesforce.com employee. First company built on top of EMC, Unix servers, field sales to large clients. Everything else is closed.

Platform 150

Platform EC2 Java S3 150

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

For this morning's interview, we thought we'd try something different, and put together a virtual panel of venture capitalists to give us a few tips on pitching your company. If I've seen companies that are similar to them--or half a dozen companies--even if the area might be big and exciting, it will be hard to make an investment.

Tech Coast Angels 100

Tech Coast Angels Ideas Entrepreneur Invest 100