Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 24, 2011

I invested in LA-based Gogii , one of the fastest growing, most exciting mobile social networking companies you’ve never heard of and maker of a product called textPlus. I quietly watched their success from the sidelines and kept spending time with and telling the CEO, Scott Lahman, that I wanted to invest in his next company.

Gogii 310

Gogii Invest Blogging Startup 310

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 22, 2011

Feature, not a company. Whether something is a feature or a company is clearly subjective. And sometimes features (say, Twitter) turn into companies. We spoke about my interest in cloud computing, digital media and mobile. At minute eight I spoke about group messaging companies as “features, not companies.&#

Company 295

Company Companies Gogii Google 295

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