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RSS VC Fund
I noticed that Jim Moore and some colleagues announced a venture fund to invest in RSS companies last week.
It reminds me of KP's Java Fund that was launched in the summer of '96 (the same time we launched Flatiron).
Technology specific funds have a mixed history. They limit what you can invest in and over time that often isn't good.
I prefer "thesis driven" investing to "sector specific" investing.
If you build an investment thesis, you can evolve it over time.
But tieing your firm/fund to a specific technology leaves less wiggle room.
Certainly RSS is a very important technology and its driving a lot of innovation right now.
It will be a fertile area for investment over the next several years.
I like Jim and his partners are smart people who I know as well.
I wish them luck and we'll certainly be looking at some similar opportunities so maybe we will end up working together.
UPDATE: Silicon Beat has a long analysis and an interview with Jim Moore. Well worth a read.
July 5, 2005 Venture Capital and Technology | Comments (3) | TrackBack (3)
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Comments
I think investing in RSS is a bit more like investing in the web than in Java. Java was an improvement over other languages (maybe) but nothing fundamentally different. Like the web, RSS is a change in the way people distribute information. The technology behind RSS (HTTP, XML, REST) are not as important as this shift to the publication/subscription model.
Maybe a RSS based fund (as opposed to a more general Internet fund) is a bit too narrow, but they've only raised 100 million. I think that can effectively be put to work to capture some important pieces in this new distribution model.
Posted by: Toby | Jul 5, 2005 3:25:44 PM
The problem is that RSS is a widget...perhaps an important future widget but a widget nevertheless. And no company has done well relying on a widget (post the original widget companies like intel lol). You gotta deliver the whole solution, and this means in practice that the web service companies, and internet infrastructure companies are the ones that will realize deliver the true value of RSS (and perhaps the vertical companies like amazon, google, ebay, etc who may roll their own RSS solutions in order to keep robust RSS and XML derived solutions from developing "in the wild" (e.g. for free)). Any company named "*RSS*" has only two exit paths, bankruptcy or buyout, and buyout will not be at the multiples the widget companies sold out for to e.g. cisco, amazon, etc. in the first internet wave, because implementing RSS is too easy (indeed any XML or XML-derived implmentation is fairly trivial, that's the whole point with XML). Taking a set of XML feeds and aggregating these into e.g. an auction "site" or a personals "site" will deliver true value, but this is where a "pure" RSS focus will not be as helpful.
Posted by: alex | Jul 5, 2005 3:52:10 PM
Wanted to send you a private email about this, is there an email address I can reach you on?
Posted by: JonK | Jul 6, 2005 9:33:03 PM
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