This morning we announced that TechStars is opening it’s 4th (and final) program in New York. As readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan and supporter of TechStars (and, along with my Foundry partners, an individual investor each of the TechStars programs in Boulder, Boston, Seattle and now New York City).

For those unfamiliar with the program, TechStars is a mentor driven accelerator for start-ups. Founded in Boulder and now running programs in Boston and Seattle, New York will be the final US city to which we take the program (we feel the model of having non-overlapping terms is the best way to maximize the success of each city program). Working with TechStars companies for me has been an absolute blast. The teams bring an energy and enthusiasm that is infectious and the progress that they are able to make over a 3 month period is nothing short of amazing.

The New York program continues the tradition of bringing together promising startups with an unbelievable list of mentors (who really make the program). New York mentors include people like Alex Blum of KickApps, David Karp of Tumblr, Eric Litman of Medialets, Howard Lindzon of StockTwits, Avner Ronen of Boxee as well as investors Dave McClure, Fred Wilson, Roger Ehrenberg, Brad Burnham, Jeff Clavier and others.  The New York program will be run by David Tisch – a well known local entrepreneur and angel investor. TechStars founder David Cohen will be temporarily moving to New York to manage the program along side of Tisch. It’s the access to these mentors and the time and energy that they put into the program that really make the experience a worthwhile one for the companies involved.

Our goal with each of the TechStars programs is to have a significant portion of the funding from the local community. The people and firms that are participating with us in investing in the New York program include well known local venture firms and angel investors (FirstMark, First Round Capital, DFJ Gotham, AOL, IA, RRE, Village Ventures, Social Leverage, and more). Many will be participating as mentors as well as investors.

It’s an exciting day for TechStars and for the New York tech community. Applications for the New York program are now open – check it out!

StockTwits announced two great new features in the last week that are worth checking out.

The first is a partnership with SecondMarket to expand the StockTwits platform to include private company streams. So just as you’d tag a post with $AAPL you can now tag private companies (think $ZYNGA,$4SQ, etc). Just as it is for public equitites, tagging your posts (tweets, blogs, etc.) with private company symbols is a much more efficient way to identify the company you’re talking about and become a part of the broader conversation about a company. StockTwits has put together an impressive database of private company symbols and is adding to this list daily.

The second feature was launched with less fanfare – a WordPress plugin that takes any ticker symbol in the body of a post and links them to the realtime discussion of that company at stocktwits.com. You can see how this works in this post – check out $GOOG, $CSCO and $AAPL. Very cool stuff. From a very cool company.

Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, sent out a tweet on Friday saying: “Convertible notes have won. Every investment so far in this YC batch (and there have been a lot) has been done on a convertible note.”

It’s an interesting data point on Y-Combinator companies, but is this truly a macro trend? Have convertible notes really won?  And if so is that good for start-ups? Good for investors?

I think the answer to these questions are that 1) it’s not at all clear that this trend is as definitive as Graham suggests; 2) it’s a mixed bag for entrepreneurs (more positive in the short run, potentially negative in the long term); and 3) it’s clearly not a positive trend for early-stage investors.

First a quick terminology recap (skip this paragraph if you’re already familiar with convertible debt vs. preferred equity). The most common forms of investment in early stage business are convertible debt and preferred equity. Convertible debt is exactly that – debt which is convertible into equity at some later point in time (or is paid off). Typically this conversion is at a discount to the next equity round (to compensate the debt investors for their risk) and sometimes carries warrants (same rational) or a cap on the equity price that the debt converts into. Historically convertible debt has been easier (and therefore cheaper) to put in place. Preferred equity is stock which carries with it certain rights (preferences) in terms of how and when it gets paid back and a handful of other items that relate to the control of the underlying business.

Also, before I jump into this let me state that I have the view that, like many things involving start-ups, there’s a balance between what’s good for investors and good for entrepreneurs (there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two). I believe in cutting fair deals with entrepreneurs and don’t at all subscribe to the belief that an investor should try to obtain harsh control or preference terms (almost all of our investments at Foundry have a 1-times preference multiple and are non-participating; see this post by my partners Jason and Brad for more details on what these terms mean if you’re unfamiliar with them). Paul himself said in a March 2009 article: “When you hear people talking about a successful angel investor, they’re not saying "He got a 4x liquidation preference." They’re saying "He invested in Google." And I believe that’s true, although as you’ll see below, I also believe there also has to be reasonable compensation for the risk that early stage investors are taking. We should all be so lucky as to find the next Google, but one’s investment strategy needs to be geared to finding the next Mint or del.icio.us.

Has Convertible Debt Won?

I asked this question to a number of angel investors (all with institutional angel funds or running Y-Combinator like programs) and the results were mixed. Interestingly there seems to be  a real split between the coasts. While all of this year’s Y-Combinator investments have apparently been structured as convertible debt, that’s not the case with other programs. While some are clearly seeing a heavier weighting to convertible debt than to equity, one east coast based program I talked to told me that fully 100% of their companies who had received funding had done so in the form of equity.  Of the super-angels I talked to, several reported that “all” or “almost all” of their initial investments were currently being structured as convertible debt with one (again, east coast-based) exception who reported only 5-10% of their deals were structured as debt. It’s hard to say where in the country the line shifts from equity to debt, but it’s clearly a much stronger trend out west than on the east coast (at least the northeast which was where the firms/programs that I spoke to on that side of the country are located). To be clear, any west coast trend by definition is trend, given the skew of investing to that geography (and by far the majority of the so-called super-angel investors are west coast based).

The trend that Paul is pointing out appears to be taking place, but is less than definitive (and much less so than I expected). 

Now on to by far the more important question – Is this trend a good one for entrepreneurs and investors?

Traditionally convertible debt is used for initial funding rounds that are smaller in size, where the financing isn’t substantial enough to cover the greater legal costs of a more traditional seed equity round, where the investor base lacks a “lead” to price and negotiate terms, or where the financing size is such that all parties agree that not enough money is being raised to put a stake in the ground around pricing. As I noted above the conversion terms typically contain a discount to the next financing round and – according to the super-angels I talked with – also almost always contain a cap on the price at which the equity can convert at later. Both these terms are designed to bound the risk that the convertible debt investors are taking in not pricing the round – they’re investing in an debt-like instrument with equity like risks.

Entrepreneurs like convertible debt for some obvious reasons. For starters, it can be much quicker to put together a convertible debt financing, so more of the capital being raised goes to the operations of the business, not to the lawyers (this clearly benefits both the entrepreneur and investors). Importantly it also puts off the valuation question to a later date and tends to shift at least some risk from entrepreneur to investor (I’ll talk about why this is in the next paragraph below). Interestingly however, with the increasing number of seed financings we’ve also seen a decrease in the complexity and cost of equity seed financings such that they more resemble in time and cost convertible debt structures (both Y-Combinator and TechStars have model seed docs up for those wishing to further streamline the process). As a result I believe some of the perceived difference in time and cost are disappearing and less relevant to the debt vs. equity debate.

It’s the question of terms that’s key to the investor side of the equation and where I believe the convertible debt trend starts to fall down. In the investor’s best case scenario, the convert terms reflect the current market value of the business (specifically, the cap appropriately prices the equity value of the business at the time of the debt investment). However the investor hasn’t actually purchased equity and has opened themselves up to an easier renegotiation of their terms by a later investor (who, almost by definition, wields more power at that time than the original angels, assuming the company actually needs to raise capital). More likely, however, the convert cap reflects a premium to the current fair market value of the business. One super-angel I talked to told me that while a year ago these caps “approximated what I’d pay in equity” that they’re now “33% higher than what I’d normally agree to pay now.”

I have no doubt that the convertible debt structure has the effect of raising prices for early stage investing. Within some reasonable range this isn’t a huge problem – early stage valuation ranges move up and down with the markets – but in larger increments (which we’re seeing now) and viewed in the light of angel investing economics, these changes in early stage valuation may be problematic.

Traditional venture investors average up their cost basis in a company and “protect” their ownership over time by investing in subsequent rounds. Often, angel investors don’t participate in future rounds (or if they do, they do so at a much less meaningful percentage of the round) meaning that their initial buy-in forms the basis for the majority of the shares they ultimately own in a company. Ironically, the trend of companies raising less capital actually enhances the importance of the initial round buy-in (both because that initial buy-in becomes less diluted meaning the first round price was that much more important and because even if an angel wants to buy up more in later rounds they’ll have less of a chance to do so; I also believe that along with the trend of companies raising less capital we’re also seeing earlier and somewhat smaller average exits – also enhancing the value of initial round buy-ins as fewer investors are truly swinging for the proverbial fence). I’m a big fan of the rise of the so-called super angels – I think they’ve been great for the overall entrepreneurial ecosystem and I’d like to see them continue to thrive.

So how is this trend bad for entrepreneurs?

Clearly in the short run this trend is positive for entrepreneurs because it has the effect of both deferring an often difficult conversation (around valuation) and ultimately increasing early stage company values and as a result decreasing entrepreneur dilution (by the way it’s also good for Y-Combinator, TechStars and other similar programs since the shares the program gets of each company act as founder shares in this financing equation). And I have no doubt that there will be many entrepreneurs who benefit from this trend. But it’s not clear to me that it’s sustainable (just as it wasn’t a decade ago). Ultimately investors need to be compensated for the risk they take in making their investments. With capital being relatively fluid (and the angel markets being finicky) as companies run into trouble, as valuation caps begin to be disrespected, as overall return profiles decrease because of higher early stage prices, money will flow out of the asset class. And ultimately this doesn’t benefit entrepreneurs either.

Conclusions?

If you’re a long time reader of this blog you’ll know that I don’t like superlatives and I don’t like sweeping generalizations. I don’t think convertible debt is bad and I don’t believe as famous angel investor David Rose has said that “Smart Money’ doesn’t invest in convertible debts. Period.” Different situations call for different capital and financing structures. That said, a broad market trend towards convertible debt has implications that I think are bad for the overall early stage investment ecosystem.

I look forward to a healthy discussion in the comments below!

Quick disclosure note, I’m a personal investor in TechStars and from that end actually benefit (at least short term) from this trend. As an angel investor I’ve participated (this was prior to raising the Foundry Group fun) in convertible debt structures, including several very positive outcomes.  I’m also an investor in several angel funds that are in the middle of this market. Foundry itself rarely (which is to say never to date) structures a first round as convertible debt.  

As if the world didn’t already have enough patent trolls, Paul Allen has sullied his name and jumped into the fray suing Google, Facebook, Apple and a bunch of other high profile companies alleging infringement of a number of patents held by his company, Interval Research Corp (now defunct). It’s a travesty that Allen has stooped to this level. Patent trolls are in my view the lowest of the low. And while our current – completely messed up – patent system erroneously rewards this behavior, most trolling takes place by firms and individuals you and I have never heard of (and frankly don’t want to know). Why Allen – worth an estimated $14Bn – feels the need to stoop to this level is hard to imagine.

And consider the patents at issue. One involves “technology” that suggests related products to a ecommerce site user. Another shows web news readers stories on related subjects.

Clearly very novel and protectable.

I’m considering trying to patent a “method for extorting money from legitimate companies for using obvious technology that was erroneously granted patent protection” and using it to go after these patent trolls.

Bleh.

My last post with some thoughts on product pricing has received a ton of traffic, comments and email. Clearly this topic is one that a lot of entrepreneurs care about (and struggle with). A few people pointed me to a great post by Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch on the Software by Rob blog that talks about freemium plans and why, in Ruben’s view, they aren’t always drive the results companies are looking for. It maps well to my thinking (I directly called the freemium model into question in my pricing post). There’s some great data in the post – definitely read the full thing. Here’s a few that caught my eye:

Bidsketch started out with a freemium model. Ruben carefully documents their early success with this (by early, he’s referring to a weeks, not months) and their challenge only a few months after launch of a sub 1% upgrade rate and rapidly increasing support challenges (they had a huge user-base – just not one that was paying). And then he did something “radical” – and completely got rid of the free version. This change led to an 10x increase in paid conversions.

Jason Fried from 37signals had a similar experience. “…the majority of people who are on pay started on pay…” he says. And by correlation, most people who start on free stayed on free.

CrazyEgg doubled their revenue the month they dropped their free plan.

We’ve had similar experiences with companies in our universe that struggled with freemium pricing plans. And while there are clearly companies that have made a success out of offering a free service to a large percentage of their user base and charging the few that are willing to pay (including some very successful ones in our own portfolio) I’m hoping that more companies at least consider that their best pricing plan may not need to include “free”.

I’ve been pulled into a number of product and pricing meetings recently (for reasons unknown I’ve become the Foundry pricing and productization guy). I thought it would be helpful to put some of my thoughts into a blog post and hopefully spur some conversation in the comments and over email. With any broad topic, there are always exceptions to the general rules. There are also few absolutes and much of this advice varies depending on your specific product and market. And keep in mind here that I’m dealing generally with web services of some kind in the advice below (not consumer apps and not enterprise software). With those caveats, here are some ideas on pricing models:

- Beware of too many pricing tiers. Relative simplicity is helpful in many things related to building companies and pricing models are no exception. As it relates to pricing tiers, I favor fewer pricing levels. More tiers = more complication = more confusion. It also makes you more likely to violate some of the other ideas below. I generally like 3 or 4 product tiers plus one “call us for enterprise pricing” tier.

- Have a clear delineation between product tiers. Many companies initially offer a base level that includes all of the features of their product and then offer a little more of each feature at various incremental pricing levels. For some relatively straightforward services this can make sense (think Basecamp where your sales pitch is about offering more of a relatively defined thing, that everyone pretty much understands and values, and generally will want more of as they use the product more). For most products, however, this is a bad idea. For starters, most companies vastly overestimate their prospective customers’ ability to understand the features of their product (thinking the value of each feature is self evident). It also complicates the buying process as prospective customers try to figure out how much of each of those great features you’ve developed they want, and doesn’t create clear delineations between pricing tiers. While there are some features in almost any product that need to be priced this way, I generally favor opening up some number of completely new features with each pricing increment (say an analytics layer or workflow module, etc.). This has the side benefit of giving you lots of nice ways in your product itself to promote higher tiered features (think grayed out features – “click here to upgrade!”). It also makes the upper tier value propositions relatively straightforward – want X feature? You’ll need to purchase the Silver package for that.

- How about overlay features that you charge by the drink for? Many companies have parts of their product which some advanced users may want to access at every product level (API level access being a pretty obvious example). In these cases (and to be clear, these should be product features that a subset of your customer base is looking for – if not, they should likely fall into your regular pricing tiers) I think it’s fine to have an overlay where you charge incrementally to the base price of each tier ($X for every 1000 API calls or something similar).

- Be careful what you put a tariff on. You should understand very clearly what drives your own costs as you start to matrix out your pricing so you know what user behaviors cost you money. You should also understand (by talking to early users) what drives customer adoption, usage and lock-in of your product. And with all that in mind, be careful what you chose to put a tax on. There’s no hard and fast rule here and this is a nuanced conversation that’s hard to generalize and put into writing. But remember that your pricing will effect your customer’s behavior around your product. And I’ve found that many companies make the mistake of charging for features that are the key lock-in points for customers in their early use of a product and in so doing actually limit their likelihood of getting enough value out of the product that results in their becoming a long term user. To be clear, you should try to align (but not necessarily match exactly) customer value to customer cost. But not at the expense of lock-in. To keep on the Basecamp example, note that they allow for unlimited users at even the base pricing level. They (correctly) realized that while they could have easily charged for this they’re better off getting as many people in an organization using the product as possible.

- The freemium myth. I’ve been a great beneficiary of freemium models (as both a consumer and an investor) but I think for many companies the freemium model doesn’t make sense. If your product offers value out of the gate, if your service is such that it doesn’t necessarily benefit by having a large volume of users (and back-end data aggregation is probably not that benefit, which I point out since I often hear it used to justify fremium models for companies that in my mind shouldn’t have them), if you are selling largely to enterprises (companies) – you may not be the right candidate for a freemium model. I know it’s in vogue and I know that your product is so cool if only you could get a million people using it you’d blow past the typical freemium upgrade rates of 1-3%. But in all likelihood if you’re offering a product of value that’s well thought through, well designed and well architected, you’ll make more money by simply charging for your service out of the gate. (Note that I’m really not talking about consumer oriented applications here, where freemium models tend to make more sense)

- Don’t be afraid to charge for your product. The other benefit of not going down the freemium path is that avoids another common mistake companies often make which is not charging enough for their product. When you’re jumping from “free” to “something” that something often needs to be relatively modest – after all you don’t want to scare customers off and you do need enough of them to pay something in order to stay in business. But the reality is that if you have a good product, many users who will pay “something” will pay more than you think for your product. Put another way, those that get value out of what you do get enough value to be willing to pay a meaningful amount of money for it. You may lose a few people at the low end, but many products have a lower price elasticity than their creators realize. I’ve watched many companies spend untold cycles trying to raise the price of their product after initially setting prices so low that they essentially commoditized what they do. It’s also worth noting that if you get it wrong it’s a lot easier to lower prices than to raise them. And to be perfectly clear, I’m generally not a fan of the $19.99 entry price point for a product/service sold to business users. You can charge more. And you should.

- Beware the long “trial” period. I’ve written about this before. I think most companies offer too long a trial period for their product. Just like most customers who will pay for a product will pay more for that product, most trial users who will eventually become customers at 30 days will do so at 14 days. The idea here is to give people enough time to see how awesome you are but not too much time to change their minds or to forget about you. There was a great debate about this question when I wrote about it last time and I still haven’t found any academic research to back up my hypothesis, but that’s my opinion.

Hopefully some of these ideas will be helpful to you. Maybe a few will be provocative (as always, let me know!). I do recommend that companies working on their product pricing matrix spend plenty of time with customers to understand how they are using their product. It’s also helpful to bounce pricing ideas off of not just your early customers but also some trusted advisors who are not as close to what you’re doing. Getting a fresh set of eyes on your feature set is a good way to avoid drinking too much of your own cool-aid when it comes to your view of the ease with which potential customers will understand your value and pricing matrix.

I had an exchange with an entrepreneur last night that I couldn’t resist posting (I did resist including the guy’s name, however). It started with a relatively typical email. One which I wonder why I still receive but still get regularly. The entrepreneur writes:

Seth…..I’d like to pitch you on a start up. I need the help of someone like you. I haven’t filed any patents yet and I need a nda signed. can we do it?

I respond as I do for all requests like this by saying:

Hi [name redacted]. Like most VCs I don’t sign NDAs (see: http://www.sethlevine.com/wp/2008/01/why-i-dont-sign-ndas). Let me know if you’d still like to show me what you’re up to (totally understand if you feel it’s too sensitive).

Here’s what I received in response:

Seth….I’m reaching out to you here, lets get off this old cookie cutter vc "don’t sign nda’s" attitude, it’s only until the patents are filed. I believe I’ve got one of the biggest deals to come down the pike in years. This isn’t my first rodeo. Just FYI, no matter how hard you crunch the numbers, this is a 20+B per year deal. I already have demo software and I need you to help me put a team together, the money will come as soon as we are able to "show and tell" so to speak. Please reconsider.

Really? That’s how you’re engaging with me? I can’t imagine how you think this is a winning strategy. Am I supposed to be bowled over by how amazing this potential opportunity might be, change a cardinal rule of our business and through this series of emails think that you’d be a competent manager, effective advocate for your business and a good guy to work with?

The initial email is completely casual, full of mixed cases and grammatical errors. Oh, and totally un-researched. But the second response really takes the cake and what caused me to post this for the world to see. Of course you have one of the biggest deals ever. Clearly this isn’t your first rodeo. Certainly you’re playing in a $20BN market. And without question I’m just one of those cookie cutter VCs. Obviously I should change my attitude.

[BTW, in case you were wondering, I didn’t bother responding]

Brad has a lengthy post up describing how we think about seed investing at Foundry Group. In it, he describes our philosophy around seed investing and differentiates it from what others (but not everyone) in the market is doing. Importantly, he notes that:

our seed investments are not “options on the next round.”  We price our seed rounds as equity investments, always lead or co-lead … and treat them the same way we would a $10m investment… when we make a seed investment, it gets everyone’s attention.  We try hard not to smother it with love, but we recognize that we usually each have something unique to add to a seed investment and try to help accordingly.  As a result, we are all emotionally involved in the investment (a phrase you’ll see in later posts about this topic) which I believe is both beneficial to the entrepreneur and extremely important to the VC firm.

At the end of his post Brad lists out the companies in the Foundry portfolio that started as seed investments (AdMeld, Gnip, Lijit, Mandlebrot, Next Big Sound, Standing Cloud, and Trada). I thought it would be interesting (and illuminating) to describe the story of one or two of these investments as a way to put some color around how we think about seed investing.

With that pre-amble, let me describe the story of Trada – a company that helps businesses more effectively manage their search marketing campaigns via its marketplace through which paid search experts work collaboratively and competitively to maximize the effectiveness of Trada customers search marketing campaigns.

I’ve known the CEO of Trada, Niel Robertson, for almost 10 years. He’s founded several companies that our predecessor fund invested in (one of which was a huge success, one of which was not). The roots of Trada can be traced back to a series of conversations Niel and I started having months before the concept of Trada was born. They started with the idea that we wanted to work together on another company and some concepts about the operating philosophy of our relationship, the kind of company culture we wanted to build and the ideal pattern of communication that the two of us would have around the business. With the foundation of our operating philosophy intact we turned our attention to what this new business should do. I had been spending quite a bit of time looking at the online advertising market and suggested to Niel that, while the display market was large (and there were plenty of interesting businesses to be built there) I was particularly interested in trying to figure something out around search – which is a larger market than display and significantly concentrated with the search platforms (there were and are far fewer companies playing in the search ecosystem than in display). This mapped with some of the ideas Niel was thinking about as well and over a series of months we tossed around a number of different ideas in search marketing. Niel eloquently describes the birth of the idea behind Trada on the company’s blog (worth taking a look at and considering the varied genesis behind businesses).  To be clear, while there is a small group of us that are Trada founders, the idea of Trada is completely Niel’s. From the initial idea we worked together to validate the operating assumptions of the business – doing collaborative due diligence on the crowdsearch SEM marketplace that was the idea behind Trada.

Of course coming up with the idea is the easy part. Executing against that idea is another matter. In this case neither Niel (nor I) had any interest in creating a traditional syndicate to fund the company. Instead we quickly put our heads together about a financing (we like to say it was over beers, but the truth is more mundane – we hammered out the details in a 10 minute conversation in the conference room of the Foundry office). We decided that we wanted to bring in some experts to help us with the business and together flew around pitching the business to a small handful of strategic angel investors to pull together a small syndicate that became the initial Trada investor base. Niel and I hammered out a second financing in similar fashion (again around the Foundry conference table, this time without the need for an angel roadshow). It’s a great example of how we like to work with entrepreneurs – especially those that we have a long history with. We like to be involved early (in this case before an idea for a business even existed) and we think of our angel investments as a down payment on a subsequent investment in the business (we’ realize that we need to give early businesses some time to develop).

More recently in Trada’s history we announced that Google has joined us in investing in the company. It’s hard to imagine a more strategic investor in a search business than Google and we’re extremely happy to have Rich Minor and the Google Ventures team on board.

We’ve come a long way with the business and strongly believe that there’s no better platform for small and medium sized businesses to leverage the power of search. If you’re a business or PPC agency spending $3k – $100k per month on search marketing, I’d encourage you to give them a try.

I spent the month of July up at our place in Granby, CO (just outside of Winter Park). My partner Brad has been a longtime fan of taking a month to work somewhere else, not travel and clear your head, but I’d never given it a try. And while I understand that not all jobs allow for this, I suspect that more people could do it (at least for a week or two) if they really wanted to.

Let me be clear that this wasn’t vacation. While I didn’t get on a plane for a month (which in and of itself felt like vacation), I was working full time – completely connected via email and phone. I actually intended to take a week of the month off, but with a number of financings closing and a Thursday full of board calls, my week off turned into about 2 days off instead. Other than those two days I was fully connected.

And the amazing thing about taking some time out of the office was how amazingly productive it was. I was completely caught up on email, totally connected to the happenings of the portfolio and my “to call” list shrunk down to zero. More importantly, I was able to spend a lot more time with my wife Greeley and our three kids (by far the biggest downside of my job is the time that it requires me to be away from my family).

While I recognize that time in the office is important I realized this summer that time out of the office is just as important. I’ll definitely be doing this again. And hopefully my pace of blogging will pick up this fall with some of the ideas bouncing around my head from July…

Clearly a hot topic in online ad-tech right now is the rise of exchange-based buying and the advent of real-time bidding platforms (RTB) that allow advertisers and publishers to transact on an impression by impression basis. Given all the focus on RTB I sometimes have to remind myself that true real-time trading is less than a year into its existence. And given its nascence, the landscape of companies (buy side platforms, sell side platforms, data providers, agencies, brands, publishers, etc.) that are playing a part in these exchanges is changing rapidly.

We’ve long been believers in audience based buying and selling of ad inventory. Our investment in Lijit is largely around this concept and more obviously, our work with AdMeld, which is a leader in the RTB world, falls squarely into this thesis. And while I’m not one for sweeping (and superlative) predictions around the future of the ad ecosystem (here I’m specifically not predicting the death of all ad networks), it’s clear from my vantage point that more and more inventory – both remnant and non-remnant – will be processed through real-time platforms. This leads to some interesting questions about how publishers will need to alter the decision making engines in their ad stacks and how blurry the line will become between premium and remnant inventory (there’s a continuum there that technology such as RTB is clearly stretching out; as an aside, we need to come up with a word for inventory that’s between house sold premium and what we traditionally called remnant).

Clearly the rise of sell side platforms such as AdMeld and AdEx needs to be matched by new thinking on the demand side. And while there are a number of companies creating DSP’s (including, of course, Invite Media who recently sold to Google) few (if any) were built from the ground up to exist in the exchange world as it’s currently evolved to. And as a result, the demand side as a whole seems to be lagging in its ability to handle the rapidly increasing scale and complexity of supply.

The ability to handle this massive transaction volume is what first attracted us to Triggit, a company we announced an investment in today (see the Triggit blog, AdExchanger, MediaPost and TechCrunch). However it was their application of additional technology to this supply to allow advertisers and agencies to run more effective campaigns that really made the company stand out.

Triggit was the first DSP to develop a self service interface which allows buyers to plan and schedule campaigns across exchanges. Triggit has also been a leader in enabling advertisers to better target audience by allowing them to append both third and (importantly) first party data to their transaction decision engine. The Triggit team – lead by Zach and Susan Coelius and Ryan Tecco – is fantastic. Both in their ability to push the limits of technology in the DSP world as well as their ability to work with leading agencies and Fortune 500 marketers to enable their exchange buying. We’re joined in this investment with Spark Capital’s Santo Politi, with whom I’ve developed a close relationship over the past several years.

We’re thrilled to have Triggit in the Foundry family.