There was a great thread this week on the Foundry CEO email list about Net Promoter Score and how companies are using it to measure the satisfaction of their customers (specifically in the case of NPS, their propensity to recommend the product or service to others). NPS can be a useful tool when used properly (which was much of the discussion on the email thread – who to measure, how often, etc.). But NPS can be cumbersome to measure, hard to understand granularly and not very helpful in letting you know what any given customer is really thinking about their interactions with your company (other than the extreme outliers).

The discussion and thinking about both the benefits and limitations of NPS got me thinking about a clever way that Trada measures customer satisfaction in their app on a customer by customer basis that I thought was worth passing along.

On most pages in the Trada app (Trada has a b-to-b focused application but this advice holds for b-to-c as well), there’s a small smiley face in the nav bar. It can exist in only one of four states – Happy, Meh…, Unhappy or Confused. It can only be set by the customer themselves (the admin login that the Trada customer service team uses doesn’t allow them to change the state) and customers are regularly prompted to update its status (which does not start “happy” so there’s no bias to just leaving it alone). It’s amazing how powerful such a simple idea has been for keeping tabs on how individual customers are feeling about their interactions with Trada and its application. It’s easy enough to use that customers engage with it. It can only exist in a limited number of states so it gets ride of the gravitation away from the edge that larger measurement scales tend to product, and is a great early sign to Trada’s customer service team that something is wrong with a client. The company uses data from this metric to reach out proactively to customers who are expressing confusion or dissatisfaction with their work on the platform. For Trada this doesn’t replace measuring NPS, which gives management a higher level view of overall customer satisfaction) but has been an extremely effective tool to help them deliver a fantastic customer experience.

Sometimes simple solutions can be very effective.

For about the past 18 months I’ve been talking about the coming of programmatic technologies (machine to machine buying and selling) to the premiums side of the display ecosystem. It was one of my “2012 AdTech Predictions” published last year in AdExchanger and I expanded on that prediction in a piece earlier this year, also in AdExchanger.

The basic idea is simple. Programmatic technology has made a huge difference in online advertising – bringing down transaction costs, allowing for better audience and content targeting, enabling publishers to better manage their inventory while at the same time allowing advertisers to make better buying decisions (not to mention spot ad buys). It’s been a great addition to the ad stack and for Foundry a solid area for investment (our two companies that play directly into this trend are AdMeld, which was purchased by Google late last year, and Triggit, the leading onramp to the Facebook exchange and growing extremely rapidly). Both AdMeld and Triggit – as well as almost all of the other companies that play in programmatic – are focused on non direct sold or remnant inventory. This was a logical place for programmatic technologies to be first applied. Publishers were more focused on the direct sold side of their business since that was where the large dollars were. And the marginal cost for a single impression (and therefore the cost of getting something wrong) was relatively low. At the same time, there was a huge volume of remnant impressions that were available to this ecosystem and because of the way these impressions had traditionally been grouped together for buys by the ad networks, there were significant targeting efficiencies to be gained by adding a software layer to this buying process (allowing more impression and user level information to pass through the system as well as opening up those impressions to multiple bidders through real time bidding).

Fast forward to today and because of these efficiencies and better targeting capabilities programmatic in general and RTB in particular has taken off even faster than most industry observers (myself included, although we’ve been the happy recipient of this trend) ever expected. But how can these same marketplace rules apply to the other side of the inventory equation – those high value impressions that are sold directly by a publisher’s sales force? This buying process is still handled manually, by fax and email primarily, adding complexity and cost to the process that is almost hard to imagine (which is one of the reasons that other forms of brand advertising remain in much greater favor than online). Dealing with premium inventory is a different beast and requires different technology and different rules of transacting than remnant. But the benefits in terms of marketplace fluidity, reach, scope and efficiency have an even greater potential on this side of the market.

I first met John Ramey from isocket about a year ago. We started talking about 16 months ago – after I had started thinking about the coming of programmatic guaranteed but before I was making much noise talking about it. isocket was well on their way building products and the isocket marketplace to go after this market. Over the months we’ve spent time together trading ideas about how this side of the business was likely to evolve, updating me on the progress of isocket, letting me know which ex-AdMelders he was bringing on board, etc. I’ve come away from each of our conversations more and more impressed with the platform isocket is building and more and more convinced that we wanted to have a chip on the table in programmatic guaranteed. John has surrounded himself with an impressive group of advisors, including James Beriker of Efficient Frontier and Dapper who will be joining me on the isocket board.

I’m extremely excited to be working with John and the isocket team and look forward to building a great business together. You can read the full isocket release here (which also talks about the launch of the BuyAds Pro product, the addition of James Beriker formerly of Efficient Frontier and Dapper to the isocket board as well as the addition of Mark Liao from Yahoo as CFO). Exciting times!

Today is the last day to enter SideTour’s contest for the ultimate New York Weekend. It’s a great chance to win a really unique weekend in New York from a company whose business is built around helping people find cool and unique experiences (SideTour is a Foundry portfolio company – in case that wasn’t obvious).

At the core of the Internet is the ability to connect together content. It was really this hyperlinking between pages that in many ways defined the difference between the early Internet and the bulletin boards and Usenet that preceded it. Google clearly saw the value of links, which they interpreted as people “voting” on the online content which they saw as most valuable. At the core of their search engine is the measurement of that linking activity. However while a huge amount of attention and investment has gone into tools to support publishers’ ability to create and post content and, of course, to create advertising around that content (literally around, by surrounding it in ads), publishers have lacked tools to properly support inserting, analyzing, managing and optimizing links in their content. Inserting links has remained a highly manual activity and a very static one – once a page has been created the links that were initially inserted are the links that remain.

LinkSmart is changing all that with the Total Link Management (TLM) product, which they announced today. TLM is an intuitive, scalable, automated platform that analyzes and controls keyword text linking with the goal of optimizing reader traffic flow – but all under the complete control of the publisher (no spam-like text link ads, no pop-ups). TLM works by identifying valuable keyword links within articles that have the highest performing click engagement, then utilizes the publisher’s own organic traffic to help readers find related content within their site or that of a partner or affiliate. In early results with LinkSmart’s pilot partners, the software performed 15 to 20 times better than other common traffic optimization techniques. The idea is to first give publishes insight into the links on their site and the click behavior of their site visitors. The system then gives publishers the ability to dynamically rewrite existing links, redirect traffic to different locations on their site or a partner site, suggests new words to highlight with links and gives publishers a complete view of how traffic is moving around. This is a huge opportunity for publishers to take control of their key asset – the content which they produce – and use it most effectively to better the experience for their site visitors while at the same time generating more traffic and more revenue for their business.

LinkSmart was built for publishers by a publisher. Pete Sheinbaum came up with the idea behind LinkSmart based on the experiences he had as a web publisher (Pete was the   CEO of DailyCandy which was sold to Comcast a few years ago). I met Pete well before that sale and he actually worked from our office while he was at DailyCandy for a while. LinkSmart was born in the Foundry office several years ago as Pete started working on his next big idea shortly after leaving Comcast.

I’ve written in the past about the benefits of “stealth mode” as well as the debates we’ve had at Foundry around whether or not companies should remain quiet about what they are planning, or be public about it from day one. In the case of LinkSmart, they’ve taken stealth to a new level here at Foundry – spending several years refining the idea and the product and working with early publisher partners to make the TLM both extremely powerful but also easy and intuitive to use.

So welcome LinkSmart to the light of day! We’re really excited about what you are doing!

It’s funny how things have a way of working out. I wrote recently of our experience with SEOMoz – from initial meeting a few years ago to finally investing in them earlier this month. Today we announced our investment in Mocavo - a genealogy search platform that provides users with the best tools available to find information on their ancestors. More specifics on the business in a minute but the year long journey from TechStars to Foundry investment is worth noting.

I first met Mocavo at the start of last year’s TechStars Boulder. I liked founder Cliff Shaw a lot and appreciated (although at the time didn’t share) his passion for genealogy. When he asked me to mentor them through the program I thought it was a pretty safe bet. “Sure thing Cliff,” I said at the time, “there’s zero chance that I’d invest in a genealogy site, but it would be fun to work together!” Through the summer I held to that party line.  Cliff and I kept meeting regularly even after TechStars (Cliff knows my soft spot for sushi and would regularly invite me to the Mocavo offices for brainstorming sessions with the team over take-out). But over the winter the lightbulb went off on what a big idea Mocavo really is. I had known that genealogy is a huge (and growing) market but was beginning to realize just how novel the tools that Mocavo is bringing to the market are. And the pent up demand in genealogy circles for better access to content, better tools for sharing this content and better ways to bring offline content (the majority of historical content still resides offline). And how passionate genealogists are about their pursuit of family history and as a result how much time, effort and money they spend in their pursuit.

Launched in March of 2011 (although their paid features only launched a few months ago), Mocavo has seen great growth in visitors to its site, searches on its platform and information indexed in its search engine. The company isn’t out to replace existing genealogical tools – it’s here to augment those tools and provide an overlay social experience that is natural to genealogy. I couldn’t be more excited to be working with the Mocavo team (along with Cliff, I’ve gotten to know Richard, Andy, Ryan really well over the last year).

Welcome to the future of your past!

There’s a wealth of experience and expertise around us every day. We probably don’t give most people we pass running around our respective busy cities a second look, but rushing by you are people with interesting expertise and experience. Artists and actors; olympic athletes and monks; sailors and graffiti artists.

SideTour looks to unlock this community and enable them to market and generate income off of their unique expertise. These experts – “hosts” in SideTour’s terminology – use the SideTour platform to advertise their experiences. SideTour helps them market these experiences and handles bookings, billing, refunds, etc. on their behalf. SideTour events are designed to be shared in groups – often people who haven’t met each other before the experience (although the platform does allow for group booking). And the entire experience ultimately becomes about the event, about the host and about the participants. The results so far have been fantastic.

Importantly, SideTour isn’t just a listing service for events, as some other companies pursuing similar models are. And SideTour heavily curates the experiences hosted on its site to ensure that they are both unique and that the hosts have true expertise. The variety of experience on SideTour really show the effect of this curation (and you thought I was kidding about luging and monks).

I met the SideTour team at the beginning of TechStars NYC and immediately loved what they were up to. And I love the story of four founders, friends and colleagues for over a decade, coming together to form a business (sounds like the Foundry story). They’ve made incredible progress over the summer at TechStars.

The company announced today a $1.5M seed financing led by Foundry and RRE (there’s a great write-up on TechCrunch here). This money will help the company further build out the functionality of the SideTour platform and begin expansion to markets beyond its launch market of New York City.

It’s great to have the chance to work with them!

This morning Federated Media announced that it has acquired Lijit Networks in a private stock deal.

I’m incredibly proud of what the Lijit team has accomplished in the almost 4 years we’ve been investors in the business – charting a course that wasn’t exactly always a straight line, but one that has always placed publishers first. As a result of this never wavering focus on web publishers, Lijit has built a large and ultimately very valuable company.

I’ve always thought that Federated was the natural acquirer for Lijit (and we’ve been partners with Federated for some time now). Federated shares Lijit’s focus on publishers (“the best of the independent web”), but unlike Lijit, who helps publishers generate revenue through better monitizing their non-premium inventory, Federated sells unique, high value premium inventory across their federated group of publishers. For a time, Lijit pursued a similar model and having bumped into Federated in many a sales process we can attest to the strength of the Federated sales team. Ultimately Lijit chose a different path – integrating with over 30 buying channels and standing up their own RTB exchange. All the while, Lijit has been rapidly growing the list of publishers they work with by providing not only an advertising channel, but search, analytics and insight tools to help Lijit publishers better understand and engage with their audience.

The fit is a natural one. Federated brings to the combined entity a large and established sales force and the ability for Lijit publishers to access premium content relationships and advertising. Lijit brings a strong technology background, a rapidly scaling publisher base and the ability of both Federated and Lijit publishers to place their inventory to auction through the Lijit exchange.

As part of the acquisition I’ll be joining the Federated Media board of directors (along with Federated founder, John Battelle, FM’s CEO Deanna Brown, FM’s early investor from Panorama Capital Chris Albinson and Fred Harmon of Oak Investment Partners, who led the large Federated financing in 2008). I’m thrilled to be working with such an accomplished group and to continue my close relationship with Lijit through my continued role at Federated Media.

I’d also note that, while the financial details of this transaction haven’t been released, this is a significant win not only for Lijit and its investors, but also a nice outcome for Boulder (Lijit’s offices are in the heart of downtown – just upstairs from the Foundry office, in fact). While ultimately the exit will be measured by the outcome of the combined Lijit/Federated business, based just on this deal’s value alone this ranks as one of the larger transactions for a Denver or Boulder based business in the last decade.

You can read the FM release here (or on their home page, which they’ve completely taken over with the deal announcement), Lijit’s founder and CEO Todd Vernon’s thoughts here and FM’s founder and chairman John Battelle’s post on the deal here.

Congratulations to both the Lijit and Federated teams! This is big!

Forbes published an article yesterday by Maureen Farrell stating that there’s a “signaling problem” for TechStars Boulder companies who don’t raise money from Foundry Group.

“… one byproduct of [Foundry Group’s] generosity for any young Boulder company is that, if it hasn’t been funded by The Foundry Group, it must explain why. Otherwise it has a signaling problem, something that happens when a VC invests in an early round but doesn’t show up for later rounds.”

And while I’m going to argue (forcefully) here that neither my partners nor I either believe this to be true or even wish for that kind of market power, I should acknowledge that I’ve heard this before. And not just in relation to TechStars companies, but for tech companies based in Boulder more generally. I’ve been in a couple of meetings where a founder has suggested that if Foundry didn’t invest, no-one would (in both cases we didn’t invest and they did indeed find another capital source). I’ve also received calls from other investors asking why Foundry had “passed” on something (although in none of those cases did I think they were fishing for a reason to pass – but rather trying to get another data point on the business). And many, many people around town talk regularly about the overall lack of venture funds in the Colorado market (which leaves Foundry at the top of a very short list of active local investors, in large part where this perception likely stems from).

I’m extremely proud of the vibrant tech ecosystem in Boulder and the role that my partners and I have played in helping shape it, however we don’t welcome the notion that Foundry somehow controls the Boulder market. Whether Foundry has this kind of negative drag on Boulder companies or TechStars is an extremely important topic to us. We spend untold time and energy helping Boulder tech companies (not just TechStars companies and certainly not limited to companies in the Foundry portfolio) be successful, and the implication that not getting funding from Foundry is a negative mark on a business is the kind of market power that we certainly DO NOT want to have.  It’s not good for Boulder, not good for Foundry and not good for other venture firms (in part because it suggests that other venture firms simply aren’t capable (or willing) to do their own work). And while all four Foundry partners are involved with TechStars, our funding support for the program (and those in other cities) comes from us personally, not from our fund (we do this in part to try to avoid the perception that TechStars is in any way captive to Foundry, which it most definitely is not).

It is my belief that this sentiment, to the extent to which it even exists, is much more perception than reality (and at that, the perception of a very limited number of people). And while writing about it might drive some traffic Forbes.com, the reality is that there’s no due diligence line item on other venture firms’ checklists for Boulder companies that says “find out why Foundry passed”. There is no signaling problem.

And the numbers support me. Strongly.

Foundry has 28 companies in our 2007 fund (we have yet to close an investment from the new fund that we announced last week). Nine of them are based in Colorado (all of those in Boulder). Since we raised Foundry Venture Capital 2007, 64 Boulder-based companies have received funding, meaning that we’ve funded approximately 14% of the local companies taking in institutional funding since we raised our fund. Furthermore, 101 different venture firms have funded Boulder-based companies during this time period – reflecting the strong national reputation that Boulder is building among technology investors. The Forbes article cites Boulder’s funding total for 2010 through 9/31 – $91M that has been invested in Boulder businesses since the beginning of the year. With $13.6M of this total, Foundry represents just under 15% of the dollars invested in Boulder in 2010. The numbers for our participation in TechStars are similar (easy to look up since TechStars openly publishes its results).  Since the founding of TechStars Boulder 39 companies have gone through the program. Of these, 22 have received outside funding and another 5 have become profitable without the need for external financing (as an aside, this is a great track record!). Foundry has funded 3 (thats 13.6% of those receiving funding and less than 8% of all the companies that went through the Boulder program).

The conclusion here is pretty straightforward – while Foundry’s presence might seem to loom large over Boulder the numbers are pretty clear – we’re in no way driving a significant percentage of the investment activity in the area.

I recognize that my partners and I carry a certain amount of weight in Boulder and are viewed as leaders of the Boulder tech community (there are many tech leaders in Boulder – it’s one of the things that makes Boulder such a fantastic entrepreneurial city). But we don’t have the corner on TechStars nor the Boulder tech market. In fact we work hard to try to avoid this. As strong supporters of the Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem we recognize that it benefits no one for us to behave in a way that isn’t in the interest of the entire community.

While it may be a catchy title to a magazine article, it’s just not the case. Simply stated, there is no TechStars Boulder Foundry Group Signaling Problem.

A note of thanks to Emily Mendell of the NVCA for pulling the Boulder data for me from the PWC/NVCA database.

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.

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.