2010 Year In Review

As we reflect back on 2010 it is fun to remember the new companies we invested in during the year.  We ended up making investments in 11 new companies this year – eight in our 2007 fund and three in our new fund which we announced in October.

When we look back and see when the investments were made, our timing is very lumpy.  We’ve always been this way – we don’t have a particular pacing, tempo, partner allocation, or thematic allocation goal – we just all work on everything together and invest when we get really excited about something.

Following are the investments we made in 2010 by month.

– April: SendGrid
– May: BigDoor, Sifteo, SimpleGeo
– June: Triggit
– September: Openspace, Fitbit, Orbotix
– November: Urban Airship
– December: Integrate and a stealth company that rhymes with Integrate

These investments cover a wide range of geography (Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland) and touch on most of our themes (Protocol, Distribution, HCI, Glue, and Adhesive).  We’ve got a good range of first time entrepreneurs, new relationships for us, and folks we’ve worked with in the past in the mix.

At the beginning of October, we raised a new $225 million fund (the same size as the fund we raised in 2007) – our November and December investments were from that fund.

In addition, we made many follow on investments to our existing portfolio companies, we remain very involved in a number of things around the entrepreneurial community including the continued expansion of TechStars, Jason’s involvement on the board of the National Venture Capital Association and the FASB Blue Ribbon Panel, Startup Visa, and the conferences we helped create (Defrag, Glue, and Blur).

We believe 2011 will be an incredible year for software and Internet innovation, company creation, and entrepreneurial impact and we are psyched to be a part of it.