Today, Foundry Group was recognized for creating the most positive impact for our workers based on an independent, comprehensive assessment administered by the nonprofit B Lab. Honorees are featured on B the Change, the digital Medium publication produced by B Lab, at bthechange.com/bestfortheworld.
Foundry Group announced its’ certification as a B Corp over two years ago – B Corps are for-profit companies certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency measured by the B Impact Assessment (BIA). We joined a growing community of more than 2,400+ Certified B Corps from 50+ countries and over 130+ industries working together toward one unifying goal: to redefine success in business
The Best For Workers list includes businesses that earned a Workers score in the top 10 percent of more than 2,400 Certified B Corporations on the B Impact Assessment. The assessment measures a company’s impact on its workers, community, customers and the environment.
On an operational level, we have always sought to treat our team members, community, and the planet with respect and thoughtfulness. Engaging in the B Corp certification process provides us with the opportunity to quantify these things through the B Impact Assessment. Our team members are a big part of this and integral to our success as a firm. We were thrilled to learn we were being honored by B Lab for how we treat our team members.
The 185 Best For Workers companies come from 58 different industries and 20 countries. B Lab simultaneously released separate lists recognizing B Corporations as Best For The World Overall impact, Best For Environment, Best For Customers, Best For Governance and Best For Community, which can be found at bthechange.com/bestfortheworld. In the fall, B Lab will release the Best For The World: Changemakers and the Best For The World: Funds lists.
B Lab is a nonprofit organization that serves a global movement of people using business as a force for good. Its vision is that one day all companies compete not only to be the best in the world, but the best for the world and society will enjoy prosperity for all for the long term.
B Lab drives this systemic change by: 1) building a community of Certified B Corporations to make it easier for all of us to tell the difference between “good companies” and good marketing; 2) passing benefit corporation legislation to give business leaders the freedom to create value for society as well as shareholders; 3) helping businesses measure, compare and improve their social and environmental performance with the free B Impact Assessment; 4) driving capital to impact investments through use of its B Analytics and GIIRS Ratings platform.
B the Change is a Medium publication, produced by B Lab in collaboration with the community of Certified B Corps and the movement of people using business as a force for good.
B the Change exists to inform and inspire people who have a passion for using business as a force for good in the world. Because we believe that storytelling is an essential element in the transformation of business and society, we commit ourselves to telling the most compelling stories possible to the largest audiences possible to propel the movement of business toward its destiny as a powerful force for good. We want to dramatically broaden and deepen engagement with entrepreneurs, managers, employees, investors and citizens in one of the most important discussions of our time.
Today, Splunk announced they are acquiring VictorOps. We invested in VictorOps’ Seed round back in 2012 and it has been our privilege to work with co-founders Todd Vernon, Bryce Ambraziunas, Dan Jones, and the rest of the excellent VictorOps team over the past five years.
We’ve invested in Todd as a co-founder/CTO/CEO three times now: back in the late 90s where he was the CTO of Raindance Communications, as the CEO/founder of Sovrn (formerly Lijit), and as the CEO/founder of VictorOps. Obviously, we are big fans of Todd and his tenacity and persistence in building companies over the years.
VictorOps was built on the vision of empowering DevOps teams by integrating on-call management with centralized system monitoring information, automated escalation, and real-time communication. This would massively enhance the situational awareness of the operations and development teams within an organization, and therefore drastically reduce system downtime and time-to-resolution of incidents. Their product has realized this vision, as thousands of VictorOps’ customers will attest.
The integration of VictorOps’ and Splunk’s products is a powerful one and enables Splunk to extend the power, reach, and actionability of their platform’s dominance in aggregating and analyzing machine-generated data for their customers.
We think this combination is a powerful and strategic match, and we are excited to see the two companies come together. We’re also happy to welcome another big tech company to the Boulder ecosystem, and proud that VictorOps will be Splunk’s beachhead in Boulder.
Our Investment in Tidelift
We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group has made a Series A investment in Tidelift. Tidelift gives software development teams dependable—professionally maintained, secured, and licensed—open source software from a single source, while introducing a new way for open source creators to get paid for doing the work they love.
Their vision is to build a new win-win model for open source. The professional development teams trying to avoid things like Heartbleed and the Equifax breach get software they can depend on while helping fund the next wave of innovation. Meanwhile, the open source maintainers who have been building all of this amazing software we all rely on get paid—ideally a lot—from their work, which encourages even more investment in open source.
We were originally introduced to Tidelift because our partner Chris Moody had previously worked with Donald and his co-founder Havoc. All four Tidelift founders have demonstrated a long obsession with this problem space, having lived and breathed this open source air for two decades. They deeply understand the perspectives of both open source maintainers and the professionals using their code. And they have been a part of the creation of the enterprise subscription model that has now turned Red Hat into a $30B market cap company, so they understand how to make professional open source work.
Tidelift’s approach—an innovative B2B take on the marketplace business model that has fueled the rapid growth of some of the most successful consumer startups of the past ten years—is what makes this company really stand apart. Tidelift nicely straddles our marketplace and distribution themes, while also serving software developers, which a number of our portfolio companies do, including SendGrid, Mapbox, mLab, Pantheon, and VictorOps.
Tidelift has the opportunity to do what companies like Red Hat, Cloudera, and Docker have done to professionalize individual open source projects, but for the hundreds of thousands of open source projects that don’t yet have a professional model.
We see Tidelift as a way to invest in the innovative potential of the entire open source community at once.
As the Tidelift team gets this flywheel going, and open source maintainers gain a new direct financial incentive to focus on the software they create, it will encourage even more people to start new open source projects or step up the innovation and dependability in the projects we already have. And the more smart people that start investing their time and energy open source, the more amazing and innovative startups that can be built on the software they create. That’s a great thing for investors like us, it’s a great thing for software as a whole, and it’s a great thing for the world that depends on the things they create.
Today, Golden Ventures is announcing the closing of their third fund, a CAD$72M vehicle. We are excited to have them join our group of Partner Funds and welcome our northern neighbors to the family.
While the vast majority of our investments are in the United States, we’ve had long connections to the Canada startup community, with a particular connection to Toronto and Waterloo. Many of our companies have engineering offices in the area, going back to our investment in Zynga in 2007. Blackberry (then RIM) acquired Gist, another early Foundry Group investment. Techstars currently has two programs in Toronto. Brad’s co-author of Startup Opportunities is a professor at Ryerson College. And, we aren’t limited to Toronto, as we currently have an investment in Data Nerds based in Kelowna, BC.
The Toronto / Waterloo region, which we like to call a binary star startup community (like Denver / Boulder), is strongly supported by universities, local and regional government programs and accelerators, and specific R&D subsidies that supplement startup activities. Favorable Canadian immigration policies attract international talent. Toronto is a city that can compete for that talent globally, with a widely diverse population and a cosmopolitan feel that appeals to people worldwide. We think Canada Is Going To Be The Next, Great, Entrepreneurial Tech Country for many reasons, including our own country’s current stance on immigration. We believe Toronto / Waterloo and Golden Ventures are particularly well-positioned to benefit.
One of the goals of our Partner Fund investments is to solidify and activate a dynamic network of positive contributors to the venture industry. We like to back firms where we have existing relationships that allow us to take a longitudinal view of the people and partners that make up a team. In the case of Golden, we saw the founder, Matt Golden, as a friend and fellow investor via our shared Yesware investment. We also have experience with Matt’s partner, Ameet Shah, from his time at Zynga. With this history, we knew the Golden team shared our #Givefirst mentality. On our reference calls, founders repeatedly emphasized Matt’s operating experience and highlighted Ameet’s product expertise as differentiators. Golden positions themselves as lead investors at the seed stage. While they are a key local early-stage lead VC in Toronto, they may also invest as much as 40% of the fund in other Canadian and U.S. markets including Montreal, Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles.
We’ve enjoyed getting to know the entire Golden team as friends, investors, and now partners. We were happy to see them pull together a strong group of LPs in this new fund. Congratulations to the Golden team – thanks for giving us a reason to spend more time in Toronto!
Our investment in PSL Ventures
Today, Pioneer Square Labs announced the launch of PSL Ventures, a Seattle-based venture capital fund that invests in early-stage technology companies. The $80 million venture fund will invest in companies all over the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The fund will also participate in financings in spinouts of PSL’s affiliated startup studio. We are excited to back the team and have them as one of our Partner Funds.
One of the key reasons we included a Partner Fund investment strategy in Foundry Group Next was to bring our friends closer while also supporting the next generation of outstanding VCs. We think of each partner fund, as well as each individual GP, as a partner in our extended network. Our investment in PSL Ventures serves as a great example of our Partner Fund strategy at work.
Seattle has become an important market for Foundry Group. We have been investing directly in Seattle-based companies going back to the mid-1990s and we’ve built up a strong network of entrepreneurs in the city. In 2010, a former entrepreneur from our portfolio. Andy Sack, and our friend, Greg Gottesman, helped bring Techstars to Seattle. It was the second market expansion for Techstars (after Boston) and our relationships there helped prioritize the market. Since then, Techstars Seattle (led by Chris Devore) and more recently, the Alexa Accelerator powered by Techstars, have served as important nodes for our Seattle activities.
We also worked with Greg at his prior firm, where we invested in a number of companies together and learned how to work through good and bad moments. When Greg and Ben created an in-house studio program at their prior firm, we tracked it closely and invested in two of the companies that launched from the studio. Then, our Seattle dream team decided to come together and launch PSL in 2015. We were excited to back them in their initial round and we helped lead their second round earlier this year. We think the studio platform is powerful for Seattle and we are excited to be a part of the PSL activities there.
While we’ve worked with Greg for a long time, we’ve come to love the whole gang at PSL Ventures. We think PSL and the combination of Julie, Mike, Geoff, and Greg already represent the natural collection point for entrepreneurial activities in Seattle, with reach to the broader Pacific Northwest. We would back this group of general partners in any market but we believe they have a special platform in Seattle and we are excited to be part of their activities across Studio and now PSL Ventures.
We look forward to a continued long relationship with the PSL team as they build and invest in the best companies in the Pacific Northwest.
