We’re excited to announce our latest FG Angels investment. We continue to review a large number of opportunities, and our FG Angels Syndicate recently closed a $339,631 seed investment in RABBL.

RABBL is a social booking platform, which enables bands and fans to market and pre-sell tickets to potential shows, and, once critical mass is achieved, broker an agreement with a venue to host the show.

On the front end of the product — the “social” part — fans and artists use RABBL to prove demand for potential shows. This lets artists find opening acts, helps artists get into festivals and new venues, and lets a fan invite and convince an artist to come play the fan’s town by proving demand.

On the back end of the product, artists use RABBL to book shows with RABBL partner venues and elsewhere. That’s easy to do, since at that point the venue or festival has dramatically less risk.
RABBL is taking the risk out of the live music business, with a mission to make more music happen, more profitably and more efficiently. The New York Times provided some nice coverage of RABBL last September.

We’re looking forward to working with RABBL to change the way fans, artists, and venues book shows!

We are excited to announce our fourth FG Angels investment in Drync – who have raised $434K from our FG Angels syndicate.

Drync builds a smartphone application that bridge the gap between experiencing wine and being able to catalogue and purchase it.  The company likes to call this “impulse commerce for wine.”  With their application, one can scan any wine bottle, immediately have the wine identified and priced for instant purchase or review.  Currently Drync has a database of over two million wines.

As wine nerds, we’ve spent too much time taking pictures of great wines and never having the time or the ability to truly follow up on our passions.  If you are a wine lover, you will love this app.  With the funds raised, they are going to add a lot of great new features.  Enjoy!

Last week we formally launched a new publishing company, FG Press.

Our first book – Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0 by Eliot Peper was released yesterday. It’s in a new genre we are helping pioneer called “startup fiction.” We believe that life often imitates fiction (or is it the other way around) and one can learn as much from a great novel as they can from a dry, boring business book.

At Foundry Group, we’ve been writing for a long time. Brad and Seth started blogging in 2004. Jason and Ryan started a few years after that. In 2010 Brad started writing books. His first book, Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup, was written with David Cohen, CEO of Techstars. Our second book, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist was written by Brad and Jason.

By that point we’d realized that writing about entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation was something we cared a lot about. Brad started a new series called Startup Revolution and now has four books in the series.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld

Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur by Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business by Matt Blumberg

Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors by Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani

The last book in the Startup Revolution series is Startup Metrics: Making Sense of the Metrics in Your Startup by Brad Feld and Seth Levine. Metrics will be out this fall.

At some point, we realized we’d had enough of working with a traditional publisher. Our friends at Wiley were good to us but there are so many things that can be improved in the relationship with author, reader, and publisher. So, we decided to create our own publishing company.

We’ve got a steady stream of projects in the works. They’ll all be about entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation. They’ll be non-fiction, fiction, science fiction, and professional development. Our goal is to publish great books and help authors and readers develop a significant, long-lasting relationship.

Oh – and have some fun in the process while helping shake up an industry that badly needs shaking.

We are excited to announce our third FG Angels investment in ARTtwo50 – who have raised $285K from our FG Angels syndicate.

If you’ve been to our offices, you know we are fans (and collectors) of original art. But, the art world is very top-down, rigid, and has remained relatively unchanged for decades. The ARTtwo50 team of designers, hackers, and Stanford d.school and business school grads has created a wholly different approach that they believe will change the way we buy and sell art.

ARTtwo50 has come up with a clever marketplace for emerging artists and collectors at modest price points.  All of the original, one-in-the-universe pieces from one of their 1000+ US-based artists start at $250. As artists sell more pieces, they unlock the ability to sell at higher price points. You simply take a photo of their space on the iPad application (and soon to be iPhone and elsewhere) and you receive recommendations based on colors of your space, location, and demographics displayed virtually hanging on your wall – to scale – before you buy.

So discover great art, try it on your wall, and live originally with ARTtwo50.

We are excited to announce that we’ve led Bounce.io’s Series A financing. Based in Louisville, CO, Bounce.io is an email infrastructure company that provides services to domain registrars, ISPs, and mail services providers to better manage and monetize bounced email traffic.

We love the email market, as evidenced by our investments over the years in companies such as Message Media, Return Path, Postini, and SendGrid, and from time to time, given our involvement in the email domain, we come across companies that have “discovered” interesting unaddressed “white spaces” in the market. Bounce.io is one of those companies.

While estimates vary widely, there are roughly 300 billion email messages sent every day, with 10% – 20% of those emails auto-generating bounced email notifications, which means there are on the order of 30 billion bounced email messages sent each day. Traditionally, these bounce notifications are auto-generated by the generic mail server software at a particular domain registrar, ISP, or mail provider.

Very little attention has been paid to the formatting and design of these messages. The vast majority are presented in English, regardless of the language of the sender or recipient, and the fact that these messages provide an opportunity for a user interaction and thus a branding or advertising opportunity has largely been ignored.

While the bulk of bounced messages are machine-generated and the result of out-of-date email addresses or simply the result of spammers phishing for active email addresses, a meaningful percentage of bounced email are still generated and received by human beings, and those bounce messages have a very high open-rate, on the order of 60%, which provides an opportunity for billions of new daily user impressions.

Bounce.io provides a service to allow its customers to manage and monetize their bounced email traffic though advertising, essentially providing “found money” to their customers and partners.

The company was founded in late 2012 by a group of experienced email entrepreneurs and technologists who collectively hold nearly twenty email-related patents. Founder/CEO Scott Brown in a serial entrepreneur and founder of six companies, and Tom Bartel, Chief of Ops and Privacy, is well known to us through his long-term involvement with Mobius VC and Foundry Select portfolio company Return Path.

Bounce sits squarely at the intersection of our Protocol and Adhesive themes, and we are excited to work with Bounce.io as they build the next great email company.