Tired of not finding what you are looking for when you search your email system? If you know the person who sent the message you are looking for, you might have some luck. But if you are looking for information contained within an attachment, link, or if you’ve forgotten who the sender was, you are most likely in trouble.
But maybe not. We are pleased to announce our investment in Attachments.me, which is building a natural-language based platform to extract information from attachments and links contained within a user’s email store. The company has created an email enhancement tool to enable easy access to the treasure trove of valuable data currently trapped within email systems. Attachments.me indexes a user’s email account and presents an attachments-centric view of it, creating document thumbnails, providing search within attachments, and, above all, makes a user’s email experience better and more productive.
Imagine that you remember someone sent you a document about a particular subject or a funny video. You just don’t remember who sent it to you or what the email text was. Now, you will be able to search by subject matter embedded in links and attachments, and browse by content type, not just by sender, and the results will include not just data in the email body itself, but in the attachments and links themselves.
This mailbox crawling technology will allow for a single searchable interface to automatically group and filter the structured data and documents in a user’s email archive. This data will also be accessible via mobile applications for on-the-go access. Attachments.me recognizes the fact that for most users, email is their de-facto filesystem, knowledgebase and personal information manager, and that better tools are needed to access and manipulate the extremely valuable data in the messages a user sends and receives.
The company was founded by Jesse Miller, Benjamin Coe and has been advised since inception by our friend and colleague Joe Stump, who is also a co-founder of our portfolio company SimpleGeo.
Theme: Distribution
As we’ve written about in the past, we use what we call a thematic approach to what we invest in. Our current themes are Human Computer Interaction, Glue, Digital Life, and Protocol. We’ve been hinting about two new themes that we’ve been investing in for a while – one that’s a derivative from our Glue theme (which we’ll discuss in a separate post) and the Distribution theme.
In general, we avoid investing in vertical markets. The one exception is a set of companies that are in our Distribution theme and include Zynga, Topspin, StockTwits, and Cheezburger. Each of these companies is aimed at a specific vertical market and has the following set of common characteristics:
A Gigantic Existing Online Market: We are only interested in companies that are attacking an existing online market segment that is greater than $10 billion in annual revenue. These are market segments that generally (but not always) emerged in the first wave of commercial Internet and Web activity between 1995 and 2000.
Entrepreneurs Obsessed With Transforming The Way The Vertical Market Works: We want to back entrepreneurs that are completely obsessed with the vertical market. They must be thinking – every single waking moment – about how they are going to change the way the world interacts with the vertical market they are attacking.
A Clear Opportunity To Use 2011 Distribution Dynamics to Transform The Market: This could be Facebook, Twitter, user-generated content, contemporary Web approaches, mobile, or something we haven’t yet thought of.
A Vertical Market At Least One Of Us Is Into: Since we generally avoid vertical markets, when we do invest in one, it has to be a vertical that at least one of us is infatuated with.
If you look at the four companies we’ve invested in the distribution theme, you see each of these four attributes writ large on the companies.
Zynga: Video games + Mark Pincus + Facebook + Brad
Topspin: Music + Ian Rogers + Contemporary Web / Social Networks + Ryan / Jason
StockTwits: Stock market news and information + Howard Lindzon + Twitter + Seth
Cheezburger: Entertainment (starting with humor) + Ben Huh + user generated content + All of us
In each case, the distribution dynamics will evolve over time as the company grows. For example, Zynga now uses distribution channels beyond Facebook (e.g. mobile) and Stocktwits now uses distribution channels beyond Twitter, while Topspin’s widgets live not only on their artists’ own websites and music-focused sites, but are distributed via sharing through Facebook and Twitter. We believe we have real intellectual leverage understanding how these different channels work and have spent a lot of time internally synthesizing what we’ve learned as we continue to evolve this theme.
There are plenty of vertical markets we simply aren’t interested in. For example, the online jobs market fits criteria #1, but we haven’t run into an entrepreneur or a distribution dynamic that we think is powerful. And, frankly, the online jobs market bores us, so it’s hard for us to engage in it.
As we’ve said before, we don’t have a particular quota or strategy for which themes we invest in – we use them to help us frame the kinds of companies we actually spend time with as potential investments and where we spend our intellectual time trying to better understand markets and where they are going. While we only have about 10% of our overall investments in the Distribution theme, we are extremely excited about the overall potential impact on our portfolio and our continuing to look for more entrepreneurs and companies to back around Distribution.
Recently, we were fortunate to have the kind folks from MSNBC come visit us to see why Boulder is such a special place for entrepreneurship and innovation.
We were originally introduced to Cheezburger’s founder and CEO Ben Huh about 18 months ago by our mutual friend Micah Baldwin at the LA TwiistUp event. We apparently shared a fondness for clever misspellings and hit it off immediately.
At the beginning on 2010, with our friend Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group, we approached Ben and started talking about investing in Cheezburger. The timing wasn’t right for Ben and his investors for a variety of reasons but we stayed in touch.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, Ben called and asked if we were still interested in putting together a financing and really going for it. During the year we had really honed our view of a new theme we have been calling “Distribution.” Cheezburger was right in the sweet spot of this theme, along with Zynga, Topspin, and StockTwits. Since we knew the company well, it took about 17 seconds for us to agree that we wanted to see if we could put something together.
We quickly put together a syndicate with Madrona, Avalon Ventures (with whom we’ve co-invested in Zynga and Standing Cloud) and SoftBank Capital (with whom we’ve had a long relationship and recently co-invested in Cloud Engines), figured out a deal with Ben and his existing investors, and now have a chance to be a lot more humorous on a day to day basis.
In the last three years, Cheezburger has grown far beyond their original lolcats site. They are now a major disruptive force in the way we consume all kinds of humor. We expect Ben to start putting this money to good use right away, hiring engineers, PMs, and sales staff. The jobs are listed at https://jobs.cheezburger.com. If you’re still reading this, you really should pounce on the opportunity to work for the funniest company we’ve ever seen.
