PandoMonthly: Fireside Chat With Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley (by PandoDaily)
Holy shit! Thanks, Dennis, for the namecheck! That’s awesome.
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Hi. I'm Rick. I write, advise, and invest.
Currently consulting at Tumblr.
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Circa launched today and I couldn’t be more excited about it.
Psyched to be a part of this. Congrats to Matt and his team.
Percolate is a New York-based startup that helps CMOs manage all of their social media content and it suggests content for them to blast to their followings.
In the past six months, the team of 22 people have signed up 25 Fortune 500 companies. Now there are more than 30 corporations paying for yearly licenses to use Percolate. Brands including Reuters, GE, American Express and MasterCard, and they are each coughing up $10,000 per month.
When you add it up, that’s more than $3.5 million per year, which isn’t bad for a startup that’s only raised $1.5 million and isn’t even two years old.
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Percolate, New York’s Gift To CMOs, Has More Than 30 Fortune 500 Clients - Business Insider
I love these guys, I love this company. This investment is really paying off. They are killing it.
Imagine what open source could do to the law. Imagine if every law and form of contract that governs your life could be made easy to read and open to improvement by the community. Imagine if we had perfect information about what the best forms of contracts where—and which parts were non-standard. Instead of a team of lawyers working at someone else’s firm drafting the terms that affected you, you could use the contract the community had already decided was most fair—for free. That would not only make doing business more seamless and less costly, but it would start to sway the balance between the haves and the have nots.
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- Thisisgoingtobebig.com - Why Docracy is the Most Revolutionary Company of Our Time
Docracy is so awesome.
One Year Ago Today
The great service Timehop reminded me this morning that it was one year ago today that I announced my departure from the agency I co-founded with several friends ten years earlier, The Barbarian Group.
A year is such an interesting time measurement. It is arbitrary, based on planetary geography. It’s a good unit of time to measure long term progress in life, but it’s also a fleeting moment, especially as more and more of them go by.
So what have I done in the last year? How do you measure progress?
- I got my sanity and happiness back
- I got engaged
- I moved to brooklyn
- I moved in with my Fiancé
- I started a coworking space. This project took me almost the entire year, but I am happy to say that Secret Clubhouse took its first tenants on monday, and two companies are working out of there today. That was a crazy long adventure, a foray into co-op approvals, the NY Dept of Buildings, architects, contractors, etc. I am excited to reap the benefits this year as my amazing group of tenants move in and we slowly develop a great tech community in Williamsburg.
- I made a ton of great investments and did what I could to help out companies like Timehop, Docracy, Circa, Branch, Percolate, Lover.ly, Mashape, Sprint.ly, Foursquare, vYou and many more that aren’t ready to announce.
- I went to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which was awesome.
- I went to DragonCon, which was awesome.
- I went to the beach, which was awesome. And the Florida keys. And saw where Emma went to school. And went to South of the Border, which was great.
- I went to Jamaica for about 4 hours and Argentina for about 48.
- I turned 40, and had two great birthday parties in Boston and New York and saw some amazing friends I hadn’t seen in years.
- I joined a secret new cadre of retired advertising executives who consult with big brands on advertising, education and creativity that I am excited about and can’t talk too much about just yet.
- I got a wonderful cat, inherited from one of my best friends.
- I read a lot of books and wrote 600 pages of my own, got an agent, and made steps towards selling it.
- I started another company which is still secret.
- I joined another company which is still secret.
- I drank less than any year since like 1995.
- I started working at Tumblr for a while, an all around great group of people, a great company and a great product.
It’s been a good year. I’ve stayed busy, but I’ve gotten rest. I’ve been on a fair number of boats, which is always good. I’ve started new things and seen the fruition of efforts from other things.
Do I miss Barbarian Group? Yes, all the time. Do I miss advertising? I don’t feel like I’ve left. I miss my old coworkers. A lot. I’ve met some amazing people this year, but those Barbarians - they sure were great.
But I can say it’s probably been the happiest year of my adult life.
Welcome to Branch!
Today, Branch is coming out of private beta and will begin sending invitations to the public. Our team is so excited to show you what we’re building, but before we do, we want tell you why we’re building it.
We think the internet is an incredible tool. It’s given each of us a voice, and the power to share our voice instantly with millions of people around the world. But gaining the power to talk to the world hasn’t lessened the value of talking to each other. If anything, we think it’s more important than ever.
That’s why we wanted to build a new way to talk to each other, and why we’ve built Branch. Between articles, blog posts, and tweets, the internet is dominated by monologues. So we want to build a home for dialogues online, by combining the intimacy of a dinner table conversation with the power of the Internet.
What makes Branch different? First, we value the diverse perspectives the internet gives us access to, but we also know that too many voices can make things noisy. So on Branch, you can pick who you talk to—but, like blog posts, branches are public, so you don’t miss out on the openness of the web. And we’ve recently added a feature called “branching” to the product; it’s like Github’s forking meets traditional threading. Last, we know it’s important to be connected to the rest of the web, so we made sure you can grab anything from the web, talk about it with anyone, and publish it anywhere.
We built Branch with you—all of you—in mind. We want it to be a place for you to talk about all the things that are happening in your world. So far, our team has used it to talk about rap music, swap travel ideas, discuss the presidential election, explore a new neighborhood, ask for advice on iOS design, and reminisce about our favorite childhood technologies.
So what’s happening in your world? We want to give you a place to talk to each other about it. We think it just might make it a better place.
Talk to you soon,
Josh
EXCITING.
Contributing Editor job at Circa in San Francisco, CA 
Circa is looking for news editors. Their product is awesome! I love it!
86 percent of chain restaurants have a presence on Foursquare compared to 81 percent on Yelp;
72 percent of independent restaurants have a listing on Foursquare, while only 5 percent offer mobile websites; and
Chains and independent restaurants have more than 300 Foursquare check-ins per location.
—Nearly 90 percent of chain restaurants listed on Foursquare | FastCasual.com
Mashape believes that by enabling API providers to easily host their killer APIs and any developers to quickly sign up to consume, it’s bringing some Github to the API space. In doing so, it wants to bring another revenue stream to companies both big and small to help them better monetize their APIs — and if that means it can soon turn a profit itself, all the better.
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The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs In Tow | TechCrunch
Mashape launched to the public today. VERY EXCITING.
But here’s the thing: Increasingly, brands are bringing social marketing in-house. The era of the social media Agency of Record is ending. So brands don’t really care if their social media management tools cut out the agency. They just want to be told what to say. It’s become a bit of a conundrum for brands that have spent the last few years amassing an audience in the form of followers and “likes.” Now what do they say?
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Percolate is Solving the One Problem its Social SaaS Competitors Won’t Touch | PandoDaily
Awesome story on Percolate. Those guys are killing it.
sprint.ly: Announcing Sprint.ly’s Jedi Council
Today is just like any other day at Sprint.ly; we’re answering your support requests, fixing bugs, and working on the next big feature. The only thing that’s changing is that we’re letting everyone in on a secret, which is that we’ve raised a small warchest and assembled an amazing list of advisors to help us make Sprint.ly the product that we and our customers have always dreamed of.
Super excited to be helping Sprint.ly as an investor. Woo!
Vyou, the New York City-based Q&A platform, has a very familiar face on its new service: media mogul Oprah Winfrey. The former daytime diva is using Vyou’s video service to enrich the recently-rebooted Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. (via Oprah Joins New York City Video Startup Vyou to Power Book Club 2.0 | Betabeat)
Awesome. Been waiting for this to launch for a while now. Exciting.
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