espite being coastally challenged (currently living in Philadelphia), Josh has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the Internet industry since its commercialization. In 1992, while he was a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Josh co-founded Infonautics Corporation – an Internet information company. In 1996, Infonautics went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
In and Out...
Some portfolio company news today.
First, today we announced our investment in OpenAds, the developer of the leading free, open source adserving platform. Already used by more than 20,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages, Openads powers more publishers than all competing solutions combined. What really excites me about OpenAds is that they are in a wonderful position to shrink the adserving market. By removing the adserving costs, publishers can now focus on raising their effective CPM. This is especially important for small and mid-sized publishers, who previously had a limited choice of adserving technologies – and no real ability to impact pricing. I look forward to working with Scott and his team, along with our co-investors (Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures) on this deal…
Second, as Techcrunch has reported, Cuts.com has been acquired by Rifftrax. Although Cuts.com’s product has been praised for its ease of use and fun, the market for a stand-alone video editing site has quickly become very crowded and competitive. And while this transaction was not the huge win we were playing for, I’m happy that Evan and his team were able to find a home for their business. As I wrote back in March, the goal of a seed-stage investment is to validate (or disprove) a venture's hypothesis – and successful entrepreneurs will do so using as little time and capital as possible. Evan Krauss and his Cuts.com team did just that.
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