The Ledger
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Clavier: Fitbit Would Have Died Without Brad Feld's Series A Investment
“Every single round of financing was either close to impossible, To raise, I had to beg Brad failed to invest in the Series A saving Fitbit, because without that investment from Brad, they would be dead, and even the Series B or the Series C were not easy, desp…”
Einstein: Jawbone failed to match Fitbit due to unfocused brand positioning
“Jawbone really built a horizontal, you know, Bluetooth business, right? So all their products have Bluetooth, they build speakers, they have headsets, they have they have the up tracker, the, you know, the sort of Fitbit clone. Fitbit is laser focused on a bra…”
Clavier in 2015: Ambient Wireless Power Will Recharge Electronics by 2018
“So those two guys out of MIT have invented a well using a technology which has been refined lab at MIT, where, you know, in three years from now, you'll have a device or earlier You will have a device on your nightstand or your desk in the office that will aut…”
Fitbit became a massive fund returner despite widespread investor skepticism
“With Fitbit, when I didn't bet on Fitbit, everybody else was looking at connected devices or looking at hardware and going, you can't make money on hardware. And I didn't, You know, sort of wrote a check into it and became one of the biggest, you know, sort of…”
Clavier: No VCs Were Willing to Fund Fitbit in 2010
“In 2000 10 there was basically no one to fund Fitbit, like no one would touch it despite the early progress and, you know, sort of early liftoff in terms of sales”
Senkut: Felicis's $41M debut fund backed Rovio, Shopify, and Fitbit
“The very first fund we had was only forty one million, and we invested in Rovio in Finland from that. The whole round was bigger than our whole firm. Shopify's A round and Fitbit's B round”
Clavier: Fitbit Reached a $10B Valuation on Just $40M-$50M in Equity
“In the case of Fitbit, they've gotten to where they are just using, you know, roughly 50, you know, 40, fifty million dollars in in actual sort of equity capital.”
SoftTech VC Doubled Down on Fitbit's $9M Series A Across Two Funds
“After a couple of months of due diligence and reference checks and spending time with the team, they led a nine million dollar Series A that I we participated into, and we actually bought more shares of Fitbit from our other fund, Fund Three, which we had rais…”
Jacobson: No mobile app directly competes with PumpUp in social fitness
“When it comes to our category, most players, especially the successful ones, are utility products. You look at Fitbit or Fitness Pal or MapMyFitness or RunKeeper tracking apps or pieces of hardware. When it comes to social and community and the health and fitn…”
In 2018, Fitbit Traded at 1x Revenue While Peloton Traded at 20x
“This is also around the same time that Fitbit as a publicly traded company was trading at about one times revenue, which isn't great. And Peloton as a private company was trading at about 20 times revenue.”
Felicis Ventures backs an average of two unicorns per year
“Backing, and I cannot believe I'm saying this, Dad, but an incredible two unicorns per year since founding, including Shopify, Opendoor, Flexport, Adyen, Twitch, Fitbit, and many more incredible companies.”
Foundry Group initially passed on Fitbit before investing
“In the case of Fitbit it, like a number of other companies that we were investors in, you know, several which are very successful, are good examples of companies that we initially passed on, and then, you know, six or 12 months later made an investment.”