Betaworks

“Bitly was interesting because it was a venture-funded company that kind of blew through a lot of the venture capital needed to become a sustainable, scalable business, and I hopped over from Betaworks to Bitly, and I saw a lot of that, not necessarily post-acq…”

“And, you know, I look back, and I, you know, I met with Betaworks, I met with Fred Wilson, I met with all these, like, amazing investors who you could never get access to now.”

“We raised a bit more than twenty million dollars from Lux BetterWorks, so a lot of, like New York investors and some Silicon Valley investors like A Capital and some fun angels like Kevin Durant before he moved to New York and the hat.”

“Because the app downloads were 40 to 50% of the revenue from Instapaper, there was a lot of hesitation around just eliminating it.”

“One of the large New York media companies sent us a letter of intent for a large sum. Very large sum. It was In the eight figure range. Yeah, it was big.”

“Dots started as sort of this little art project that was born at Betaworks which is an incubator investor in New York City.”

“And as a New York company, we wanted what we thought the best and smartest and most empathetic venture investors in New York to invest in our company, which was USV, so we kept pitching them, and they kept saying no. They rejected my company as a business”

“Because last year, you know, we raised a lot of money for Givy, and Givy's tapping more than a hundred million people every day.”

“We co-build companies for equity. We're not, I don't have a fund. Mike and I, we, Our team, we don't not have a fund. We are an operating company. We're an LLC similar to beta works, but we don't have a fund.”

“At the end of 2012, what happened was that Dig was really split apart into kind of three different deals. The first was that a lot of the folks, the people, and the tech went to Washington Post, and then the second was that a bunch of the patents went to Linke…”

“Matt, for example, he was a super early user, Matt at beta works. And when we started, when I started talking to him, like he already understood the value of it and he was a user and consumed it daily himself.”

“So I consider beta works as a, not only just an investor, but also a co-founder.”

“Now, Betaworks has done about 25, maybe 30% of its investments historically have been on the West Coast with the majority of those being pretty much in San Francisco, a handful in Silicon Valley.”

“Matt is Director of Seed Investments at Betaworks, who have invested in the likes of Tumblr, Airbnb, Groupon, and Twitter, and have internally built startups such as Chartbeat, Bitly, and Socialflow.”

“I think we've done about, built about 19 companies from the ground up in various stages, and they, they're, if you come into our office, we have, there's probably a hundred, over a hundred people here. All working at the moment on 10 different companies”

“That is one of the key things that we look for in our investments is we were very introspective with our early companies that were working with that haven't launched yet. The only thing we have is kind of our view of how we're using the product and how it fits…”

“I remember when we first started talking to Ryan from product time, one of the things that we had done was this network analysis with our data. I had sat down with our data scientists and started mapping out the networks of this on Twitter. Because it's so pub…”

“A bunch of people at Betaworks were on the early on an early version, I think it was an email before it was even a website.”

“One is I think that Gimlet could, has the potential to be enormous.”

“I use product hunt as a way to find investment. We've made investments that were initiated on product hunt.”

“So we were one of the earliest investors in Tumblr and Kickstarter, and a whole bunch of, ah, companies across, ah, the tech scene in New York City.”

“TweetDeck was actually built at Betaworks and then sold to Twitter.”

“They're manually labeled, so we're getting these labels from, ah, actual humans, ah, so they're really, really clean and great data.”

“Digg, for example, is fairly large, ah, in terms of Betaworks companies. It's 15 people.”