A year and a month ago marked the closing chapter of my prior venture. There are many learnings among the scar tissue. And many that will be played into strengths in the next chapter... The next chapter began when I joined Venrock last September as an EIR, with the prospect in mind that I would start my next business with them. This alone was personally validating given all things, and provided a palette to work with, in an environment suited to succeed. Within a month we had nearly a dozen different ideas cooking. One of them was a mobile messaging service called Chadr. It was so simple but when we piloted a prototype, it overwhelmed handsets with volumes of messages. Enough with the mobile already, it was time to move on!
So Ben Dean joined me in November officially, and we ideated heavy with a long list of must-haves. We had a Cc:Betty alpha up quickly (thanks to Chris Finne and Sean O'Malley) and launched it to some friends and family on New Year's Eve. And then iterated for a beta in early March. Then last week we launched another major iteration thanks to Jeff Carnegie and Paul Canavese. In parallel we built a distribution implementation version with the help of Alex Soto. (We're not talking about that one yet). Finally, today we announced our first round of funding, thanks to Brian Ascher at Venrock who provided us this opportunity. Also in that funding are Tuff Yen from Seraph Group and Boris Putanec from Hillsven, both angel investors who share our vision. (Oh, and thanks to Paul Bragiel who made those angel introductions! When was the last time a user and fan of your product introduced you to a VC!)
With a great balance around the table, a great product in the making, a great time in communications history (Hello Wave), a known quantity team, it seems as though stars are coming into alignment - which is rare and not to be taken for granted.
It just goes to show you, when one door closes, another one opens... It's just like your mother said, Tribec!
Technorati Tags: Cc:betty, Venrock, Hillsven, Seraph Group, Paul Bragiel, Sean Omalley, Lefora, Bill Hunt, Dave Gravano
