Convincing online gamers to buy more hearts of romaine lettuce might sound like a tall order, but that’s what 7-year-old Loyalty Lab recently managed for client General Mills, through a partnership with social gaming giant Zynga. How? By smacking “Free Farm Cash” stickers on participating packages of General Mill’s Green Giant Fresh produce -- stickers that can be redeemed by Farmville users for five units of the game’s virtual cash currency. Indeed, in the promotion’s first five weeks, more than $100,000 of the units were redeemed by customers, who cashed in two coupons apiece on average. (The companies have limited the redemptions to three per user.)
3 min read · 30 August 2010
As valuations steadily rise for consumer Internet startups, angels appear to be increasingly willing to take some money off the table by selling to secondary investors eager to buy into those companies. That seems to have been the case last Thursday when crafts e-commerce site Etsy raised a $20 million series E round led by Index Ventures. The new round was not driven by founders or VCs looking for liquidity, but instead was “angel liquidity driven,” Fred Wilson, a principal of Union Square Ventures (an Etsy investor), wrote on his blog last Friday. Wilson went on to write that “the main point of this post is we are seeing that angels can get liquidity via these secondary transactions. They don't need to wait for the sale of the company or possibly the IPO. That is a very good thing, for the angel/seed sector, and for the overall venture capital market.”
3 min read · 30 August 2010
For a brief period on Friday afternoon, Quora, the Benchmark-backed question-and-answer site, went down, and the digerati lit up with Twittersphere with questions about when the service would be reinstated. The answer, it turned out, was quickly. Still, given Silicon Valley's love of Quora, it's unsurprising that one of its most popular question-and-answer threads in recent weeks has centered on: What do people think of AngelList? Turns out the list, created by the "advice site" for entrepreneurs, VentureHacks, is considered indispensable, according to the 55 people who'd responded to the question as of this afternoon, many of them well-known investors like Dave McClure and Jon Callaghan of True Ventures. It's not surprising, given that the directory of more than 100 angels includes many of their likes, dislikes, and how best to reach out to them -- information the investors provide in return for exclusive information about startups that have been vetted by VentureHacks itself. The feedback is worth reading all the same. Because it's so extensive, I'm publishing just the first five answers from respondents, but take a look at the original thread if you have time.
7 min read · 27 August 2010
2 min read · 27 August 2010
2 min read · 26 August 2010
4 min read · 24 August 2010
1 min read · 20 August 2010
1 min read · 20 August 2010
In its upcoming edition, Forbes publishes a glowing profile of Groupon, the group-buying Internet phenom that was valued at $1.35 billion back in April when it raised $135 million from Digital Sky Technologies. Little wonder: the company is reportedly on track to pull in more than $500 million in revenue this year. Indeed, if I'd sat down with its 29-year-old CEO, Andrew Mason, I'd have swooned over the numbers being thrown out, too. Here's just one snapshot from the piece: In May Groupon sold 6,561 tickets to a King Tut exhibit in New York's Times Square for $18 apiece, little more than half the list price. The campaign brought in $120,000 at virtually no marginal cost to the exhibit; Groupon pocketed about 50% for a day's effort. The most popular item so far: a $25 ticket for a Chicago architectural boat tour sold for $12. In May Groupon moved 19,822 tickets in eight hours and split the $238,000 with the tour operator.
2 min read · 19 August 2010
2 min read · 19 August 2010
