Betaworks: Inside the Much-Buzzed-About New Media Incubator
If real-time Web startups prove to be the Next Big Thing, then Betaworks could become one of the hottest new media companies in a generation. If not, it's bye-bye, Betaworks. Such is the gamble Betaworks founders John Borthwick and Andy Weissman decided to take in the summer of 2007. At the time, Weissman was working as a VC at Dawntreader Ventures. Borthwick was the CEO of the photo-sharing site Fotolog. As Fotolog entered talks to be acquired by a French media company for $90 million, the old college friends --and, in the mid ‘90s, colleagues at AOL -- started fleshing out ideas. Borthwick and Weissman knew that Twitter was no passing fad, yet they were among the first to see that any number of new business possibilities could emerge from real-time social media. Enter Betaworks, a New York-based company that develops its own ideas, acquires companies and invests in nascent startups that it views as strategic to its ambitious vision of creating an empire of companies -- all of which are rooted in live social activities online.
