Venture Studio (27): Sachin Kamdar, CEO Parse.ly

I met with Sachin Kamdar recently, CEO of Parse.ly. In essence the company allows online publishers to optimize their existing content through personalization. Users get to visit their favorite news sites, but with Parse.ly those sites now understand the tastes of their readers and can deliver more relevant content to them. Their products have already driven millions of clickthroughs for their customers and their newest product, Dash, now tracks over 500 million pageviews a month and is growing rapidly. 

Sachin and his co-founder Andrew Montalenti have a great story- and they way they've stuck together through thick and thin, their inventiveness, willingness to adapt to the needs of the market is simply awesome.

My favorite line was: "... get product market fit, gain the domain expertise, be persistent and eventually you get there..."

Enjoy

00:10 What is Parse.ly?

00:23 Their new analytics system: Parse.ly Dash (capturing >300 million page views per month)

00:56 The origins of the company, how the cofounders literally worked nightly to figure out what they should do (while holding down day jobs), and eventually got into DreamIT Ventures accelerator

2:23:  Their funding story (Blumberg Capital, ff Ventures, Scott Becker and other angels)

3:25:  The challenges they encountered prior to receiving funding, ie. doing consulting on the side to help bootstrap the company, etc! What qualities Sachin thinks it takes to succeed

Crowd-Sourceable Map of World's Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

This is part of my various Series on Venture Capital, Angel Investing and Entrepreneurial Culture.

As described in this recent post, this mapping project evolved from that late night a few months ago when I decided to first map-out the Silicon Alley early-stage investor ecosystem. I wanted to provide a resource for entrepreneurs wherein they would be able to actually see the entire venture ecosystem in one glance. Due to much encouragement and postive feedback, I eventually created maps for Boston and then for Silicon Valley. This was of course not enough. I wanted these maps to be interactive and eventually, crowdsourceable. That's when I reached out to my good buddy Shane Snow. As I've mentioned here before, he is a super-talented entrepreneur, hacker, designer and journalist extraordinaire who can basically do anything.

Well, after quite a bit of effort, I'm happy to say that today we're releasing the next iteration of all this. We've now created a crowdsourceable global map of what we hope will one day be the entire world's entrepreneurial ecosystem:

Click here for the global map.

(Or, you can click on the global map icon on the right-hand side of my blog's homepage to enter the map environment. You will find instructions for using the map there- it's very straightforward.)

So as this is the first pass we've made, we're really asking for your help in adding investors to the map, in correcting mistakes we've made (which are no doubt many) and the like. You will see tabs above the map for adding investors and adding firms respectively. The map is meant to be crowdsourced and will only be as good as the effort put into it, so please weigh in!

Future releases will go beyond venture, angel, corporate investors and accelerators. We will be trying to comprehensively cover as many facets of the entrepreneurial ecosystem as possible in an easy to use manner- all in one place.

Thanks in advance for your help!

For the next post in this Series click here.

Mapping the Whole Venture Ecosystem (or my new life as a Venture Cartographer)

                               
This is part of my various series on Venture Capital, Angel Investing and Entrepreneurial Culture.

It all started when it occurred to me that we were missing a nice visual map of Silicon Alley's early-stage ecosystem available for everyone to use. Entrepreneurs were always asking me about various angels and VC's and I just thought that such a map would be a good resource to which I could refer people. I also thought that adding the twitter addresses of all these investors would be a nice feature as well. So one night I did just that and mapped out New York's early-stage tech investor ecosystem and posted it here on my blog.

After receiving so much great encouragement and so many submissions and corrections, I thought I'd do the same for our neighbors to the north- my old stomping grounds- Boston! That took me a bit longer, of course, because the ecosystem is quite a bit larger than NY's coupled with the fact that I couldn't do most of it from memory. I haven't lived in Boston for over nine years now! 

Well, the encouragement and emails kept flowing. There was a real need for this. No one enjoyed wasting hours looking various funds up online or clicking through some spreadsheet or flipping through one of those venture capital directories for that matter. I knew then that I had to take the next step into what appears to be a new discipline- I think I am going to call it Venture Cartography.  :)

The Silicon Valley/San Fran map was soon to follow and I'm happy to say it is now up and running! Corrections, submissions, etc. more than welcome as usual. Bring it on!

At this point, however, I realized I needed help. I really wanted these maps to be interactive and provide richer information for us all. So I gave my friend Shane Snow a call. He is a super-talented entrepreneur, hacker, designer and journalist extraordinaire who can basically do anything. 

Our collaboration has resulted in this interactive map, which is a precursor to us mapping the venture ecosystem of the entire world in its component parts. Now all you have to do is just click on the city you are interested in and then click on any investor to get a good understanding of his or her background, investments, blogs, opinions, twitter-feed and the like. 

We've put a lot of effort into teeing this up, but this is meant to be crowd-sourced on an ongoing basis- so please- send us all the names, the people, the angels, the accelerators and the funds we are missing! You can email us here: info at venturemaps.co   (yep, that's .co, not .com)...

We'll be thankful for all the help you can provide. Apologies in advance to anyone we've left out.

I want to offer a special thanks to the folks who have given us excellent insight into their respective ecosystems, especially the venture investor and irrepressible gadfly Stewart Alsop  (@salsop) as well as my buddy JJ Freitag  (@jjfreitag) over at Azure Capital. Thanks guys!