Category Archives: Bullpen
No, I really DON’T want to see your demo (part 2)…
It’s been slightly over a year since I wrote the following post about not wanting to see product demos and I am somewhat amazed how controversial it was. But with a year of extra data I have a few new insights: (1) Some people are personally offended that I don’t want to see their product […]
Bring Obama’s Tech Targeting to your Startup…
Grassroots Unwired was started 2 years ago by a veteran Democratic political insider named Russ Oster. He was continually amazed to see that the state of the art technology for door-to-door canvassing was simply pencil and paper, with the occasional clip board. That’s when he decided to automate the process and build one of the […]
Tech Crunch gives Bullpen some credit for predicting series A crunch…
It’s nice to get credit for spotting a trend before it happens. That said, this was not really a tough one to predict. With the massive growth of the super angel (seed) funds and flat lining of the series A funds, a crunch was inevitable. I can’t say that me or my co-founders knew WHEN […]
Tello Acquired by Urban Airship
We are very pleased to see that Urban Airship has acquired one of our porfolio companies: Tello. Tello did a masterful job of launching a new product that generated tremendous buzz. Their new offering called PassTools really sparked interest in the entire Apple Ecosystem. You can read about that launch here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/19/tello-launches-passtools-to-help-businesses-build-their-apple-passbook-passes/ Information about the […]
Surviving the Series A Crunch
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that funding of consumer web companies is down 42% in the first nine months of 2012 (as compared to the same period in 2011). This is not due to a shortage of seed rounds, but rather a shortage of adequate follow-on financing. Fred Wilson attributes this shift to three […]
SF Giants owner and Atlanta Braves pitcher explain how Bullpen Capital got its name…
People ask us all the time how we got our name at Bullpen Capital. We’re not just baseball fans, there’s more to it than that. We asked two of Bullpen Capital’s good friends Dan Scheinman (co-owner of the SF Giants) and Chad Durbin (relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves) to help us make a short […]
Real-Money Gambling Earns Real-Money Profits for Betable
Congratulations are in order for Bullpen portfolio company Betable, which continues to exceed expectations quarter after quarter. One of Betable’s partners and #1 iOS casino app, Big Fish Games, just announced the launch of its first in a series of games enabled with Betable’s real-money gambling toolkit. Betable’s technology allows game developers like Big Fish […]
Photos From Venture Shift 2012
We had a really great turnout for our Venture Shift event earlier this summer. The highlight of the show was Lawrence Coburn’s brutally honest story of fundraising. Here’s a picture of Lawrence telling the story. I hope to have the video up soon. The other real highlights of the event were two discussions of the […]
Liquidity Cometh
Ari Levy and Lee Spears of Bloomberg Newsroom write clearly about the impact of the Facebook public offering, offering little in the way of condolences for those buying at $42 in the opening confusion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-21/facebook-ipo-spawns-new-wave-social-media-angels-tech.html Instead, they rightly focus on how liquidity, locked up for years in quiet ponds (some bigger than others), is soon […]
Why We Invested in Byliner, the Pandora For E-Books
Byliner is a digital publisher that is promoting a new format designed for e-readers: the “e-single,” a two-hour read of 10-30K words that fits between a magazine article (3-5K words) and a book (75-200K words). We have seen this sort of disruption in music, where iTunes brought back the single and liberated songs from the […]
