Congrats Josh and First Round

Great Businessweek article on Josh Kopelman and the new early stage market. Congrats, Josh and team, on a really terrific piece. The article does a great job of showing the raw energy and activity occurring today in what we call the “Very Early” market. At True, we have just had the most active nine months in our history with respect to new investments. Our companies are launching faster than ever and generating more revenue sooner. We are seeing better and better talent starting companies. The downturn is creating disruption and dislocation across the tech landscape, and only the creative and bold investors like Josh, ourselves, and a some others (see below) are poised to capitalize on it. It is an exciting time!

It is also wonderful to see that the mainstream media is beginning to pick up on the disruption and innovation occurring in the venture business. Many of us started our firms back in 2005-2006, and we recognized that there were challenges and opportunities to the traditional early stage venture model. The combination of growing fund and firm sizes was leaving Sand Hill Road ill-equipped to and uninterested in investing in the beginning phases of startups like Meebo, Automattic, Facebook, Twitter, and others. A band of smaller funds filled this gap, which appears to be widening as Moore’s law begins to invade every corner of the tech world which results in dramatically lower startup costs.

The Very Early stage market is vibrant these days. In addition to those mentioned in the BusinessWeek piece, our friends at Alsop-Louie, Jeff Clavier, Brad and the Foundry crew, Naval at Hitforge, the Founders Fund, OATV, Greycroft, and USV in NY are all busy building firms in this segment. This is exciting, because these are incredibly talented entrepreneurs and investors who are working tirelessly to create more choice for entrepreneurs and foster creativity and innovation.

Congrats, Josh, on a really great article, and thank you BusinessWeek for shedding light on the entrepreneurs and the ecosystem that are so vital to the future to the US economy.