Congratulations to BackType!

Intense is the word that comes to my mind when I think of Chris Golda and Mike Montano, the founders of BackType. I first met Chris and Mike in the Fall of 2008. They had gone through the YCombinator program and launched a blog comment search engine to positive reviews. Even at that early stage, I came away impressed by how intensely focused Chris and Mike were on building something big and important. After following their progress for a few months, True made a $300k seed investment into their company in January 2009.

Chris and Mike had ambitious and exciting plans to track not just blog comments but online conversations across all blogs and social networks and to do it in real-time. They saw the need for social media analytics – the need for people and companies to figure out who is  saying what about them across various social networks as it’s happening – a good year or two before that field emerged.

Before they could dive into building their company, however, they had to settle themselves in San Francisco. To do so, they moved back to their native Canada and started working on visas. It all took longer than expected – I think about 6 months – but they never seemed deterred in the least. They just moved back in with their parents and wrote code all day and night. By 2009, they were finally up and running in San Francisco. They rented a condo in the South of Market neighborhood where they lived, worked, and sometimes slept for a few hours in between writing tons more code and testing out lots of product ideas. Soon, they had dozens of well known companies like Bit.ly, Radian6, and the Huffington Post rely on BackType to power key social features on their sites. Around the same time, BackType started tracking and analyzing Twitter’s exploding activity and data. They were also joined by Nathan Marz, who became the lead engineer for BackType’s rapidly expanding service.

By summer 2010, they felt  ready to further grow their business, and True led a $1M round of additional investment, which also included K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and several others. Following that investment, BackType continued building out their world class technology platform, signing up more customers and earning more money. Then came a moment a few months ago when it became clear that the analytics tools they had built for tracking activity on Twitter was particularly powerful and interesting to Twitter themselves. A conversation started between the two companies that culminated in Twitter acquiring BackType last week.

Congratulations from True to Chris, Mike, and the entire BackType team on this exciting outcome and the intense focus, determination, and passion that led them to it.