Connecting people never goes out of style

Connection is an essential part of the human experience. And since we don’t often have the luxury of face-to-face contact with our friends, family and business associates, communications has become one of the most important resources in our lives, scaling more rapidly throughout history than almost any other industry.

The original Bell Telephone Company connected tens of millions of people and scaled to a few hundred million over approximately 100 years. The dawn of the Internet gave us email and connected islands of local computer networks, reaching over a billion people in approximately 15 years. The advent of social media accelerated this growth exponentially: Facebook grew at an unprecedented pace from 12 percent of the Internet in 2007 to 55 percent in 2011, reaching the coveted one billion active monthly users earlier this month. And Skype recently announced the same goal. As mobile broadband continues to expand into the next decade, even bigger opportunities and faster rates of growth will emerge. Think about it: where the web had a few hundred million end points, mobile has 6 billion.

Today’s Internet is ubiquitous. It’s mobile. It’s not just always on, it’s really never off. We used to talk about “going online” because it was a conscious act you had to perform. Now, we are never (or rarely) offline, and we do so with enormous effort (excellently documented in this post from Jenna Wortham). Ubiquity and ambient connectivity have been the catalysts of invention for so many new communication behaviors. Not only is email still the killer app, but so too are texting, notifications and Instagraming.

As messaging behaviors change and evolve, the importance of scaleable, flexible, powerful messaging capability becomes core to all companies. And by all companies, I don’t just mean software and IT companies. I mean all companies. In our small portfolio, we have companies that enable cash payment at 7-11 (and other) stores, instant photo printing at Walgreens, and retailers—all have messaging requirements. Devices themselves generate messages: Fitbits, MakerBots and Sifteo cubes send messages to users and the social web.

Messaging is core. Messaging is king.

This belief has lead us over the years to seed fund Urban Airship, Meebo, Yobongo, SoundTracking and many others in the messaging world. Nearly two years ago, we backed the phenomenal Narendra Rocherolle, Jeremy LaTrasse and their team to start Message Bus, which just announced an $11 million Series B round to expand on its cloud-native application service for enabling and powering messaging across email and mobile channels.

 
One of our mantras at True is to invest behind Founders of movements, and Jeremy and Narendra are at the forefront of the next wave of enterprise communication. As the number of ways we can connect has grown and the number of devices has grown, the way we power the back end has to change. The server needs to be reinvented, and messaging needs to mean a lot more than just email. Connecting people today requires capabilities that have never before existed, and Message Bus is the first to innovate beyond Saas, IaaS and PaaS to create the first cloud-native application service for messaging across established and emerging channels.

Messaging is indeed the killer app, and we are incredibly inspired by Message Bus’s mission to make a great communication vehicle even more effective, seamless and scalable.

Jeremy, Narendra and team Message Bus, congratulations on your round! We are honored to be a part of it.