Final days at Pier 38

Om Malik wrote an exceptional blog post last evening, that beautifully captures the early days at Pier 38 for all of us at True. We’re sad to see Pier38 come to an end.  We loved that zany, dirty, drafty place, and it’s where True committed to countless deals, including Urban Airship, XPD, Stocktwits, and many, many others. We held our first few Annual Meetings there, as well as our all of our Founder Camps.

Many people found our offices “unique” and “different,” and that they were. It was a cold Thursday afternoon in the winter of 2009 when I heard about an exciting entrepreneur named Jack Abraham, and the True space at Pier38 was the original home of Automattic, GigaOM, About.me, Kiip, SyncPlicity, Infectious, and many, many more exciting startups. It was a hub in every sense of the word: people congregated there and would tend do drop in for the unexpected. It was always exiting, and always alive. It was also always seemingly about to fall into the Bay in one way or another.

We owe all of this to our partners Toni Schneider and Phil Black, who saw the place in 2006 and instantly thought of it as home. You guys had singular vision for what Pier 38 could become, and this vision is what makes our partnership so great.

Pier38 was an essential ingredient to the delicious mix that is True Ventures, and I’ll miss it. But like all things in life, we grow, we evolve, and we’ll make the magic someplace new, for after all of the great times we had there, it’s the people that made the place great, and we still got the great people thing going on at True.