Happy Bleeding Cowboys, Typekit Acquired by Adobe

This morning, Typekit announced they’ve been acquired by Adobe. You can read the Typekit blog announcement here and the Adobe press release here.

This acquisition is a tremendous outcome for Co-Founders Ryan Carver, Bryan Mason, Greg Veen, Jeff Veen, their team and investors. Bringing Typekit under the Adobe umbrella is a natural fit and a great opportunity for the company to further scale their vision of beautifying the entire web. It is a very smart acquisition for Adobe to make, and they are acquiring a superb team and product with a rapidly growing customer base.   Personally, I could not be more thrilled for the team.

Typekit is built around web standards with a focus on providing designers and developers a subscription-based library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on their websites. Hence, this is the team making your web experience just a bit more beautiful. They have grown incredibly fast, counting over 500,000 customers including some of the most iconic sites/ hosted platforms on the web today: WordPress, The New York Times, Conde Nast, Twitter, and many others—so that anyone with a website can use real fonts. Today, high expectations around beautiful design are the norm, but the Typekit gang was clearly ahead of the curve.

A little history.  I first met Bryan and Jeff when Adaptive Path helped us conceive and design Sphere in 2005. These guys were talented partners and made a huge impact on our success. Our collaboration gave us a foundation to stay in touch and, in addition to serving on their board, both became key advisers to Ryan, Tim and I when we co-founded about.me. Turning back the clock just a bit, in 2008, they ventured on their own, kick starting a few ideas until they eventually focused their attention on making web fonts universally available across the web. It took a few months and some convincing, but in the end they chose True to lead a seed round investment.  We were joined by some of the most respected Founders and investors on the web including Evan Williams (Twitter), Matt Mullenweg (Automattic/ WordPress), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Chris Sacca (Lowerbase Capital), Josh Felser & Dave Samuel (Freestyle Capital) and SV Angel.  I then joined the board after leading a Series A investment in May 2010.

Since then, the Typekit founders have become part of the True social fabric and substantial contributors to our platform. They have generously advised portfolio companies (about.me, KISSmetrics to name only a few), participated in Founder Camps, True University and their example has impacted so many Founders/ companies in our ecosystem.

Thank you Ryan, Bryan, Greg, Jeff and the Typekit Team for inspiring us all in so many fundamental ways. It has been a privilege to watch your vision for a beautiful web come together so nicely and it’s been an honor to be a small part of your team. But most importantly you taught us all that Helvetica isn’t as cool as Bleeding Cowboys.