When a little funding goes a long way

Charlie O’Donnell has a good summary of the big lesson from the Twitter – Summize acquisition confirmed today, and how $750,000 in funding helped Summize leap Tweetscan as the leader in the Twitter search space and get to the sale to Twitter.

So, when your investor is having this kind of smart conversation with an investor in one of your likely acquirers, you’re at a HUGE advantage. This isn’t someone pitching your company to get flipped–this was some pretty high level thinking (and outside the valley thinking, I might add).

So while you’re protecting all your equity from those big bad investors, ask yourself the question of who’s having these types of conversations with key decision makers and thinkers about your company. “Who’s a lot more experienced than I am that thinks intelligently about my company’s strategy–and cares about it?”

THAT’s the kind of investor that makes the rest of your equity worth multiples of what it is the moment they take their 20-30%.

The lesson: Early mover advantage doesn’t alway pay off if you can’t sustain your infrastucture due to lack of capital.

Calacanis is out, and I know why.

Well, maybe. It’s one of two reasons. Either, he wishes Silicon Alley Reporter had been 8 years later because he was doing all of this blogging stuff before blogging was blogging. Or, because he wishes Mahalo had been a blog network instead of a semantic search engine. Either way, he’s just waiting out the storm because its about to be back to the amateurs (like me).

So, its time to mark the end of the uprising. All of the tech blogs that bucked the “mainstream media” and have dominated the conversation for the last 5 years. It is quite an achievement, and media is forever changed. But, the wall is crumbling. Let us recount:

  • Preview: Conde Nast buys Reddit – Oct 2006
  • MediaBistro cashes out – July 2007
  • Scobelizer and Fast Company hook up – March 2008
  • Conde Nast takes out Ars Technica. – May 2008
  • PaidContent rocks it $30 mil – July 2008
  • Guy Kawasaki sells Truemors – (what?) – July 2008

Who is next? Well, two guaranteed predictions:

  • Readwriteweb
  • TechCrunch – Henry Blodget’s $100 mil valuation is just months away.

Ain’t it great when old media gets a whiff of new media?

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