Today, Techdirt announced the closing of an angel round of funding. I led the round and will be joining their board of directors. The money will go towards building out and promoting their new Insight Community system, which I wrote about here. They've had an amazing response since announcing the Insight Community service; if you're a blogger I suggest you check it out.
I originally met Mike Masnick, Techdirt's CEO in 2003. He was one of the first users of Bloglines and had several great suggestions for improving the service. Since then, I've watched Techdirt continue to grow, in terms of readership, reputation, and actual paying customers of their Corporate Intelligence service. When Mike told me they were thinking of raising money to build out and promote their new Insight Community service, I immediately asked if I could participate. The combination of an innovative new web service along with the excellent team that Mike has assembled made the decision a no-brainer.
As many of you know, I worked at several startups before taking the plunge and starting two of my own companies: ONElist, which was sold to Yahoo in 2000 and is now Yahoo Groups, and Bloglines, which I sold to Ask Jeeves in 2005. Since that time I have been focusing more of my time and energies on helping other entrepreneurs. A year ago I became an angel investor in One True Media and joined their board of directors (the company recently raised a round from Kleiner Perkins) and I am now doing the same with Techdirt -- angel investing and becoming a board member. I love the energy surrounding startups and feel fortunate to be able to lend perspective based on my experience starting and growing web service companies and I hope to do more of the same in the future.
