Ben Dean, my co-founder and I incorporated Buzzage (now called Jangl) on March 16, 2005. We began to tighten our plan. We both agreed that the kinds of services we would offer should be more about people than technology. We weren't doing this for technology's sake. We were bringing a new generation of telephony to people.
There would be a big VoIP element in what we were planning, but we agreed the best place for VoIP to be was on the back end of the service, rather than on the front end where consumers had to do something out of the ordinary (like buy a piece of hardware and install it or download software and play for months.
Around the same time, I assisted a small venture fund called Outlook Ventures, with diligence on a couple companies. (I think it was Sean Parker who introduced me to Outlook in a prior life). One of the partners there named Randy Haykin asked me what I was doing next, so I talked a little about Buzzage. He was interested in taking a peek at it, as a friendly sort of review. I didn't know Randy well, but I knew he was an early VP of marketing at Yahoo!. We weren't quite ready to fund raise yet, but we took him up on his offer anyway.
I pitched Randy. He took a fast interest. He asked if he could introduce us into some other VC firms that they like to work with, under the guise that we might just close a round quickly. (I called Ben in Jersey and asked if he was ready for the ride of his life. He was. He got on the next Jetblue flight to Oakland). I could see where this was going. Randy wanted dibbs on the deal. There is a scarcity factor on good deals from a VCs perspective. He wanted to take us into some other firms he knew to validate the deal and potentially syndicate it. Not a bad strategy if you're a VC and you see something has legs.
Before turning us on to his close network of VC brethren, Randy introduced us to the great Tim Koogle (TK), former CEO of Yahoo!. TK, since leaving Y! was sitting on boards and doing a little investing in companies like Friendster. He was also spending a lot of time doing real estate developments in Punta Mita, an area outside of Puerto Vallarta, so it wasn't clear he had the cycles nor the interest in another tech startup. In our imaginations, Ben and I sheepishly asked ourselves, "Gee, could we be the next Jerry Yang and David Filo?"
We met TK at the law firm of Cooley Godward Kronish in Palo Alto. In an attempt to come up with a proxy for Buzzage that TK might relate to, we came up with "geocities for phones". Just as geocities made it easy for consumers to publish content to the web, we would make it easy for consumers to publish content to phones.
{I must sleep now, after a day with my family and Ben's family, baking holiday stuff. More tomorrow}.
Technorati Tags: Buzzage, Jangl, Punta Mita, Randy Haykin, Sean Parker, Tim Koogle, VoIP
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