1000 Flowers Bloom

Why do a B Round for Aggregate Knowledge?

Well as reported in a variety of places (here a few of them) Aggregate Knowledge just closed another round of funding. It's a large one and I wanted to take a second to talk about why we decided to do it at this juncture as I've seen a few people comment on it.

When we started Aggregate Knowledge we had a vision and a plan for how we thought the business was going to play out. As in any A round company we made a lot of assumptions about the future. The reality, as people like Josh Kopelman (an investor) have posted about, is that your business plan is never right. We got our fundamentals correct - we had a great product delivering measurable value that customers were willing to pay for.

What we were wrong about was how quickly the market would move. We believed that the market for Discovery services would take until 2008 to truly come to fruition.

The rub is that it moved FASTER than we thought it would. The Discovery market is here NOW.

The number of customers who are interested is much higher than we anticipated and the hunger for a solution is stronger than we imagined.

Yes, we could have held off on raising money and grown more slowly and organically. Ironically, as an entrepreneur its actually more  tempting to do that, grow slow and take less dilution. You don't look quite as silly if it doesn't work out for you.

It would be the wrong thing to do though. The Discovery market is maturing quickly and even though we are leading the charge today,if we had to start turning down customers it wouldn't stay that way. We need to ensure that we have the resources to address this market as it grows and keep innovating on the service we provide.

We are the leader in the Discovery Market today and we intend to stay there. I think most would agree that's the best of all reasons to raise more capital.

Why Offline Support Matters

I usually love the 37 signals blog - Signal vs. Noise. I agree with a lot of what they say but their dismissal of offline support for apps just doesn't ring true to my experience.

The claim in the post is:

The idea of offline web applications is getting an undue amount of attention. Which is bizarre when you look at how availability of connectivity is ever increasing. EVDO cards, city-wide wifis, iPhones, Blackberry’s. There are so many ways to get online these days that the excitement for offline is truly puzzling.

Except here are the problems:

EVDO - cool idea. Not widespread and its expensive
City-wide wifi - ditto
iPhone - doesn't exist yet.
Blackberry - I can do email but what about everything else I need to do?

The reality is that there are a lot of us who need to work on things like say a Powerpoint or an Excel Spreadsheet and can't afford to have to be online in order for that application to work properly.

Here's a specific example of a place where you can be cooling your heels for a while and where it would be really useful to have an application that works offline - the VC office. Yes that's right. When Aggregate Knowledge was fundraising last year I would say that at least 50% of the VCs we talked to did not have open wifi. Combine - no wifi with a penchant for keeping people waiting and you're damn straight I love my offline apps. I won't leave home without them.