W Media Ventures

Last week we brought together over 20 founders, CEO’s and senior managers from 6 portfolio (AbeBooks, Suite101.com, Nexopia.com, TeamPages, Techvibes, Carrie & Danielle) and 2 associated companies (LiveCurrent, the company behind Perfume.com and Cricket.com, Strutta) for our first Burda Digital / W Media Ventures event in Vancouver. It was a day packed with best practices and company presentations but the talk that resonated most with everybody was Brian Scudamore’s “How to build a great company culture” speech. Brian is the founder and CEO of 1800-Got-Junk and an entrepreneur I truly admire. It wasn’t so much that anybody needed convincing that a strong company culture is something to strive for - it was more that Brian reminded us how much hard work it is on a daily basis and how easy it is to forget about this aspect in day-to-day operations. The one thing that really works for 1800-Got-Junk is the daily huddle that brings together the whole company for 7 minutes every day. 7 daily minutes during which the team can feel the current vibe of the company , 7 daily minutes during which everybody can be reminded of the company values, 7 daily minutes during which everybody from customer service agent to CEO can show leadership in front of the whole company. And as 1800-Got-Junk now has over 200 employees, the excuse that our companies are too big for such a daily all-company meeting is not really valid for most of us - try it out!

Posted: May 11th, 2008 under News.
Comments: 2

Today we announced our investment in Indochino, a website that helps people to buy a tailor-made suit directly from a professional tailor in China. Together with a few other angels, I had been invested in the company since last summer and was very impressed what the founders Kyle and Heikal built up with very little money in very little time. The investment announced today will now give the team more resources to quickly expand their service.
So what do we like about Indochino’s business model? It is its simplicity: everybody who has ever traveled to Asia knows what great deals you can get by just walking into a tailor shop in China, Thailand or Vietnam and get a suit just made for you at prices that are below most of the suits you would buy in your hometown. This is exactly the experience that Indochino now brings directly to your doorstep – Indochino sends you measuring tape and swatches (if you wish so), you measure yourself (or get measured by a tailor around the corner), you provide these measurements and chose the suit style online and two weeks later the tailor-made suit arrives at your doorstep. And it becomes even easier once you start ordering a second time (which I have done)….Congrats to closing the investment, Kyle and Heikal – and good luck with building up the business between Victoria and Shanghai!

Posted: April 23rd, 2008 under News.
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Carrie & Danielle’s vision is to inspire authenticity – understanding who you are, what’s working in your life and what’s not, and turning that understanding into action. The two founder ladies (by the name of Carrie and Danielle, who would have thought?) have been hugely successful in the past few years with their style statement consultations and their Style Statement book (order at AbeBooks or Amazon). Interesting offline media business but what has that to do with consumer internet? Comes in Dan Gibbons who just joined Carrie & Danielle as their new CEO – Dan is not only a serial entrepreneur but also one of the few people that I know who understands technology and media equally well. Under his leadership the company will turn an interesting offline media business into the leading social media company focusing on authentic living. The financing that was announced today will help achieve this vision – building out the website, creating interesting tools and applications and investing in unique content. The investment also shows in my opinion that Vancouver as a location for consumer internet businesses is evolving – it took just 4 weeks to pull together the round, with the money mostly coming from local angels. Congrats Carrie, Danielle and Dan – let’s start building a great social media company!

Posted: April 10th, 2008 under News.
Comments: 3

Vancouver-based Communicate.com announced today that I will be joining their board effective immediately. Since taking over as CEO and Chairman a few months ago, Geoff Hampson (who is also my business partner in Techvibes.com) has assembled a really strong management team led by Jonathan Ehrlich (one of the digital media people to watch in BC in 2008)  and they have aggressive plans to turn the company into a leading e-commerce and media company, initiatially focusing on Perfume.com and Cricket.com. We need more large and fast-growing Internet companies in the region and and I am therefore extremely happy to be part of the Communicate.com development going forward. Official press release below:

PRESS RELEASE:

Communicate.com Inc. Appoints Consumer Internet Pioneer Boris Wertz to the Board of Directors VANCOUVER, BC – March 17, 2008 – Communicate.com Inc. (OTC BB: CMNN) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Boris Wertz to its Board of Directors effective immediately. The addition of Dr. Wertz to the Communicate.com board demonstrates the Company’s intent to build out a seasoned team of Directors to strategically grow the business of developing premium e-commerce and content destinations. Dr. Wertz has an established career of strategic management and operational experience in the consumer internet space. He currently serves as CEO of Nexopia, the most popular social networking utility for Canadian youth, and CEO of W Media Ventures, a Vancouver-based venture capital firm that focuses on consumer internet investments. Before founding W Media Ventures, Dr. Wertz was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com, the world’s largest online marketplace for books. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for AbeBooks as well as Suite 101, Tripsbytips.com, Indochino.com, TeamPages and Techvibes.com. Dr. Wertz completed his Ph. D. as well as his graduate studies at the Graduate School of Management (WHU), Koblenz, majoring in Business Economics and Business Management. Geoffrey Hampson, CEO and Chairman of Communicate.com stated, “Dr. Wertz brings a wealth of experience to the Communicate.com Board which will provide management with invaluable insights and direction. His extensive knowledge and operational experience as a director of many successful consumer internet businesses will help to aggressively drive forward our efforts to evolve Communicate.com into an industry leading e-commerce and media company. Along with other recently appointed team members, Dr. Wertz will provide direction aimed at maximizing the value of the Communicate.com assets and creating value for our shareholders.”

About Communicate.com Inc.

Communicate.com builds, owns and operates content and commerce destinations on the Internet. Founded in 1994, Communicate.com has headquarters in Vancouver, British Columbia with a location in Bellingham, Washington. Communicate.com is publicly traded on the NASD OTCBB (CMNN). For more information, visit www.communicate.com. Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although Communicate.com Inc. believes the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions; it can give no assurance that its expectations will be attained. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations include financial performance, regulatory changes, changes in economic conditions and other risks detailed from time to time in Communicate.com’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, and readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

Media Contact: Communicate.com Inc. Becky Porter Director, Corporate Communications (206) 713-7959 becky@communicate.com

Investor Contacts:

Communicate.com Inc. Adam Rabiner Director, Investor Relations (604) 453-4875 or 1-866-898-4354 adam@communicate.com

Alliance Advisors, LLC Mark McPartland Vice President (910) 221-1827 markmcp@allianceadvisors.net

Posted: March 17th, 2008 under News.
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This past week I attended TED 2008 in Monterey (last time in this location as TED moves to Long Beach) and - as usual - brought back tons of ideas and inspiration (good coverage here). TED is definitely one of the best conferences one can attend, full of energy, interesting people and new discoveries. This TED made it also clear to me how the conference is really developing into a fully-fledged media business. The original TED concept was to bring a small group of interesting people once a year together in Monterey to listen to even more interesting people. It was very close to a traditional conference business with the exception that TED was invitation-only (hence exclusive) and one of the more expensive conferences. When Chris Anderson bought TED a few years ago, he turned a conference and a small community into a world-wide community and media platform for “ideas worth spreading”. His best move in this process was probably the launch of TED talks – free videos of the TED talks that could be viewed by everybody in this world on TED.com. It turned a small, though exclusive platform that reached a thousand conference attendees each year into a worldwide media platform that now reaches millions of people. This extended reach does not only help to attract more interesting speakers to TED but also more companies as sponsors that want to show good corporate citizenship by getting involved in TED projects. Interestingly enough, the TED business model resembles very much that of many Web 2,0 companies – TED has built a platform on which users create content for free that TED then distributes and monetizes. Definitely something to consider for other conference organizers…

Would love to hear from other people if they share my thoughts on this development.

Posted: March 7th, 2008 under News.
Comments: 1

International expansion is part of almost every business plan of an ambitious start-up but few ever get around to it: strong existing competition in international markets, a lack of understanding of the local culture or not enough international expertise in the management team often keep start-ups in their domestic market. At AbeBooks, we learned very early what huge opportunities international expansion can bring and the company is generating today more than 40% of its revenues outside of North-America. I was therefore very happy to see Suite101 expand so quickly into Europe with the launch of a German site last week - as with the launch of every new site it will take some time to develop this part of the business but it is important that we plant these seeds as early as possible. The Suite101 team has done an incredible job in pulling off the project in a very short period of time and I am sure that the concept of providing a publishing platform for freelance writers will find the same success over in the Old World as it has here in North-America with over 7 million uniques / month - good luck for the official launch of Suite101.de this week and the accompanying press tour in Germany!

* On a sidenote: it is nice to see that the tradition of office sharing between portfolio companies continues over in Germany: in the same way that Techvibes bunks up with Suite101.com here in Vancouver, Suite101.de found some desks at Tripsbytips over in Berlin.

Posted: February 18th, 2008 under News.
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Today we announced our investment in Nexopia.com, Canada’s largest social networking site for youth. At the same time we also announced that I will be joining the company as CEO. A new (and very exciting) investment for Burda Digital Ventures / W Media Ventures and at the same time an additional job for me!

Nexopia has seen phenomenal growth over the past 5 years since it was founded by Timo Ewalds in Edmonton. Without any external funding the site has grown to over 1 billion page views / month and 1.2 million registered users. One of the questions that I got repeatedly asked when discussing the Nexopia investment with friends and business partners in the past weeks, was focusing on the competitive threat by Facebook.  Three importnat points to be made in this respect: 1. Facebook is about efficient communication with your existing friends while Nexopia (and many other social networks for that matter) are much more about expressing your personality on the Internet, discovering new things and making new friends. 2. Nexopia has continued to grow very strongly in the past year while Facebook was on the rise here in Canada so their competition doesn’t seem to have hurt us. 3. We are focusing on the 14-20 years demographic and think that they have very specific needs that we can serve better than a social network that tries to organize all age groups.

So what’s next? We have two big priorities for 2008: churning out lots of cool new product and expanding Nexopia into Eastern Canada. I am very impressed with Nexopia’s engineering team so we should be seeing some quick results on the first point. And given our track record in Western Canada I am pretty confident that the youth from the East will soon be connected through Nexopia as well. Exciting new investment, exciting new job!

Posted: February 4th, 2008 under News.
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Just came back from 3 incredible days at DLD. The conference (hosted by our friends from Burda) is getting better each year and has definitely become the premier European conference for digital media. The first day was a bit slow but day 2 and 3 had a range of highlights: a social networking panel with all of the big guys (Facebook, Linkedin, Bebo, Xing), a very interesting discussion of human versus algorithmic search with Jason Calacanis and Jimmy Wales and comments from Marissa Meyer (see Techcrunch coverage here - isn’t Google human after all?), Shai Agassi’s presentation of his new venture Better PLC) and the Exploding Media session with Jeff Jarvis, Bradley Horowitz, Peter Hirshberg and Marissa Meyer. All in all a fantastic event with great networking and really interesting panels. Only drawback: the conference location HVB Forum is getting a bit packed but I guess this is a good problem to have.

Posted: January 23rd, 2008 under News.
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Boris Mann and Danny Robinson (both Digital Media people to watch in 2008) have partnered to start an incubator in Vancouver (see Techvibes coverage here). I think that this is incredible news for our city - as I said before, Vancouver has already a lot of engineering and entrepreunerial talent as well as VC money but we need more experienced entrepreneurs like Danny and Boris to help grow ideas into real companies. This is an important step to turn Vancouver into a really buzzing start-up city, good luck to both of you, look forward to seeing many successful products and companies coming out of BootUpLabs!

Posted: January 11th, 2008 under News.
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This past year has been a good year for Vancouver in terms of Consumer Internet activities - just have a look at the companies on the Techcouver map or the latest Vancouver Start-up index from Techvibes. And Vancouver’s Web 2.0 scene is poised to grow in 2008 as we slowly seem to reach critical mass of great entrepreuers and engineers (here are 11 people to watch this year), venture capital and media activities. Looking forward to beeing an active part of it in 2008!

Posted: January 4th, 2008 under News.
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