Pioneer in Person-to-Person Payments

Accept had the insight that people would want to make payments to one another over the internet.  In Accept's vision of internet payments individuals could e-mail electronic money by debiting one credit card or bank account and crediting another.  Danny Shader, Accept's CEO, along with a world-class team of industry veterans built the beginnings of a marvelous company in P2P and P2B payments space.  In an unusually swift turn of events, Amazon purchased Accept and moved the team to Seattle before the company could even ship its first product!  (It is a small world, however: we funded Danny's next company - Good Technologies).

Inventures was very active in helping Danny and the team make some very critical strategic decisions about what services should be pursued in which order.  We also spent lots of time with the product team helping to refine the concepts, build the team and organize for a successful, scalable business.  Much to the chagrin of some, we were also very active in product and usability testing.  See here for Danny's comments about working with Eric.

Innovator in Enterprise Mobile Messaging

Good Technology is an innovator in the enterprise mobile computing market. Good develops wireless software and services that provide mobile professionals with a continuously synchronized wireless connection to their corporate email and information. The result is improved communication, decision making and worker productivity at a low cost of ownership.

Customers choose GoodLink™ because it dramatically reduces enterprise deployment and ownership costs while providing mobile users with a perpetually synchronized wireless handheld. GoodLink is based on Good's patent-pending compression and two-way wireless synchronization technologies that free users from their desktops while keeping them continuously and wirelessly connected to company information. In addition, the product's zero desktop software architecture eliminates the need for IT professionals to install any software or cradles on end-users' desktops.

Danny Shader (see our investment in Accept) is Good's CEO.  Many other folks from the Inventures network are there, too - including those from Collabra, Netscape, RemarQ, and elsewhere!  Read a bit about the history of Good (and our small role) in this USAToday Article.

Stealth.  Apologies.

Early Leader in E-Mail Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

We were invited to join Kana shortly after its first venture round.  We spent lots of time working with Mark Gainey, Kana's founding CEO and his VP of Engineering, Michael Wolfe on product strategy and organizational development.  We also spent a lot of time helping Kana with its early acquisitions.  We were involved with Kana through Mark's well-deserved retirement, the arrival of our new IPO-savvy CEO, and the multi-billion dollar acquisition of SilkNet.  Our involvement ended in 2001.

Inventures got involved because of Mark's incredible commitment to "doing it right" and the deep belief that internet-based CRM would become a must-have addition to the traditional call centers operated by huge corporations.  E-mail and web self-service would likely be at the core of that interaction and we loved that notion. Click here for some of Mark's thoughts on Inventures.

E-Mail/Desktop Search

Datacenter Automation

Opsware automation software provides the ability to control many tasks, across many IT groups with everyone working with same understanding of the state of servers, applications and configurations, an approach that ensures you are 'doing it right' by providing policies, standards and the current state of the environment.

A Leader in Enterprise Messaging Security

Linux and all things Open Source

Innovator in Internet-Scale Communities

RemarQ was the leading supplier of planetary-scale web-based discussion board systems.  The RemarQ platform powered major eCommerce sites like Amazon and eBay, web portals like InfoSeek, Excite, and AltaVista (okay, so things have changed a bit since then...) and a number of corporate sites (like Novell).  RemarQ's system could easily handle millions of postings per day, and managed discussion repositories at terabyte scale.  Very cool.

We invested because we loved the notion that we could connect people together in great numbers and use those connections to help businesses increase top-line revenues and customer satisfaction.

Bill Lee and Craig Wallace bootstrapped RemarQ (originally called SuperNews) in their apartment with their own funds.  Through incredible dedication on the part of the founders and team, RemarQ was a classic Silicon Valley success story.  We were involved from beginning to end helping with product strategy, hiring, business strategy and ultimately the sale to Critical Path in January of 2000.  It was a fun, wild ride and an honor to work with this high-energy team. Click here for some of Bill and Craig's comments.

The Coolest Thing in Open Source Messaging (email) and Collaboration