Our Investment in Sidebar
Building a Relationship with the Founder
In 2013, a particular twitter account started popping up in my feed more. This user was crafting tweets and linking to blog posts about mobile, and they were really good.
As someone who thinks about mobile every day, in work and for writing and investing, I was intrigued. And, it turns out he was in Palo Alto. Interesting.
He wrote a short post on push notifications that motivated me to write an entire weekend column on the topic.
I think he started reading my blog, and we started going back and forth on twitter about mobile. (Now as I’m writing this, it sounds like we were courting each other! LOL.)
Anyway, we met up a few times and I told him my interests, and he started talking about his new company.
As a second-time founder and someone maniacally focused on mobile, he shared a great vision for his next company, but he didn’t have a product yet, and it was really early.
I didn’t care. I wanted to invest.
Recognizing a Novel Vision
The reason I was comfortable making a bet on a person and an idea is that Ariel Seidman, the founder of Sidebar, appeared to know a lot about something that most other people didn’t know.
First, everyone was trying to go after consumer mobile. Ariel wasn’t. Those who weren’t focused on consumer focused on enterprise, in the traditional sense.
Ariel didn’t. Instead, he wanted to leverage an insight he had from his first company to guide him as he built a product for the second.
The result is a focus area that I have yet to see in mobile, and I’m damn excited about that!
Trusting the Founder’s Expertise
Ariel and the team are working quietly with customers and building. I know he’s intensely focused on this company and his family. That’s it.
He’s so particular about every decision he makes, I always know that any decision is thought through, fully — including this draconian decision to unfollow everyone on Twitter (including me!) and instead following only 4 or 5 accounts, like Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski.
Back in the fall, we were both invited to speak on a panel at a small mobile event in SF, so we drove up together (my car was in the shop), and we just started talking about our paths through the Valley.
He’d been here for a long time, and I, pretty new. He told me all about this first company, and how he selects investors. I told him about my interest in investing, in quite a bit of detail.
He listened closely. I’d describe it as mutual trust and respect, not built over years, but pretty quickly given our interests and goals, forged over Twitter and blogs.
Conclusion
By engaging with Ariel Seidman through social media and personal interactions, the investor was able to identify a visionary founder with a novel approach to mobile that diverged from the common consumer and enterprise focuses.
This investment demonstrates the value of looking beyond established trends and being willing to bet on a founder’s expertise and unconventional ideas, even at the earliest stages of company formation.
You can read the rest of “Why we invested in” collection here:
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