Lgilab

LgiLab's Outbrain raises A round

Today we are happy to announce that one of our LgiLab portfolio company Oubrain is raising an A round with LightSpeed Venture and Gemini.

Outbrain provides smart blog rating and their business model will be built on their capacity to deliver powerful recommendations. Smart blog ratings provide really useful informations both for the readers and the blog/content editor.

This is the first Lab company to "graduate" to the A round stage after have been funded in seed stage. The purpose of the internet lab is precisely to fund companies until they reach a critical milestone and require more funding provided by Gemini and LightSpeed.

The news has also been covered onTechCrunch

Technorati tags: rating, blogs, techcrunch, lgilab

LightSpeed Venture Partners launch a new VC blog

Happy to announce that LightSpeed Venture Partner is just joining the community of VC blogging. It is hold by Jeremy Liew, now partner at LightSpeed previously MD at Netscape (other partners contribute too).  Rss feed is here

As i said in the past (read 10 reasons a VC should blog), there are many reasons VCs should blog. Gemini already do it, LightSpeed now does it and Lgilab also. Reading on LSVP blog on why launching a blog now

The truth is we debated the idea internally and ultimately decided we need to do a better job of two things:

1. Sharing our personal ideas, beliefs and lessons with the community of entrepreneurs we are in the business of serving.

2. Engaging on a consistent basis with entrepreneurs and opening up direct channels of communication.

 

10 reasons a VC should blog

I orginally posted this on my personnal blog. But Yoni suggested this should appear also here. Actually a challenging follow up post will arrive soon. stay tuned and read that first.

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I am often asked the question “what is the benefit of blogging for a VC?”. To be honest for me this has become so obvious that i did not ask myself this question.

I started blogging before i join a VC but as i did, i started to write more about Venture Capital as i discover this industry from the inside. We even decided to launch a blog for LgiLab. So i would not say starting a VC blog came because i thought of the good reasons first. It just came naturally.

As i got into the blogosphere i discovered many VCs run a blog. And most of the time they are really EXCELLENT. Curiously in Israel, not enough VCs are blogging (Gemini is well represented)

With retrospect here are, i believe, the TOP 10 reasons a blog should blog.

 

• 1. Gives a human voice to your VC: VCs are mostly considered as arrogant and “know it all”. A blog is your opportunity to express your human side and give a true down to earth feel to your readers. Specially if you write not only about VC (a VC does that really well)
• 2. Helps entrepreneurs prepare their meeting: you can’t even imagine how many entrepreneurs start a meeting by telling me “we read your blog”. I think this is great. By knowing how i think and what i like or don’t they can fine tune the meeting and make it better. Not meaning this is enough
• 3. Helps you with lead more efficient meeting: By helping entrepreneurs preparing better their meetings your allow yourself to run more efficient encounters. If for no better reason you can save the 5min intro on yourself.
• 4. A window to outstanding network: with the time, you will attract more readers and some of them, probably VCs and industry experts, will contact you and eventually meet you. I found those contacts to be outstandingly qualitative
• 5. Keep touch with internet reality: with a food in a blog you are closer to the internet. You understand better what user generated content is about and you are more tempted to keep up to date and try all those new services.
• 6. Create different relation with your colleagues: your colleagues will discover another you and will probably be curious to read you.
• 7. Help create some true differentiation/authority: What is the uniqueness of a VC? i believe the people. And what is the best way to showcase your uniqueness? By expressing who you are. I think a website is too static and too cold to give the right impression on who you are.
• 8. Get a Free PR Channel: i discovered that many journalists and other opinion leaders read my blog. Sometime what i write here and there is re-used (like here). A blog is a communication channel. A powerful one, free and instant one.
• 9. Source new deals: eventually some entrepreneurs will consider your blog as “special” entry door out of the official channel. I receive a big chunk of our deal flow through my personnal blog.
• 10.Help you structure your thoughts: VCs are overwhelmed with new ideas, articles, news, business plans, ..I found out that writing about something helps you clear out the fuss and produce more articulate thoughts and feedbacks (specially in meetings)

Bonus reason: Step up to the next generation before it is too late: my bet is that most VCs will have a blog within 2 years maybe less. Just like emails became popular, blog will become standard. So don’t be last and show you’re fast in adoption

My recommandation: if you still don’t have a blog, START ASAP. Like Biking, the only way to learn that is by making. If you want to know more on how to start, read blogs here is a good selection of VC Blogs

But like any communication channel it requires time, dedication, persistancy and regularity. One unique thing about blog is that you have to be open to conversations, as comments will come, and be ready too to criticism and sometime personnal attacks. I can live with that.

In a word a blog is a good investment for a VC

I recommand this complementary reading by BeyondVC

 

 

Off to Silicon Valley/San Francisco

Blogging will slow down the next 10 days. I am off to California to attend Web2.0 Conference and IsraelWebtour as well as many other events and meetings. I will of course meet with Daniel Cohen, Gemini Partner in the valley as well as LightSpeed Venture team.

This is my very first trip to Silicon Valley. Look forward to see and feel this world i am reading/writing about everyday day for a long time now.

If you are around and want to meet up contact me at ouriel (at ) lgilab – dot – com. © Andre Pogodin - FOTOLIA

Lightspeed Gemini Internet Lab’s Blog: day 1

That’s it! We decided to open our own blog. When we started thinking about it, we wanted to find a better way to explain what we do and share with whoever could be interested in our experiences, views and thoughts on the internet industry.  

A blog was a natural solution to this question. Blogs are a perfect format to establish an ongoing communication process too. Communication with those interested in what we do, Communication with those interested with what we think, Communication with those who share our passion. 

The new internet is a complex environment and as we found ourself, like most players in the industry, in a learning process we wanted to be closer to this new ecosystem made of entrepreneurs, ideas, companies, products, investors, thinkers ….A blog is helping us in doing that. 

Many VCs have already chosen a blog format to share and express themselves. Some of them are remarkably well written (like Union Square, First Round Capital…). In Israel too this starts also to be the case, but this is still a shy trend. 

This blog is the voice of several persons contributing to Lgilab activities and now also to this blog. We hope it will help our readers understand better what we do and how we work. We believe it will also be useful for entrepreneurs that are intending to contact us and meet with us. I realized that most people were reading my blog before joining a meeting. We think LgiLab Blog will be a better addition. We also think this blog could be useful for us and we look forward to your comments and reactions along with our posts.  

So what will we talk about here? We will discover it with you on the way, but expect posts about internet, web2.0 (we prefer the expression “new web”), startups, venture capital, Israel high tech and of course news about LgiLab. For information the pictures you see on the right of this blog are a selection composed of our own LGiLab photos and a random web2.0 tag from flickr. 

Hope you’ll enjoy.