Archive for July, 2008

Raising money isn’t the core business of any business so help is always needed and appreciated. David Jouarisse have been helping me and VideoPlaza with this seed round in many ways. The reason I’m writing this is that I want David’s rather unique approach and attitude to be highlighted.

I met David early in the fund raising process and he has been a great support all the way through. Since he’s been working as a VC himself, he gave me lots of great advice and coaching. But not only that, he also put me in contact to many relevant people, helped me with the pitch during late nights and even took a cab ride with me to the airport in Paris just to catch a potential angel for 15 minutes. David is an advisor that walks the walk.

The photo above is actually from that airport trip when we on the way back met two cool people from South Africa and New York.

Thanks David for all the support!

Running a startup, getting funding for your business can be perceived as a business of its own. And well, somehow it is, especially for first time entreprenuers like us. But now we’re there and it all turned out better than we could have ever imagined.

Today we got €420k in the bank from one of Swedens top VC firms, Creandum, and two business angels Henrik Torstensson and Magnus Hultman. From my mobile office in a Starbucks in London, I’ll tell you a bit more about these guys.

The investors

So far, we’re really impressed with Creandum. The company is run by a group of really good people and they haven’t disappointed us on a single point. Fredrik Cassel who is our main contact is smart, professional and have been really helpful this way. The company has also invested in Xtract, working with social advertising intelligence, Cint, a marketplace for online panels and Edgeware, selling robust server systems for online video.

Henrik Torstensson and I are not only neighbours and love great coffee, we also connect in a good way when it comes to business. Henrik is today VP Business development at Stardoll and has a background in successful Swedish internet companies like TradeDoubler and Spray.  In addition to making his first angel investment, Henrik will enrich our board with his sharp analysis around online advertising and building a business.

Magnus Hultman is the best enterprise sales guy I have met in my life. You like him the first time you meet him, (he’s a sales guy god dammit!) and for some reason that first affection simply doesn’t wear off. This guy knows everything there is to know about selling your product. Magnus has a background at FramFab and founded Instadia, a web metrics company, in Sweden. The company made an exit to Omniture where he today operates the sales for Scandinavia. The plan is to recruit this guy, let’s see how that goes…

This seed funding will give us the muscles we need at this stage to take the company where it need to go. Top priorities are getting our product really scalable and expanding sales outside Sweden.

Update: In the press: PaidContent, NewTeeVee, The Alarm:Clock, theNextWeb, Internetworld, Resume, Dagens Media & Medievärlden.

While Stockholm and Sweden goes into their summer sleep, I’m heading to the ever insomnic London. On Monday I’ll temporarily move in a small apartment near Marylebone for four weeks. The purpose is to learn more about the Brittish online video advertising market and to meet a lot of people.

I’ll try to meet up with people working in agencies, advertisers, publishers, ad-networks, streaming providers etc. Do you have any advice on interesting people I should meet up? Send me an e-mail at: sorosh@videoplaza.se or call me at +44 7530 885 492.

Ad:tech London is the event that gathers the European online advertising business. Videoplaza will attend the event will full ammo.

I have a keynote session with the topic “5 steps to make online video profitable”. I’ll try to attack the issue both from a publisher and advertiser perspective.

Besides the talk, we’re having a stand, among the other 150-200 companies (!), where we’re showing our fresh product with demo’s and hope to meet a lot of nice people. So if you’re going to be there, make sure to come by and say hi.

Get your calendar out and book September 24-25.