Prolific investor Jeff Clavier has 81 deals to date, with several successful exits in his pocket— including Mint, Truveo and most recently Disney’s acquisition of Tapulous. As the founder of SoftTech VC, he is technically a micro VC, but he prefers the far sexier title of “Super Angel.”
We talked to Clavier on Wednesday on TechCrunch TV, for his take on the pulse of seed stage funding and the sectors he’s zeroing in on. Calling it a “seller’s market,” he says that valuations are still on the high end in the crowded market, but he is actively looking for attractive deals in the B2B, B2C web services segment. He already has 20 deals in this space, including EventBrite and DNAnexus. When I pressed him to be more specific, he said his next purchase will likely help “publishers make more money on something that they do.”
Unfortunately coy; however, he did expound on his acute regret for passing up on LinkedIn, Twilio and Foursquare. He had an opportunity to invest in Foursquare last summer, but didn’t recognize the long term opportunity at the time:
“So it wasn’t valuation at all [unlike LinkedIn and Twilio], I chatted with Dennis in July of last year, I liked the concept, I liked Dennis, very smart. I liked the gaming aspect that they were introducing to get users engaged… I didn’t see the long term retention. That was sort of in July, so I wasn’t exactly clear as to what I wanted to do. Went on vacation, came back , Foursquare was all the rage then and there was sort of no way to get back in. So I sort of passed by omission.”
While the valuations of the main players (the pure plays like Gowalla, Foursquare) in geo-location are now too high, he says, there are appealing layers within the space. He has just invested in one company (the investment has not been announced yet) that he says aggregates geo-location data from several sources and uses it for a very targeted, specific application. See the rest of our interview above.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most active seed stage investors in Web 2.0 startups. Since 2004, Jeff has invested 110+ consumer internet startups in areas like social media, monetization, search, gaming or B2B/B2C web services. These investments are typically located in Silicon Valley, New-York and Boulder. With over 20 years of operational, entrepreneurial and venture capital experience, Jeff is able to add relevant perspective...
Foursquare is a geographical location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. Users share their location with friends by “checking in” via a smartphone app or by text message. Points are awarded for checking in at various venues. Users can connect their Foursquare accounts to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, which can update when a check in is registered. By checking in a certain number of times, or in different locations, users can collect virtual badges. In addition, users...
SoftTech VC is an early stage venture capital firm managing seed stage funds, SoftTech VC II and SoftTech VC III. SoftTech VC funds are backed by a mix of institutional and private investors. SoftTech has consistently invested in 20+ new opportunities a year in consumer Internet companies, including next gen commerce, mobile and SaaS. Founder and managing partner Jeff Clavier launched SoftTech VC in 2004, making the original 20+ investments (our non-traditional ‘Fund I’) as a business angel, investing his...
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