• Sign Of The Times: Startup Raps For Angel Funding

    Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

    Hop-Hopportunity

    It’s not a bubble until startups are rapping for seed funding. Mick Hagen, the founder of Undrip, a stealthy startup in San Francisco that is building a service to better filter your Twitter stream, is trying to get the attention of top angel investors with the rap video above. (Is it really that hard to get a meeting with investors these days?)

    The video doesn’t say anything about what the startup does other than it’s the “biggest move I’ve made since I dropped outta Princeton” and we’ll be crushin it from NDA to IPO.” They are already “lookin for the future exit strategies” even though they have yet to launch a product. The chorus, which I do admit is catchy, goes, “We need a angel, We need a ride.” (Full lyrics below). There is even a red sports car.

    It’s all about getting noticed, of course, in an overfunded environment. And if this video doesn’t work, they have 20 more addressed to individual super seed investors. Ron Conway, the first one should be in your inbox soon (see below—the production quality isn’t quite up to the $4,000 spent on the main video above, but it is personalized). Other investors who can be expecting a personalized pitch in rap form include Ashton Kutcher, Dave McClure, Michael Arrington, Keith Rabois, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, and Sean Parker.

    Before you completely dismiss Undrip, Hagen was involved as a co-founder of Zinch, a college admissions matching service, which was sold to Chegg. And at least they are tackling a real problem. Filtering the realtime Twitter stream is something nobody has yet cracked in a satisfying way. If their product is half as slick as their video, it might do okay.

    Here are the lyrics:

    Verse 1:
    Yo this is Undrip baby, comin hot out the kitchen
    It’s Mick on the Mic, so you might wanna listen
    Bout to knock the socks off the competition
    Biggest move I’ve made since I dropped outta Princeton
    I don’t play games like a politician
    Wouldn’t be here without a value proposition
    Ambition doesn’t get an intermission
    So I’m swingin for the fences like I did with Zinch and
    Inch by inch, row by row
    I’m gonna make this business grow
    All I need is that seed round dough
    and the flow from my Undrip fount – Say Word
    Uh yes yes y’all, we’re Thus Fresh y’all
    A cut above above the rest, obsessed with success y’all
    You know I don’t sleep, Cuz it really ain’t RESTful
    I’m always on my grind like a mortar and pestle

    Chorus:
    We need a angel, We need a ride
    We need a bump, a bump so we fly
    We’re gonna make that money off of social steam
    But we need your help to reach the dream
    We need a angel, We need a ride
    We need a bump a bump so we fly
    Undrip is about to go
    We just need an angel to unlock the flow

    Verse 2:
    Comin straight outta Soma, the valley of silicone
    In the zone, writing code til we see the break of dawn
    Learning the ropes from the CEO
    And we’ll be crushin it from NDA to IPO
    Here we go again, yeah it’s back to bootstrap
    A lot of young companies do dat do dat
    You see these other suckas and they moving at a turtle pace
    But check the way we run it when we jump over your burn rate
    New York never sleeps, well that may be
    But we never sleep either, cuz we workin on them qwerty keys
    Lookin for the future exit strategies
    If you sleep on this now, then we’ll see you at the mezzanine
    Real hot issue, cold hard currency
    Term sheet poppin’ so check check out the equity
    Mister Investor, Mister VC
    I’m down to take a number, but don’t make me take a knee


    Company: Zinch
    Website: zinch.com
    Launch Date: February 2007
    Funding: $5M

    Zinch has a simple goal: to level the college admissions playing field and provide a means by which individuality and greatness can be extracted from everyone during the admissions process. Zinch aims to give every student an equal opportunity to say, “This is me. Love me, hate me, recruit me, or trash me. This is who I am.” Students place their profiles on Zinch (with an emphasis on the non-transcript stuff that schools try so hard to uncover for best...

    Learn more
    Company: Undrip
    Website: undrip.com
    Launch Date: September 1, 2011

    Our social networks are noisy, and only getting worse – it’s a constant leakage of great content. Undrip stops that leaky faucet. What google did for the web – which is to surface the best and most relevant content – Undrip is doing for the social web.

    Learn more

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