Portfolio Update Part 4

Here's the fourth and last part of my 2010 portfolio update. The first three are here, here and here. The last (but definitely not least) update takes me back to Berlin, which is not only home to my portfolio company Momox, covered in the first update, but also to another great company that I've invested in together with XING-founder Lars Hinrichs: samedi.

samedi offers a SaaS booking and resource planning solution for doctors in Germany. In some ways, samedi is doing for physicians what Clio is doing for lawyers – provide an easy, secure way to manage your practice from any device that is connected to the Web. Using samedi, physicians and clinics can also easily offer their patients a way to conveniently make appointments online, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. samedi also allows healthcare providers to optimize their practice workflow using a simple ERP solution and lets practices, health insurance companies and other players in the healthcare industry collaborate online.

Bringing the healthcare industry, which at least in Germany is pretty old-school and bureaucracy-ridden, into the Cloud age is a very tough nut to crack but there's a huge reward for the company that pulls that off. And if there's anyone who can do that, it's the founders of samedi, Katrin Keller and Dr. Alexander Alscher who have the relentless persistence (and the ability to do with very little sleep) that is necessary in that market. After a slow-ish start in 2008 and 2009, samedi started to take off in 2010. Having grown revenues six-fold in 2010, samedi is now used by more than 2,000 physicians and other health practitioners to manage more than one million patients. Thank you, Katrin and Alex, and on to a great 2011!

This was the last part of my little series. My other investments have not or not yet been announced, but expect to hear some exciting news pretty soon!

Portfolio Update Part 3

Here's the third part of my 2010 portfolio review. If you're new here, please start with part 1, move on to part 2 and then (hopefully) return to this post.

The next stop is Crakow in Poland, home of inFakt.pl. inFakt.pl was founded in 2008 by two extremely sharp students of the Cracow University of Science and Technology who wanted to build a simple, easy-to-use, web-based invoicing and billing application for small businesses in Poland. I invested in the company together with Team Europe Ventures early last year.

2010 saw the company dramatically expand its product offering to become a complete accounting solution for SMBs in Poland and grow the team from just five people at the beginning of the year to 14 today. To date, more than 80,000 companies have signed up for the software, which is marketed using a freemium model, making us the largest provider of our kind in the Polish market. Dziękuję bardzo, Wiktor and Sebastian, and congrats on a very successful year!

Another investment that I made in 2010 is Propertybase. Propertybase, based in Munich, offers a simple-to-use yet powerful software solution (do you see a pattern here?) for people in the real estate industry. It offers real estate developers, agents and brokers a complete CRM solution which allows them to capture leads, create sale and lease offers and agreements, manage listings, track payments and more. Since the software is entirely web-based, users can enjoy all the SaaS advantages that make the movement from on-premise to on-demand so irresistible: Never worry about updates, backups and security, access to your data from anywhere, easy integration with other Cloud-based offerings.

Apparently the real estate industry worldwide has been waiting longingly for a solution like this: In 2010, Propertybase won customers from more than ten countries and four continents and grew its customer base by more than threefold. And our customers really love us – so far our churn has, amazingly, been zero. Thank you, Mike and Max, supa g'machd!

Portfolio Update Part 2

Continuing my little 2010 portfolio review (here's part 1), the next stop after San Francisco (Zendesk), Vancouver (Clio) and Berlin (Momox) is Edinburgh, home of FreeAgent Central. By launching a flurry of innovative new features such as multi-currency support or project profitability analysis, in 2010 the FreeAgent team has shown again who's setting the bar for online accounting. An incredibly powerful yet simple-to-use application is what 1000s of users love us for (as well as the press), and is the reason why we've won a Software Satisfaction Award for the second year. And there's more to come. 2010 has been a big year for the company in other ways as well: In March we announced that we've taken a minority investment from and entered into a strategic partnership with IRIS, the leading supplier of software for accountancy practices in the UK with over 14,000 practice customers (50% market share!). Kudos and a huge thank you go to Ed, Roan, Olly and everyone else at FreeAgent Central.

The next portfolio company takes me to Tokyo. Konnichi wa, myGengo. myGengo is a pretty recent investment of mine which I've done about half a year ago together with Dave McClure and other angel investors. myGengo is a crowdsourcing marketplace for human translations – think Amazon Mechanical Turk for translations. myGengo connects people who need translations with qualified translators in a way that's much more efficient than it used to be and thus allows it to offer high-quality translations done by certified translators at affordable prices. Thanks to this very clever idea, extremely strong execution and lots of innovations (like an iPhone translation service and a very smart API), as well as a rapidly growing list of language pairs, my Gengo has more than doubled translation volume and revenues in every quarter this year. Even so, the young startup is of course just scratching the surface of the huge, multi-billion dollar translation industry, which makes me extremely excited about the opportunity ahead. Thank you very much and doumo arigatou gozaimasu, Rob and Matt.

Portfolio update (part 1)

As 2010 is drawing to a close I’d like to take a moment to give you a quick update on my angel investment activities and more importantly, thank the incredibly talented and hard-working people who have made it such an amazing year.

Since becoming a full-time angel investor in 2008 I’ve made 14 seed investments, with 4-5 additional ones being on the way. Except for two of my first investments that didn’t work out – rookie mistakes, fortunately pretty small ones – I’m absolutely blown away by the success of each and every company in my portfolio.

Some highlights:

Zendesk has had a phenomenal year. In May we announced that we’ve reached 5,000 paying customers. We didn’t publish an updated number since then but I think it’s no secret that the number of Zendesk lovers worldwide has continued to explode throughout the year. With a world-class management team and Board, one of the best products and brands in B2B software and a recent $19M cash infusion Zendesk is ideally poised to bring Cloud-based zen and good karma to even more people in 2011. Mange tak to Mikkel, Morten, Alex, Michael and the whole crew.

Speaking of the Cloud, 2010 may mark a tipping point with respect to the adoption of Cloud-based services in the legal technology field: In 2010 my portfolio company Clio, which provides a web-based practice management solution for solo lawyers and small law firms, has grown its customer base by more than 400%. The company also continues to launch new features and initiatives pretty much on a weekly basis, boasts (by far) the highest trial-to-subscription conversion rate that I’ve ever seen and has a ton of great new stuff in the pipeline. Thanks and merci to you, Jack and Rian, and your growing team of hand-picked rock-star developers and industry experts.

The development of Momox, which has bought more than 8.4 million used books, CDs, DVDs and games from private sellers since 2006, has been equally impressive. We’ve grown revenue by more than 2.5x , recruited two stellar executives to head logistics and marketing, moved to a new 85,000 square foot warehouse, relaunched our online shop, raised a couple of million Euros from Acton Capital Partners and scaled up the whole organization to make sure that we can handle our continued growth. Huge kudos to Christian Wegner and his 150+ people in Berlin for this gigantic and successful effort – jut jemacht!

More in part 2.

Zendesk - Help Desk 2.0

Following my long-due update on Pageflakes here’s an update on what I’ve been doing since I’ve left Pageflakes. After spending some time with my family at a beautiful place in the sun, I started to look for new opportunities (to be perfectly honest I of course couldn’t resist researching new ideas while we were still on Barbados. Caribbean beaches and a DSL connection, what more can you ask for?). For various reasons I wasn’t yet ready to start my own thing again so I started to look for existing early-stage companies where I could come in as an angel investor and advisor. To some degree I “went to the dark side” (of funding) as it’s sometimes referred to but I’m really trying to be worthy of the term “angel” investor by really trying to help my companies in many different ways.

The first company I’ve made an investment in is Copenhagen-based Zendesk, founded in 2007 by a rock-star team around CEO Mikkel Asger Svane. This is no new news since it was announced last June and covered by Om Malik and others but I still wanted to blog about it here. If you don’t know Zendesk yet, the company offers a beautifully simple yet powerful on-demand help desk solution. You can buy and operate the system online and never have to worry about downtime, upgrades, security, backup or training. Setup is extremely easy and you can be up and running in hours.

Any business that serves more than a handful of customers needs a help desk solution in order to handle customer questions and support requests. Existing solutions are expensive, painfully difficult to set up and hard to use. Zendesk combines a professional-grade feature set with a beautifully simple Ajax-based user interface that resembles everyday web applications. If you want to have more productive and happier customer agents and want to save money along the way, check it out!