When we were raising our first fund, the founders of Ribbit decided to take a chance on us. They accepted the terms for our financing of the company before we had even completed the first closing of the fund (which happened in August, 2006). Now, just two years later, BT (British Telecom) has bought the company. This is bookends: The founders of the company helped us raise our fund by showing our investors that experienced entrepreneurs would agree to work with us and now they have made us look good by creating our first outcome. We feel pretty good about these four guys, the cofounders: Ted Griggs, Ramani Narayan, Peter Leong, and ...

I am a deep domain expert in Scrabulous. At least, I'm a deep domain expert if expertise is defined as spending hundreds of hours playing the damn game. I spend more time playing Scrabulous than I do playing PackRat and I could make millions of dollars from that game (since we invested in the company). You would have to have been asleep for the past year not to know that Scrabulous was developed by a web development firm owned by two brothers in India and that the brothers were sued by the owners of the official Scrabble game for violation of copyrights and tradmarks. Speculation has run rampant about what the owners of Scrabble, Hasbro and Mattel, both ...

I have hundreds of friends I've never met. Being a gentleman of a certain vintage, I like the idea that attractive young women will accept my friendship without having ever actually met me. So you might notice in my Facebook profile that I have quite a few such "friends". Other Facebook users seem to want to be friends with famous people or visible people or whatever. I have been hearing the drumbeat about FriendFeed recently, so I signed up in an idle moment a week ago. Little did I realize that I unleashed a frenzy of new friendings; immediately, I started getting "subscription requests" from people I had never met and who did not identify themselves by their real ...