Ribbit introduced itself formally to the world today. Talk about BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), but the company has adopted the line that it is “Silicon Valley’s first telephone company”. For the best coverage of the company’s proposition, read Techcrunch’s post, which goes pretty deep in understanding what’s possible.

Ribbit is a classic (and wonderful) startup problem: How do you decide what to do when everything is possible. Ribbit has a killer advantage, which is that — under the covers — it has a Class 5 soft switch, the innards of a traditional telephone company that allows it to set up, route, and terminate phone calls. No other startup can duplicate that infrastructure in less than 3-5 years; but, on top of that infrastructure, Ribbit has build a platform and a set of applications that integrate with standard Web applications and finally merge telephony and computing and that we believe give the company the chance to grow into a real, modern telephone company. That’s what leads to Ribbit’s BHAG.

We’ve been using the service, in alpha and pre-alpha, and despite all the reliability and performance issues of using a pre-release service, Ribbit has already transformed our telephony. So we tend to be total believers in Ribbit’s ability to reach its goal.

Alsop Louie Partners lead the Series A investment in Ribbit with participation from KPG Ventures in October, 2006. (The company is completing its Series B funding, lead by Allegis Capital.) But we love Ribbit for another reason; it was one of the two companies that agreed to be funded by us before we finished raising our capital. It takes a lot for an entrepreneur to take that much of chance on a new venture capital firm and, for that confidence, we owe a lot to Ted Griggs, Crick Waters, Ramani Narayan, Peter Leong and the rest of the founding team at Ribbit.