Austin Ventures provides eyebrow-raising $50M to nascent enterprise social software company
Austin Ventures is pumping $50 million into a company, as yet without a name, that wants to somehow provide social software to enterprises. The founder, and apparently the reason for the large round, is Jeff Dachis, best known as the cofounder of 90’s era web consultancy company Razorfish, that lost billions in market value when the dot-com bubble burst. For a brutal but interesting recap of Dachis’ career, see Valleywag.
I’ve been hearing a lot enterprise software folks talking about integrating social software components, but you can stick the buzzword “social” on many different types of software without creating meaningful products. At least this new company will have the funds to experiment, and anyway, it will be able to hire a strong sales team.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.