-by Scott Jacobson
One of the best parts of being an early-stage investor is getting to be part of the creation process. Partnering with very smart and passionate entrepreneurs to take the early seeds of an idea and turn those seeds into products that solve interesting, tangible customer problems. I have really enjoyed working with the Decide.com team, and am super excited for them as they launch the first version of their product to the public today. CEO Mike Fridgen wrote a great blog post (here – http://blog.decide.com/decidecom-launches), and there has been a lot of nice coverage from the tech blogosphere. But thought I’d share three quick reasons I’m excited about the company.
1.) Great founding team
At Madrona, it is part of our core strategy to build long-term partnerships with outstanding entrepreneurs. The founding team at Decide includes Oren Etzioni, who is a venture partner at Madrona, and a great founder on company #3 with Madrona (Netbot and Farecast previously) and CEO Mike Fridgen, who is also a third-time Madrona entrepreneur (Triphub and Farecast previously). Oren and Mike have built an incredibly strong team from a mix of previous Madrona portfolio companies, e-commerce leaders, and top engineers from the University of Washington.
2.) Hard IP
Over the last 18 months, Decide has built a massive proprietary database (60tb and growing) comprised of model lineages (for hundreds of thousands of devices), historical pricing (billions of price observations from thousands of sellers), and product rumors and news across the web. On top of this database, they apply advanced machine-learning and text/data-mining algorithms to make highly accurate predictions of product price changes and future model releases. This is very hard to do algorithmically, and there are very few people in the world who have done it in a way that creates value for the mass market. Fortunately, most of those people work at Decide.
3.) Solving a real consumer problem (i.e., there is a market need)
There are two simple value propositions at Decide that resonate with consumers: avoid buyer’s remorse, and save money. We’ve all had that experience where we buy a new TV and three weeks later the next model gets released that obsoletes the one we have, or we buy a camera at Best Buy, are surfing Amazon a month later, and find out we could have saved $100 if we’d held off a couple of weeks. Decide endeavors to eliminate these frustration points for consumers for all of the products we buy. The company is starting with a few categories in consumer electronics, but the need and appeal is very real across a broader set of products.
It is still very early days for the Decide team, but we are very excited about what they’ve accomplished to date and the vision going forward. Congrats to Mike, Oren, and the rest of the team on this important milestone in the life of the company. If you haven’t been to Decide yet, check it out (http://www.decide.com). And please let the team know what you think!
We are happy to announce Madrona’s most recent investment, a Series A financing for Cedexis, the Portland, OR-based market leader in community-based cloud performance monitoring and optimization. To read more about the company’s financing check out its blog. Madrona Venture Partner Len Jordan led the round.
