New Internet Economy Friends,
WashingtonVC is alive and well despite economic turmoil all around. We are especially proud to continue our progress on the charitable front with Grassroots.org and Make Change! Trust. In times like these the poorest and sickest citizens often end up being overlooked and the charities they depend on struggle for cash to provide necessary services. Grassroots.org is doing fabulous work providing free services to about 1000 charities including web development, hosting, domains, content management, email, consulting, SEO services, phone services, and business plan assistance with our partner, the University of Maryland Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship. The team at Grassroots.org consists of bright, hardworking, innovative servants of the nonprofit world and committed social activists, much like our Board.
Our new team leader is Shane Hankins, Executive Director. We are honored to harness Shane’s enthusiasm for technology business in the nonprofit world. He has been doing a fantastic job so far along with Katie Winterbottom, Sura Hart, Mike Maloy and the rest of their team. Please see http://www.grassroots.org/ and review our work. Let Shane know how you want to participate by mailing shane (a) grassroots.org. Also Shane and Tom Forman did a great job representing us at Courteney Cox’s house in Hollywood last week - See http://popsugar.com/1964737.
Furthermore Susan Wilder has been continuing her pro-bono assistance leading Make Change! Trust, which has recently supported such fine organizations as, CraigsList Foundation, Hope for Henry, Institute for Jewish Learning, Race for the Cure, First Descents, HeadCount.org, Walk Now for Autism, EarthCare.org, Mentors, Inc., MS Walk, HeartSongs, Benjamin Children’s Library, and others.
But alas, as Bill Clinton said in ‘92, “It’s the economy stupid”, and WashingtonVC has been hit surprisingly hard despite our merely indirect links to Wall Street. While our companies are not directly invested in or owned by such firms, one of our charities, Make Change! Trust, does have considerable exposure to what were once considered safe mutual funds. Moreover the minority of our companies that currently require current financing cannot generate it from our own family like usual, due to a paucity of liquidity events, despite a few small wins in the spring, and the fact that virtually all outside investment groups are spooked from everything, no matter what a bargain the new market pricing suggests.
Moreover the physical real estate of our investors has not been liquid or has sold at relative fire sales. So the point is that despite access to the best programmers, code, growth plans, business conceptuals, domains, brand names, etc., many companies will still not receive significant growth capital any time soon, which will slow down sales but reinvigorate innovation and efficiency.
Fortunately, on average this is a bigger concern for the outside world because many of our other companies continue on a fantastic technical and brand building innovation trajectory, and do not require significant cash currently. So the bottom line is that we are being spanked on the bottom line but not as bad as most others, knock on wood.
I cannot believe how fast the small Internet industry has caved in parallel with the broader Wall Street garbage. One would think they are not so closely linked, while in fact the whole economy is suffering, and based on a preponderance of current evidence will continue to suffer for some time. It’s really scary how many bright, once financially comfortable entrepreneurs, executives and even technicians have been contacting us about finding new work, and are willing to take a significant portion if not all their pay in sweat equity. Many of them have small companies they would practically give away at this point if they could promise their spouse a steady income stream.
Bad news for sure. But on the bright side we intend to source a significant capital stream before the broader economy turns around, and with it we will buy many targeted assets at significantly lower prices than we expected previously, and we will continue to hire the brightest Internet minds in leadership positions within our family of companies.
Despite the bad news I’d like to call out Phone.com and a couple others on their excellence amidst tumultuous times. Phone.com is growing strong. It quickly established a large following and is now recognized as one of the leading Virtual Business Phone Solutions in the market. While our team created dozens of companies over the years we anticipate this one will ultimately become the coolest, highest profile, and hopefully most profitable of all.
Phone.com is constantly innovating and adding products to its portfolio. It recently added its Text Voicemail transcription service which allows subscribers to get a text transcription of every voicemail they receive to their email. It also expanded its Greetings center and through its audio production store users can now record their own Music on Hold greetings and many other professional greetings. Its fax service also expanded and now any customer can simply click the send fax tab on their control panel and send a fax to any fax number. Try it out at http://www.phone.com/
We also encourage you to try our new no-cost phone messaging service (temporarily called Phonedot which you should try at: http://www.phone.com/phonedot/ ). This fun application (including on iPhone) lets anyone write free text messages and convert them to a synthesized voice of their choice and blast it to one or many phone numbers. Stay tuned for more developments with this super cool messaging app!
Finally, Phone.com is introducing a new international number service allowing any user to obtain a local phone number at a local cost in over 40 countries and forward to their US number.
Ari Rabban, Phone.com’s president, also has economic commentary on his blog, http://www.phone.com/blog/
DomainMarket.com has the best brands available for sale, and the world’s most experienced domain team and technologies. Watch for its market assault in the coming years, and its new website in the coming weeks. Check out some of the amazing inventory available right now at http://www.domainmarket.com/
SEO.com is selling some big national accounts and lots of small ones with its excellent growing team. Stay tuned for the official announcements.
Skateboards.com is the definition of cool, top link in Google, and fortunately selling a bunch of boards online. More innovation is coming with our series of boarding sites.
Yield Software is doing well and offering a trial of its main product, http://www.yieldsoftware.com/search-engine-marketing-free-trial-a, thanks Matt.
Graphics.net continues to produce clean innovative Web design: http://www.graphics.net - if you need any contact Mr. Benson, mike (a) graphics.net
Also my book and our newsletter are hot off the press. If you didn’t get the email below please email my sister, debra (a) washingtonvc.com and send your snail mail address:
“This is Debra Monaco from WashingtonVC. I’d like to send you a complimentary hard copy of Mike’s updated book, Make Millions and Make Change! http://www.globalpress.com/mikemann/.
Please email me your snail mail address and I’ll drop a copy in the mail for you as soon as it’s back from the printers. If you’d rather not, just let me know, but if you don’t mind we’d like your mailing address anyhow so we can keep in touch and send you a copy of our newsletter, Web Street Journal http://www.webstreetjournal.com/. Also please check out our new site and latest activities at http://www.washingtonvc.com/.”
Lots of other cool stuff going on but none of us have enough time right now, so please check out the rest linked to http://MikeMann.com/, and stay tuned for several innovative product launches in the coming months. Thanks a lot for your time and continued interest in our work. I wish you and your families all the best.
Feel free to forward this mail, blog it, or publish it in whole or in part at your discretion.