In our continuing series discussing some of our investment themes, we'd like to introduce a topic that we're calling "glue". Glue is our term for the web infrastructure layer that facilitates the connections between web services and content companies. As this ecosystem becomes increasingly complex and as web sites and web based applications rely on more underlying services, this "glue" layer of the Internet is becoming more and more core to overall web infrastructure. Commerce,...

Continue reading Theme: Glue

Now that we've blogged about our thematic investing approach at Foundry Group, we thought we'd spend some time explaining some of the themes we are excited about. Yesterday we wrote about our interest in next-generation human-computer-interaction applications and technologies, and today we are going to talk about another one of our active themes. One of the areas we are deeply interested in is what we (and many others) call the implicit web. While it may...

Continue reading Theme: Implicit Web

As we mentioned in the previous post, at Foundry Group we structure much of our investment analysis and thinking around themes. For us, a "thematic investment approach" is something broader than investing in market sectors, rather we look at the world in a horizontal fashion. A theme is applicable across consumer and enterprise customers, and is usually based on an underlying technology, protocol or broad market trend that we believe will drive investment opportunities...

Continue reading Theme: Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Now that we are up and running and making new investments, one of the questions we are often asked is "what types of companies do you guys like to invest in?" That is usually followed up with "what sectors do you find interesting?" The easy question to answer is the first; we like to invest in seed and early-stage information technology companies. The harder question is the one about which sectors we invest in. We...

Continue reading What Is "Thematic Investing?"