Larry Page thinks we are, as a population, too negative. Especially the tech community.

It’s a topic that he tackled a few times during his surprise Q&A after this morning’s Google I/O keynote, and it actually ended up being one of my favorite bits from the entire three hour presentation.

The solution? Amongst other things, Larry wishes the world had some sort of permanent Burning Man-esque place for crazy builders to just be crazy. A place with less societal pressure, and without antiquated laws makin’ things sticky.

Early on in his post-keynote speech, Page dug into the tech community for focusing too much on Company A vs. Company B:

“… We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.”

It’s something I’ve touched on before, and have been meaning to go back to for a while now. Even when something is quite clearly labeled as an experiment from day one — as with Google Glass — we collectively rush to lampoon it.

“No one in the entire world would want this!”, shouts one site. “It’s the next Segway!” shouts a dozens others. “But at least they’re trying something crazy,” shouts pretty much no one.

Is Google Glass a bit strange? Absolutely! It’s weird as hell. But it’s also a rare example of a company using their mountain of spare funds to try something crazy. It’s Sergey Brin gettin’ his Tony Stark on. It’s something we should absolutely be encouraging. It doesn’t have to win or lose. Few companies have the resources and talent to build crazy, real-world crap just to see what happens. Even fewer of those are willing to.

In response to a question on how we could change the tide, and make the world a more positive place for people to build weird new things:

Yeah that’s a really good question. I think people are naturally concerned about change. We’re changing quickly, but some of our institutions, like some laws, aren’t changing with that. The laws [about technology] cant be right if it’s 50 years old — that’s before the Internet. Maybe more of us need to go into other areas to help them improve and understand technology.

We don’t want our world to change too fast. But maybe we could set apart a piece of the world .. I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

(If you think about it, this is exactly what Google is doing with Glass, constrained to limitations of not actually having a dedicated physical space to do it in)

Is it a bit Island Of Doctor Moreau? Sure, though it probably involves more rockets and robots than it does Leopard-Men and Beast Folk. But I’d buy a house there — or at the very least, I’d book myself an annual trip.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Superfly launched at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2010 with plans to become the Mint.com of travel, or more specifically, for your rewards and frequent flier miles and travel spending. Following Kayak’s lead, over time, the startup added metasearch capabilities, integrating rewards and points into the flight booking process. Its approach attracted ex-Kayak CFO Bill Smith, who began advising the startup after leaving Kayak before its IPO.

Under his guidance, and backed by seed funding from travel veterans like Smith and Travelport Chairman Jeff Clarke, Superfly is today launching a product that clearly shows the travel startup is headed in a new direction. Whether you call it a pivot or not, Superfly founder Jonathan Meiri tells us that the team eventually became frustrated by the limitations of metasearch and simply trying to “build a better Kayak,” and has instead decided to move in a new direction, focusing on the areas where it can actually provide more value.

“The reality was that we’ve been fairly successful at acquiring customers at a significantly lower cost than traditional travel players, and, over time, our customers had entrusted us with a boatload of their travel data,” Meiri tells us. They quickly realized that this “share-of-wallet” data was its most valuable data, so, over the last nine months, Superfly has shifted its focus exclusively to that data.

During that time, Superfly developed Superbox, which, like LinkedIn, looks at a user’s email contacts to suggest new connections, and like TripIt organizes your itineraries, the service allows users to view and organizes their travel history.

Thousands of users are now our using Superbox to find lost miles buried in their email, the founder says. Beyond finding those lost accounts and emails, the startup’s patent-pending tech extracts data from key data points within emails, like receipts, itineraries, offers and boarding passes, for example, to build a deeper personal travel wallet.

Today, Superfly is adding an important piece on top of Superbox in an effort to expose these emails to users to help them better manage their travel. The product, called Travel Emails, is also part of the startup’s move to collect more nuanced data on your travel behaviors so that it can target flights, awards and promotions more effectively.

Essentially, the new tool collects users’ travel emails in a searchable timeline-type interface, which makes this data easier to parse. In a way, it’s not unlike the capabilities offered by TripIt, while focusing more on aggregating user travel data in a single interface, giving your travel info its own dedicated hub, rather than having it be drowned out in the noise of your inbox.

Superfly has been keen to streamline travelers’ ability to find promotions for their trips, along with loyalty updates for frequent fliers, reservations and so on. However, it’s been tough for the startup to offer any kind of real personalization from the limited publicly available travel profile data out there.

Getting access to this data is important, Meiri says, because it helps increase the opportunities for value (and revenue) generation. Of course, there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with access to this personal data, so the founder was quick to assure us that Superfly with never sell that data to third-parties, instead allowing travel suppliers to target offers to users based on the more robust travel profiles it can create from this data.

“Beyond creating value for consumers, travel suppliers can now leverage the aggregated traveler data to provide valuable offers and promotions to the highest value travelers,” the former Kayak CFO says, “and consumers can now receive these offers simply by joining Superfly.”

The last 10 years in travel have been dominated by the rise of meta search and OTAs. These companies have generated a tremendous amount of the value for shareholders by creating mass market tools, arbitraging web traffic and making affiliate revenue. While this game will continue to work for a while, Meiri says, the next ten years are going to be all about personalization. And personalization, of course, is all about consumer data.

For more, find Superfly at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Professional networking and profile startup Zerply is introducing two new features today to help its members better advertise their skills and to help employers better source candidates for open positions. Work Images allows users to attach an 800

Editor’s note: Bill Ready is CEO of Braintree, an online and mobile payment provider to many of the top apps in the App Store, including Uber, Airbnb, Angry Birds, OpenTable, Fab and HotelTonight. Follow him on Twitter @williamready.

When asked about a Facebook app for iPad in November 2010, Mark Zuckerberg brushed off the question with a quip. “iPad’s not mobile. Next question…. It’s not mobile, it’s a computer, it’s a different thing.” Since then, Facebook has evolved its view of mobile, having dealt with the struggles of its user base moving to mobile before they had an answer to mobile monetization. However, the debate over whether tablets are mobile devices has continued.

The introduction of the Samsung Galaxy S4 may finally put an end to the debate. The Galaxy S has been one of the best-selling smartphone models ever and the next incarnation will have a 5-inch display – just under the size of the Samsung Note II. Now, the next best-selling phone on the market may, in fact, be a tablet that people are carrying around in their (oversized) pockets.

The similar user experience on smartphones and tablets has led to the convergence of the two devices. Smart phones are getting bigger (iPhone 5 increased from a 3.5-inch to a 4-inch screen) and tablets are getting smaller (iPad mini – now the best-selling iPad model – reduced the size of the iPad screen by nearly two inches). Perhaps the best exemplification of this phenomenon is the Samsung Galaxy Note II, which sports a 5.5-inch display and has been dubbed a “phablet” because it can be used as both a tablet and a phone.

Those that would argue that tablets are just a new form of PC point to data that tablet usage is rapidly cannibalizing PC usage. Tablets now account for a third of the overall PC market, and consumers who own tablets find they are using their PCs less. It is also the case that 90 percent of consumers use their tablets at home, instead of a PC. However, it is also the case that tablets are clearly being used as portable devices, with 40 percent of consumers using them outside the home.

In addition to being commonly used outside the home, the user experience on a tablet is fundamentally different than on a laptop or PC and is much more akin to a smartphone than a PC. For example, GPS and native applications allow for context-driven experiences across the web on both smartphones and tablets. Touchscreen displays and the absence of a physical keyboard require a style of interaction on both that is largely driven by context-aware experiences (i.e. applications that know about you or what you want so that you don’t have to enter lots of information for the application to work).

The implications of this are profound. Mobile devices are becoming the primary computing devices now that they pack the power to perform many of the things that people previously did on their PCs. Nowhere is this more evident than in e-commerce where mobile devices now account for more than 30 percent of all e-commerce shopping sessions. That percentage is more than doubling year over year, meaning that by the 2013 holiday shopping season, mobile devices will likely account for more than half of all e-commerce shopping. It is also the case that consumers aren’t buying mobile devices with the primary purpose of making phone calls anymore. In fact, phone calls are only the fifth most popular feature on smartphones – behind browsing the web, using social media, playing music, and playing games.

This radical shift in consumer behavior has created huge opportunities for those who have embraced it and massive threats for those who have failed to. Uber and HotelTonight are great examples of wholly new commerce experiences that are only possible because of mobile devices. At the same time, traditional e-commerce providers are seeing their conversion rates drop by 75 percent or more on mobile sessions if they have not properly optimized for mobile with context-driven experiences, such as one-touch checkout. Brick-and-mortar retail locations now deal with the showrooming phenomenon where more than 40 percent of consumers will use their mobile devices to price check items and perhaps complete orders online while in the store.

If the Samsung Galaxy S4 is as successful as its predecessor and manages to create the perfect combination of phone and tablet, the shift in consumer behavior toward mobile devices as the primary computing devices will certainly accelerate. Along with that will be a meaningful acceleration in the opportunities and threats that are posed by consumers shifting to mobile.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This morning Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg officially launched “Lean In,” a non-profit organization aimed at creating a global community that encourages women to continue to be active and ambitious in their careers even as they start families.

The launch of the organization, which Sandberg co-founded with Rachel Thomas, comes less than a week before Sandberg’s highly anticipated book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is set to make its debut on March 11. All the profits from the book sales will go into LeanIn.org, and Sandberg has also contributed her own funds to the organization.

Not surprisingly, the onboarding experience at LeanIn.org is heavily integrated with Facebook. In order to join the movement, share your own story, receive updates, and the like, you are asked to sign up for the Lean In page with your Facebook profile. Once you’ve done that, you’re then directed to “Like” the Lean In page to receive extra tips and written updates. It’s a clear sign that, despite the speculation that Sandberg may be looking toward a long-term move into the political realm, as of now she is still heavily invested in her day job.

While the Lean In movement is aimed primarily at women, in a blog post announcing the organization, Sandberg points out that its message can relate to both genders. “By talking openly about the challenges that we all face in the workplace and at home, we can work towards solutions together,” she writes, adding later:

“Together, we can break down the stereotypes that hold us all back, making our organizations more productive and our homes happier. Together, we can create a world where everyone—women and men, girls and boys—has true choice and equal opportunity to follow his or her dreams.”

It’s a big worldwide movement, but it is ultimately rooted in the small and local realm. The organization wants people to create their own “Lean In Circles,” small groups “that meet regularly to share and learn together—like a book club focused on helping members achieve their goals.” Lean In provides “Circle Kits” to provide an outline for disucssion. And while Circles are meant to have a big in-person element, Lean In also has an online space for organizing the group and staying connected with it. To create a circle, you can either log in through Facebook or create a profile with a user name and password.

The Lean In concept stems from Sandberg’s assertion that many women begin to “lean back” from their careers at the age that they start thinking about having children, effectively cutting off their opportunities for real success in the workplace at the knees. She described the phenomenon in her May 2011 commencement address at Barnard College thusly:

“Because what I have seen most clearly in my 20 years in the workforce is this: Women almost never make one decision to leave the workforce. It doesn’t happen that way. They make small little decisions along the way that eventually lead them there. Maybe it’s the last year of med school when they say, I’ll take a slightly less interesting specialty because I’m going to want more balance one day. Maybe it’s the fifth year in a law firm when they say, I’m not even sure I should go for partner, because I know I’m going to want kids eventually.

These women don’t even have relationships, and already they’re finding balance, balance for responsibilities they don’t yet have. And from that moment, they start quietly leaning back.”

With the new book as well as the organization, Sandberg is encouraging women to push back against that status quo, and instead lean in to their careers — and encouraging men to support them in that.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough, the native video advertising company. Follow him on Twitter at @dgreenberg. James Navin is the vice president of Strategic Operations for Sharethrough. Follow him on Twitter @jnavin.

There has been a lot of talk in the digital media trade press about native advertising and the opportunities for advertisers. Yet, much less has been written about the opportunities and implications for digital publishers. But, first things first…

What Is “Native Advertising”?

Native advertising is a concept that gained traction in the digital ad industry in 2012. It refers to digital ad formats that integrate more seamlessly (yet transparently) into website aesthetics, user experiences and/or editorial in ways that offer more value to both advertisers and readers. Put simply, native ads follow the format, style and voice of whatever platform they appear on.

Over recent months, the conversation about native advertising has focused largely on the pros and cons of just one facet of the larger movement: publisher-produced sponsored posts on editorial sites. However, native advertising is an umbrella concept that encompasses much more, starting with Google Search Ads and now extending to Promoted Videos on YouTube, Sponsored Stories on Facebook, Promoted Tweets on Twitter, promoted videos on sites like Devour and Viddy, promoted content on apps like Pulse and Flipboard, branded playlists on Spotify, promoted posts on Tumblr, sponsored check-ins on Foursquare, and brand-video content integrations produced by sites like Men’s Journal and Vice.

What ties these seemingly disparate ad products together is one common theme: The ad’s visual design and user experience are native to the site itself, and these native ad placements are filled with quality brand content of the same atomic unit (videos, posts, images) as is natural to that site.

Native ad executions are not new. For decades brands have been integrated in unique ways into media, such as product placements in TV sponsorships or in “Special Advertising Sections” in print magazines. But it’s only recently that digital advertisers and publishers have started to conceive analogous executions on the web.

Benefits Of “Native” To Advertisers

Brand advertisers are expecting to benefit from native advertising in at least two ways:

1. Higher perception and ad effectiveness via placements to which the reader isn’t blind. Native placements are not simply right rail boxes, but integrated with the native user experience of the site, whether a stream, feed, pin layout, check-in flow or video list. For example, Facebook and Twitter both integrate native ad placements directly into users’ content feeds with Sponsored Stories, rather than just relying on 300 x 250 banner ad placements sitting on the right column of their sites.
2. Increased brand perception because the brand isn’t detracting from user experience by merely consuming webpage real estate. In fact, when done well, the ad execution can actually enhance the user experience. For example, sponsored posts on BuzzFeed regularly generate sharing numbers that are equivalent to their editorial content.

The result of the above will be higher brand engagement (whether measurable by clicks, engagements, sharing or brand-awareness studies) and brand perception, and, therefore, higher ad effectiveness.

The benefits to publishers are, naturally, the inverse of the above:

• A user experience that isn’t compromised by the advertiser but, in good ad executions, enhanced by it.
• The willingness of the advertiser to pay a higher CPM due to the increased effectiveness of the ad.

Native Opportunities For Publishers

Unfortunately, the biggest benefit of native digital ads is also their biggest drawback. That is, to the extent that the best native ads are customized for a given web publication and its audience, they become more difficult to produce and sell at scale. And if a publisher lacks a direct sales team and/or sufficient scale to be interesting to advertisers and agencies, it may have trouble monetizing the ad opportunities most native to its site.

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets and Facebook’s Sponsored Stories are probably the most oft-cited examples of native digital advertising. And, until relatively recently, these large platforms have been the primary beneficiaries of the native movement because they’ve offered the only opportunity for digital media buyers to distribute brand content through native ads at scale.

But what if the Facebook or Twitter ad products aren’t the best strategy for a given marketing execution?  Likewise, how might the more conventional, editorially driven digital publishers capitalize on the desire by advertisers to leverage “native” across the rest of the web?

The Native “Adscape”

To answer the questions posed above, it might be helpful to consider the wider native advertising landscape. As previously mentioned, the major web platforms of record have set the tone for native by providing brands the opportunity to run advertisements at scale within users’ news feeds. However, these ad opportunities, as large as they are, are currently both specific and limited to each social network. And while rumors have emerged about a potential Facebook ad network that would distribute Facebook’s ads to the rest of the web, nothing has emerged quite yet. This limitation to a given site or platform represents a “closed” platform model.

So what about marketers who want other opportunities, different audiences or new environments for their videos, posts or other forms of branded content? What options might they have?

Top-tier publishers and platforms, such as Forbes, Flixster, The Atlantic, Devour and Pulse, as well as ad platforms such as Outbrain, Inpowered and Sharethrough, have developed strategies and tools that allow marketers to distribute brand content on publishers across the web. These “open” environments provide both advertisers and publishers with flexibility to “go native” with their media strategies without having to be limited to a single ad execution or platform for promotion.

In the “Native Adscape” (left) we attempt to define the leading players in this nascent market in order to shine a floodlight on the exciting and extended world of native advertising — beyond Facebook, Twitter and sponsored posts.

We categorize their distribution models as “social”, “editorial” and “open” or “closed” so as to inform the advertisers and publishers of their opportunities to participate in the native movement. It represents many of the companies that are currently moving the digital advertising industry forward with more effective native ad solutions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Iron Man” was one of the biggest winners during the Super Bowl blackout on Sunday. The Paramount Pictures film received as many as 2,000 new Facebook fans per minute following its commercial, which happened to be the first one CBS cut to after the power in the Superdome went out during the big game.

The “Iron Man” page exceeded the next largest Super Bowl advertiser’s growth by a factor of seven, according to data provided by Facebook analytics and advertising company Optimal. This was largely because the commercial for the third film in the comic book franchise included a call to action to see an extended trailer on the movie’s Facebook page. Perhaps because of the game delay from the power outage, viewers were more likely to turn to the social network and seek out the page. Click here for a closer look at the graph below and to compare the growth of other Super Bowl advertisers.

Optimal notes that not only were viewers coming to the page and viewing the extended trailer, but they were also sharing it. The video post has more than 59,000 shares and 88,000 Likes. More than 57 percent of users who shared the trailer were women with an average age of 33. This demographic was 7 times less likely to have been a fan of “Iron Man” before Sunday, according to Optimal’s Audience Matrix. The U.S. fanbase of the page skews 61 percent male with an average age of 24.

From the distribution of Likes per minute, it does not appear as though the “Iron Man” page was running Facebook ads on Sunday, so the new fans are most likely the result of Super Bowl advertising and organic News Feed stories about users’ friends interacting with the page.

“Iron Man” also gained significantly more fans than other movies that advertised during the Super Bowl. “Oz The Great and Powerful,” which included the hashtag #disneyoz after its commercial but no mention of Facebook, got only a slight bump in new fans. “Star Trek” barely registers on the graph below, as it was gaining fewer than 17 new Likes per minute. The commercial for that movie included a call to action to download an iOS app from the App Store, but no mentions of social media pages.

“Fast & Furious 6″ was another movie that advertised during the Super Bowl and included a Facebook mention, but Optimal did not track the Likes by minute for the page. According to our own PageData tracking tool, the movie’s page gained 214,976 new Likes that day, nearly 6 times more than the day before. Its three posts on Sunday received between 16,000 and 60,000 shares each, though we don’t have data on how many of those shares were likely from new fans versus the franchise’s more than 24 million existing fans.

Optimal says the trends from the Super Bowl are a reminder of how television and social media can work together to drive awareness and engagement for a brand. Advertisers wouldn’t have been able to predict the blackout, but they could perhaps consider other ways to time their promotions to maximize the opportunities for users to take action on or offline. The company wrote in a blog post:

“Although the blackout was accidental, the minute-by-minute social data shows the potential for interplay between television, online content and social sharing, and how advertisers need to think holistically about how channels work together to create incremental reach and interest in their products.  In Iron Man 3’s case, the promise of exclusive online content, a ready social audience plus a bit of lucky timing became the fuel that rapidly propelled Tony Stark’s image to a new audience.”

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

ShareMyPlaylists, the Spotify community and playlist sharing site, has released an API so that developers can get access to its treasure trove of playlist data — 120,000 playlists, referencing a total of 20 million tracks — and start to build apps or integrations on top of the service. The news will be formally announced at Music Hack Day Stockholm this weekend, an event that the company is sponsoring and where CEO and founder Kieron Donoghue hopes he’ll get a “feel” for the types of apps and who might leverage its data.

It’s potentially interesting data, too. The user-generated playlists themselves have quite a lot of metadata attached, such as the number of plays (or popularity), related playlist recommendations, artists featured, genre, playlist author, and track/playlist running times. In addition, ShareMyPlaylists publishes chart data — top 50 playlists, top 50 tracks, and top 50 artists — which is updated just after midnight each Sunday, and this is also being made available via its API along with playlist reviews submitted by users. So there’s quite a lot to play with.

On that note, Donoghue says that in terms of size and quality of its curated playlists, ShareMyPlaylists is “unrivalled”, setting it apart from competitors such as Songza. “I think the opportunities for a third-party to utilise them, along with our other biggest asset which is our chart data, is huge”, he says.

In terms of what wares could materialise out of that opportunity, examples of mashups provided by the company include a simple mosaic of playlist artwork that refreshes with the latest additions, and another that combines this with chart data (playlists, tracks and artists) along with various other data. Fun but fairly limited stuff, so it will be interesting to see what a bunch of — hopefully more imaginative — hackers produce this weekend in Stockholm, which is the whole point of ShareMyPlaylists backing Music Hack Day.

For code monkeys developers wanting to get their hands on the new ShareMyPlaylists API, they’ll need to first sign up for a free account and then request access.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

SeatGeek, which aggregates tickets from resale sites like StubHub, just launched its first iPhone app, one that allows users to browse interactive maps as they try to find the best deals.

When SeatGeek raised funding back in August, the stated reason was to “build a really great mobile app.” Co-founder Russell D’Souza and Director of Communications Will Flaherty stopped by the TechCrunch office yesterday to show off the results of their work. The functionality should be pretty familiar to SeatGeek web users — you can search for tickets based on the performer, event, or venue. Then when you’ve found the event that you’re looking for, you can bring up a map showing where the different tickets would locate you, zoom in on any part of the map (usually surfacing more tickets as you do), then tap to buy.

I was particularly impressed by how much information SeatGeek is able to pack onto the iPhone screen. Despite the limited visual real estate, the team seems to have found an elegant way to lay out a full stadium map with lots of dots representing tickets, and basic ticket info below. (The tickets are sorted based on SeatGeek’s deal scores.) Flaherty said SeatGeek worked hard to pare away a lot of the features that aren’t essential on the phone, focusing on the search and map experience. If the site is a Swiss Army knife, then the iPhone app “cut out all the tools,” leaving “a really sharp blade,” he said.

D’Souza added that SeatGeek is the first smartphone ticketing app to include these kinds of interactive maps, rather than just static images of the venues. He argued that SeatGeek is “a technology company that happens to be in ticketing,” whereas its competitors “have the exact opposite mentality.” That also means we’ll see a number of rapid updates. (There’s also an Android app in development.) For example, D’Souza said he’s interested in the opportunities for integration with Apple’s PassBook.

Mobile has been growing dramatically for SeatGeek, D’Souza added.  (The company already offered a mobile-optimized website, sans interactive maps.) It now makes up 25 percent of total traffic, and he said he wouldn’t be surprised if it accounted for the majority of SeatGeek’s traffic and revenue within 12 months.

In fact, given the mobile growth both at SeatGeek and the ticketing industry as a whole, the real surprise may be that the startup has waited so long to launch the app. One holdup — SeatGeek’s actual ticket purchases occur on other websites, so it would be a bit annoying for users if they got a great mobile experience on SeatGeek, only to be a passed off onto a hard-to-navigate site to complete the deal. Now that many of the company’s partners have built mobile-optimized sites themselves, it made more sense for SeatGeek to make the leap. (You can also filter searches so that they’re limited to sites that are designed for mobile checkout.)

SeatGeek launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2009 and recently said that it has turned profitable. You can download the iPhone app here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Earlier this month, angel investor Chris Sacca announced that his firm Lowercase Capital was launching a new Los Angeles-focused fund, and that he’d hired someone to run it. Now we know who that someone is — Matt Mazzeo, a business development executive at Creative Artists Agency.

It might seem odd for Lowercase to bring on someone from a talent agency, but Mazzeo’s job at CAA has actually been to bridge the tech and media worlds, helping startups navigate the entertainment industry and vice versa. He told me he’ll be doing something similar at Lowercase by investing the new fund (he isn’t disclosing its size) in companies that sit at the intersection of media and technology.

“I think the opportunities in LA are incredible,” he said. “It’s the heart of the entertainment community, and you’ve also got all these entrepreneurs who are sticking around after they graduate from UCLA and USC and Caltech.”

At the same time, even though Lowercase is “betting heavily” on the LA ecosystem, Mazzeo said that his investments won’t be limited to one geography, and that he expects to spend a lot of time in New York and the Bay Area, too.

Mazzeo said he will be the first partner Sacca has brought on at the firm. The two of them have been friends for several years, with a relationship built on “secret, late-night wine-drinking and jam sessions” at South by Southwest. When Sacca reached out with the opportunity, Mazzeo said he was attracted to the firm’s “unique way of just finding great young talent and nurturing them.”

The hire isn’t a sign that Sacca plans to bring on a bunch of other partners, Mazzeo said: “We’re going to continue the tradition that he’s built of being as lean and nimble as possible.”

Lowercase’s current portfolio includes Bit.ly, Chartbeat, Kickstarter, Uber, and many others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch