John M. Brimacombe's Blog

Breaking News – Kelway acquires Panacea to create £140M reseller

skylander2000 — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:35:25 +0000

Kelway (where I am a non-executive director) have just announced their second major acquisition, cementing their position as the fastest growing mid-market IT reseller in the UK and strengthening their propositon around managed services and virtualization. Congratulations to CEO Phil Doye and his team.

Twitter’s revenue model – do I care ?

skylander2000 — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:43:59 +0000

I feel fortunate to have been an angel investor in Twitter since the first institutional round, having been introduced to the opportunity by my good friend and former colleague at HandsOn Mobile, Robin Chan. I had to make the decision to invest very swiftly and haven’t regretted it for a moment (well maybe one moment during the 2008 stability woes).

An article I read today set me thinking once more about Twitter’s apparent lack of a revenue model and whether or not I care or am going to start caring about this. And the answer is, particularly giving the recent substantial financing for the company, I currently still don’t care. Why ? Well, 2 reasons …

1. Twitter is a clear Black Swan, passing through its tipping point and well on its way to being a global cultural phenomenon embedded in peoples consciousness and every day (minute?) social and communication habits. I think its easily as important as YouTube or HotMail were at their points in the evolution of the Web and should be able to achieve a great ($500M+) exit based on its uniqueness alone. I would be pretty happy with that.

2. Once Twitter has acheived true mass global adoption (50M+ users) the monetisation potential looks very strong – commercial grade accounts & services; on-page and on-search advertising; targetted campaigns; data & analytics; registrar-style fees; brand partnering etc. etc. That business could be worth $2-3B (which would make me very happy) and I imagine that is what motivated Benchmark and IVP. In the meantime I don’t want anything to impede the company achieving that scale.

Plenty of hostages to fortune in this post but once you have a tiger by the tail you just have to sit back and enjoy the ride!

Sussex Place Ventures leads investment in Skimbit

skylander2000 — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:48:07 +0000

I have recently completed my first investment at Sussex Place Ventures, the resident fund manager at the London Business School where I joined the team as an Operating Partner 3 years ago in order to raise a new fund.

The investment (led by SPV with participation from NESTA and The Accelerator Group) is in an exciting affiliate marketing start-up Skimbit whose main product is SkimLinks – a ‘software as a service’ offering which simplifies affiliate marketing and makes this attractive revenue model (where you get paid for referring traffic to ecommerce merchants) accesible to content publishers, forums and blogs of all sizes. Instead of having to sign up with 16+ affiliate networks, hand-edit links to merchants in multiple different formats etc you just sign up with SkimLinks; incorporate a single line of code in your web source and wait to receive your first cheque. In a world which is increasingly sceptical about the value of PPC/CPM campaigns, a product which makes the most virtuous form of CostPerAction (CPA) model as simple to use and accesible as AdSense is timely.

Skimbit is led by tenacious Australian entrepreneur Alicia Navarro who kept her company and vision alive by sheer force of will through a long search for the right business model and then for financing. Typical of the way we work at SPV we spent almost 10 months getting to know Alicia and her team before leading her first investment round and we helped her develop her vision and execution well before we were ready to invest. Early stage investments of this type are rare indeed in the current economic climate and a testament to the confidence we have in the robustness of the SkimLinks proposition. TechCrunch covered the round here.