Thursday, August 21, 2008

Flipkey funding paves alternate path for Boston Web Startups

It is old news now that the startup FlipKey received a majority investment from TripAdvisor this week. See MassHigh Tech and TechCrunch articles. Congratulations are in order to the team.

What caught my eye in the TechCrunch post was the mention of two local entrepreneurs and one VC that were among the syndicate of angel investors providing the initial seed capital of $ 400K.

One of my favorite topics is the lack of qualified angel investors in Boston for the emerging Web companies that require less capital and more vision. Even though we have some of the oldest Angel Investment groups in the country and they are actively funding, one look at their portfolio shows that consumer web is not their thing. Compare this to the God Father of Silicon Valley: Ron Conway who invests at a clip of 50 companies per year.

With the FlipKey announcement, it was great to see some local entrepreneurs such as Jeremy Allaire CEO of Brightcove, Sheila Marcelo CEO of Care.com and Nick Beim of Matrix Partners backing a local consumer web property. This is a great sign that there are other avenues and maybe another class of angels ready to step up and fill the gaps left by the local "old school" angels.

Kudos as well go out to TripAdvisor for stepping up and buying into the local consumer web ecosystems.

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