Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others | Hacker News Reader

Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others

techcrunch.com

120 pointsmartinkl44 comments

I was confused about some of the jargon in Paul Graham's "The future is no fixed amount, no fixed closing date, and no lead" quote so I looked them up best I could:

no lead - A lead investor is basically someone who commits, and says "we're in" at the start of the round. They commit organizational and negotiating resources. They also typically take a board seat. See http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2007/10/the-lead-invest.html

mass syndication - Instead of having a lead investor and a big closing event, you drum up interest from lots of parties who commit based on the understand that other investors are also buying in with the same terms. See http://blog.rafaelcorrales.com/2010/05/mass-syndication-is-p...

no fixed amounts - This seems to mean that a valuation is set, but the actual amount of money invested is not. I imagine it's sort of like a line of credit, but the startup takes as little as they need. Does anyone else know more details about this?

no closing - I'm reaching here a little, but I think what's implied here is that instead of getting everyone to commit to one big agreement, which is signed at once with great fanfare and large checked being signed, the startup just gets interested parties to sign on one at a time, and they go until they have sufficient funding. This is obviously more of a leap of faith for investors, so you have to set your valuation below market. See http://venturehacks.com/articles/no-lead

Anyone else have details on what these things mean? I'm just clicking around reading blog entries.

Your definitions are pretty close.

no lead = there's no one investor who particularly stands out (e.g. by taking >30% of the round); a lead would usually drum up the other investors; with no lead, it's the entrepreneur who drums up the others.

no fixed amounts, no closing: with convertible notes (as opposed to straightforward sale of shares, aka priced round) the entrepreneur can be a lot more flexible. The round doesn't technically have a valuation, but it does have a valuation cap: see my write-up http://www.yes-no-cancel.co.uk/2010/05/05/valuation-caps-on-... for an explanation. The amount raised can also be flexible.

This doesn't require any more of a leap of faith or any lower valuation than a priced round, and the paperwork is simpler. That's why convertible notes are very popular for seed rounds these days.

The other thing a lead often does in seed rounds is to work with the entrepreneur to set the price and other terms; the subsequent investors then reassure themselves that somebody who knows what they are doing thinks this is a good deal.

So in about 18-24 months the Rapportive team should have had time to acclimate to the new corporate culture and integrate these features into Gmail natively. I'm definitely going to use it then.

Rapportive looks cool but I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar or 'good enough' appear in Labs at some point. It reminds me of url shorteners on twitter.

Looking at the set of investors who endorsed their vision, I think they probably have a lot more to come which may define why its more interesting beyond the mashups they have right now.

Not to be disgusting...but where is the revenue generation play?

Or is this a str8 sell to Google play?

I would probably pay $5 for it right now. It's really fucking useful.

For entrepreneur 'networking' linkedin types I can see the value. For everyone else, not sure...

Actually I can see the value for any random middle-manager at a big company whose job involves a bucketload of email correspondance with lots of people outside of the company. That seems like a big enough market to me.

Are random middle-managers at a big company using GMail though? Wouldn't they be using outlook/exchange?

Yeah, these guys are competing with Xobni.

It'd be useful even for correspondence with people within your company. The main gotcha there is that company email addresses usually don't have a lot of scrapable/public info out there.

I believe the raplets are going to be really valuable, which opens it up to more than the entrepreneur/linkedin types.

BookingBug is a good example.

We've got some great premium features planned, but right now it's more important to us to get the free product from "quite useful" to "couldn't live without". We think we're well on the way there, but we're still working really hard to understand what would make it more useful.

Is that legal to replace the ads? I would think it is against the TOS of the site.

Users chose to do it to themselves. So presumably its just as legal as adblock

Can't see it being a good thing when Google are deciding what company to buy though - would anyone buy adblock?

I absolutely hate plugins/companies that just routinely cover up other peoples advertising. It's not a smart move IMHO.

would anyone buy adblock?

Makes even more sense to buy and kill a service hurting you.

Yes they do it but I just question how viable a company is that relies on blocking ads to display their data.

If it drives more people to the online version of Gmail then that's still a win for Gmail in some sense (if not monetarily). I currently use Gmail via IMAP so never see any ads but Rapportive could tempt me back online.

Yep, especially if it gives them a lot of useful information about you to target ads to you in the rest of the googleverse.

We believe the context we provide is a much more valuable use of the limited sidebar space than the ads it replaces; and we think that adds value to the platform, both for Google and for its users.

We're not interested in cheating Google out of their ad revenue, although we suspect the Gmail ads aren't making that much revenue anyway.

Update: I should also add that we have a good relationship with Google, and we were a launch partner for their contextual gadgets platform: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/putting-email-i...

"although we suspect the Gmail ads aren't making that much revenue anyway."

If that were true, I'm pretty sure Google would have either 'fixed it' so that they do make revenue, or removed them.

Personally, I'd expect those ads on GMail certainly make a few million.

congrats to an amazing Open Angel Forum company!

proud to be an investor.

proud to have you on the team. let's crush it.

How do you get away with removing the ads from Gmail? is that not against their TOS?

We believe the context we provide is a much more valuable use of the limited sidebar space than the ads it replaces; and we think that adds value to the platform, both for Google and for its users. People evidently agree, as (nearly) nobody complains about the loss of the ads, but lots of people love the utility we provide - and indeed have switched to Gmail to get it.

We're not interested in cheating Google out of their ad revenue, although we suspect the Gmail ads aren't making that much revenue anyway.

We have a good relationship with Google, and we were a launch partner for their contextual gadgets platform: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/putting-email-i...

That didn't really answer the questions.

Actually it does. Google thinks replacing the ads is fine, because they are adding more value to Google's email product than they are taking away.

Likewise, proud investor! And totally addicted user.

Rahul, Sam and Martin are really capable and some of the best at listening to users and to the market.

Congrats to the Rapportive team!

Thrilled to be on board as an angel investor.

Not to be biased, since I know the guys, but eTacts (YC w2010) is a much more powerful solution for making my inbox life better.

I think that Raplets are what makes the difference between the two services, because it let developers easily integrate their application in it, so for example if you have a to-do list app, you could integrate it with Rapportive to show any open to-do item related to that person.

We're really excited about the potential of Raplets: they make users' lives easier by integrating repetitive workflows into their email, and they help websites increase engagement by being right there in their users' inboxes.

For example, we have an internal admin page allowing us to fix and diagnose bugs, showing us what browsers someone uses, etc. It took us about half an hour to build a Raplet that integrates that into our email, so that whenever we get a support email, we're one click away from the admin panel for that user.

We also have some great integrations with web services like Crunchbase - see an investor's portfolio as soon as they email you - and MailChimp - when a customer emails you, see whether they read your newsletters and what links they've clicked on.

Rapportive is awesome because its simple and easy to understand. Everyone gets it without any confusion. Would be interesting to see how they make money, though. Thats a toughie, especially considering the target market is Gmail users.

Also, anyone know how they are getting Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Skype info for email addresses? Are they using RapLeaf? If so, are they paying for every such lookup? That would be a huge cost to deal with.

Congrats to Rapportive! They are awesome, especially when it comes to help other developers to build on their platform.

I wonder how many people install this just to get rid of the Google ads. I did.

congrats guys, you guys have a great product, glad to see the news.

literally crushing it

Rapportive is one of those things that I didn't have a need for, but now that I have it installed, I wouldn't want to be without.

This sums it up quite well. Rapportive really comes in handy now.

Are you getting lots of e-mails from people you don't know? In general I'm getting e-mails from people I already know (if its business related, I'm not too fussed by their facebook profile) and if they're friends, well - they contact me on fb anyway and not e-mail.

Any companies I get e-mail from, I already know about so the company profile feature isn't that useful idea.

I'm just wondering what the value prop is if you can enlighten me?

The core idea is that there's a lot of useful context about the people you email, but email clients right now don't give you any of that context. We serve it up right next to your email, so you don't have to hunt around for it. We want to help you engage more meaningfully with the people you email.

We've found different people find it useful for different reasons. Founders, journalists and BD people get a lot of mail from people they don't know, and we've had a lot of love from that demographic because we help them put a face to the email. But as you say, a lot of people get mail mostly from people they already know.

We've got some ideas coming up for that which we think are going to be incredibly useful. Right now, if you get an email from a friend, you can see their recent tweets right there in your email - I've found this really useful, as I can refer to their tweets while replying to their email, or see who else they've been talking to. There's a lot more coming along those lines.

Is there anything we could do that would make it indispensable to you?

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