GroupSpaces secures $1.3M funding from Index Ventures and Silicon Valley angel investors

We are very pleased to announce a new $1.3 million round of funding for GroupSpaces this week.

Mike Volpi (left), celebrating with the GroupSpaces team

We raised this investment to enable us to expand our engineering team and build many more features into our product to meet all the needs of our diverse and growing user-base of sports clubs, university societies, local interest groups and associations. We will also be using the money to expand our marketing teams in the UK and US, enabling us to bring GroupSpaces to a much wider audience.

The investment round was led by European Venture Capital firm Index Ventures, who has previously invested in Skype, Last.fm, MySQL and Betfair, amongst many other successful technology companies. We are glad to work with Index as they have a fantastic track record in helping early-stage Internet companies develop into global leaders. Index Ventures Partner, Mike Volpi (former Chief Strategy Officer for Cisco and above on the left, with the GroupSpaces team), joins us as a Director and you can read about why he led the investment in GroupSpaces on the Index Ventures blog.

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A Guide to Seed Accelerators

Following my recent guide to Angel Investors, this is the second of three articles exploring ways for UK-based start-ups to obtain funding.

“Seed Accelerators” are investment funds that supply small sums of capital (typically up to £50,000) to extremely early-stage start-ups in return for small amounts of equity (typically up to 10%) and provide an organised support program for a limited time period following their investment.

Launching in the summer of 2005, Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator (YC) is the pioneer of the Seed Accelerator model. Following in YC’s footsteps, there have been more than a dozen other such programs created since 2005, all of which have focused on the Internet, software and mobile industries due to the low capital requirements and short amount of time needed to launch a product. In the future, I expect the model will be adapted to fit other industries, but for now these funds are likely only to be relevant if you are starting an Internet, software or mobile company.

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How to Fly with Angel Investors

You’ve got an ambitious business idea, done your initial research, started developing your product and you need some investment to finish building it and take it to market. This is a common situation for young entrepreneurs to find themselves in.

In this article, we’ll explore one potential solution: Angel Investors. These are usually wealthy entrepreneurs who are looking to invest their own money in early-stage businesses. In addition to offering your business money, they can also offer their advice, experience and knowledge.

[Note: my advice throughout this article is tailored towards raising money from UK-based Angel Investors, however many of the principles apply elsewhere]

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Interview: David Langer on Your Hidden Potential

Last week Joseph Ajilore (Founder, Your Hidden Potential) interviewed me for his young entrepreneur blog. He asked me about how to be a successful entrepreneur, why I rejected multiple corporate job offers in favour of pursuing GroupSpaces full-time and who I find inspiring. Following a lot of great feedback we’ve both received on the interview, Joseph’s kindly allowed me to re-publish it for the readers of Freed From the Matrix.

Can you quickly give us some background information about yourself?

I’m a 24 year-old Internet entrepreneur, born and bred in Wimbledon, currently based in Oxford having completed a Mathematics degree at Oxford University in 2007. In addition to working on my startup GroupSpaces, I also write for The Gateway newspaper as their Entrepreneurship Columnist and train for my current sporting passion: triathlons.

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NACUE Launches to Revolutionise University Enterprise in the UK

Have you started your own company or are you thinking of starting one in the future? If so, then taking advantage of NACUE (which stands for National Consortium of University Entrepreneurs) should be high up on your list for the 2009/10 academic year! NACUE is an exciting new national student-led organisation that helps student (and recently graduated) entrepreneurs to access resources, support and funding to develop and grow sustainable ventures. Having initially launched in May 2009, this is the first academic year in which NACUE is fully operational.

Victoria Lennox

The NACUE concept was conceived in late 2008 by Victoria Lennox (right), a former President of Oxford Entrepreneurs society. Last week I caught up with Victoria to get the lowdown on what NACUE can offer student entrepreneurs and where the organisation is headed in the future.

How can budding student entrepreneurs benefit from NACUE over the coming year?

From participating in enterprise societies and accessing our online directory to attending inspirational and informative events and pitching for funding in front of interested investors, NACUE provides a one-stop-shop for budding student entrepreneurs to get inspired, develop skills, gain experience and start a venture.

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Navigating the Jungle: A Survival Guide for Student Entrepreneurs

So you’ve got a business idea, you want to get your first company off the ground and you need to balance this with getting the degree you want. It’s a tough position to be in – particularly if you don’t have much business experience. The good news is that there are a wealth of easily accessible people, resources and organisations which can help you out!

I was in exactly this position a few years ago. I had a business idea during my second year at university and started with the student society for entrepreneurship (Oxford Entrepreneurs). I also found great value in the resources below and these helped me develop my company GroupSpaces to where it is today.

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Entrepreneurship & Execution

David Langer, Co-Founder & CEO of GroupSpaces speaks at Oxford Brookes Business Society, Oct 08.

Produced by Henry Mori, Executive Director, Global Soken Research & Ex-VP, Imperial Entrepreneurs.

Startup School 2008

On 19th April 2008 at the Kresge Auditorium, Stanford University, 11 of the key players in tech entrepreneurship shared their wisdom on startups at the 4th annual Startup School conference. Andy and I had the pleasure of attending along with 500 other aspiring hackers and entrepreneurs from around the world.

We arrived on the Friday afternoon and after a party at Y Combinator in Mountain View where we met many of the YC alumni, including Trevor Blackwell’s robots, we stayed at Snaptalent HQ along with Kev Edwards and Jon Markwell from the Brighton entrepreneur scene.

There’s already been some good coverage of Startup School 2008 by TechCrunch, Wired and Kontsevoy so rather than go into too much detail, I’m going to share the key messages that have stuck most firmly in my mind since the day:

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Team Talk

Last week we discussed idea generation and evolution. Here we’re assuming that you’ve got an idea, developed it into a planned product or service and you are now working out who else you need to work with to help turn your dream into reality.

First of all, you probably need co-founders. A quick analysis of all the recent success stories points to 2 or 3 being the optimal number. For example, Bill Gates had Paul Allen at Microsoft [current team of CEO Steve Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates above left] , Larry Page has Sergey Brin at Google and Mark Zuckerberg initially had Andrew McCollum and Dustin Moskovitz at Facebook.

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A Week of Conferences (Part 4)

I was going to write lots of stuff about the Essential Mediatech conference. However, the day contained many inconclusive panel debates about the direction of the online advertising and television industries, none of which were particularly interesting.

The one thing that stood head and shoulders above the rest of the day for me was Reid Hoffman’s keynote speech – it was awesome. He proposed academic-style arguments about Consumer Internet businesses; and since he is the self-proclaimed world expert on Consumer Internet, I’m inclined to listen to pretty much everything he said (bar the odd LinkedIn plug!).

His main argument observed that the Internet advertising industry is so chaotic and evolving so fast at the moment that it is almost impossible to write down any meaningful plan or projection for the next 2-3 years. Therefore the most sensible thing for an early-stage business to do is put “revenue placeholders” down e.g. Google Ads in banner space, and then worry about the specific monetising channels if and only if you actually build a user-base of significant size. Selling direct advertising early on as a bootstrap may also be acceptable in some cases. Some might say this is Web 101, but given current advertising market conditions, with Facebook’s Beacon etc. it’s probably the most sensible thing for most early-stage businesses to revert to with their strategy.

You can watch a full video of the speech on Intruders.tv: Essential MediaTech Keynote: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn

Also, webstreams of every panel discussion from Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford are available here.