My huge congratulations to the team at Cloudkick and in particular the founders, Alex, Dan and Logan, on their acquisition today by Rackspace (RAX). The risk, untold work hours, and the burden of having no one to rely on but yourselves and your fellow teammates culminated in the unsolicited acquisition of your promising company and the personal rewards that come from taking on this responsibility. You will now have significant management and individual contributor roles at a major company, and your “baby” and passion now has a much bigger platform to impact.
Along with Avalon Ventures, my firm Nueva Ventures provided the first capital to Cloudkick in August 2009 that enabled them to kickstart their idea into a business. I heard their pitch at the Under the Radar Cloud Computing Conference (my wife Charlene Li actually moderated their panel) and foretelling of things to come, CloudKick won best of show.
The founders had only recently graduated from college, were amazingly efficient and insightful at product development, and determined to succeed. I was a believer in them from the get go and got busy introducing them to other funds to co-invest with us. Along the way, they got what seemed to be the usual dose of Sand Hill Road treatment, but persisted to pull together the seed round with us and Avalon Ventures, including adding Avalon’s Rich Levandov to the Board, an experienced entrepreneur with deep computer industry experience (Rich was the inventor of Phoenix Bios).
We invested in Cloudkick out of a pilot fund my partner Neil Weintraut and I raised in 2008. Neil and I launched our fund with three beliefs: Entrepreneurs, Cloud Computing, and Super-Angel capitalization. Namely, that you back entrepreneurs, the future is (and greatest opportunities are in) ventures that take advantage of Cloud Computing, and the capitalization model, speed, and mindset that has come to be known by the term “Super-Angel”, is best for success, the entrepreneurs, and yes, investors.
Alex, Dan, and Logan, thanks. This is only the beginning for you and your accomplishments! It has been a real pleasure to work with you and we wish you well in your new home as you build out Rackspace in the Bay Area.
