The May Report

News From Ron May

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The May Report: 4/5/2012: Records provided by Jesse White’s IL Office of the Secretary of State show that Guild Capital LLC is a foreign corporation w/ a filing date of 01/31/2012, file # 03823008; jurisdiction is Delaware, and the agent is listed as Iain Martin Shovlin. The agent’s address is 520 N. Kingsbury St., Unit 3810, Chicago, IL 60654, so, it’s quite possible that, since Guild Capital, LLC is fairly new, that Iain Martin Shovlin could also be the guy who is tied to Technology Crossover Ventures, and a NYC office, etc. Since he’s on N. Kingsbury, I may just go there and ring his bell. I have so much more from Tues. night at Rockit and from my 1871 tour, but just off the top of my head, Bob Geras (we sorta smoked ‘em peace pipe)) told me he’s had 2 liquidity events and one $15MM raise in the last year — I’ll go to work on details; ScholarPro, an Excelerate alum from 2010, raised $900K from Sandbox in Jan. 2011 and now has term sheets for Series B funding; Elicit, www.elicitsearch.com, was at Rockit and they are ready to get some publicity — I was contacted over a wk. ago by their PR person, Christine Castro, in NYC, and she wants me to meet with them, but so far, they’re otherwise occupied — they’re founded by Eric and Adam Heneghan; it’s “a venture-backed internet SaaS software company based in Chicago, .. transforms on-site search into the most powerful branding and conversion tool on the web. With elicit, marketers and retailers can now curate search results, better aligning brand story, marketing calendar, promotional initiatives and eBusiness objectives.”; the SpotHero boys, who have changed their biz model a few mos. ago and are staying put at TechNexus, tell me Michael Eisenwasser and Matt O’Brien who did have http://www.clusterig.com/ are now starting a new firm and they’ll be in 1871; Josh London, who currently has www.allitas.com, is starting a new firm and he’s having a beer with Seth Kravitz at O’Leary’s at 541 N. Wells tonight — I may just happen to stop by :-) and Seth will go nuts; a guy named Bennett from Accenture is starting a mobile trivia app called www.quaffic.com and he may present at Technori next mo.; other cos. from Rockit: Nate Lassiter’s www.weresicc.com, Lindsay Roberts’ www.thegiftinsider.com, Erica Harris’ www.thelegalbalance.com; www.oxandpen.com, Kevin Nemetz’s www.tix4cause.com (he used to be at ProvisionX); K.R.’s www.rollonit.com; Willer has not responded to me yet, but we’re delving down deep into 1871; Kevin does not want Pretto — nothing personal — but no sales guys who are part of larger firms, either locally or nationally based — they want real start-ups w/ 2-5 people as the sweet spot, and at 10, it’s time to move out; and while KW says they’re not soliciting members, I hear some people are being referred in by guys like Seth Kravitz, so of course I want to know if being referred in gives a firm a leg up, and much more to come…btw, the MIT-EF volunteer meeting got such winners as Ed Kozak, Robert Harney, and Thomas Burrell along w/ regulars Nancy Munro, Chris Rollyson, and Josh London

The May Report April 5th, 2012

The May Report: 4/5/2012: Records provided by Jesse White’s IL Office of the Secretary of State show that Guild Capital LLC is a foreign corporation w/ a filing date of 01/31/2012, file # 03823008; jurisdiction is Delaware, and the agent is listed as Iain Martin Shovlin. The agent’s address is 520 N. Kingsbury St., Unit…

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The May Report: 4/4/2012: Scoop day at TMR! The mystery and highly secret name of the key investor in Techweek is “Ian from Guild Capital.” But I give up! I need your help. This reminds me of the day the whole Chicago tech community came together to confirm the rumor I’d heard, namely that the new name of the firm resulting from the merger of Whittman-Hart and usWeb/cks was marchFIRST. That day, possibly the best day in the history of TMR, had three reports and each one got us closer to the truth. I had been approached the night before at a meeting at the Gleacher Center and I announced it at the TiE meeting I attended later that night, but it was still just a rumor. By the end of the next day, March 17, 2000, we had confirmation on the name and even had access to the test site which was unprotected; well, and that night Bob Bernard and I spoke by phone and he said I was a Kamakize who had ruined his $50MM roll-out campaign, and remember, the back-up name was Primary Red; Last night at Rockit, I found out that the mystery and highly secret name of the key investor in Techweek is “Ian from Guild Capital.” Well, I’ve spent a lot of time on this since last night. Guild Capital from where? NYC, LA, there are a number of Guild Capital firms including Guild Investment; Ian who? I could not find anyone named Ian at any firm named Guild. Then, a break in the case — one of my unnamed elves who knows how to find things on the net much better than I came up with this: It’s Lian Shovlin and he’s listed as having contributed $2,500 to the Quigley campaign and his firm affiliation is Guild Capital, LLC; and then it was off to the races, and here’s what I found … and the plot thickens.. Does anyone have an actual phone number and address for this guy; I was told that Guild Capital does not have an internet presence, and what is the connection, if any, to Technology Crossover Ventures? Is the Iain or Ian or Lian Shovlin of Guild Capital, LLC the same as the person on Built in Chicago and the same as the person with Technology Crossover Ventures? It’s not just a mystery about the person or people funding Techweek, but it’s also about the mystery of Iain or Ian or Lian Shovlin. Can anyone shed light on this?

The May Report April 4th, 2012

The May Report: 4/4/2012: Scoop day at TMR! The mystery and highly secret name of the key investor in Techweek is “Ian from Guild Capital.” But I give up! I need your help. This reminds me of the day the whole Chicago tech community came together to confirm the rumor I’d heard, namely that the…

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The May Report: 4/3/2012: I’m going to stop making silly promises like I’ll have 5 reports out in a day — if there were no fatigue factor and if I didn’t have to sleep, that might be possible; Uber has been getting national attention lately and they were mentioned and shown in a recent report on mobile payment systems on CBS Morning News by Whit Johnson and they’re providing services at Rockit tonight for Built in Chicago; On Saturday, at a party thrown at Tadros’ old office, I talked to Nate Kontny who has left Inkling Markets to start a new venture called CityPosh, http://www.cityposh.com/, while Adam Siegel continues to run Inkling; my info. is that one difference between Jon Pasky and Arabella is that Arabella has decided to nix the media part of Techweek; Kevin Willer may have to backtrack on some things he told me — he stands firm on the no pool tables, no fussball, no ping pong tables policy; and he is adamant that there will be no freebies when it comes to rent, but the $400 or the $250 is “all-in,” so aside from rent, you just have to buy your own coffee at Intelligentsia; they’re looking to host plenty of events, but only evenings and weekends, none during the day, except for tenant run events of course; Jennifer Thomas, alum of Lean Start-up Circle, tells me she’s at TechNexus and the other 3 finalists are spread out between several places including VentureSHOT, Bernard Kappe’s place and maybe 1871; Jason Jacobsohn is organizing the next class of the Founders’ Institute; Chicago ranks #17 in social media activity by government, down from #8, but these stats are pre-Rahm; it’s against my core princeples, but in some ways I wish Matt Moog, Troy Henikoff, Fred Hoch, Seth Kravitz, and many others had even one-tenth the personality, charisma, or likeability of Kevin Willer, and if you quote that back to me, I’ll deny having written it. :-)

The May Report April 3rd, 2012

The May Report: 4/3/2012: I’m going to stop making silly promises like I’ll have 5 reports out in a day — if there were no fatigue factor and if I didn’t have to sleep, that might be possible; Uber has been getting national attention lately and they were mentioned and shown in a recent report…

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The May Report: 4/2/2012: I said 5 reports and I just may make it: After admitting late Friday afternoon (the timing was no coincidence) that it really lost $65MM, not the $43MM they initially reported and revising its 4Q financials, Groupon shares fell 17% today (Monday) — we’ve seen this movie before, but are we going to watch it as often as Howard Hughes watched the movie Ice Station Zebra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Station_Zebra ?; Len Bland caught with his hand in the cookie jar or we could say he has huge conflicts of interest in that while he’s supposedly trying to raise a fund, meanwhile he is now an operating officer of Clean Water Forever http://cleanwaterforever.com/ which raises all sorts of questions about Mr. Bland who turns out to be anything but — hey that was clever and no help from you-know-who; Rahm is starting to show his true colors with the way the Infrastructure Trust is being handled with no aldermanic input on the board and a rush job through the city council; among the many folks moving into 1871, one group of 10 will be the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition (ISTC) run by Matt Summy on April 13th, and Matt, what a goofy operation you’re running — the number for Lyu Uzunov, whom I met and interrogated at Phil Tadros’ party on Saturday, still belongs to Kyle from the CEC who left at the end of August 2011; Kevin Willer, I really enjoyed and was excited by the tour, but those six suites you’re renting for $2,000 a month with only about 250 sf each are costing the renters — can you believe this? — $96 a sf — I calculated that down in the food court on the 2nd floor — which one can only conclude is a scheme to charge for access to the start-ups, a form of monopoly rent, and Kevin said the demand exceeds supply for those 6 suites — is the review committee the decision maker for those suites as well? They could be taken by i2A (Kapil and Stu) or OCA or New World (JB did put in seed $, but I don’t know how much), and what was Steve Collens of The Pritzker Group doing there?, btw, his dad, Lew Collens, was President of IIT from 1990-2007; Much more to come on 1871

The May Report April 3rd, 2012

The May Report: 4/2/2012: I said 5 reports and I just may make it: After admitting late Friday afternoon (the timing was no coincidence) that it really lost $65MM, not the $43MM they initially reported and revising its 4Q financials, Groupon shares fell 17% today (Monday) — we’ve seen this movie before, but are we…

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The May Report: 4/2/2012: The 1st of 5 reports today and don’t think I’m kidding; with 6k members, Built in Chicago re-launches its site today — they used Duo Consulting (full disclosure, an occasional TMR advertiser) to revamp the site in Drupal — Sonny Cohen of Duo says “You can read it here: http://www.builtinchicago.org/profiles/blogs/built-in-chicago-re-launch-announcement It is being migrated from the Ning to Drupal platform with some additional functionality. We anticipate there will be more features added over time as the Drupal platform offers greater capability. Job #1 now is to get out the gate”.; 20 companies and 50 people have been accepted for reserved seating (the $400/mo. deal) at 1871 so far; in keeping with their beta launch (Willer’s Google background), several firms were moving into 1871 on Friday and the CEC with its current staff of 4 moved in last Tuesday (I was there Fri. getting a tour from Kevin Willer), and the start-ups included The Cheeky Girls, Simple Relevance, and Frank Muscarello’s www.markitx.com; Code Academy graduated 56 students Wednesday night at 1871; much more to come on 1871; Acquity Group phones in its IPO from Cabo while sipping on Tsingtao. http://www.youtube.com/watchfeature=player_embedded&v=NIRZlAM3MrM#! and note the palm trees in the background; The Acquity Group 1% for the AG 99% who may be curious. Who owns what at Acquity Group LLC which has filed its F-1 for an IPO? Chris Dalton and his partners cashed in huge when selling to George Lu; Paul Weinewuth invested in distressed condos. Matt Schmeltz built a huge house in Park Ridge. Scott Spear is in restaurants. Chris Dalton has property in Lake Geneva. There’s a small group of senior guys, the ones who have been there from the start that still go to Cabo each year to party hardy — they’re the real decision makers; Think they’re going to share the wealth this time around with the employees? Nope. Dalton told everyone 2 years ago there would be no options because they were in a rush to file; It’s 2 years later and still nothing. seems like time enough to reward your employees — you think? Can you believe this? Have you ever heard of an IPO where all the employees get the short end of the stick? This was supposed to be the big event where everyone shares in the success. Read the filing, they let a select few have equity last year. everyone else gets “Bupkis mit Kuduchas” Not a growth stock, should have had those private shares issued for pennies. People tell me that everyone at Sapient got stock a few years ago and did well. Why wouldn’t Acquity Group do the same?

The May Report April 2nd, 2012

The May Report: 4/2/2012: The 1st of 5 reports today and don’t think I’m kidding; with 6k members, Built in Chicago re-launches its site today — they used Duo Consulting (full disclosure, an occasional TMR advertiser) to revamp the site in Drupal — Sonny Cohen of Duo says “You can read it here: www.builtinchicago.org/profiles/blogs/built-in-chicago-re-launch-announcement It…

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The May Report: 3/28/2012: Code Academy breaks the ice with first event being held in the 1871 facility this evening and guess what? 553 people have RSVP’d and add me to that list! Why are events in this town not given better pre-event publicity? Matt Moog’s re-launch party was shrouded in secrecy; Aside from that, Kevin Willer agreed to give me a hard hat tour sometime this week, but by the time that happens, everybody and his brother will have been there; My info. is that the CEC has moved in already and get this, Troy “I love publicity” Henikoff can’t decide if he wants to move Excelerate Labs there — it could be a money issue since the program is only 13 weeks and he may not want to pay for a whole year, or it could be ego, as in ‘I’ll get my own place and why should I throw my hat in with this one big happy family?’; meanwhile there does not appear to be much adherence to protocol and I smell a whiff of elitism: people have applied, but have not heard back from the review committee while others have been given the green light, so what is the procedure? Fill out the application and wait for a call, or is it the squeaky wheel gets the grease? or is it I met you at some coffee shop, so you’re in? Meanwhile, Jason Goodrich of Shortlist sits and waits, and sits and waits — maybe he’s just too nice of a guy; Technori drew the usual large crowd (I won’t say 500 because the info. I have is that there are 400 seats in the auditorium, but there are people standing in the back), and of the 60+ people I polled at the after party (percentages are approximate), Zealous Good http://zealousgood.com/ had the most votes by far (50%), but Stage Bloc http://stagebloc.com (17%), followed by the jeans company http://www.zipfit.me/ (17%) got a fair number of votes, and a few people mentioned http://lovendar.com/ (8%) and http://blog.kula.com/ (5%) which uses Foursquare as opposed to Zaarly and Airrun, also 2 Chicago firms, and they use the cash pmt. system Dwolla and OurLabel https://www.ourlabel.com/#!/ (3%) got a few votes but was 6 out of 6 in my poll

The May Report March 28th, 2012

The May Report: 3/28/2012: Code Academy breaks the ice with first event being held in the 1871 facility this evening and guess what? 553 people have RSVP’d and add me to that list! Why are events in this town not given better pre-event publicity? Matt Moog’s re-launch party was shrouded in secrecy; Aside from that,…

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The May Report: 3/27/2012: Catherine Steege of Jenner & Block refused to agree to a continuance (which is very standard practice) for the other side in the Efoora bankruptcy case, but Judge Benjamin Goldgar overruled her; there are many questions, not the least of which is why Ms. Steege won’t simply go out to California and see for herself what progress Varshney is making at Applied Biomedical; Steege wants to give up all shareholder rights for a paltry $50K from Varshney when the shareholders invested $57MM this was not the deal Rick Fogel negotiated and I’m sure Judge Milton Shadur would not be happy with it; I’ll have another report this afternoon dedicated to the highly respectable (NOT) management at Acquity Group LLC, including all 28 comments on Glassdoor

The May Report March 27th, 2012

The May Report: 3/27/2012: Catherine Steege of Jenner & Block refused to agree to a continuance (which is very standard practice) for the other side in the Efoora bankruptcy case, but Judge Benjamin Goldgar overruled her; there are many questions, not the least of which is why Ms. Steege won’t simply go out to California…

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The May Report: 3/23/2012: Bulletin: FeeFighters, fka TransFS, bought by a small local firm nobody’s ever heard of — what’s their name again, oh yeah, Groupon; this is Hyde Park Angels’ 2nd exit out of 14 investments; CEO and founder Sean Harper revealed the purchase in his blog; Many local investors/mentors were in on this including Excelerate Labs, Hyde Park Angels, 500 Startups, Sandbox Industries, OCA Venture Partners, and Arizona Bay Technology; meanwhile, Groupon’s on a buying spree: Kima Labs, Hyperpublic, Adku, and others in recent weeks; Thank goodness Lightbank was not invested in Feefighters or we’d have conflicts galore and a case of self-dealing, but whew, this is a case where Eric and Brad can spread the money around; How long will it take for Troy Henikoff, aka a media wh**e, to get himself quoted by Lynne Marek in Crain’s?; Lynne, you might try talking to Jim Dugan for once or talk to Dave McClure who founded 500 Startups; and let’s see if Matt Moog or Kevin Willer who, like troy Henikoff, just can’t stand publicity :-) weasel their way into the story; and thanks Ira Weiss for the tip — you beat out Jeff Carter who is probably out drinking – it’s Friday night after all

The May Report March 24th, 2012

The May Report: 3/23/2012: Bulletin: FeeFighters, fka TransFS, bought by a small local firm nobody’s ever heard of — what’s their name again, oh yeah, Groupon; this is Hyde Park Angels’ 2nd exit out of 14 investments; CEO and founder Sean Harper revealed the purchase in his blog; Many local investors/mentors were in on this…

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The May Report: 3/23/2012: Gary Slack no more than the ringleader of a flea circus when compared to Gyro/HSR, a marcom firm with 17 offices — real ones, not phantom Slack offices — and 70 people here in Chicago (we had the MoMo meeting there at 20 W. Kinzie Monday night) with clients in Chicago like Walgreen’s, John Deere, PNC Bank, Kimberly Clark, and USG; Gyro says B2B has ceased to be; and Gary, hanging on to the shibboleth, believes that he is the fastest way from B to B; Slack wants to be the life of the party after the party’s over; What does Gary’s ‘innovative’ thinking bode for the upcoming BMA conference this summer in Chicago? — maybe he should leave the heavy lifting to Gyro and stick to what he’s good at — like reading written notes; The May Report’s Town Crier, Jeff JWillie Willinger, told to shut up st SXSW; JWillie warned to NOT mention people he meets in his frequent calls to Ron May; marchFIRST was one of the dumbest names ever, and I think time will prove that 1871 is another, but here’s one that never saw the light of day: Monday; does anyone know the story? PwC Consulting was going to split off from PwC and planned to call itself “Monday,” but just before the split was going to take place, IBM came in and swooped them up (beating out competitors which included HP) for $2.7B in cash, $400MM in a convertible note and $400MM in U. S. stock; on the day that Bob Bernard (Robert F. Bernard) died (I believe that was Friday, Feb. 8th) from a second heart attack — the official story — Bob went home with a big powwow scheduled for Monday, a meeting at which he was going to be fired, but when Monday came, they announced that he had died; Genevieve Thiers claims she stepped down of her own volition and likens having a start-up to raising children, speaking of which, where are her twins?

The May Report March 23rd, 2012

The May Report: 3/23/2012: Gary Slack no more than the ringleader of a flea circus when compared to Gyro/HSR, a marcom firm with 17 offices — real ones, not phantom Slack offices — and 70 people here in Chicago (we had the MoMo meeting there at 20 W. Kinzie Monday night) with clients in Chicago…

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The May Report: 3/21/2012: Rhodes reappears to play blind man’s bluff with Chicago gaming startup: is he holding a dead man’s hand??? Andy Mckenna, did you google the name Mike Rhodes before you signed a deal with the guy, and did you talk to the landlord of 322 S. Green St., and Andy, do you recall how Rhodes proclaimed loudly that the Sync was not closing, just moving to a new location in 30-60 days? Anyone doing business with or considering doing business with this guy or Central Street Games, consider yourself duly warned; Kraft snubs Chicago –nice work from Rahm — maybe he had help from Fred Hoch or maybe Kraft does not like the ethical example Rahm is setting with Resolute Consulting, Greg Goldner and Redflex Traffic Systems Inc. — is the Rahm administration just the same old way of doing biz, but with a new shingle?; Don’t play video games on the new iPad for 45 minutes or it will heat up to 116 degrees; MoMo on Monday drew about 70 people with a slew of folks from both Nokia in Itasca (fka Novarra) which is hiring about 25 developers http://jobs.nokia.com/ and Nokia (formerly NAVTEQ) in the city; and one guy, Chanse Arrington, from California; trivia quiz of the day: What marcom firm has USG, PNC Bank, Walgreen’s, Kimberly Clark as clients and competes with Ogilvy and Doremus?, and no, the answer is not Slack and Co.

The May Report March 21st, 2012

The May Report: 3/21/2012: Rhodes reappears to play blind man’s bluff with Chicago gaming startup: is he holding a dead man’s hand??? Andy Mckenna, did you google the name Mike Rhodes before you signed a deal with the guy, and did you talk to the landlord of 322 S. Green St., and Andy, do you…

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