

Lanyrd (YC W11) Secures $1.4m In Seed Funding To Make Conferences More Social - simonw
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/lanyrd-secures-1-4-million-in-seed-funding-to-make-conferences-more-social/

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petercooper
A nice validation of being in the UK, given the rather negative air over
startups in the UK recently. As much as I want to be in the US one day, the
labor here is certainly a lot cheaper and easier to obtain.

I wonder, though, where's the money in something like Lanyrd? Payment
processing for events? Promotion of events to the userbase? I'm guessing the
investment is primarily a way to start exploring these possibilities?

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earbitscom
I have always seen tons of monetization potential in Lanyrd. Conferences are a
time of significant travel, planning, wining and dining, and other things that
companies spend money on. And, Lanyrd stretches across a ton of industries.
Just like companies will pay big bucks to sponsor an event, sponsoring the
Lanyrd destination for that same event, if thousands of attendees will see it,
is highly targeted and of similar value. As someone with a lengthy background
in the advertising and lead gen space, Lanyrd seems like a gold mine to me in
those areas alone, to say nothing of speaker reputation management, event
planning assistance, group discounts for specific industries surround events,
and more.

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joshu
Hooray! (I'm not in the article but I invested)

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bdr
Any insights on the company you can share?

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joshu
In terms of? I've known Simon since before he built it.

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bdr
Why did you invest? I'm always interested when e.g. Fred Wilson blogs about
this kind of thing. So in terms of team, market, product, trends, or whatever
you want.

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timcederman
Can't speak for joshu, but I invested simply because Simon and Natalie
impressed me as co-founders, and I love the product.

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joshu
I knew Simon before he did Lanyrd. I try to back friends when they do
interesting stuff. I figure if your friends don't have your back, they aren't
really your friends, right?

I've done about as well investing in friends as I have on thesis investment,
so it's not a terrible strategy.

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davidw
Do you worry about the friendship souring if things go awry with the
company/investment? In the sense that if a !friend investment goes sour,
perhaps it's rough, but you're not out a friend in addition to the money.

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dools
I'd love to hear some opinions here on the difference between "angel" and
"seed" funding.

From some information I've gathered by reading and talking to people, "seed"
funding is for product development, right? You might have a prototype, but you
really haven't been able to prove product/market fit yet for lack of funds? In
that case it seems that some "seed rounds" (eg. Lanyrd and OnSwipe) are really
large.

I also gather than the size of the investment is not what determines the
"stage" of the round - ie. Tech Crunch reported $1mil in "seed funding" for
OnSwipe. They later went on to raise a "Series Awesome" of some $5mil.

Then there's "angel investment" which seems to be much less formal and
probably more likely in the tens of thousands than hundreds of thousands (or
$1mil+).

What I'm really wondering is: at what stage are these companies with their
products when they get these seemingly enormous seed rounds?

A lot of what I read about "getting investment" seems to suggest you need
traction, paying customers, product/market fit, a track record of running
successful companies, etc.

But then it seems to me (from the outside, at least) that some companies
manage to get quite a substantial investment as a "seed round" which seems to
be (again, from the outside I really have no idea what's going on under the
hood here) largely to finish off an otherwise prototypical product so that it
can be released to the target market.

It's my understanding that once you get to "Series A" you're basically not a
"startup" any more (by the definition that a "startup" exists to find a
business model).

As you may be able to tell, I'm thoroughly confused. Any advice or links to
relevant articles most appreciated.

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joshu
There's no official names to the rounds, so it doesn't really matter.

A seed round is mostly just an angel round with some VCs.

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holman
Lanyrd is one of those weird sites that I expect never to work because of how
hard it is to consolidate content, and yet it always works. Glad to hear that
things are going well for them; without Lanyrd I'm not sure how I'd sort
through conferences.

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simonw
Thanks very much. Lots of people ask us how we scrape the data... the answer
is we don't, it's all added by our community (the only exception is the
schedules for larger events such as OSCON, which I sometimes import in to the
site).

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tstyle
I'm impressed by how you've able to crowd source data collection to the users.
Does the site contain gamification elements that reward and encourage
community contributions?

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simonw
Not exactly - we're cautious of adding scoreboards / points etc because they
can very easily distort the site, resulting in people gaming the system to
increase their score rather than adding genuinely valuable data.

Instead, we've focused on getting the right incentives for people to add data.
Speakers add events to fill out their speaker profiles for example, and
attendees do it to track the events they've been to (you sometimes see people
include conferences attended on their CVs, so this is actually a useful tool
even for non-speakers).

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sogrady
Given the sheer volume of conferences these days - a problem that's only
getting worse - I don't know how I'd plan my schedule without Lanyrd.

So this is excellent news.

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manojranaweera
Great news! well done. Love to welcome you to Tech Centre Manchester - perhaps
an event to introduce Lanyrd to the North West community

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simonw
We'd love to come up to Manchester some time - drop us an email: contact at
lanyrd dot com.

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achompas
Great news! Congrats to Simon and Natalie.

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andrewreedy
Congrats guys!! Excited to see where you take it!

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frankdenbow
Still my favorite site for conference information. Feels like it will only get
better with time.

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adrianwaj
I wonder how far the Milner investment took them, was it really needed?

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simonw
The Start Fund money gave us a bit of breathing room at the end of YC, meaning
we didn't end up having to rush in to a deal we weren't happy with. From
talking to other companies in our batch this seems to be one of the recurring
advantages: you get a bit more time to put together your ideal round.

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monkchips
official at last. yay!

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sylvinus
congrats, I wonder how you'll make money though.

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earbitscom
See my other comment here. I've got years of advertising and lead gen
experience, and marketing to wide variety of decision making professionals
during peak times of travel is a huge opportunity with a lot of options to
increase ad pricing. There are other ancillary opportunities in event
planning, speaker reputation management and more.

