

Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others - martinkl
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/02/rapportive-funding/

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erikpukinskis
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...](http://blog.rafaelcorrales.com/2010/05/mass-syndication-is-party-
round.html)

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.

~~~
martinkl
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-...](http://www.yes-no-
cancel.co.uk/2010/05/05/valuation-caps-on-convertible-notes-explained-with-
graphs/) 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.

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staunch
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.

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benologist
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.

~~~
betterlabs
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.

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

Or is this a str8 sell to Google play?

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

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

~~~
abstractbill
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.

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

~~~
revorad
Yeah, these guys are competing with Xobni.

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

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

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

~~~
amirmc
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.

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

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jasonmcalacanis
congrats to an amazing Open Angel Forum company!

proud to be an investor.

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

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

~~~
samstokes
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...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/putting-email-in-
context-with-gmail.html)

~~~
callmeed
That didn't really answer the questions.

~~~
petervandijck
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.

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jasonwilk
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.

~~~
davidedicillo
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.

~~~
samstokes
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.

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betterlabs
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.

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

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c1sc0
I wonder how many people install this just to get rid of the Google ads. I
did.

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

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pclark
literally crushing it

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zackattack
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.

~~~
smiler
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?

~~~
samstokes
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?

