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From the Partnership
App47, one of our 2011 seed investments, has just emerged from stealth mode and is launching version 1.0 of its product, a platform for enterprises to manage their mobile apps. We interview Chris Schroeder, App47 CEO, below. We also welcome our latest investment, ShopXimity, to the Valhalla portfolio. ShopXimity is an early-stage company at the intersection of mobile with brick-and-mortar retail. As always, we welcome your comments and questions. Please email to editor@valhallapartners.com. Valhalla CEOs: Chris Schroeder[Ed.: App47 is an exciting investment for Valhalla. We believe that smartphones and mobile apps running on smartphones will finally trigger the widespread use of mobile computing power in the business world. Starting with email and calendar, small applications running on smartphones are allowing employees to initiate wire transfers, approve new hires, view corporate data securely: in a nutshell, these apps will liberate the conduct of business from set times and places.]  How did you get the idea for App47, and what convinced you it was a winner?After selling RealOps to BMC in 2007, transitioning the team and working on the M&A team, I left BMC to pursue new adventures in the consumer market, specifically the mobile consumer market. I built several iPhone apps, published them in iTunes and set out to market and sell them, $1 at a time... I learned two things, the customer acquisition costs exceed revenue (unless you are picked up on iTunes as "App of the week") and I have a lot to learn about the consumer focused marketing. You're a return entrepreneur. What did you learn from RealOps that's serving you in good stead at App47?There is a very long list of items I learned, or were reinforced by being part of RealOps. The more significant ones are:
What advice would you give to investors in picking the right seed projects to bet on?I'm a firm believer in that there are three things to look at, in most any investment. Proven management team (execution), hot market (revenue), killer technology (delivery). You rarely have all three, but the question should be which two do you have, and how do you fill what you don't have. The flip side of that statement, if you have all three, you probably don't need money. What will mobile apps look like in 2 years? In 10?There a couple different facets I see changing for Apps in the next two years. Apps will become more immersive - we hadn't thought of a touch interface five years ago, now my five year old is swiping his way through my iPad. New gestures, sensors in the mobile device (think Xbox connect for mobility) will provide new experiences to mobile devices, and thus Apps, that we have yet to see. They will be more connected - to date, Apps have been stand alone functional units of work, but you see more and more connectedness between apps and services. In simple terms this may be posting a tweet or FaceBook update, but Apps will start to use and integrate to other services and features. This will provide a richer feature set for Apps that are narrowly focused today. They will transition into content creation as much as they are a content consumer today - with more immersive and greater fidelity on the mobile devices, the ability to do large content creation (more than a tweet) will become easier and more common place. This bodes well for enterprise Apps as they require more than consumption of RSS readers and YouTube. In 10 years, there will be a new evolution of products, features and services we haven't dreamed of yet, so it's hard to predict 10 years from now. However looking back ten years ago; all that has really changed is the delivery platform. Ten or twenty years ago we had applications that provided access to data to a centralized server, depending on your age, it was called Mainframe or client server, all that has changed is the delivery platform. I don't think it's the App that will change as much as the platform will change, driving a new innovation wave of how we get "things" done. What makes a great early-stage company? Two early-company screens we likeNaval Ravikant, a fixture of the Bay Area entrepreneur support system, gave a talk at Founder Institute's "Founder Showcase" event in San Francisco earlier this month. Here's a good summary of his talk (together with a video of the whole thing). Naval said – which makes a lot of sense – that of the five factors he discusses – Traction, Team, Product, Social Proof, Pitch – it's Traction that counts for the most with investors
Valhalla Partners 3rd Annual Video SummitValhalla's third annual Video Summit was held in New York this year, in concert with the flagship launch of the Elevate Video Advertising Summit, a conference organized by Will Richmond of VideoNuze and Marc Sternberg of Rising Tide Media (previously President of AlwaysOn).
DC-area Product Innovators' Meetup July 14  Valhallans Kiran Hebar and Kevin Greene will host our third meeting of local Product Innovators on July 14th at the Teqcorner LLC in McLean, VA. The first two meetings in Tysons Corner and Arlington earlier this year were a great learning experience for us. We gathered a group of "product visionaries" and had some terrific discussions. The group asked for some structured demo time, so at the Arlington meeting in April, five companies (Big Universe, nExercise, Ringio, Workforce Growth, and Oculis Labs) demoed to a group of seasoned product professionals to gain access to quality product feedback, ideas and best practices. We encourage any product innovators from the DC metroplex (or beyond) to join us. RSVP for the July 14 gathering at the Product Innovators' Meetup page or via email to Kiran or Kevin. Portfolio News
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The Valhalla TeamInvestment StaffAdministrative Staff
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