The sFund Calls in Social Kings, Flush with $250M to Start
There’s news pouring in from all corners about the announcement at Facebook Headquarters. While the announcement/event hasn’t started yet, there is a series of chairs set up and a backdrop that reads: sFund. Also prominent are the logos for a multitude of well-known industry favorites like Facebook, Amazon.com, Zynga, and Comcast. Details on the fund will be on display here once the announcement is complete.
The sFund is a new $250 million Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services — Amazon.com, Facebook, and Zynga, the leading companies defining today’s social and online environment; entertainment and media leaders Comcast and Liberty Media, and Allen & Company LLC, who have commited to invest in the sFund and serve as strategic partners. The sFund will provide financing, counsel, and relationship capital for a new generation of entrepreneurs to deliver on the promise of the social web.Bing Gordon leads the sFund in collaboration with other KPCB partners.
The sFund is led by KPCB Partner Bing Gordon in collaboration with partners Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Eric Feng, Lila Ibrahim, Randy Komisar, Aileen Lee, Matt Murphy, Ellen Pao, and Ted Schlein.
Amazon, Facebook, and Zynga are strategic partners, providing sFund companies with special support and networking opportunities.
Update: The event just started and you can catch the live feed over at AllFacebook.com. One of the people in the chairs happens to be Mark Zuckerberg.
Here is the full press release
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Launches $250 Million sFund Initiative for Social Web Entrepreneurs
Amazon.com, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast and Liberty Media to Invest and Help Accelerate a New Wave of Social Web Innovations
October 21, 2010 – Palo Alto, Calif. – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the sFund, a new $250 million initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services. Amazon.com, Facebook, and Zynga, the leading companies defining today’s social and online environment; entertainment and media leaders Comcast and Liberty Media and Allen & Company, LLC, have committed to invest in the sFund and serve as strategic partners. The sFund will provide financing, counsel, and relationship capital for a new generation of entrepreneurs to deliver on the promise of the social web.
“We’re at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites,” said KPCB partner John Doerr. “There’s never been a better time than now to start a new social venture.”
The sFund will be led by KPCB partner Bing Gordon, former chief creative officer and longtime executive at Electronic Arts and board director of Amazon.com and Zynga. Gordon said, “Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the Internet, the race is on. Today every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy.”
“Social apps are viral, and when they hit, it often happens suddenly, and then they grow explosively. That’s one of the reasons the scalable, elastic, no capex, variable cost nature of Amazon Web Services is ideal for social apps,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “The top three companies that develop for Facebook all use AWS.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said, “The Web is being rebuilt around people, and we’re at a point where any app, website, or device can be designed to be social from the ground up. We’re focused on enabling entrepreneurs to build companies that can disrupt their industries.”
Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, noted, “Zynga’s successes – such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars – show the speed with which entrepreneurs can transform existing industries and invent entirely new ones through social platforms. Our model demonstrates consumers’ desires to connect with others in new and valuable ways.”
Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, said, “Social businesses play an increasingly important role in our entertainment and communications products. We’re very pleased to be a part of the sFund and look forward to seeing the great innovations that are generated from its investments.”
All anchor investors in the sFund initiative are prioritizing developer services for entrepreneurs, who will be part of an active ecosystem. The strategic partners launching the sFund each bring unique contributions. Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide AWS Getting-Started Support for one year, priority access to worldwide Startup Events, and dedicated business and technical support. Facebook will contribute access to its platform teams, beta APIs, and new programs, like Facebook Credits. Zynga will host periodic sessions with sFund companies to focus on management and technical development, including open source collaboration. Comcast Interactive Capital, Comcast’s venture fund, will provide access to Comcast’s resources,
teams, and relationships.Over the past year, there has been unprecedented innovation in social applications. KPCB’s latest social ventures show the breadth of the social opportunity, from seed stage to scale-up, and enterprise to entertainment, including:
- Cafébots — The first company dedicated to Friend Relationship Management. By building applications that are useful, fun, and scalable, consumers will be able to extract more information from and make better use of their social graphs. KPCB led a Series A funding for the company founded by a team of Stanford PhDs.
- Flipboard — The world’s first social magazine, delivering a beautiful, personalized experience of the news, images, and information being shared by your friends across social network feeds on your iPad.
- Jive — Jive’s social software leverages innovations in social to radically change the way work gets done in the enterprise. Jive has over 3,000 customers serving 15 million users. KPCB led a growth stage funding round in July.
- Lockerz — A new social commerce company aimed at ages 13-30 creates a revolutionary new way to shop, play content, and connect. In less than a year, Lockerz has grown to more than 17 million members, offering major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.
KPCB will have 10 U.S. partners working on the fund, including Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Eric Feng, Bing Gordon, Lila Ibrahim, Randy Komisar, Aileen Lee, Matt Murphy, Ellen Pao, and Ted Schlein. Another four KPCB partners in Shanghai will extend the sFund’s reach in China.
Go to www.kpcb.com/sfund and www.facebook.com/kpcbprofile, or follow us at twitter.com/kpcb to learn more about the sFund.
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.
One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.
Join our community on YouTube
Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.
THANK YOU