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22
May

Going for a Two-fer: Strategic/Law Partner

Whether your company is raising money or positioning for a sale, the support of experienced professionals is essential and the relationship with your lawyer is a very important one. Before you spend a significant amount of money and energy pursuing your financing or some other deal, it is crucial that you establish a solid legal foundation that protects your business, technology and processes.

Selecting a law firm can be a daunting task…typical advice ranges from choosing the right sized law firm (to ensure a cultural fit, and to receive the right level of attention), to finding a firm that is local (close enough to give you the opportunity to establish a closer relationship with your lawyer, which facilitates their understanding of your business, leading to an improved level of service) to avoiding big law offices (so that you don’t end up financing part of their huge overhead, via higher hourly rates).

But beyond this basic advice, if I am either starting a company or am part of a small cap public company, I am looking for a two-fer (“two for one’). In other words, beyond a law firm, I would also seek a strategic partner. So my two-fer criteria would be the following for selecting a law firm:

  1.  Legal: ethical, right sized, cultural fit, entrepreneurial minded, local, fair fee structure
  2. Strategic: highly connected (introductions to top-class advisors, board members, angels, entrepreneurs) and relevant industry business experience

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7
May

Facebook Acquires Glancee

From Glancee:

We started Glancee in 2010 with the goal of bringing together the best of your physical and digital worlds. We wanted to make it easy to discover the hidden connections around you, and to meet interesting people. Since then Glancee has connected thousands of people, empowering serendipity and pioneering social discovery.
We are therefore very excited to announce that Facebook has acquired Glancee and that we have joined the team in Menlo Park to build great products for over 900 million Facebook users. We’ve had such a blast connecting people through Glancee, and we truly thank our users for being a part of the Glancee community.

As an advisor to Glancee, I wanted to first congratulate  Andrea Vaccari, Alberto Tretti and Gabriel Grise, who are the true pioneers in social discovery…Facebook users will soon experience more meaningful connections and interactions, as a result of Facebook’s acquisition of Glancee.

A bit about Glancee…

Glancee is a location-based mobile app that helps you discover the hidden connections you share with the people around you. Glancee highlights people who have friends or strangers in common, that went to the same school you attended, that work in your same company, or that share interests similar to yours. You can use Glancee to explore the profiles of people nearby, or you can keep it in your pocket and be notified if someone interesting is nearby. This ability to link people together offline, with help from the web, aligns perfectly with Facebook’s mission to make the world a more “open and connected” place.

Now, some people consider such social discovery applications as an invasion of one’s privacy or creepy, but that is short-sighted, in as much as it is up to the individual user to determine what information should be shared and whether to make one’s contact information available. I personally see a tremendous amount of value of such an application, particularly as it relates to connecting me with strangers in the business world, with whom I may have common interests or industry background.

Now, a bit about Andrea Vaccari…

A. Vaccari, SXSW 2012

Andrea is an extremely bright, resilient entrepreneur. Andrea represents the new prototypical entrepreneur. He is a data scientist, who has previously worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Santa Fe Institute to investigate people’s lifestyle through their interaction with digital technologies. His work has been exhibited at the MoMA in New York City and the Design Museum in Barcelona, Spain.

As many of you already know, data analytics will revolutionize how business is transacted…from market research, to business planning, to sales management, to strategy development, to supply chain management. It has been with this background, that led Andrea to leverage analytics to connect people with similar interests and to eventually the founding of Glancee.

So beyond Glancee itself, Facebook is getting a tremendous asset in Andrea, so great for them. Keep an eye on Andrea, as this won’t be the last time that you will hear of him…