Today is just like any other day at Sprint.ly; we’re answering your support requests, fixing bugs, and working on the next big feature. The only thing that’s changing is that we’re letting everyone in on a secret, which is that we’ve raised a small warchest and assembled an amazing list of advisors to help us make Sprint.ly the product that we and our customers have always dreamed of.
Our primary focus was ensuring we had enough funds to aggressively pursue some of our biggest goals, while surrounding ourselves with investors who would work with, and for, us. We had three objective filters that all of our investors had to meet:
- Must have founded a company at some point in their career.
- Must be investing their own money – in whole or in part.
- Must do less than 5 deals per year.
As for our advisors, we were looking for people who met one or more of the following criteria
- Has considerable experience managing all kinds of software development teams and products.
- Has considerable design experience.
- Has expert knowledge in a field that we, as developers, do not (e.g. branding, advertising, operations, sales, business development).
So who are our investors? Freestyle Capital, Andrew Bosworth (Director of Engineering at Facebook), Stan Chudnovsky (Founder of Ooga Labs), Blaine Cook (Former Lead Architect at Twitter and Cofounder of Poetica), Ross Dargahi (Cofounding VP of Engineering at Zimbra), Ryan Freitas (Cofounder of About.me), Tony Haile (CEO of Chartbeat), Michael Levit (Managing Partner at Founders Den), Eamon Leonard (VP of Engineering at Engine Yard, Cofounder of Orchestra.io), Matt Mullenweg (Creator of WordPress, Founder and CEO of Automattic), Alex Payne (Former API Lead at Twitter, Cofounder & CTO of Simple), Jason Shellen (Cofounder of Brizzly and Tapedeck), and Rick Webb (Cofounder of The Barbarian Group).
And who are these advisors? Chris Lea (Author and VP at Media Temple), Michael Lopp (Renown as @rands, Formerly Apple, Director of Engineering of Palantir), John Quinn (Former VP of Engineering at Digg, VP of Engineering at Gilt Group), Evan Henshaw-Plath (Formerly Yahoo! Brickhouse, Fire Eagle, Odeo, and Founder of Cubox), Alex Hunter (Former Head of Global Digital Brand Strategy for Virgin), Marc Hemeon (Designer at YouTube, Cofounder of fflick & teefury, Director of UX at Oakley), Jeffrey Kalmikoff (Head of Product & Design at Betable, Former Chief Creative Officer at Threadless), and David Bill (Cofounder and CTO of CoTweet).
We announce our funding, not as a triumphant achievement per se, but as a public declaration that we’re 100% committed to helping our customers achieve development-Zen with Sprint.ly. This announcement shows that we are not only pushing forward with Sprint.ly, the product, but also setting up Sprint.ly, the company, to live a long, happy, and prosperous life.
Finally, we want to thank you, our customers, for cheering us on, reporting bugs (in some cases submitting patches!), building tools on top of our software, and supporting us with your hard earned dollars every month.
