A Little Misunderstood

After the flurry of press yesterday around Cover’s launch I received a telling note from one of the investors in our fund. I don’t have permission to share their exact words, so I’ll offer a dramatic rendering here:

WTF were you guys thinking?!? Srsly? A restaurant app? What happened to Alpha Geeks and working on “things that matter”? Is waiting for your bill at a restaurant that big of a problem? This is not the kind of stuff I expect to see funded by OATV

I wasn’t all that surprised by their reaction as it was fairly similar to the one we got from folks when we funded TripIt. 

What in the world were we doing funding a travel company? Something so practical, bordering on mundane. Whither the Alpha Geeks?!?

To be fair, I can understand the root of these types of reactions, but I reminded this investor and myself that our fund doesn’t have to do all drones and satellites all the time. Or even, all wacky ideas all the time.

Tho we do fund things that are often misunderstood each investment is rooted in a thesis we’ve operated under since founding OATV. It’s a thesis that has shaped our voice as a fund and our underlying portfolio of companies- Watch the Alpha Geeks, see what they’re working on in their free time, and develop investable themes around them.

In the case of Cover, the alpha geek driven theme our investor had missed was that of Context Aware Programming. As Tim recently wrote:

Just as the switch from the command line to the GUI required new UI skills and sensibilities, mobile and sensor-based programming creates new opportunities to innovate, to surprise and delight the user, or, in failing to use the new capabilities, the opportunity to create frustration and anger.  The bar has been raised. Developers who fail to embrace context-aware programming will eventually be left behind.

This is a theme we’re deeply interested in and one manifest in a number of the companies we fund. Cover happens to be directly relevant to this theme and being lead by founders who’ve embraced this notion to their core.

So, let’s go ahead and just chalk up this latest email exchange with our investor as another case of being misunderstood. The misunderstanding around TripIt worked out pretty well, I offered to buy our investor dinner when Cover does even better.

Paying with Cover of course.