How I found Brad Feld and went “Lijit”

Posted on 07 July 2007

Although Brad Feld doesnt know me, he’s had a significant impact on my life (and free time) these past few weeks. As with all 6-degrees-of-separation stories, Brad came into my life through someone else - In this case, my fiance, Julie. Jules’ daily life is consumed in Venture Capital and I’ll be the first to admit that she has a much cooler job than I do. Her job makes for great after-work conversation, and a fantastic residual benefit I get from her day-to-day is that I get to hear out about a ton of exciting new startups and pre-funded technologies months before they ever hit the public’s radar. Every now and again, she’ll come home after a long day of meetings and presentations super-excited about a new technology or product that her firm’s considering funding, itching to share her news about the next-greatest medical breakthrough or internet startup. A little over a month ago she had one of those days - she had just met Brad Feld. Ever since that night I’ve been a Feld fan, and I read his blogs, Feld Thoughts and AskTheVC , regularly. Brad’s the Managing Director at the Foundry Group, and currently serves on the board of directors of a number of private companies, including ePartners, Gold Systems, Judy’s Book, NewsGator, Rally Software, and StillSecure. One of his group’s most recent successes is Feedburner, which was recently acquired by Google.

One of Brad’s newest projects is a company called Lijit, which is still gathering momentum. Last week Lijit announced that they had raised a $3.3 million financing. If you aren’t familiar with Lijit, it’s the search box widget in the far right column of my site with the “My Content” icons. The Lijit widget is free to publishers, and cake to install - just a cut and paste of couple of lines of java. I found that it had one very minor bug when it comes to WordPress 2.2.1, which is my platform of choice, but the formatting problem I was having was fixed almost immediately thanks to Lijit’s customer service, which is literally the best of any company I’ve ever experienced on or off the web — I’d also like to clarify that I’m not prone to sweeping statements like that - I have been emailing back and forth with Tara Anderson at Lijit weekly and her friendly replies hit my inbox before I close my browser every single time. Just to show you how awesome she is, here’s an excerpt from one of her rapid responses yesterday when I had a minor formatting issue

Hi Steffan,

I agree that this is a very weird problem. When did you first notice it?” Our developers are in a meeting right now but as soon as they’re out, I’m grabbing one of them (forcefully) and making them investigate this issue. I will get back to you as soon as I have an answer for you. Things are really good here and thanks for asking. Hope to have this issue of yours resolved quickly and easily….

Tara

And this was a formatting issue — That’s customer service. There must be something magic in the water up in Boulder. In any case, what excites me about Lijit is that it gives publishers and bloggers the ability to customize searches on their sites to include all the content that they publish - that’s including your bookmarking services like del.icio.us, digg, and reddit; your YouTube and Flickr accounts as well as your social networks like MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter and MyBlogLog. Especially for bloggers, who publish across multiple blogs and who are active taggers and social networkers, this means a much richer, customizable search that they can provide on their sites - which translates into increased value for readers. The ability to build customized searches based on a network of content represents a significant improvement on traditional site search. Not only does it give publishers an easier way to cross-promote mulitple sites, but it allows for a much richer interaction between publishers and readers in real time. I’ll be following my experiences with Lijit closely in this blog, but, for now, if you’d like to read more on about it, a great starting place is Brad’s recent post I’m Feeling Lijit.