The tech media in San Francisco was abuzz last night with the launch of GoInstant, the latest venture of Jevon MacDonald, until recently the entrepreneur-in-residence at Innovacorp in Halifax.
Forbes, PC Magazine, TechCrunch, ZDnet and CNet all reported on the launch of the Halifax-based venture at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in Silicon Valley.
MacDonald, a PEI native who came to Halifax by way of Austin, Texas, amicably left the one-year post at Innovacorp earlier this year and has been known to be working on his next venture with a group of collaborators. GoInstant’s technology allows two people in two locations to use two mouses (or is it mice?) to share a PC screen, allowing companies to work more closely with customers to explain how its product or service works.
``GoInstant can be described in three simple words: `collaborative Web browsing,’ a phrase which doesn't really explain just how simple this startup's technology is,’’ wrote Mark Hachman of PC Magazine. ``What is it? Imagine surfing the Web on a screen with two mouse pointers, one controlled by you, and the other by a remote user.’’
MacDonald and cofounders Gavin Uhma, Kirk MacPhee, and Dave Kim have lined up $1.7 million in seed funding for the venture – not a jaw-dropping figure in itself. What is impressive is the pedigree of the investors, who include:
Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners, a co-founder of LinkedIn; Howard Lindzon, managing partner of Social Leverage and founder of StockTwits; Josh Felser and Dave Samual of Freestyle Capital; Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures, an early investor in Twitter; Chamath Palihapitiya of Embarcadero Ventures; Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures; Ed Sim of BOLDstart Ventures; Yuri Milner; Matt Wyndowe; Jonas Brandon, a co-founder at StartupNorth; and Rypple's Daniel Debow.
One other investor listed on the startup’s website is Patrick Keefe of Innovacorp, which means the people of Nova Scotia also have a slice of this venture.
There are two important ramifications about this launch:
First, an Atlantic Canadian startup can go to Silicon Valley and secure seven-figure funding from the best tech VCs in the world. The people responsible for LinkedIn and Twitter are now backing one of our own. This is important because not a year ago we kept hearing from Central and Western Canadian VCs that they wouldn’t waste their time looking at Atlantic Canadian companies because everyone knows they’re no good. With Radian6 selling to Salesforce.com, Unique Solutions raising $30 million in private money and now MacDonald raising $1.7 million in Silicon Valley, we’ve put a stake in the heart of that demon.
The second important aspect of this launch is that MacDonald will soon fly home from San Francisco and resume his work in Halifax. He is extremely community-minded, even by the high standards of the startup community in the region. The entire tech cluster in the region will benefit from having him operating here. Already he is giving his time to serve on the board of Sheepdog Inc., appear at DemoCamp 2011 and Invest Atlantic, and I suspect we’ll be hearing more soon on how Halifax techies will gain from his success.