While I'm at it, Sparkbuy is another new Founders Co-op investment...

Dan Shapiro isn't ready to spill the beans on what he's up to just yet, but word is already on the street that he's rounded up a great group of folks to back him on his next venture: Sparkbuy. Dan was previously CEO of Ontela, acquired by Photobucket about a year ago). We think the world of Dan and are (obviously) super-excited about what he's up to, but will leave it to him to tell you what that is.

Since we can't talk about the product, we can at least share one of the reasons why we like Sparkbuy as a Founders Co-op investment. As Dan put it in the TechFlash story on the raise:

"I am really excited about building a startup that is leaner and is able to consume less resources to go after its goal, and that was one of the things that I was excited to try differently this time around."

There's a theme here...

More FC funding news: Estately brings the capital-efficiency gospel to online Real Estate

When it rains, it pours...

TechCrunch just broke the news of our investment in Estately alongside 500 Startups, Founders Fund, Jeff Clavier and AngelList's Naval Ravikant. We've been tracking CEO Galen Ward's progress for a while and just love how he thinks about building an online business. He's now raised slightly more than $1MM in total to pursue an opportunity - online Real Estate search and lead generation - that other firms are tackling with orders of magnitude more capital.

With this lean approach, Galen has quietly built a top 10,000 website and a growing network of real estate agents who can help turn that traffic into closed home sales. His secret: understand the customer problem, hire great people and be insanely focused about where to allocate both time and money to deliver results. Real Estate is a huge business and there's room for more than one firm to build value - we like Estately's approach and love the team Galen has pulled together to make it so.

Urban Airship is on fire!

The news is all over the wires today (e.g., Mashable, TechCrunch, PEHub, Xconomy, etc) so I don't have much to add other than a big congrats to the Urban Airship team. Not for the raise (raising capital is always a bittersweet event) but for rocking the world of smartphone messaging infrastructure so hard. The Urban Airship team delivers that rare combination of relentless innovation with insane customer focus and rock-solid execution at crazy scale (over 1 billion messages served to date). Adding Foundry to the investor team is a huge win for the company (and just plain fun for Andy and I here at Founders Co-op - between TechStars, BigDoor and Urban Airship we now have three good reasons to hang out in Boulder). Nice!

GFA at work: Nearlyweds! does some serious startup-fu with OneWed buy

There's plenty of news out about the deal (see here, here, and here) but I wanted to pile on with a quick shout-out to the Nearlyweds! team on their acquisition of Chicago-based OneWed. The company has been executing like crazy on their core business since we first invested a year ago, striking deals with some of the best names in the wedding invitation business and constantly iterating to deliver the best wedding website platform on the web. Every Founders Co-op company runs lean, but Nearlyweds! accomplishes more with less than almost anyone else in the portfolio.

The OneWed deal is a perfect example of GFA* at work. John Scrofano (Nearlyweds! CEO) was already running flat out on his core business and had lined up a great series of partner and distribution deals heading into winter - the peak season for wedding planning. But when he heard a rumor that a big venture-backed wedding site was in play he found another gear, flying out to Chicago to dig in on diligence, warming up investors for a fast-track raise, and bringing his team and board along with well-crafted arguments and supporting analysis on the deal.

In less than a month, the OneWed deal went from wild-hare idea to fully diligenced, funded strategic acquisition. And this was not a sweetheart deal - competitors were bidding up to the last few days of the process - and the Nearlyweds! team only won the day because they brought their best game - financially, technically, and personally - to the field every day.

I was already excited about Nearlyweds! as an enabling platform for the future of social wedding planning and celebration. With the addition of the OneWed team and capabilities they took an already-great business and supercharged it for profitable growth. Kudos to Nearlyweds! and a warm welcome to family for the OneWed team.

*GFA = Get F**king Aggressive