Have you ever heard of Tim O'Reilly before? He's the guy who founded top publishing house O'Reilly Media and has written a number of forward looking articles on open source and the Web 2.0 phenomenon. He's also the same guy who brought his experience to bear in a number of savvy investments e.g. Bloggger which sold out to Google.
He now has turned his hand to the VC world where he has a $51 million fund called AlphaTech Ventures. It is not a big heavy wait fund but rather a small and nimble fund that looks at investing at a very early stage. Impressively, some of his investors include Jeff Bezos, who is the founder of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Pierre Omidyar , who is the founder of eBay (NASDAQ EBAY).
Of no suprise is the fund has gone to work already, the investments include: Instructables, Chumby, and Wesabe.
In particular I like the first company Instructables which is a search engine that gives you “step-by-step instructions for making things you never knew you wanted”. Like this lightbulb vase above. It's pretty cool! After a little more investigation I unearted on the jobs page of this company that they are allowing applicants comment their way around the open job descriptions, and the public are allowed to see what they say!It also openly advertises AdWords on the site! Do you think this is a novel idea that may catch on in career sites across the world!?! Or just a cash strapped start-up trying to make some quick advertisement revenue?!?
