Mobile Marketing Leaders Since 1998
Press
Mastering the Startup Vibe
October 13, 2008
It’s not easy to raise $15 million for anything these days, much less a mobile marketing startup 10 years in the making. In doing so, Vibes Media now carries the torch as the Chicago-area tech company most likely to succeed.
Founded in 1998 by then recent college grads Alex Campbell and Jack Philbin, Vibes Media today is a profitable player in the $4 billion mobile marketing industry. The company, which received its first outside round of funding from Boston-based Fidelity Ventures, helps advertisers like Pepsi and Texas Instruments create text messaging campaigns. Vibes recently hired a finance chief that has experience selling startups to both Yahoo! and Google, and then serving as an executive with both companies.
My relatively short tenure at Google suggests that I am a small company guy," said Charley Cassell, who became Vibes’ chief financial officer in June. A year before joining Vibes, Cassell served as CFO of FeedBurner during its $100 million sale to Google. During the “frothy” dot-comedy of the late ’90s, Cassell helped sell a company called eGroups to Yahoo!
“This is a good time to make a transition back to something smaller,” said the 42-year-old North Carolina native. “The size and stage of Vibes made it interesting for me to join and develop my skills as a CFO.”
While privately held Vibes does not disclose its financials, last year it made the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in the United States. Cassell said Vibes will invest the new money in acquisitions, technology and adding to its 60-plus employees who punch in at 205 W. Wacker.
“Charley knows how to do things to make a business run faster,” said Google executive and former FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo. “He had a huge impact and did a great job instrumenting our financials.”
Even after working for two Silicon Valley-based behemoths, Cassell, whose dad was born in Des Plaines, prefers to play with local entrepreneurial companies.
“You can be a relatively bigger fish in a market like Chicago if you establish yourself,” he said.
Local investors make right bet
While 2008 has been tough for nearly everyone in every sector of the economy, two local venture capital firms are successfully swimming upstream. Evanston-based New World Ventures and Northfield-based DFJ Portage proved to have made the right deal when their portfolio company Left Hand Networks sold to Hewlett-Packard last month for $360 million.
Based in Boulder, Colo., Left Hand Networks sells storage virtualization equipment to more than 3,000 customers including Dell and EMC. The company, which first raised money from New World and DFJ Portage in 2001, was thought to be a likely IPO candidate before the market for new offerings cratered earlier this year.
Left Hand is the second company backed by New World and DFJ Portage to sell for nine figures. In January, Rolling Meadows-based online ticket retailer TicketsNow.com was acquired by Ticketmaster for $265 million. TicketsNow, which was founded in 1999, first raised venture capital in 2006 and was later backed by Adams Street Partners.
Do social media ads work?
You might not notice, but social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are increasingly serving up ads they hope will reach a more targeted, engaged audience. The problem, according a recent survey by lead generation firm Prospectiv, is that very few of us seem to be noticing. On Thursday evening, the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association hosts a panel conversation that asks “Do Customers Respond to Advertisers Messages Anymore?” More information about the program can be found at www.chicagoima.org.
