Geckoboard – Your Business in Real-Time

I’m thrilled to announce that together with Robin Klein at Index Ventures, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund and my friend and former Atlas Venture partner Alexander Bruehl I’ve made an investment in Geckoboard. Geckoboard is a beautiful real-time status board that lets businesses keep an eye on all the indicators that matter to them.

It’s a bit like “Pageflakes for businesses” (although “Chartbeat for everything else” is probably a better analogy), which is one of the reasons why investing in Geckoboard was a pretty easy decision for me. Another reason is that Geckoboard will be provided as a web-based service, with a free trial and a pay-as-you-go subscription model. Exactly the kind of SaaS business that I’ve developed a focus on in the last two and a half years. Another reason was the huge demand for the product's beta invitations (one of my favorite requests for a beta invite is this tweet, but there are many more). And of course the fact that the company was founded by an extremely sharp guy, Paul Joyce. Yes, a lot of reasons.

I also have a strong bias for startups with websites and applications that look beautiful because I think that's crucial in a world of consumerized enterprise applications. The talent and the experiences to create software that looks and feels great is rare and probably under-rated, but Paul and his team have it. Check out how awesome Geckoboard looks, no matter if you view your dashboard on a large wall-mounted screen, a computer monitor, an iPad or an iPhone.