Biscotti Mobile

Biscotti Mobile was the fifth company I started at Polaris and the only one not to raise capital.

My co-founder, experienced mobile exec Marc Theermann, and I started working together in February of 2008. Marc and I liked working with each other and wanted to start a company. After killing a couple of early ideas, we focused on the mobile analytics space. By June, we had a vision of a mobile analytics company that could help substantially improve the performance of mobile advertising across content silos (mobile Web, SMS, video, applications, etc.). We had an idea how to enable precise ad targeting that’s 100% privacy safe and we had to move quickly.

We brought in two additional mobile execs as co-founders and struck a deal to buy a CA-based mobile ad optimization company as part of the Series A to accelerate time-to-market. We got a $7M term sheet from Polaris. Unfortunately, the deal with the other two co-founders and the CA company couldn’t survive the pressures of time and the economy. In the end, Marc and I decided to stop fundraising and find other means to achieve the vision we had outlined.

Marc went on to lead business development at Smaato. I left Polaris and started FastIgnite. Some of my thinking about enabling targeted advertising while protecting consumer privacy migrated to BetterAdvertising.