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Advertising - Monday, January 16, 2006

SpotRunner Gets $10M to Sell Cheap TV Ads

Some entrepreneurs remind us of zombies, they just keep coming back. We are amazed to see that Nick Grouf and David Waxman are the guys behind SpotRunner. We expected this Los Angeles-based TV ads sales startup to have been founded by TV vets, not Net guys.

We met Waxman and Grouf back when they founded Cambridge, MA-based Firefly - a personalization pioneer - which floundered for a business model and sold its technology in a fire-sale to Microsoft in 1998. Then they founded PeoplePC which had an IPO in 2000, but the company racked up $200M in losses and sold to Earthlink for pennies per share.

SpotRunner has raised $10M from Battery Ventures, Index Ventures. We have a good feeling about the third time around for Grouf and Waxman. The company has created a number of canned ads that buyers can personalize and then buy TV air-time via SpotRunner. So they have spots about job recruiting, mortagages and pest control that buyers who lack big budgets can buy and place for targetted markets and demographics.

While we SpotRunner's model is spot on today, we like the fact that they are targeting the stone-age TV
ad market with modern technology and business models. We think Grouf and Waxman will be able to figure it out.

Read - SpotRunner: Easy TV ads for local businesses (Silicon Beat)