Goodbye, Visto Corp.
You were one of my first investments back when I was a neophyte investor. I learned so much from investing in you! And now the remains of…
You were one of my first investments back when I was a neophyte investor. I learned so much from investing in you! And now the remains of you have been sold off — to the enemy nonetheless!
That’s right — the news yesterday morning was that Blackberry (FKA Research In Motion) has acquired Good Technology for $425M. That company was originally known as Visto Corp. I sponsored the investment by New Enterprise Associates in the Series C financing of Visto Corp. in June, 1998, two years after the company was created by David Cowan when he was a neophyte at Bessemer Venture Partners!
Visto Corp. initially made a consumer-facing email and personal information service, well before anyone actually wanted one of those things. The company pivoted into enterprise email, also well before anyone thought they wanted that! But it persisted, in part by raising lots of lots of money (back when $200M was still an amazing amount of money). Along the way, NEA and most of the other early investors stopped participating in the financing of the company and were diluted in their ownership. New investors took the lead and continued to fund the company.
After NEA stopped being an active investor and after I left NEA to co-found Alsop Louie Partners, Visto acquired the company original known as Good Technologies (a company that had been also been unsuccessful and had been sold to Motorola). The combined companies, renamed Good Technology, ultimately managed to create and acquire so much intellectual property in the world of mobile enterprise email that it became the sole credible alternative to Blackberry’s own mobile email system. It did that in part by being very aggressive in suing competitors for infringing on its intellectual property, including RIMM, the company that had developed the Blackberry and its mobile email software. It won enough of its lawsuits to continue funding its own marketing and development until the market caught up and it became a successful company — sort of.
Now Blackberry has acquired Good Technology, nee Visto and Good, and has finally consolidated all of the intellectual property about managing secure, mobile email in the enterprise. Nearly 20 years later, I am once again reminded that, when a venture capitalist first invests in a company, there is no way to know what the future holds or predict the outcome for the investment!