Monday, January 28, 2008

Fanzter plans site launch for consumer community

By Christopher Calnan

A Connecticut entrepreneur is leveraging his contacts and experience at ESPN.com to fund a new company that's scheduled to launch the first in a planned series of consumer websites next month. And Fanzter's chief backer is a Seattle venture capital firm launched by a former colleague of Fanzter's co-founder with a history of developing consumer websites.

Aaron LaBerge, CEO of Collinsville, Conn.-based Fanzter Inc., plans to create the websites featuring online communities to generate revenue from advertising and e-commerce. The company's first website, Coolspotters.com, has yet to launch and LaBerge provided few details except to say it would combine pop culture with consumer products. LaBerge, a 34-year-old former senior VP of technology and product development for ESPN, declined to disclose how many sites Fanzter plans to create.

The company, founded in June 2007, has attracted nearly $2 million in Series A funding, he said.

Investors include Seattle-based venture capital firms Second Avenue Partners and Curious Office Partners; Seattle-based investor Richard Barton, founder of Expedia Inc. and CEO of real estate website Zillow.com; and several angel investors whom LaBerge declined to identify.

Mike Slade, a partner at Second Avenue Partners, declined to disclose details about Fanzter's products. Yet, he said Fanzter is his firm's second New England investment, both of which have been founded by former co-workers. The previous portfolio company was FanNation.com, one of the sites created by Collinsville-based Sports Technologies Inc., which was founded by another former ESPN executive, Chris Nicholas. In February 2007, Sports Illustrated bought FanNation.com for a reported $20 million.

Both Nicholas and LaBerge initially worked for Slade at Seattle-based website builder Starwave Corp., which was acquired by the Walt Disney Co., ESPN's parent company, in 1998.

"You bet on the person," Slade said of his investments. "We definitely wouldn't have done it with guys we didn't know."

LaBerge founded Fanzter with Eric Kirsten, 38, founder of Colorado-based webconferencing company TrueChat Inc., which was acquired in 2000 by Terayon Communication Systems Inc. in a stock-and-cash deal worth more than $12 million.

At consumer sites such as Coolspotters.com, the priority is to grow as quickly as possible to enable site operators to gather information from users to target them more deeply, LaBerge said.

"All you focus on is getting scale," he said. "Everything else will follow that."