Thursday, January 13, 2011

OnSwipe founder: no difference between Boston & NYC

By Galen Moore

OnSwipe co-founder Jason Baptiste is in a growing class of entrepreneurs who may have trouble picking a side in this Sunday’s football matchup between the Patriots and the New York Jets. Baptiste is the latest founder to say his company is based in both Boston and New York. OnSwipe launched in Miami and raised money in Boston. Now it’s in New York, starting the brand-new TechStars New York incubator program there this winter.

“I don’t even fully differentiate between the two cities because they’re so closely linked,” Baptiste said.

OnSwipe is developing software to automatically convert websites, blogs and ads into slick HTML5 formats that work like apps designed for touch-screen tablets. The company, founded as PadPressed, has already done it with an eponymous product for WordPress bloggers.

Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that OnSwipe raised $1 million led by Boston investors,  including VC firm Spark Capital, micro-VC Hadley Harris of Eniac Ventures, and angel investors Dharmesh Shah, Jennifer Lum (Apricot Capital LLC) and Roy Rodenstein – many of the same investors mentioned in a December Mass High Tech article on angel investors who keep their day jobs. Fundraising began with Rodenstein in September, and the money was in the bank Jan. 3, Baptiste said.

In an interview this morning, Baptiste said he and co-founder Andres Barreto picked TechStars New York because of the publishing industry customer base there. “If you basically have a Sonic the Hedgehog bonus level equivalent where you could go to any customer in 15 minutes, what city would you do that in?” he said. “For us, that was New York.”

Then, he said something surprising: he described Boston as “close-knit.” “There’s no stuffiness,” he said. “Everybody’s approachable.”

Two years ago, no one was saying that about Boston. This was the city where investors wanted clubby deals with entrepreneurs who’d done it two or three times before. Internet technology? Too risky. Media? Hits-driven. Boston dealmakers weren’t interested, and they certainly weren’t interested in taking a meeting or making an introduction, unless you came with a pedigree.

Apparently, that has changed. Baptiste raved on. “Everybody’s very approachable and just wants to help,” he said. “You don’t get that everywhere. I’ve been in California and I’ve been in other web communities. There’s something unique about people wanting to help each other.”

Baptiste and Barreto began working on PadPressed about eight months ago. Barreto had previously been a co-founder at streaming music search engine Grooveshark.  Baptiste was a co-founder at Publictivity, a workplace data sharing service, which is now shut down. The two had worked together on Cloudomatic, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business application search engine, and they wanted a better way to make their Wordpress blogs presentable on an iPad.

Soon, Baptiste began traveling to Boston to check out the startup scene here and tell that story. “We didn’t even raise the money with a deck,” he said. “We had it, but it was more about the story. We would go in and tell the story of how we met all the way three years ago, to why we developed this, how we’re starting to get traction and what the vision is. And then we demo’d.”

Much of the core technology in PadPressed will be used to build similar products aimed at advertising and publishing industry customers. OnSwipe is hiring eight to 10 developers, Baptiste said, but he’s not sure where they’ll be based. They’re already working with a couple of developers in Mexico, who are excellent, he said. While he wants a startup culture to gel, it may make sense to house design and sales in New York and development in Boston.

“We think it’s about this new breed of publishers we call the new influencers,” he said. “We’re not going to see another large, centralized entity like the New York Times in our lifetime. Our belief is it’s about this new class who sits in the middle, which is called the new influencer – a specific influencer on a topic with a highly valuable demographic attached to it.”