When I got a call from Dow Jones last week and my thought process was as such:
1) Seriously?
2) The price of the site has gone up now.
3) I hope they will do a good job with it.
Fortunately for everyone, everything I thought of happened. Notice the new price for the site (+$1 for every unique visitor we get to the site, which is now at 19,263) and the fantastic article below, which no doubt is front page WSJ material.
Clever T-Shirts Target ‘Twisted, Warped’ VCs in the February 25th via Dow Jones and VentureWire
By Arwen “the awesome” Ungar (emphasis ours), reprinted in entirety with permission.
2/25/2008
What is the biggest problem facing venture capitalists?
The lack of clever T-shirts.
Or so says VC Wear, a company that started as a joke aiming “to take over the fashion world, make the whole world smile and cure some disease somehow.”
After hearing friend and venture capitalist at Pearl Street Venture Funds Paul Roales being harangued in a bar by an overeager entrepreneur pitching a stealth-mode contextual advertising company, Andrew Hyde, co-founder of entrepreneur conference organization Startup Weekend, decided he could provide a truly invaluable service to venture capitalists: High-priced T-shirts - available only to accredited investors - warning off the passionate, the inexperienced and the pushy with slogans like, “Don’t Pitch Me, Bro” and “Your mom is not a valid test market.”
Hyde and his friend Matt Emmi cemented the details of the company in a moleskin notebook on the flight home from an entrepreneur event in Bloomington, Ind., put on by Startup Weekend.
The pair decided on a target audience, “Really warped, twisted venture capitalists.” And then further targeted it: “Basically, Brad Feld is our only target.”
Feld, a partner at Mobius Venture Capital and managing director of Foundry Group, was the inspiration behind a tee that pictures a man on a contraption called the treadputer, a working computer with three monitors attached to a treadmill that Feld had created and described on his blog Feld Thoughts.
By Thursday, barely two days after it was founded, the company had sold nine T-shirts. But Hyde said Feld had not yet purchased one.
“Given that I am their target audience, I would expect a free treadputer T-shirt in exchange for the use of the phrase treadputer,” Feld said. A true venture capitalist, he added, “I expect that if they lowered their price to $25 per shirt, they’d sell more than enough to buy a year’s supply of ham sandwiches.”
Feld wasn’t the only one who noticed the site: News spread among venture capitalists faster than Webvan sped into bankruptcy in 2001.
U.S. venture capitalists had heard of it. “I think it’s absolutely hilarious,” said Braughm Ricke of True Ventures. “The quotes are intuitive and very funny.”
International venture capitalists had even taken notice. “Finally, this industry gets its own T-shirt site. A hoax, of course, unless you have $100 to blow on some fine American Apparel cotton,” Max Niederhofer of Atlas Venture in Germany said via email.
The site was quick to respond to the onslaught of references in the venture capital blogosphere by posting a new shirt, “More People Have Seen This Shirt Than Your Startup.”
And it’s probably true. Even the National Venture Capital Association weighed in. Emily Mendell, vice president of strategic affairs and outreach at the NVCA, said: “It’s really clever and the folks responsible really understand venture capital. I think they could have a real business. They could do hedge fund shirts, buyout shirts.”
All seriousness aside, Roales, the initial inspiration, said Hyde and Emmi never really meant to make money.
“The $100 pricing is meant to go along with that theme of humor and social commentary,” Roales said.
In addition to shirts, the site also features a “Buy this company now” button where impulse shopping venture capitalists can purchase the site for $100,000.
The purchase of the site will include “hundreds of tear-filled term sheets that will come in handy when reprinting the shirts,” and the “envy of all your VC friends.”
Whether the site expands into different areas such as LBO Wear like Mendell suggests, or lowers its prices like Feld posits, for venture capitalists, its wry and spot-on humor may withstand the test of time, just as long as it avoids turning into another hackneyed site like T-Shirt Hell.
Provided they’ve learned the lessons adorning the shirts, venture capitalists should know better.
