In my daily perusing around the blogosphere, I had to applaud the piece by Matt Marshall today in SiliconBeat. He noted that Seattle-based Trumba received $8 million in financing and that it was one of several startups getting funded in the "calendaring" arena.
I couldn't agree more with his take that this seems like the classic case of VC Overkill. This is not to say calendaring isn't an ultra-important application OR that many of us couldn't use a better calendar [I currently maintain four different calendars between Outlook, my PDA and two personal services], but the money flow into these startups means that quite a few VCs are going to be left holding the bag on this one, in my opinion.
Putting aside whether or not each of these startups offers something unique or innovative, let's remember that Ray Ozzie and Microsoft just launched a revolutionary bidirectional RSS movement called SSE (Simply Sharing Extensions). If SSE is as compelling as I think it is, it won't be long before we'll see tons of useful extensions of Outlook and other calendaring solutions developed by open sourcers (SSE is licensed under the Creative Commons initiative). Microsoft + Open Standards = what I believe to be trouble for anyone counting on generating high IRRs from exits of these calendar "me toos."
Note: At the time of this writing, I and/or funds I maintain discretionary control over maintained a long equity position in MSFT.
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