Betaworks Coming Out Of Beta?

John Borthwick indicates a major change of philosophy at Betaworks, the NYC start-up incubator, along with announcing the departure of his co-founder Andy Weissman to join Union Square Ventures:

via Ben Popper, Andy Weissman Leaves betaworks For Union Square Ventures, quoting Borthwick’s internal email

First, after four terrific years, Andy will be leaving betaworks to pursue a career in venture capital at Union Square Ventures.  This is a terrific opportunity – we are all very happy for him and look forward to working along side him at USV.  Second, over the last several months Andy and I have been working on what comes next for betaworks.  We have had great success since we started betaworks; we’ve grown and sold companies such as Summize, GroupMe, Mobly, and TweetDeck, we’ve invested in companies such as Tumblr, Kickstarter and Ideeli, and we continue to build and work with promising new ventures such as News.me and Findings.  This year alone we have completed five transactions/exits.

We are now ready to move into the next generation of betaworks, #betanext, which is betaworks as an operating company.  Though we will continue to do seed stage investments, our primary focus will be on building the core capabilities of the companies that we acquire and grow in-house.  We are excited about the path that we are taking and have a lot of thrilling work ahead of us.

Andy has been a valued part of the team since the day betaworks was sketched out on the back of a napkin.  He has done a terrific job of seed investing.  He will be around until the end of the month and looks forward to catching up with all of you about his exciting plans, but I wanted to share the news with you first.

Tomorrow, like today and every day, all 82 of us here at betaworks will continue to work on innovative ways to connect people to information and to each other, and we will move forwards towards #betanext.  We wish Andy a the best of luck.

I’ve been working with Betaworks for a few years, as an advisor on News.me and Bitly. I’ve gotten to know Andy very well, and he’s tops. I know that Union Square will be better for his involvement, and with that crew, that’s saying a lot.

Borthwick’s comments about a new stage for Betaworks is perhaps even bigger news. He intends to grow a software company with a large and growing number of software products, as a way to gain maximum synergy across the pieces. Considering how many of the companies fit together, like Chartbeat, Bitly, and News.me, this makes a great deal of sense.

Related articles

• News for news.me - John Borthwick (stoweboyd.com)
• For 21C Malone, #whatsnext? (localglobe.blogspot.com)
• Fog Creek Software Becoming a Betawork’s Style Innovation Lab (betabeat.com)
• On Bitly Buying Twitterfeed (readwriteweb.com)