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Early-stage investor and operating executive joins Chicago office   CHICAGO, IL – Origin Ventures, a Chicago and Salt Lake City based venture capital firm focused on early-stage technology investments, today announced that Alex Meyer has joined as a Partner. Meyer brings 20 years of experience as an operator, executive, and investor to Origin Ventures. He joins Origin from SAP, where he served as Vice President for Global Business Development. Mr. ...

In 2019, we celebrate our firm’s 20-year anniversary with 20 short storiesand lessons learned by investing over $150M in more than 70 companiesand the entrepreneurs behind their origin. These are their stories. GrubHub and the Spurs Today marks the 5-year anniversary of Grubhub’s 2014 IPO on the NYSE. Origin Ventures was the first investor in the company, leading the Series A financing in 2007. NEW YORK, NY – APRIL 4: ...

The next time a budding musician searches “best violin teacher near me,” he or she may find a link to an app, not a teacher. Origin Ventures recently announced its participation in a $1.29M seed investment in Chicago-based startup Trala. Other investors include LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Techstars Ventures, and executives from Duolingo. The Techstars company has built an app that can teach anyone to play violin using Julliard-approved methodologies ...

We finally met a used-car salesman we liked. Justin Davis is CEO of Kansas City-based BacklotCars, and while he’s not selling cars directly, BacklotCars’ marketplace has made it much easier for auto dealerships to buy and sell used cars between each other. Car dealerships have long bought and sold used cars from each other directly, usually at live auctions. For example, Carl’s Cars, based in Milwaukee, can’t find buyers for ...

Since Steve Miller and Bruce Barron founded Origin Ventures in 1999, one piece of feedback we get consistently is that the Origin team brings an authenticity to all of its interactions: whether with investors, entrepreneurs, or other venture capital firms. While Steve and Bruce’s individual selflessness, integrity, generosity, and accountability have come to define Origin’s external persona, we have done our best to maintain this principled personal style as our ...

“Effective teamwork begins and ends with communication.” – Duke men’s basketball coach Mike Kryzyzewski (aka “Coach K”) In their October 2016 article in Harvard Business Review titled “The Performance Management Revolution”, authors Peter Capelli and Anna Tavis laid out many reasons why up to 70% of multinational companies were moving away from an annual employee review process, and toward more frequent feedback cycles. While we agree with their underlying rationale, ...

We first met Cameo in October 2017, when a one-hour introductory meeting with the founding team turned into a two-hour chalk talk. We liked it right away. Cameo is a Chicago-based company that allows consumers to purchase short video shout-outs from a long list of “talent” - celebrities, entertainers, and athletes. Two days after that initial meeting, I tried Cameo by booking a video from European soccer star Kevin Prince-Boateng ...

As Series A investors, a majority of our capital and attention goes towards helping our portfolio companies grow and scale their sales and marketing organizations. So we know firsthand the many challenges that marketers face, especially when marketing directly to consumers. As paid social advertising platforms have matured, they have become efficient at capturing a large percentage of the advertisers’ willingness to pay. In turn, companies are finding it difficult ...

WeWork has acquired our portfolio company Teem. Teem is a Salt Lake City-based software company that provides innovative meeting room scheduling and workplace analytics. Since we first met the company in 2015, Teem has installed their software in tens of thousands of office locations, and touched millions of users in some of the most innovative companies in the world – including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Snap, Palantir, Slack and Evite. Teem had ...

In July, the Origin team hosted marketers from across our portfolio and extended network to our 2018 Summer Marketing Summit here in Chicago. The 30-odd attendees drove the day’s content by leading conversations around topics they selected ahead of time. The daylong event included robust discussions on marketing best practices, areas for improvement, recommended tools and resources, and more. Find key takeaways below. Powering Up: Marketing Tech Stack Mastering software ...