Ooga Labs is now operating as the NFX Guild. To get in touch with us, please go to www.NFX.com website and consider applying for the next class.
About
We’ve been working together since 2000, and Ooga has been our Advising/Investing vehicle since 2007.
James Currier
Growth Advisor PayPal Co-Founder of Tickle, WonderHill, Jiff, IronPearl
Stan Chudnovsky
VP Growth PayPal Co-Founder of Tickle, WonderHill, Jiff, IronPearl
Working with US
We work exclusively with Networks and Marketplaces. We’ve specialized in network effect businesses because they benefit the most from the type of non-linear growth that we can help with, and once they start working, they tend to become huge and are defensible.
We provide expertise in growth, hands-on mentorship, and access to capital. We help companies iterate product and grow fast.
After establishing an advisor relationship, we typically invest $25K - $100K of our own capital, and our partners might put in another $150K - $900K
Ooga Labs is based in the SF Bay Area. We are now operating as the NFX Guild (for Network Effects, www.nfx.com) and are not investing or advising outside of NFX. If you have a network or marketplace and want to consider applying to NFX, please send an email to networkeffect@oogalabs.com requesting an invitation, and include a deck and a description of the key members of your team.
Israel & Europe
We are interested in marketplace and network companies in Israel and Europe, particularly ones that want to access the Silicon Valley ecosystem. We are often there, and are happy to meet up when we are. networkeffect@oogalabs.com
Open Letter
{Written in less than 5 minutes by James in 2006, in an email to an engineer graduating from his alma mater, Princeton. It was subsequently passed around by the engineering deans to their departments.}
Don't make my mistake!
So you're going to take a cube job with slow Microsoft, bureaucratic Oracle, or with some boring financial company?
C'mon! Do you want spend all of your life wearing modest habits of charcoal grey, driving your Volvo on the salty roads of the drab East Coast, paying 50% of your earnings to taxes, and hanging out with narrow minded people, congratulating yourselves on improving a feature of a widget of version 12.1b.4 of some software, or maybe improving the financial return of some rich bald dude in Greenwich, CT by 0.2% above the S&P Index?
Has no one taken you aside and said, "Wait! You're about to waste 10 years of your life figuring out the path you chose out of college is crap!"
No one did to me either when I went to Princeton, and it took me until I was 31 to get my ass out to San Francisco and do tech start ups. Don't make my mistake. Save yourself now. Even if you don't work for me. I mean it.
Out here, you think about the future. Out here, you are surrounded by colorful, dynamic technologists and entrepreneurs who are really making a difference, pushing the edge.
Most people think that working for a big or known company will give them good experience. That's kind of like saying learning to sit still for dental surgery is good experience. Sure, it's an experience, but there are life paths where you don't have to have dental surgery, or work for a big company, to have the best life. In fact, I would argue that you learn the wrong things working for a big company, and that it's actually not good experience. A good experience is when you really make something happen in the world. Big companies teach you how to work through layers of bureaucracy and how to solve problems in very risk-averse ways -- in short, how to make something happen in their organization. A big company is not the safe career choice. It's the risky choice. It risks your mind and your life.
Oh, and one more thing. Initially, your friends and family may not understand why you didn't take that "safe" cube-job with the company whose name they know, but in two years they will understand. They will love using the websites you build, and they will talk often with their friends about it. They will see you having a vibrant life, pushing the edge of what's happening, and they'll be proud to know you.
Take a few minutes and reconsider your first "starting point" out of college. It sets up a direction that takes some time to change. Aim yourself in the right direction. Again, you don't have to come to Ooga Labs, just get to the Bay Area and join a startup. You will never regret it.