Why Initialized Capital Invested in AdQuick

5 years ago, buying this billboard was a lot harder to buy than it needed to be.

We love the idea that file-cabinet industries are doomed. People are used to world-class software for taking photos of their kale salads at lunch, but come back to the office to do their jobs using terrible or no software. That’s an opportunity. You can see the theme in our seed investments investments like Flexport, OpenDoor, and Bellhops. Today we’re announcing that we led the seed round in AdQuick.

Buying out-of-home advertising is no exception: information asymmetry, multiple phone calls, and dozens upon dozens of emails and attachments. And it’s a $40 billion global business that’s not going away if you believe we will keep leaving our homes. It’s also the only growing traditional ad medium.

Outdoor advertisements I ran in DC during the last fight for Net Neutrality

Wasted time, human error, and unnecessary costs can be curbed with software and Adquick was the first of these companies promising that future who actually delivered a quality software product in the present. I’m no stranger to buying billboards, so the concept resonated with me immediately, but it wasn’t until Garry and I sat down with the founders (former Instacart [Fund I] employees) that we saw how diligent they’d been with little to no funding.

We’ve seen pitches for this business for almost a decade, but this was easily the most impressive technical execution and at a remarkably early stage.

Starting a company in the internet age means you don’t need to open a factory, you only need to open a laptop, but far too few founders have as much to show for it as Matt, Fahim, and Connor did. A modern, searchable map interface combined with unique tracking data to help marketers show elusive ROI on out-of-home ads made this a really formidable pitch despite only being a 5 month old business.

It helped that I’ve ordered some outdoor advertisements, but the reference checks ranged from incumbents like H&R Block to upstarts like OVO all came back effusive. If a range of customers, who learned about you organically, love your b2b product that much and you’ve only just begun — we’re interested.