An Interview with David Carlick
David Scott Carlick believes that successful investing hinges on markets and entrepreneurial teams. Products and services that are clever and adaptive yield success in new markets. To deliver these products and services requires vision and collaboration by inspired people.
David is currently an independent director and investor at PayActiv and Music Audience Exchange, and an investor in several private companies and venture funds. He is also an early investor in CodeStream.
Q: You are an investor in CodeStream. Why did you decide it was a good bet?
A: First of all, I believe that tools and services for software developers are a big and growing market. Software is eating the world and many more developers are needed to meet demand. In addition, open-source code, distributed teams, and a demand for more rapid development put new strains on the development environment and present new opportunities. Second but equally important, I believe in great teams. I have had the pleasure of working with Peter and Claudio for many years now, always with happy outcomes. Peter has a keen eye for future trends and underneath his product visions and successful business outcomes is the mind of a die-hard coder. With CodeStream, he is completely immersed in the needs of our target customer, because he IS our target customer. The combination of a great market and a strong team is usually a good bet.
Q: What about the product?
A: I am not a developer, but I asked around and found that developers and development managers saw the demo and loved the concept. It is clear that it addresses a real pain point for development teams. Beyond creativity and technical chops, great software is about communicating the right information to the right people at the right time. It’s clear that communicating about code is fundamentally different than other kinds of communication, and I believe CodeStream represents the solution that teams are looking for.
Q: What trends are you spotting these days?
A: I have long been a fan of ‘crowdsourcing.’ This has changed everything from Freelancer.com or 99Designs, where you can source freelancers instantly from around the world, to Uber and AirBnB, which are using ‘crowds’ to transform transportation and hospitality. I think this new ‘distributed’ company approach is going to have a big impact on how products are engineered, how teams are built, and of course, all this begs for tools for coders to be able to collaborate.
About David Carlick
David has served in a variety of roles at VantagePoint Venture Partners and Rho Ventures where he was involved in numerous investments including Intermix Media (parent company of MySpace that was sold to NewsCorp in 2005), ReachLocal (IPO 2010, acquired 2014 by Gannett), XGraph (acquired by AddThis and Oracle) and Multiply, led by Peter Pezaris (acquired by Naspers). The high-tech agency he founded was acquired by Poppe Tyson (BJK&E) in 1993. While at Poppe Tyson he co-founded poppe.com which spun out and merged with Modem Media (NASDAQ: MMPT) and was an early co-founder of DoubleClick which was spun out, went public and was subsequently sold to Google. As an independent director, he served on the boards of Ask Jeeves through its acquisition by IAC, and was a founding director of International Network Services through its IPO and acquisition by Lucent.
