Color was a bold bet with a very, very strong team to try to predict the future of mobile when we were all trying to figure out where it would go, pre-Instagram, pre-Snapchat, pre all that.
It raised a ton, pre-product. It didn’t work. Apple still acqui-hired back a lot of the team, the investors got some of their money back.
It was probably a good bet, from a portfolio construction perspective: SaaStr | Making Sense of Color after Meraki, and Going Big
Investing in Big, Proven Teams pre-product fit costs a lot. Especially if you want to own a lot.
And while Big, Proven Teams scale better in many cases than first-timers … they often don’t get to product-market fit any easier or better.
