Thoughts in Time

Lightyear Capital Makes Significant Investment in Higher One Holdings, Inc. - MarketWatch

Exciting…. When this deal funds, it’ll be my 1st liquidity event (partial - but hey, it’s still a liquidity event) . Really excited that we were able to build Higher One to the point where an investor such as Lightyear wanted to become involved. Early investors were able to realize more than 20X on their investment and better yet, this deal provided everyone involved with the opportunity for some diversification, while also being able to choose to maintain ownership and participate in the upside as the company continues to grow and increase operating leverage. Congrats to everyone at Higher One. I look forward to seeing the continued growth in the coming years!

Update - I made a mistake and the original PIkum I listed below was for pounds… I’ve switched to Pikles so everyone can play.

The last couple of months have been really busy. I’ve been working really hard with Pikum! and Kellee and I have also done a little bit of travelling (Berline, Rome, US). I’ve gotten slack with my blogging as it has always fallen to “last priority”. There’s a lot going on again, and friends and family have let me know they enjoyed the updates, so I’m going to make sure I post at least a couple times a week going forward.

I’m really excited about the start of the Olympics today. We’ve put tons of Olympics events into Pikum. Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a huge basketball fan. I’m really interested to see how the US do in the upcoming tournament. They clearly have the best athletes in the world, the question is whether they’ll play together, play great defence, and take advantage of the FIBA rules.

To make it a little more fun - I’ve created an Olympics Basketball Pikum that includes the mens and woman’s tournaments. Just click on the link and enter your predictions to play. Enjoy!

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15 Additional Colleges and Universities Implement Higher Ones OneDisburse Refund Management

Been really busy and travelling a lot, so haven’t blogged in a while (Kellee’s been giving me a hard time about that)… so here’s a link to an update on Higher one.  They keep rolling along.  Some updates on Pikum and life in London coming soon (excluding rants about IKEA).

Image via WikipediaPikum! launched a big promotion today around the Champions League Final between Chelsea and Manchester United. If you’re over 18 and live in the UK, you can put up an entry stake of £2 for a chance to win the prize pool of over £1,000. Also, as people enter, the prize pool will keep growing. It’s our way of celebrating the all England final and providing a cool incentive for over 18s in the UK to try playing Pikum for real money. If you’re not in Pikum, shoot me a note at sean at pikumteam dot com, and I’ll invite you in.

Here’s a link to the Pikum….

Response Source | Press Releases - Friends Win Big With New Online Social Betting Game, Pikum | Journalist enquiries, press releases and more

The Press release announcing Pikum’s beta release just went out.  “Hello World”

Now this is what I’m talking about. Johannes has created two pikle pikums on German football… and I’ve won both of them. I guess I know more about Bundesliga football than I thought.

Actually, what I’ve really been enjoying is the feedback we’re getting on Pikum! It’s not the nice notes (”Pikum looks great, lots of fun”), but the notes, twits, and blog posts where we’re learning what people think we can improve. There’s a lot to the Pikum! product and getting into private beta gives us the opportunity to learn how we can best refine and simplify the interface, user paths, and help content to make it really easy for users to understand the game, get started, and start competing… so they can Pikum and win too!

Yesterday we decided to release Pikum! into invite only beta.  The core site processes are working, and we felt the best way to go from here (a good product) to a great product is to get users into the site so we can get feedback.  It’s all about getting feedback and iterating.

It’s been great to see people getting in, entering pikums (we already have a couple with double digit entrants), and sending out invites.  We’re also accomplishing what we wanted in that we’re finding the key issues and pushing them to the top of our list to fix (for instance, we’re finding that we still have a lot of work to do on email deliverability - something we thought needed work, and realize we REALLY want to focus on!).  I was also the first person to win a Pikle Pikum on the live site (Johanne’s “German Quickie”) … We’ll see who the first winner of a real money Pikum is.

We’re going to be blogging ongoing at blog.pikum.com  as we find issues, implement updates, etc.  Stay tuned!

I’ve been a little silent on the blogging front, and it’s not just because I finally got my furniture from IKEA.  I had a trip to the U.S. last week and have been working like crazy as we are focusing on launch (or P-day as we are affectionately calling it). It’s amazing all the different things that you want to come together for a launch of a product like ours.  Here’s a short list, but not necessarily exhaustive:

• Product functionality
• Product design and branding
• back office functionality
• regulatory approval (needed in our case)
• PR preparation (release(s), media list, any events, quotes from outside parties, etc)
• Marketing planning
• Partner and affiliate preparation and operations
• customer service training
• operations training / prep
• hardware / managed hosting prep
• patent composition / filing

It’s coming together nicely and although our team is working amazingly long hours and pushing to get every last bit done, I think we’re all going to be proud of what we’ve built so far, and know that although it’ll still definitely be beta, we’ll continue working hard to improve and provide a great entertainment product that people really enjoy!

Entrepreneur magazines Hot 100 Company Rankings - Higher One

Great to see that Higher One has gotten onto another hot company ranking list… this time - the #12 fastest growing private company in the U.S. according to Entrepreneur magazine. Recently, the company signed it’s 100th university client. Glad to see that things continue to go so well. The great thing about Higher One is that because it’s business serves colleges and students, it’s actually counter cyclical, meaning that if the U.S. does head into a recession, the business should do better, rather than worse.

The business is also growing inorganically, having just purchased EduCard and setup a major partnership with Evisions (http://www.higherone.com/media/2008/acquire_educard.shtml). This will make it easier for 900 Evisions clients to get up and running with Higher One. It’s pretty amazing that something that Miles, Mark, and I founded in 2000 now serves 5% of US college students and has managed over $4 Billion in payments.