Speek co-founder Danny Boice
Edward Norton, the Golden Globe award winning actor behind Primal Fear, American History X, fight club and many more has deep ties to the Delaware, Maryland and Virginia area (DMV). Speek, the future of conference calling with headquarters at AOL’s fishbowl and deep ties at Washington DC’s 1776 also has roots in the same area. But it wasn’t in Maryland, DC or Virginia that Norton met up with would be one of his few technology investments.
Speek Co-Founder Danny Boice, told Techfaster in an interview that Norton spoke at a Speek event in New York City. It was at that event that Norton became amazed by how easy it was to initiate, participate and keep track of conference calls using Speek’s easy platform. He asked to be introduced to Boice and co-founder John Bracken (also a co-founder of e-vite). From there Boice tells us that he and Norton were to have a quick 30 minute lunch meeting that quickly became three hours.
The meeting also resulted in unprompted tweets of endorsement from Norton about Speek and then a contest for Speek users to have a Speek conference call with the actor.
Norton has only made a handful of technology investments including ride sharing service Uber, and crowdrise. Like actor turned technology investor Ashton Kutcher, Boice reports that Norton takes a somewhat active role in his investments.
“I met him near his house in NYC and a 30 minute coffee turned into 3 hours. We all hit it off from day 1. From there he both made an investment and also joined as a very active advisor. The guys is SHARP and has been super helpful with biz dev deals and fundraising. He is a Yale grad” Boice said.
Norton participated in Speek’s Series A round which just closed for $5.1 million dollars. 500 Startups also re-invested in the company. Former 500 Startups partner, Paul Singh, also participated through his new Crystal Tech Fund. Middleland Capital, CNF Investments, Founders of Blackboard (Michael Chasen), WeddingWire (Timothy Chi, Sonny Ganguly), CrowdRise (Jeffrey Wolfe, Robert Wolfe), Webs (Haroon Mokhtarzada, Zeki Mokhtarzada) also participated.
Speek’s been making waves since their launch including a stunt pulled by Boice last year at Tech Cocktails startup event at SXSW which resulted in Speek co-founder John Bracken getting a tattoo on his ass.
Speek has also been named one of the Wall Street Journal’s “top 20 startups of the year”, Entrepreneur magazine’s “100 most brilliant companies”, and PCMag’s “Top 100 Websites of 2013”.
Speek makes it super easy for anyone to participate in a conference call by using their own unique Speek url like speek.com/techfaster, speek.com/allief and speek.com/kyle. Although it’s great for personal use, Speek For Teams, their enterprise/business offering is the companies biggest revenue stream.
You can try speek out here.
