This Mobile Seed Fund Just Added Two More Partners Silicon Valley-based Tandem has added former Google and Yahoo executive Shashi Seth and co-founder of couchsurfing.com Daniel Hoffer as partners.
By Kate Taylor
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Days after dropping the title "accelerator," this seed fund is bringing on new partners.
On Wednesday, Silicon Valley-based Tandem announced it has added Shashi Seth, who has served as an executive at tech companies including Google, Yahoo and eBay, and Daniel Hoffer, a co-founder of CouchSurfing who has also worked at TripIt and Symantec.
"Together our new partners have decades of experience building global consumer-facing businesses," Doug Renert, co-founder of Tandem, said in a statement. "Tandem backs great founders from around the globe, and now they'll all benefit from Dan and Shashi's insights, experience and skills in the push for product-market fit."
While at Yahoo, Seth oversaw Yahoo Search, Local, Small Business and other products. At Google, he helped develop YouTube's ad framework and worked in product development in search. Hoffer is one of the founders of CouchSurfing, a site that connects travelers with people willing to house them. The company was founded in 2004 and currently has more than 10 million members, according to its site. Both partners have served as advisors in the startup world.
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Tandem, the largest mobile-first seed fund in Silicon Valley, now has 15 full-time team members who work directly with startups. With the addition of Seth and Hoffer, Tandem today has six partners including Renert and co-founder Sunil Bhargava, who started Tandem in 2007. The company has not yet brought on any female partners.
The announcement of the new partners comes days after Tandem's announcement that the company had dropped the word "accelerator" from its title. The decision came as Tandem felt the term no longer encompassed the seed fund's involvement and investment in its startups.
"We simply felt that the typical accelerator (and its close relative, the incubator) had evolved a long way from our original investment approach," the company said Monday in a blog post. "Tandem has always been focused on backing a limited number of talented founder teams and working with them very closely to discover product-market fit."
In January, Tandem completed its third investment fund, raising $100 million, a figure that tripled the size of its previous $33 million fund. The company says that plans to use the fund to partner with startups beyond the acceleration phase and expand its program to include companies working on the Internet of Things and connected devices.
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