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Great blog post by Loic Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic, explaining how he formed the company and raised his intial investment. what’s that old adage? - Oh yes - ‘ its not what you know, it is who you know’.

I closed the initial funding of Seesmic in September 2007. The main investment came from Atomico’s Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (they invested $5.5 million on the $6 million). Talking to bloggers all the time, I have not been very good at keeping the secret as Om Malik was the first to talk about it on October 8, 2007. On November 28, Liz Gannes got almost the entire list of investors right. We have never really hidden the funding as a partial investor list was even on our company backgrounder at the last Demo conference (by the way see our DEMO video if you want to learn about Seesmic in 6 minutes). So the only real news today is the full list of investors.

We should have made it “officially” public for a while but I did not want to do it until all the paperwork was done and signed. That happened last week. Getting 14 investors on board – most of whom are individuals and not through funds - takes time.

Niklas Zennstrom and I have been friends for years and we have been wanting to launch a project together for a while. We both know that the media that has not really changed since the growth of the Internet is TV. Most of our friends do not watch TV anymore or watch it only with a laptop on their knees. TV will totally change in the future, we all know that. While Niklas and Janus are focusing on the high end video content with Joost, I have always been fascinated by the conversations.

I explained to Niklas that for me, the quality of conversations that I have enjoyed on blogs and social software since 2003 had to happen in video and that simply isn’t happening yet. I said I wanted to make this happen and make it my next company and Niklas immediately [Read more]

Tags: AOL, Goldman Sachs, Google, IPRO, Joost, LinkedIn, Pulver, Seesmic, Skype, SofTech VC, SupportSoft, TechCrunch, Topica

The New York Times reports that Seesmic, a video social networking site founded by Loic Le Meur, a successful French tech entrepreneur and one of Europe’s most widely read bloggers, expects to seal agreements for more than $5 million in financing in the next few weeks from investors including AOL founder Stephen Case, Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and leading Internet business angels such as Ron Conway of Angel Investors, according to BusinessWeek.

Seesmic is something like a cross between Facebook and YouTube, where users can post videos of themselves talking, then other users can pick up the conversational thread by posting videos of themselves responding.

But what really sets Seesmic apart, BusinessWeek says, is its business model, which gives a whole new meaning to “building a company online.” Every day since setting the company up in October, Mr. Le Meur has filmed himself talking about what he needs to do next. He posts the videos on a site, www.loic.tv, whose 5,000 viewers serve as an ad hoc advisory board.

www.seesmic.com

Original story from BusinessWeek.

Tags: Angel Investors, AOL, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, The New York Times, YouTube