Bijan Sabet, general partner of Boston's Spark Capital, talks about partnering with other VC firms, especially New York's Union Square Ventures in this episode of The Deal's Behind the Money video show. Spark and Union Square co-invest in Boxee, Bug Labs, Covestor, Tumblr Inc. and Twitter Inc.
To get a feel for the mechanics of co-investing, we asked Sabet (pictured) to walk us through how he met David Karp, the 22-year-old founder of Tumblr Inc., and introduced him to Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson.
In December, the two firms invested $4.5 million in Tumblr, following up on a $775,000 round the previous year that included TV producer Fred Seibert, entrepreneurs Jakob Lodwick and Martin Varsavsky, as well as Betaworks, an innovative incubator in New York.
To find the next generation of Twitters and Tumblr, last week Spark announced a new seed-stage program called Start@Spark. Through the new program, Spark will invest up to $250,000 each in promising startups in the Northeast.
Click here to watch The Deal's video interview with David Karp about raising Tumblr's Series B. Click here to watch our interview with Union Square Ventures partners Brad Burnham, Albert Wenger and Fred Wilson about Hacking Education.Watch the video interview below or download it at iTunes. -- Mary Kathleen Flynn
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By Edward Schneidman, Michael Blair and David Malinger, Mayer Brown
Real estate sponsors that might wish to undertake an IPO will need to consider a wide variety of issues and begin to take action long before the first filing with the SEC.
Paulson's proposal to purchase an equity stake in Yellow Pages publisher Idearc is the second time in recent months an investor group has used its prepetition debt position to execute a bargain price 'exit LBO.'
Bijan Sabet, 
