Chris Sacca, the open wireless spectrum advocate who left Google Inc. last month to focus on early-stage investing, unwittingly got the blogosphere guessing this week about the identity of the first company he's backing as a full-time investor when he posted a help-wanted ad on his blog seeking a "Web Geek... for a startup -- in NYC." 

While Sacca wouldn't tell us anything about the "edgy little content company" he's investing in (except that it is not David Karp's Tumblr Inc.), he shared his thoughts on what he's looking for in seed-stage tech firms. His early track record as an investor is promising -- his first private investment was in Photobucket Inc., which was acquired by MySpace.com parent company Fox Interactive Media Inc. in June for $300 million, including a $50 million earnout.

TC: And speaking of Josh Kopelman, he recently defined his criteria for evaluating companies. What are yours?
Sacca: The trouble with my building a hard-and-fast filter is that no sooner do I do it than an opportunity comes along that breaks it. My first step in evaluating a company is, could I be personally helpful to it? Are there insights I can offer? A lot of the value of my being involved early is that I have experience doing deals and in product strategy. It's all about products. If a company is not building a product to solve a user problem, there's no hope anyway. Without focus on a solution, no amount of marketing or fancy Web site is going to fix the company.

TC: How do you determine if a company is worth investing in?
Sacca: Great companies start at one or the other end of the spectrum. Either they make amazingly compelling products that users have to use and who become natural evangelists for the products, or they have an ingenious new business model, a new way of monetizing something that takes advantage of an inefficiency.

TC: Give us some examples of the kind of companies you're talking about.
Sacca: Former Googler David Friederg's WeatherBill Inc. has an incredibly compelling business model. It's a sophisticated weather-hedging market. And a really compelling product is Twitter Inc. People get it and understand it, and millions of people are twittering. I use it to keep in contact with a couple hundred people who would normally be out of reach or hard to follow. Those two companies are at either end of the spectrum. I worry about companies that start too much in the middle, with an OK product and some random monetization but nothing really compelling.

TC: What other startups do you admire?
Sacca: Auctomatic, which is a front end for eBay power sellers to use. It's a YCombinator company. It's not necessarily a consumer product. It's not counting on virality. Power sellers love this thing -- it takes advantage of an inefficiency in the commerce process and inserts itself in there.

Another one I like is Meraki Networks Inc., which makes an affordable Wi-Fi mesh radio you stick in the window. It's bringing Wi-Fi to a large chunk of San Francisco without doing any big deals. It's a Google collaboration that took a $20 million round from Sequoia Capital this month. Another is Satisfaction Unlimited, a combination wiki and power-user moderated customer support service. Twitter uses it for customer service. And I like Oolaya, which was started by former Googlers who left to build a platform for managing syndicated video content and monetizing it.

TC: When is the right time for a startup to really focus on forming a sustainable business model?
Sacca: Lots of startups build in monetization too early, and it calcifies their business model and their product. Once you have people paying for a product and advertisers, it restricts your flexibility. You need to stay nimble up-front and have a feedback loop at the back end of your product so you know what your customers think of it. That puts you in a great position to evolve the product without having to worry about satisfying stakeholders and paid advertisers. - Mary Kathleen Flynn