Back in March of 2006, nextNY held it's second social gathering--that time it was at Dewey's Flatiron. This guy comes up to me and says he works at a company called Squarespace. I had heard of it--they were big buyers of Google Adwords and I felt like I had checked out the site before. It seemed like a pretty comprehensive publishing tool. I asked him how many people he had working with him. The answer?
"None. It's just me."
Honestly, I wasn't sure I believed Anthony Casalena at the time. It just seemed like a lot for one person to build. He did say something about having hired a contractor once to do some small stuff, but still, I was throughly impressed.
Since then, I've only grown more and more impressed. He has grown the team and they've just moved into an awesome new office. This year, I finally became a Squarespace user after admiring the product for a while. I love it.
Apparently, I'm not the only one. After taking no more than just 20k from his dad way back when, Anthony and his team just raised $38 million from Accel and Index. Not only was it nearly twice as much as Foursquare just raised--and probably at a higher valuation. Given that he's actually profitable and making money, why would he bother giving up more than a third of the business? Probably wouldn't, so I have to imagine that this was a $100 million pre deal.
And yet, no magazine covers for Anthony. Maybe this news will change that--but I doubt it. He seems more focused on just building a great business. Good luck to him and his team!
This is a pic of literally the first moment I met Anthony--back in March of 2006. It may be the back of his head, but now we know how much potential he had going in that noggin.