Brad Feld

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The Lack of Numbers on a Y Axis Doesn’t Disqualify You

Oct 06, 2007

Charlie Wood reminded me in his comment to my post The Purpose of Numbers on a Y Axis that Greg Reinacker’s first pitch to me had a revenue graph lacking Y Axis values.  For those of you that don’t know Greg, he’s the founder / CTO of NewsGator, a company that I was the seed investor in and am very proud of.  Here’s that graph from the first presentation.

Fortunately (for both me and Greg), he had plenty of other slides in that first presentation, including the money shot that was the vision slide.

This was spring 2004.  I didn’t know what RSS was, nor did the vast majority of people who know about it today.  Greg was way ahead of the curve, explained it to me in a way that helped me overlook his lame revenue chart, and resulted in our investment in NewsGator in the summer of 2004.

While this demonstrates that I can get past my pet peeves, please put numbers on your Y Axis.