A surprising thing about
In September, Founders Fund partnered with
Thiel says that he expects the partnership should be cemented within a few more weeks and indicated that the Founders Fund has invested in a “handful” of undisclosed Facebook applications.
The market for Facebook applications, widgets for use on the social networking website, has delivered plenty of attention to investors, much in the same way that Java funds of the mid-1990s did when they first came out.
The program accounts for only a small part of Bay Partner’s $300 million fund, but garners plenty of attention. Bay Partners has since asked the PR firm to do less promotional work so that the partners can focus on doing deals, says Salil Deshpande.
The firm has invested in six deals since the program was created, only one of which has been publicly announced.
The one Bay Partners deal to be announced so far is its backing of Buddy Media, makers of the AceBucks virtual currency application. Facebook users earn the currency by playing games, taking surveys, inviting their friends to use an application. AceBucks has opened its own programming code to application developers in a bid to become the standard currency for Facebook.
In September, the New York-based company raised $1.5 million from Bay Partners and other individual investors, including Thiel, Keith Bank, James Altucher, Roger Ehrenberg and Mark Pincus. —Alexander Haislip