Good morning. Big news to announce today. We are happy and excited to announce that we just closed a $5M Series B round led by Polaris Venture Partners with our good friend Mitch Kapor joining in. Here is the full Sprout Series B press release.

So what does this mean for us? The fresh funding gives us an opportunity to bring on more people to help us continue to build Sprout. This means more engineers, business development, marketing, and support folks. See the Sprout jobs page for an idea of who we are looking for.

Raising venture capital money has it pros and cons. First off Mike at Polaris is a great guy and I am very much looking forward to working with him. Polaris is a very well respected fund and we join an impressive family of companies in our space. Things are going to change pretty quickly for us. We have been running a pretty small operation up to now and making decisions based on instincts and experience. Having a VC involved will very much drive us to formalize much of what we are doing while demanding that we have the discipline to build the company in a thoughtful and strategic manner.

Raising money is not the most important factor to our success. We can not build Sprout without the great support from our users who continue to push us to improve the platform. This Series B funding is a reflection of user adoption for Sprout and thus I want to thank you all helping us raise the money!

Ok... now back to work! We are busy planning our V 2.0 launch and the specs and wireframes are almost done. That means we will have a launch date soon. I am sooo excited about what we are working on and can't wait to share it with you all! Keep checking back here for bits of news that may "accidentally" come out :)

Early coverage from our friends:

Techcrunch
Mashable

Sprout closes $5 million series B led by Polaris Venture Partners

San Francisco – May 13, 2008 – Sprout, the premier platform for easily creating, publishing and managing rich media Web content, has closed a $5 million Series B financing led by Polaris Venture Partners. Mike Hirshland, general partner at Polaris, has joined Sprout’s board of directors. Existing investor Global Venture Capital (gvc) and legendary entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3, also participated in the round.

Sprout is a free Web-based authoring platform that enables anyone to quickly and easily build widgets, mashups, mini-sites, banners and other forms of interactive and distributable web content. Users create “sprouts” by dragging and dropping rich media such as video, audio, images, text, shapes, and interactive services such as Twitter, Ribbit, PollDaddy and more. Sprouts can be embedded onto any Web site, blog, or social networking profile, and updates to the sprout are instantly reflected in all copies in circulation. Sprout’s customers range from individuals, organizations, and business small and large, including major record labels such as Universal Music Canada.

“While Flash content is ubiquitous on the Web, the process of creating and distributing Flash content was time consuming and required specialized skills. And integrating Flash with third party Web services and components has been near impossible. With Sprout, anyone can quickly create rich, Flash-based content that incorporates advanced components and Web services, and distribute them on the Web,” said Carnet Williams, co-founder and CEO, Sprout. A video interview with Sprout’s co-founder and CEO, Carnet Williams is available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=dL33PSV-ioc.

“We’ve been on the widget bandwagon for some time now, and are thrilled to have found a team in the space to back,” noted Mike Hirshland, in a blog post ‘Why Polaris is Backing Sprout.’ “The web’s basic building block is shifting from websites to embeddable, portable chunks of content – widgets, gadgets, whatever you want to call them. Sprout has quickly established itself as the early leader for creating, launching and managing this fast-emerging content format, much like our portfolio company Allaire did with website creation a decade ago, and we think Sprout has a similar opportunity to build tremendous value.”

Read more ››

In schools we worry when heads are down; we worry when hoods are up. Are students secretly texting each other, listening to music, watching YouTube? Several years ago, at a Multi-Media Advisory Meeting, Mark Sturges from Autodesk, Inc. was asked what courses he thought schools should be teaching; he answered, “multi-media for hand-held devices”. Did we listen? But then came the multi-media power widget to the rescue - sprouts!

Schools understand the power of information but possibly under-estimate the power of multi-media. With schools competing, because of declining enrollments, the school web page is the first stop for parents. What if, instead of the traditional web site, parents and potential students found multi-media sprouting everywhere: sprout jukeboxes with the latest band or choir concerts, multi-page sprouts containing video highlights of each sport offered on campus, slideshows touring the classes and labs, welcoming audio from the principal and sprouts showcasing outstanding student works. Now that is power!

And heads-up . . . it’s free.

The Sprout Builder application will be unavailable for a brief period between 12:00AM PDT (midnight) and 2:00AM PDT to perform some scheduled maintenance tasks.

Please avoid working on your sprout within this window. The delivery of published sprouts will not be affected.

We're sorry for the inconvenience, but hope you'll understand and continue to crank out those new sprouts early Tuesday morning.

Thank you for your continued support,

The Sprout Team

OK, but did we mention that we'll pay you to find engineers for us?

Hello. I'm Matthew McNeely, the Engineering VP at Sprout. Don't let the title fool you though, I spend most of my time laying down Actionscript code. Unlike most of the Sprout team, I dwell in the Eastern Timezone (I like to refer to my office as the 'Atlantic Branch'). The three hour (PST) and six hour (HST) time offsets to the rest of the Sprout team allow me a little time in the morning to tend to some of my VP duties--one of those is finding qualified engineering candidates.

We are hiring experienced software engineers that are fluent in Actionscript 3, and/or Java, and/or C++ and have been involved in complex commercial software systems that employ Object Oriented Design and Event Driven Models. The ideal match might also be familiar with HTTP and/or TCP networking and understand Web 2.0 architecture. Engineers specializing in User Interface development, particularly in the Flex environment, are also sought. Those familiar with Internationalization and Localization techniques are most welcomed to apply. Engineers already experienced in the release of production quality software over the Internet to an established user base will be given a really comfy seat during the interview.

It has been a bit of a quiet period at Sprout this past two weeks. A couple of our developers took time off to rest after the last sprint. New employees are getting settled. I have been totally focused on interviewing new team members. It is amazing how much time it takes to recruit great people for the company. We are maniacal about spending the time and energy now to make sure that everyone that joins Sprout not only has the skills and experience, but have the passion and drive to match our current culture. I have seen too many times where startups hire as fast as they can rather than hiring the best that they can. We are taking the long view on everyone that joins us. As Matthew says "hire slow, fire fast."

So what is the culture at Sprout? We try to keep it very simple. First and foremost we all respect each other. We share a common goal and vision for making Sprout a success and that means that we all roll up our sleeves and do whatever is needed. There is no "that's not my job" mentality. In Hawaii there is a word and concept called "ohana" which loosely translated means "family." That is how we work... we don't always get along, but in the end we realize that we are all in this together.

The calm before the storm is about to be over. We are working on our V2.0 roadmap and will be starting a new sprint soon for that launch. Deep breath!

Cool video that Loic and the gang at Seesmic shot last week.

Had a great dinner last night with Mike Hirshland and Ariel Poler to talk about Dog Patch and met some great folks. The theme of the evening was to talk about how startups can better work together to create a community effort for success. I think the first step is to meet good people who are all focused on the same thing.. building a great company. Last night I was in awesome company as we talked about ads, recruiting people, social graphs and other random thoughts. We started Sprout in Hawaii, but now that I am based in San Francisco, it is nice to start building a network of friends and advisers.

So what does this have to do with Sprout? Well, we are building an Internet Content Platform and in order for us to be the glue that binds content online, it is important that we continue to work with companies that are generating the raw material we need to mash together in Sprout Builder.

We sprinted the past two months to release V 1.5 and now the team is taking a deep breath to rest up for the next big push for V 2.0. We reviewed the roadmap today with Jason and it is exciting to see the new features we have planned. I can't wait until it is done!

Well, the SanFran MusicTech Summit. We'll be there, May 8, Hotel Kabuki. If you are in San Francisco and love music and technology(!), you should be there too.

And of course, a SanFran MusicTech Summit sprout for their home page...

http://sanfranmusictech.com/

The two week sprint of conferences is finally over and we are back at the office trying to catch up on all the leads generated while also building more capacity in the team. Todd and I sat down this morning to review four new positions in the Marketing/BD area along with expanding our SDK and Internalization teams. I can hardly believe how fast we are growing, but the time is ripe to capitalize on all the great momentum we are building. As they say, grab the opportunity with both hands.

It is easy for startup companies to grow up too fast.. without a defined strategy. Todd has been great at helping us focus on why we are hiring, not just hiring people and then finding a place for them. The key for us to to build a team that is scalable. That means having specific job responsibilities and then finding the right people to fill them.

We have been getting some nice video coverage lately so wanted to post some of them today:

This video is Ryan Stewart interviewing me at the Adobe Engage event when they launched Air/Flex. It was two weeks after our DEMO launch.

You’ve been asking – no, not for my vital statistics – for help videos and we'll be posting the first set in the next day or two. “Getting Started”, “Adding Assets”, “Shapes Tools” and “Text Tool” videos are in the first release. Others we have planned are “Object Properties”, “Links and Tracking”, “Designing Pages”, “Master Pages”, “Components”, “Settings”, “Publishing” and “Reports”. And that is not all! Soon, dearest Dorothy, you will be able to travel to lots of tips and tricks, some from clever and amazing sprout users, and some from yours truly & Kelly, our new design intern. Kelly dashed off a sprout to celebrate her arrival as the newest member of our CC Intern Team.

Web 2.0 has come to a close and now the work begins. I promised to not work today and rest, but I could not pass up a quick post to show off Jason being interviewed by KRON tv here in SF.