Google Ventures’ Joe Kraus Joins OpenCandy’s Board of Directors

I profiled San Diego-based OpenCandy just last week, and the Web-based distributor of open-source software already is providing an update. Excite founder Joe Kraus, who participated in OpenCandy’s Series A funding round as an angel investor, has joined the company’s board of directors. According to a statement issued by the company, Kraus will be joining directors James Cham of Bessemer Venture Partners and Darrius Thompson, OpenCandy’s founding CEO.

I noticed, though, that Kraus recently joined Google Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm founded last March with a $100 million commitment from Google, the Mountain View, CA-based search engine giant.

So does that mean that Kraus could someday oversee a Google Ventures investment in OpenCandy?

OpenCandy co-founder Chester Ng responded by e-mail: “Two of our angel investors, Joe Kraus and [LinkedIn founder] Reid Hoffman, have gone venture (Google Ventures and Greylock, respectively) since we raised our [$3.5 million] A round in late 2008. We’re excited to see this; this does not preclude their firms from leading future investments in OpenCandy. If we brought on their firms as investors, other partners would likely be involved to mitigate any conflict of interest.”

Prior to joining Google Ventures, Kraus was a director of product management at Google, where he oversaw the OpenSocial project, the company’s effort to develop API [application programming interface] standards for social networking platforms. Kraus joined Google through its 2006 acquisition of JotSpot, where he was co-founder and CEO.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.