Zui Founders Unveil Team Group, Offering Startup Services and Funding

Team Group, Cliff Boro, Tom Broadwell

[Corrected 8/14/13, 11:45 am spelling of partner Tom Broadhead.] It wasn’t long after San Diego Web entrepreneurs Cliff Boro and Tom Broadhead sold their kid-friendly Internet startup Zui (founded as KidZui) to Saban Brands of Los Angeles that the wheels began turning.

The Zui deal was announced last September. By January, the business partners were making a small investment in another Web startup. Boro and Broadhead had enjoyed some modest success before selling Zui, most notably by selling Infogate to AOL Time Warner in 2003. So they had begun the post-startup journey to a higher plane of existence as venture capitalists, right?

Not exactly.

After operating in quiet mode for nearly a year, Boro and Broadhead are now taking the wraps off Team Group, a San Diego firm with two lines of business and an approach that is akin to sweat equity for venture investors. One business, called Team Ventures, invests small amounts of capital in seed-stage Web startups. A related business, Team Services, manages the human resources, accounting, cash management, and other administrative, financial, and strategic tasks for early stage entrepreneurs.

So far, the firm has made four investments: DealStruck, a San Diego startup developing a crowdlending platform; Chatmeter, a San Diego startup that provides local brand management; 6Sense Insights, a San Francisco data analytics startup; and a mobile startup in San Diego that remains in stealth mode.

Team Group also has seven clients on the services side, Boro says. While the average size of the firm’s investment is about $100,000, Boro adds, “Our principal investment is us, working alongside the entrepreneurs.”

TeamGroup LogoTeam Group represents a new iteration of CVT Ventures, a venture capital and startup development group that Boro and Broadwell had established with Vidar Vignisson, a Zui co-founder they had worked with at Infogate. CVT still exists, but Boro says, “Vidar went on to do different things” and CVT is no longer making investments.

“We’ve structured Team Group a little differently,” Boro explains. At CVT, one of the partners typically took

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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.