Congrats to Bret Taylor and his friend Jim Norris who have taken up Entrepreneurs in Residence positions at Benchmark Capital.
The position allows them to work on their start-up idea and immediately start receiving support and resource from Benchmark. It’s a pretty sweet opportunity, but they both deserve it.
Bret and Jim were part of the small team who created Google Maps – the project which unintentionally kick-started Google’s foray into the world of mashups.
It’s therefore no surprise that Bret went on lead Google’s developer network Google Code, which is how our paths first crossed whilst I was leading backstage.bbc.co.uk.
Bret and I gave a plenary talk at the 2006 Computer Human Interaction conference about the usability of mashups.
I wish Bret and Jim all the best with their new venture, and can’t wait to find out what it is. I’m guessing it’ll be map/geo or mashup related, but they have has told VentureBeat it’s ‘consumer orientated’ so that rules out mashups.
Best of luck guys.