Bill Boebel

🛢️ ⚡ ⛏️ ₿ 🏄 🤙

[Bill Boebel @billboebel]

Congrats guys! Amazing journey

[Pat Matthews @patmatthews]

Today, ProsperOps announced that they are being acquired by @flexera .

This is an incredible outcome for ProsperOps and a seminal moment for us at Active Capital.

ProsperOps has been a special company for me and our firm from the very beginning.

I worked with the founders for many years at @Rackspace. We weren’t especially close at the time, but I had deep respect for their work.

In 2018, after two of the founders left Rackspace, we met quietly in New Braunfels to talk through the idea of starting something new.

A few months later I led their pre-seed round at Active Capital.

I loved their vision. From my time in the cloud world, I knew how massive cloud spend was becoming and how painful cost optimization was for businesses.

Most tools at the time focused on reporting. ProsperOps had a very different idea: automate savings and optimization directly. Even before AI was fashionable, the company was built around automation, intelligence, and outcomes rather than dashboards.

From there, the company took off.

What stands out in hindsight is how intentionally ProsperOps was built. Under their leadership, this became one of the best-run companies I’ve been involved with. The culture was real and durable. You could see it in employee tenure, public sentiment, and consistent execution over time.

These guys built the company from first principles, and I have incredible respect for that. For example, the company started generating revenue quickly, and as growth accelerated, there was pressure to raise more capital. They resisted that. It simply wasn’t necessary.

In fact, ProsperOps never raised another venture round beyond our initial investment yet was always one of the fastest growing companies in our portfolio.

Then came early acquisition interest.

When you’re only a couple of years in and someone offers what feels like life-changing money, it’s hard to turn down. There was understandable temptation. But instead of selling early, we provided secondary capital so the founders could take some liquidity off the table and keep building.

I’m not sure how many pre-seed venture capital firms would do that.

But it changed everything.

By staying independent, ProsperOps continued to compound. Over time, the company became far more meaningful and far more valuable.

This is the biggest outcome for our firm to date. I feel incredibly proud and privileged to have been the lead investor alongside this team from the very beginning. Watching a group of former Rackers go on to build one of the most successful companies to come out of our ecosystem is something I’ll always be grateful for.

I want to specifically thank the three founders:

- Chris Cochran, an incredible leader and CEO.
- Erik Carlin, a product savant who could see around every corner. cc @ecarlin
- Chris Kuehl, whose technical vision was remarkable to watch play out at scale.

Congratulations to the ProsperOps team and to Flexera.

And thank you to everyone involved in the ProsperOps journey.

[XMTP @xmtp_]

World Chat just launched, and it's redefining what messaging can be in an AI-saturated world.

Secured by @XMTP_'s protocol, it's the first messenger that combines proof of humanity, global payments, and Mini Apps in one seamless experience.

🧵 Here's what makes it different:

[Bill Boebel @billboebel]

@AppleSupport can you crack down on push notification marketing spam? For example, in the @Avis app it does not let you opt out of their marketing push notifications without opting out of all their notifications.

[Bill Boebel @billboebel]

@Uber I have marketing push notifications disabled but you are still sending them. Please stop!

[Bill Boebel @billboebel]

@siriusxmu @josiahonair I loved last week's Download 15 with @nmasi5. It felt like the old days when I mostly discovered new bands from the DL15 rather than just hearing new releases from bands I already know. Keep the new bands coming, please!!

[XMTP @xmtp_]

As of today, XMTP is now a fully quantum-resistant decentralized messaging protocol.

This means, any developer, anywhere in the world can leverage XMTP to provide their users with private, decentralized, & quantum-resistant messaging.

[Pat Matthews @patmatthews]

I’m excited and humbled to share that we’ve closed our third fund at Active Capital: $28M+ to invest in the future of enterprise software and cloud infrastructure.

I started Active Capital seven years ago with a belief: founders deserve early capital from someone who's walked in their shoes. Someone who truly understands the challenges of starting and building a great company.  With this new fund, we’re continuing to invest in the kinds of companies I helped build, many of which are building in underdog cities across America.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve helped lead companies through major shifts—from old-school software to SaaS, cloud, and mobile. Today, I couldn’t be more excited to back the next generation of founders who are re-shaping software and infrastructure in the AI era.

The strategy is working. Our first fund, raised in 2018, has already returned nearly 70% of capital, with a total value-to-paid-in (TVPI) multiple—meaning the current value relative to capital invested—now exceeding 4x.

While this is the largest fund we’ve raised to date, it’s still smaller than most funds you’ll read about. When I started Active Capital, I purposefully decided that part of our strategy would be to raise multiple similar-sized, $25M-ish funds—to stay focused, master our craft, and resist the urge to go upmarket.  This is a very unique strategy in venture capital as the temptation to raise bigger and bigger funds is extreme.

That said, small numbers add up too. This new fund brings us to over $100M in assets under management, across three similar-sized funds and several individual investments in breakout companies.

Since 2018, we’ve backed 50+ startups across the country, in cities like San Antonio, Austin, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Miami, Atlanta, Boulder, Portland and of course… NYC & SF.

Some of our early exits include:
- Altru, acquired by iCIMS
- Cloudsnap, acquired by Paylocity
- Finmark, acquired by https://t.co/bjbNMcLrQv
- Makeswift, acquired by BigCommerce
- RemoteTeam, acquired by Gusto

What we invest in:
- Lead or co-lead pre-seed rounds
- $500K–$1M checks in $500K–$3M rounds
- Strong preference for smaller rounds, low burn, and extreme focus on product market fit
- Technical founders, solo or team, building in cities across America

More about Active:
- Pre-seed firm focused on enterprise software & cloud infrastructure
- Solo GP firm & awesome team with 15+ years working together
- Repeatable, similar-sized funds; focused on mastery, not scale
- We’re long term investors–we don’t chase early markups or depend on secondary sales
- Backed entirely by successful founders, families, entrepreneurs, and operators—no institutional capital

I’m especially grateful to our investor base—from former Rackers, to incredibly successful families and entrepreneurs in San Antonio, to founders and friends I’ve met along the way… and of course, plenty of Virginia Tech Hokies. THANK YOU!

If you’re building something bold at the pre-seed stage, let’s connect.

[Bill Boebel @billboebel]

@patmatthews Keepin it real

[Mel Brooks @MelBrooks]

I told you we’d be back

[Shane Mac @ShaneMac]

Launching testnet is a huge milestone for XMTP. This is real progress toward our long-term goal of building a truly decentralized messaging protocol and network that has Signal-level security and crypto financial rails built-in.

[BlockJoy @BlockJoyWeb3]

“A bespoke solution for blockchain node operators, eliminating the need for costly cloud infrastructure.” 
BlockVisor 2.0 is here—on any bare-metal servers, zero egress fees, and up to 80% savings over AWS. Built for Web3 with 30+ protocols, including @ethereum, @0xPolygon, and @solanalabs 🔓https://t.co/ZJvZe0dqdF

[Bill Boebel @billboebel]

Just finished reading Code Breaker about Nobel Price winning @doudna_lab's work with CRISPR gene editing. Pretty cool to think that one day after the ethical issues are worked out, we'll be able to permanently edit out the OR6A2 gene that makes cilantro taste like soap

[Bill Boebel @billboebel]

.@go_aro Feature request:  I would love to be able to set a schedule for my kids that tells them when to put their phone in the Aro box, and then alerts me if they don't follow that schedule.

[Matt Galligan @mg]

XMTP is getting Universal Allow/Block Prefs (✅/🛑) and I’m stoked.

You can read the technical details of XIP-42 here (https://t.co/tGBYp6Oj99), but I also wanted to share what went into it and how it makes the @XMTP_ experience way better.

So what is it? 👇

[BlockJoy @BlockJoyWeb3]

This speaks for itself...

[Nick Gallo @nick_gallo15]

Hokie Nation - You know what the goal is for 2024. Let’s get to work!! 🦃

[Osano @Osano]

We have some big news to share! Osano has acquired @wirewheel_io and will integrate its enterprise-grade privacy solutions into our industry-leading #DataPrivacy platform. Read more here: https://t.co/DIXvNy4JTq. #Privacy #PrivacyCompliance #PrivacyMatters #GDPR #CCPA #CPRA

[Brandon 🚀 Flightcontrol @flybayer]

🔥 ANNOUNCING @FLIGHTCONTROLHQ 2.0 🔥

AWS has been too intimidating and tedious, causing teams to settle for a simplistic black box PaaS or hiring devops too early. But no more! 🙅🏼

Our Developer-first AWS infrastructure enables you to use the best AWS services without manual infra work. In fact, you might even call it delightful 😍

1️⃣ Connect your GitHub & AWS accounts in 1-click
2️⃣ Zero config or customize to your heart’s content
3️⃣ Relax while we deploy to your AWS
4️⃣ Never worry about hitting the technical or cost limits of black box PaaS

Deploy every language, globally

✅ Servers, background workers, static sites, databases, redis. Coming: Lambda and more
✅ Every language and framework
✅ Use all 32 AWS regions. Multi-region deploys are in early access

A few years ago I was building an app that should have been using native AWS services. I tried, but it was too hard. So I ended up on Vercel with a Frankenstein collection of third-party services. It worked ok until I accidentally racked up a $6,000 bill 😬 That was my fault, but the rickety setup of callbacks and lambda chains made it much easier to fail.

So I thought, why can’t I have a great developer experience on my own AWS account?! Then I met @abadir_ who has been using AWS since S3 & EC2 were all they had. He had the same vision of a better cloud, so we joined forces and the rest is history!

2.0 barely scratches our vision. But it's now a mature product we're really proud of!

You can now easily deploy and manage AWS services without having to use AWS console or cli. The all-new dashboard has runtime logs, metrics, and even live AWS cost reporting!

Companies of all sizes from startups to Series H are now using us to deploy thousands of times each month.

What are people saying?

“Flightcontrol removes an extremely large portion of complexity and lowers the barrier of entry to using AWS, as a company without a devops team this is a huge win for us. Keep up the good work, I like you all!” — Dan at goHappy

“Flightcontrol offers a nice balance between batteries-included and escape hatches that I haven't seen elsewhere. Keep up the good work!” — Matt at Spring Studios

“Flightcontrol is the real deal. I think this is the future for teams that don't have the resources for an SRE team and still want to have control on their infra.” — Thomas at Unrevealed

If you are even a little bit frustrated with Vercel, Heroku, Render, Railway, Fly, or a custom AWS setup, I invite you to take Flightcontrol for a test flight!

https://t.co/292ueqcIIk

[XMTP @xmtp_]

Picture this:

• Receive a text when a new DAO proposal goes up
• Vote without leaving the app

Dead simple.

Now live on @SnapshotLabs, 🤝 powered by @xmtp_

DM chat.snapshot.eth to get started!