Adam Salamon, Entrepreneur in Residence at New Coast Ventures , courtesy photo

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Adam Salamon is the first Entrepreneur in Residence at Next Coast Ventures, an Austin-based venture capital firm.

Salamon most recently served as co-founder and chief operating officer of Perk Inc., a rewards and engagement platform that went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. RhythmOne PLC acquired Perk earlier this year.

RhythmOne PLC acquired Perk earlier this year for more than $40 million in a stock deal.

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Salamon talks about how Perk, which spun out of Jutera Labs in 2011, initially built a web-based browser that rewarded users with Perk points. Consumers could then redeem those perk points for gift cards and other items.

But Salamon and his co-founder Roj Niyogi, quickly learned that there were too many hurdles to getting consumers to switch their Internet browsers. So, they pivoted and created a mobile-based rewards app that rewarded people with Perk points for watching videos, playing games and doing other tasks. They built up their user base to more than one million users. They targeted people who wanted to save money.

Perk also raised $60,000 in a seed stage investment initially from an Austin angel investor. They later raised $1 million from a family office in the Bay area of California. With that money, they ran the business for three years from 2011 to 2014 before seeking an additional $2 million. At that point, they brought on Ted Hastings as CEO, based in Waterloo, Canada. Under his guidance, the company went public on the Toronto stock exchange. It then completed a series of acquisition of other rewards-based companies. At the end of last year, RythmOne PLC and Perk struck a deal for RhythmOne to acquire the company for more than $40 million in an all stock deal.

At the time of sale, Perk had a dozen employees in Austin and 15 employees in an office in India.