When John Borthwick and Andy Weissman joined forces four years ago to build social media companies on the internet, they were not sure about how to proceed. The two former AOL executives had a sense of where they wanted to end up, but no clear idea of how to get there.

“We spent a year trying to figure out the best way,” says Mr Weissman. “We wanted to invest and build things and, maybe, buy. We tried a couple of approaches that did not work out; offshore development in India failed miserably. We wondered if there was a core technology we should own but we realised that was irrelevant.”

Finally, the two partners settled on a structure – a company that would invest in and develop small start-ups. It would be neither a venture capital fund nor a start-up incubator such as Bill Gross’s IdeaLab in Pasadena, but a bit of both.