Second Avenue Partners is a venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 firm based out of Seattle, Washington

Seattle, Washington

Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...

 focused on emerging Internet businesses

Dot-com company

A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com , is a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website that uses the popular top-level domain, ".com" .While the term can refer to present-day companies, it is also used specifically to refer to companies with...

 in the high-tech field.

Second Avenue Partners was founded in February 2000 by former Starwave

Starwave

Starwave was a Seattle, Washington based software and website company, founded in 1993 by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. The company produced many original CD-ROM titles, including disks for Clint Eastwood, Sting, and Peter Gabriel...

 CEO Mike Slade, former Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 vice president Pete Higgins, the late former McCaw Cellular executive Keith Grinstein, and former aQuantive

AQuantive

aQuantive, Inc. was the parent company of a group of three digital marketing service and technology companies: Avenue A/Razorfish, Atlas Solutions, and DRIVE Performance Solutions....

 founder Nick Hanauer. The firm does not follow the traditional venture capital fund model, and the partners invest only their own money on new ventures. This allows the partners to act collectively or independently of the group, choosing how much or how little to invest on new prospects.
While the firm’s venture fund is directed primarily at Internet startups, it’s portfolio depicts a diverse spectrum of investments including Newsvine

Newsvine

Newsvine is a community-powered, collaborative journalism news website, owned by msnbc.com, which draws content from its users and syndicated content from mainstream sources such as The Associated Press...

 (acquired by MSNBC

MSNBC

MSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...

), FanNation (acquired by Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...

), Imagekind

Imagekind

Imagekind is a commercial website that prints and sells images created by participating artists on-demand. It also includes a social networking and marketing site for artists and their customers...

, Revenue Science, the Insitu Group, HouseValues, Inc., and Modumetal.
In 2008, Second Avenue Partners joined with Zillow.com

Zillow.com

Zillow is an online real estate database that was founded in 2005 by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, former Microsoft executives and founders of Microsoft spin-off Expedia. The website uses a proprietary algorithm called the "Zestimate" to appraise property values based on undisclosed factors...

 co-founder Rich Barton

Rich Barton

Richard Barton is a former Microsoft executive and founder of online travel company Expedia, Inc. and real-estate internet company Zillow.-References:...

 and Curious Office Partners to back Fanzter Inc., the Connecticut startup behind Coolspotters.com.