Entrepreneurial

– Alastair Goldfisher is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. He was also part of the judging panel at the Twilio Conference with Paul Singh of 500 Startups and Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures. This article originally appeared here. –

This week at the Twilio Conference in San Francisco, 500 Startups founder Dave McClure announced the launch of a second Twilio MicroFund of $250,000 to invest in companies that are based on Twilio’s Connect platform.

McClure and Ron Conway of SV Angel will each invest $125,000 in the fund. McClure will manage the investments, with Twilio serving as an advisor.

Twilio, a 500 Startup’s portfolio company, provides cloud-based telephony services. The San Francisco-based company, which is hosting a two-day conference, has raised more than $15 million in venture funding from 500 Startups, Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Lowercase Capital and numerous angel investors.

The first Twilio MicroFund of $250,000 was supported entirely by McClure and launched in late 2010. It has funded 10 companies to date: Callyo, FastCall411, KnockKnock, Magnolia Prime, Order Mapper, Proven, Qwipd, Textaurant, Voicendo and Volta.

A T-Mobile G1 Google is shown photographed in Encinitas, California January 20, 2010. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Dave McClure, venture capitalist and founding partner of the Silicon Valley tech incubator 500 Startups, remains a staunch advocate of search engine optimization and its benefits. He shares some of his thoughts about SEO with Reuters.

Q: Do you think it’s harder for startups to gain traction with SEO now that Google and other browsers seem to be more quality focused?
A: People can build a history in three to nine months. It’s not forever. There’s quite a bit of traffic being driven by search and quite a bit of monetization.