As most people who subscribe to this blog know, blist raised $6.5M from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures earlier this year. While raising money does tend to be picked up and reported on by journalists, it really is a non-event. What matters is what you do with the capital you’ve raised. After all, the existing shareholders wouldn’t accept ownership dilution unless they felt enterprise value would increase over the long term by exchanging some ownership for some working capital.

The most important activity a startup can do with more capital is hire great people who can help accelerate the pace. We’ve maintained a really high hiring bar. I’m thrilled that we’ve kept the bar high but have been able to hire some really key contributors. I mentioned that our first director of user experience joined us a couple of weeks ago. Today marks the start of three back-to-back-to-back weeks of new hires joining us from Amazon. Two of them are mid-career software engineers and the third is a technical program manager who’s also been a software engineer at Amazon. In a couple of weeks we’ll also add our summer first intern - a graduate computer science student from the University of Washington.

As a team, all of us at blist work hard to continue to hire exceptional people. I’m thrilled with the team we’ve assembled and look forward to an incredibly productive summer and remainder of 2008.