Dan Primack broke the news today that another seed stage fund is poised to enter into the New York’s teeming tech scene. The fund, which has reportedly raised around $23 million, is called Trigger Media Group. It will be run by Andy Russell, a co-founding partner of Bob Pittman’s VC and PE firm Pilot Group LLC.
Mr. Pittman, of course is the former president of AOL and the founder of MTV. According to Crunchbase, Pilot Group likes “to buy undervalued companies, fix them, and resell them.” Pilot Group is an investor in Zynga, betaworks, and our friends over at Silicon Alley Insider.
Trigger will focus on the digital media space, which means it should be wading through plenty of potential local investments.
Thus far, says Mr. Primack, the fund’s hires include a handful of McKinsey alumni, including Vanessa Liu and Jonathan Keidan. In researching Conde Nast’s iPad woes, Betabeat heard that Mr. Pittman was one of the executives McKinsey leaned on to advise the struggling media giant. Sources told us it was Mr. Pittman, via McKinsey, who suggested that Conde appoint Viacom exec Joe Simon as its first CTO.
According to Mr. Primack, Mr. Russell “seems to maintain some sort of formal affiliation with Pilot Group, where he had worked for over eight years. His portfolio companies included Thrillist, Idealbite, DailyCandy and Zynga.”
