Only months after closing a $100 million fund as a spin-out of Insight Partners' Boston office, OpenView Venture Partners has made a questionable investment overture.

Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog published by Gawker Media, received an e-mail from Glenn Michael asking whether Nick (presumably Gawker CEO, Denton, not Valleywag correspondent, Douglas) would be interested in discussing the "possibility of a future investment by OpenView Venture Partners". Michaels wanted to arrange a call between Denton and OpenView senior associate Kobie Fuller.

Denton didn't say whether he responded directly to the firm or not, but I think his post speaks for itself. He published the e-mail from OpenView and wrote:

One would have thought that Gawker Media's Valleywag had tortured so many venture capital firms that investors would stay well clear of the site, and anyone associated with it. But Boston's OpenView Venture Partners must either enjoy abuse, or be so desperate to catch the web boom that they're reduced to spamming any site with any audience that registers in Alexa.

While OpenView is clearly not sending out blind e-mails to Alexa top 5000 sites, suggesting an investment into Valleywag, which any careful visitor to the site would know is part of Gawker Media, shows a shockingly low level of due diligence. It also doesn't seem to match OpenView's investment criteria of providing expansion stage capital to a company with a minimum of $500,000 in revenue per quarter. I'm not so sure Valleywag generates that.

On the flip side, in OpenView managing partner Scott Maxwell's post introducing the firm on his blog in October, he wrote:

The team would be very appreciative if you would be willing to mention OpenView Venture Partners and our URL (www.openviewpartners.com) so that the search engines have an easier time picking us up.

This week's gaffe will surely help in that regard.

Tags: openview, valleywag, vc, venture+capital