Technology startups and political campaigns are roughly the same thing: smart, driven people get together to make something that they think is useful happen for the world.

Chances are that the campaign staffers for Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama all share that same frazzled look of spening a late night working hard to get a release out. It’s roughly the same thing.

The problem is, both of these work environments yield delusion.

When I was Howard Dean’s lead programmer in 2004, we all feasted on an information diet of news clips about Howard Dean, then wrote and read blog posts about Howard Dean in the afternoon, and watched the West Wing — which we thought was a documentary about Dean’s future presidency — in the evening. And while it was helpful for morale, it wasn’t useful for decisionmaking. After all, when our pollster came out and said Kerry would win Iowa two weeks before the caucuses, we were all taken by surprise.

A deliberate information diet would have been helpful, and I think such a diet needs to be a necessary part of a startup’s culture.

Now, I don’t mean that your startup needs to go and start planning out a prescribed reading list of things for employees to consume — and dicta that employees should consume only those things. That’s not an information diet; that’s fascism.

What I do mean is that your startup should consider making a more deliberate information consumption process happen as part of your corporate culture. Instead, it’s about creating a culture of deliberate consumption inside your organization.

How to start

First, ask yourself, what is your company’s current information diet? What are people reading? What is it that people are taking in? Just like with food, you’re always on an information diet of some kind, that diet just might not be very good. Taking a week, to keep a group journal of everyone’s intake either by using a service like RescueTime or by keeping an analog journal.

At the end of the week, have a meeting to share how much and what types of content everyone is consuming. I’ve found that, just like with a food journal, a lot of people are shocked by how much they’re consuming and how many hours of their life they’re spending on stuff that doesn’t matter. But this also gives everyone a chance to deliberately share resources, and knowing where good learning is coming from is important to share.

How to correct information diet imbalances

Second, think about what goes into a healthy information diet for your organization. In my book, I talk a lot about how it’s vital to default to local news and then grow to national news — and local news means really local: what’s going on in your house, at work, and in your neighborhood.

The same can be applied to your organization: is everybody tuned in to the political news, or is it comprised of news from far-away places that have little to do with the day-to-day business of things? Isn’t it odd that Reddit is better at communicating to people at your company than you are? Fix that.

Third, make sure to diversify your diet. Engaging yourself in constant affirmation about how great things are going, or even how great your industry is going, is a great way to pick up a disease called delusion. You’ve probably figured out that decisions ought to be made mostly on data with a little bit of intuition, but it’s important to empower both that data and that intuition with source material. Steve Jobs was great at his job not because he listened to what the customer had to say but because he knew what the customer wanted. Is your information diet giving you more insight on the former or the latter?

Finally, know that decompression time, time spent mindlessly cruising Facebook and the like, is actually good for you in limited doses. So just be conscious of the time you spend; don’t try to ban it outright. And don’t forget, part of a healthy information diet is a healthy sense of humor. Learn to laugh, especially at work.

There’s no way to design a universal information diet for every startup. Unlike food, information affects us all differently, and thus there isn’t really a generic prescription for every person or every startup. But a healthy information diet pays dividends. It creates a more open workplace that’s communicatative and responsive. Your business is already on an information diet, so why not make it a healthy one?

Clay Johnson is the author of The Information Diet, which provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. The Information Diet was recently published by O’Reilly.

Image courtesy of Lightspring, Shutterstock

As a software securities analyst for investment banking firm Canaccord Genuity, Richard Davis spends 200 days a year on the road visiting companies. He goes to public companies such as Oracle and Salesforce.com, but he also visits up-and-coming software companies he thinks will go public in the near future.

ChannelAdvisor: Aiding online retailers

I’ve known this company for several years, and during that time I’ve watched the firm mature and evolve. Several years ago, ChannelAdvisor was tightly focused on the eBay eco-system. Since then, the firm has emerged as a global aid for online retailers, helping them efficiently reach prospects.

This means ChannelAdvisor helps firms manage multi-channel outreach, whether that is down the street or on the other side of the globe. In 2010, the firm managed $2.8 billion in gross merchandise value from leading retailers like Saks, Dell, and Brookstone, and 30 percent of Internet Retailer Magazine’s Top 500 online retailers. It seems to us that Channel Advisor is a company on the move. We plan to pay much closer attention to this firm over the next few years.

Approximate size: $50-100 million in revenues.

Chegg: Digital textbooks, book rentals, and more

Chegg is much more than textbook rentals. The firm offers e-textbooks, course information, reviews and in some instances notes from a few dozen colleges. In addition, the company offers homework help. Basically, the firm is emerging as a go-to source of content (books, notes, comments, grade distribution, etc.) and coursework help. That seems like a viable plan for a big business to me.

I caught up with a Chegg board member recently and we spoke a bit about how the firm is single-handedly saving students millions of dollars on egregious textbook costs. I know this is true from personal experience with my children at college; textbook prices are way too high for the amount of updating that occurs year to year.

Approximate size: >$100 million in revenues.

Gift Side Story: Helping guys buy gifts

I arrived at Buck’s in Woodside a few minutes early for my breakfast with a long-time friend. I saw another fellow advance to the door at the restaurant, which was locked. He circled back, came up, and said hello. “Hey, I’m meeting some VCs around here for the first time and I was wondering if I should be wearing a suit or not?” I said no, unless he was a financial services software firm or he was going up to San Francisco proper where some people wear sport coats. He thanked me and I asked him what the name of his company was. “Gift Side Story,” he said. His name was Ankur Jain.

Jain said his company was a website that helped guys figure out what gifts they should get for their wives or girlfriends. You fill out a brief questionnaire about your significant other’s preferences and the software provides you with recommendations. It has a self-learning component that is designed to formulate better results based upon the more information that is put into it in terms of questions and responses to actual orders. There is also a real-time chat function available if you get really stuck, which is a nice touch.

You pick an item from the recommendations and it takes you to the site’s checkout page. Input your credit card info and presto, the gift wrapped item is on its way! The prices looked good with discount banners indicating 10-50 percent off deals.

Richard Davis is managing director of enterprise software for the brokerage firm Canaccord Genuity. Before joinging Canaccord, he spent 10 years as a senior analyst at Needham & Company. Previously, Davis was at Tucker Anthony, where he launched the firm’s Internet and enterprise software coverage.

1) Keep your options open. The smartest second- and third-time entrepreneurs I see raise capital in a very focused and efficient manner. They preserve option value at each stage of the company’s growth and make conscious decisions about how to proceed in each funding round. I learned this the hard way in my first company, where we raised capital at a $250M valuation and essentially priced ourselves out of an attractive M&A opportunity. I can’t tell you how many companies I see that would be terrific $50M-100M acquisition targets, but lose that option because they’ve raised too much capital.

2) Hire the best talent you can find.  I really can’t say enough about this. The bottom line is A players may cost 50% more than B players, but will add 10X the value. Talent wins. Be proactive and always on the lookout for impact players.

3) Take advantage of the moment, and run like hell. Great entrepreneurs don’t wait. When they’re onto something, they move aggressively, and don’t spend time thinking about Plan B. They realize they have a window of opportunity, and they jump through it. I meet with many companies who are the number two or three player in their space, and the CEO often can’t figure out why the number one player is kicking his/her butt. If I’m doing my job as a VC, I will have also met with the number one player. The leader is aggressive, maniacally focused on growth, moving fast, and delivering for customers. The followers are often bogged down by customer/product/board/funding issues. In short, #1 sees speed bumps and jumps them, whereas #2 and #3 see roadblocks and spend time trying to figure out how to go around them.

4) Work with great investors. This doesn’t necessarily mean the headline-grabbing VCs you read about on TechCrunch. Ever heard of Dave Strohm, David Cowan, or Jim Goetz? They’re three of the most successful early-stage VCs you’ll ever meet, but you won’t typically read about them on today’s hot tech gossip blog. Don’t get caught up in the hype. Focus on VCs who have built winners in your space and reference well with entrepreneurs and CEOs. They’ll make a difference.

5) Play bigger than you are. Create a market impression that is greater than reality. This has to be done carefully – history is littered with companies that failed to live up to the hype – but done well it can really boost your company’s prospects. Artfully tooting your own horn is part marketing, part PR, and part an aggressive approach to today’s social platforms. Done right, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook can serve as powerful platforms to amplify you company’s position. The key is to not just talk about how amazing your company is, but to show how you’re succeeding with key customers, business milestones, analyst and media coverage, and key new hires. Examples of companies that have done a great job building this kind of buzz include Buddy Media, Yammer, Zuora, Betterworks, Square, and Appirio (my firm is an investor in Buddy Media, Square, and Appirio).

6) Find and leverage mentors. There are many amazing CEOs in Silicon Valley who love nothing more than to help young entrepreneurs build great companies – you just have to ask for their help. It’s one of the truly unique aspects of Silicon Valley. Ask your investors for introductions. And don’t just reach out to a mentor in times of crisis; build an ongoing relationship with him or her. You’ll be amazed and the nuggets of wisdom you pick up from CEOs who have “been there, done that.”

7) Be honest and transparent. The most successful entrepreneurs I know are transparent with their team and with their board. They stay in regular communication with their board members and treat board meetings as an opportunity to have a meaningful discussion around core issues – not as a sales pitch. Your board and investors are “in the boat” with you, and fully invested in helping you build a winning company. If you have to constantly “sell” your company to your board members, you’ve got the wrong board members. Brad Feld and Fred Wilson have covered the topic of board meetings well.

8) Enjoy the ride. I started my first company when I was 25, and by the time I was 30 we had raised more than $100M and hired 400 employees. It was awesome, but I was immensely stressed. The second time around, I surrounded myself with better talent, raised less capital, and had a lot more fun (and a better outcome). Great entrepreneurs have that unique DNA that makes them relentlessly focused on building something great, and it’s a 24×7 thought process. However, the difference I see between first-time entrepreneurs and second-time entrepreneurs is that veterans are typically enjoying the ride. They’ve figured out how to make time to have fun, spend time with family and friends, and still build a great company.

I look forward to hearing from entrepreneurs in the trenches. What did I miss? What kind of advice have you valued from your mentors and investors?

Jeff Richards is a partner with venture capital firm GGV Capital and the former co-founder of two companies, R4GS and Quantum Shift.  Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jrichlive.

This sponsored post is produced by MicroVentures.

Startup investing used to be only for the rich, only if you knew the right people, and only in deals in your city. Those factors left many interested investors on the sidelines.

But today, it’s a lot easier to become an angel investor due to crowdfunding, micro lending and investment sites like MicroVentures which allows you to invest smaller sums alongside others and to invest in deals stretching from Boston to Silicon Valley.

Gone are the days where you have to risk $50,000 or more, receive a personal invitation to invest from a friend and only see a limited number of deals from the few available in your area.

MicroVenture helps investors learn about companies they may never have heard of, and to invest smaller sums, which is virtually unheard of with traditional investing.

The service matches companies seeking money with investors looking to invest anywhere from $1,000 to $30,000 or more. MicroVentures helps investors with the initial due diligence process by filtering startups and then providing documents to help investors conduct their own due diligence prior to making a final investment decision.

The key to winning at angel investing, of course, is to invest in the right startups. To get there, you need:

1) Good deal flow, allowing you to spot potential winners from many potential options.
2) The ability to invest in multiple deals so you gain experience.
3) A knack for spotting potentially successful companies, and more importantly, management teams and entrepreneurs that will succeed.

Getting good deal flow is often the stumbling block for the average person looking to get started in angel investing. And it’s one of the reasons Bill Clark launched MicroVentures. He wanted to begin investing, but didn’t have access to good deals.

Like others thinking about becoming angels, Clark wanted to invest smaller sums in more companies, allowing him to spread his risk and also increase his chances of picking a winner. And he wanted access to great companies outside of Austin, his hometown.

Today, Clark invests alongside the more than 1,900 investors from 20 states that have joined MicroVentures. To date, investors have put more than $2 million into 13 companies.

If you’d like to join the more than 1,900 angel investors getting in on new deals via the MicroVentures platform, be sure to put “VentureBeat” in the referral code when you sign up and we will send you a $100 gift card after you make your first investment.

When it comes to bringing in the right talent, we tend to think that big-name brands have it easy — or at least easier.

High-caliber candidates flock to top-tier organizations like Google and Microsoft, reducing the recruitment process to a pleasant walk in the proverbial park.

For the rest of us, attracting quality candidates can be quite the challenge. Small businesses and startups competing with big brands for A-list talent often find themselves at a major disadvantage.

The solution lies in social media recruitment.

Social networks have completely reshaped the recruiting process. In the hiring process, size, brand recognition, and big budgets once prevailed. Now, however, engaging content, likability, and genuine substance are the makings of easy and successful recruitment.

Social media is an open and authentic means of attracting and targeting top talent, and it provides invaluable recruiting opportunities at little to no cost to the business. Even the smallest startups are now able to publish exciting job openings and communicate their company brand to the largest possible audience.

Aside from its affordability, social media recruiting is an ideal match for the more organic, grass-roots nature of today’s startup culture. Smaller companies are generally more successful at cultivating engaged followings on Facebook and Twitter, which is a huge leg up in the new recruitment arena. By presenting your company in an accessible, likeable manner and tapping into the right technology, hiring has never been so easy — or so economical.

Social media is your friend

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can provide your company access to huge numbers of qualified candidates. Facebook alone has more than 800 million users and also boasts the highest rate of engagement of any website. In order to reach the largest possible audience, businesses must maintain attractive career pages and share interesting and authentic content.

Social media is driven by likability. Published items cannot be found through keyword searches but are instead discovered when they spread virally across the digital community. In order to ensure that job postings are liked, shared, and recommended across networks, companies must provide rich and engaging career-focused content. This content needs to be optimized for social media, which enables companies to reach second- and third-degree friends.

Take advantage of social media’s userbase by publishing job opportunities and career events to your company’s Facebook Page and News Feed. In addition to posting career-related information, introduce your networks to your brand and culture by participating in relevant industry dialogue and contributing thought-provoking stories.

Embedding dynamic, interactive features directly within your company’s Facebook Pages will create a positive, appealing experience that will encourage sharing and solidify your online image. Be sure to incorporate your company’s YouTube channels, blogs, and other social media profiles. Job postings themselves should also be personalized, preferably including photos of recruiters and links to their personal online profiles.

The more enjoyable and engaging the experience, the more likely users will be to share the information with their networks, thus creating a buzz about your company and maximizing your exposure to ideal candidates.

Capitalize on the startup ethos

At some point over the past few years, startup culture has picked up a cool new sheen. It’s being validated by the media and celebrities, so why not take advantage of that reputation, yourself?

By nature, web-based and other tech startups tend to garner quite a bit of attention due to their innovative offerings, fresh perspectives, and desirable company culture. Small businesses are, by reputation, attractive places to work. Casual office environments, mobility, superior work/life balance, interesting clientele, and exciting projects are just some of the benefits.

Social media provides ample opportunity for small businesses to brand themselves, so recruiters and hiring managers should be sure to highlight these unique perks when establishing their company’s Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

In social media, likability and engagement are the keys. Potential candidates should come away from your pages and job postings with a better understanding of who you are as a team and how they would fit into your company.

Enable and encourage employee referrals

Employee referrals often deliver the best talent with minimal expenditure of time or resources. Recent improvements in social recruitment technology have streamlined this process, enabling employers to leverage the referral networks of their existing employees.

Companies can now access the social networks of their employees, reaching an even larger talent pool. Considering that a typical social media user has 150 people in her personal networks, companies with as few as 100 employees can leverage 15,000 first-degree friends and 2,250,000 second-degree friends.

By encouraging employees with referral bonuses and by keeping track of referral activity, targeting the best and the brightest has never been easier.

Within a startup community, teamwork and a shared vision are essential to running a smooth operation. Referral hiring reinforces the idea of cooperation and employee contribution, and it also increases the odds that the new recruits are a good fit with the company culture.

Jindrich Liska is the CEO of JobMagic, an all-in-one social recruiting platform for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. His company’s platform includes technologies for social media sourcing, automatic job publishing to 300 social networks, referral hiring, talent network management, and semantic profile-based matching. Jobmagic is used by companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 firms to startups and across industries from retail to healthcare.

Image courtesy of leedsn, Shutterstock

Think about it: If you’re racing against the clock to get traction in your business, who better than Chuck Norris to lead you to glory? With his arsenal of ball-breaking, arm-snapping, kung fu-kicking tricks and tips, surely Norris would be able turn your start up into a well-oiled, butt-kicking machine.

After nine years of building businesses and occasionally falling flat on my face, I’ve learned a few things, and I’m now ready to share them with you.

Based on my experience and relfection, here are the three most important butt-kicking approaches I think Chuck Norris would use to build badass businesses.

Fatal mistake #1: Building products without understanding users

When you build a product and it fails, it’s typically for one major reason: You started with the product in mind, then tried to find users. Instead, flip the script, and think about where your user is coming from.
Knowing your users’ mindset is like having a “Chuck Norris grip” on your market-boosting traction and enhanced virality.

Here are some questions to ask yourself about your customer:

• Before hearing about your product, what are they actively searching for?
• What conversations are going on in the minds of your prospect?
• What are thier fears, frustrations, desires, and hopes?

When you take time first to learn from your customers, you are then able to build products that fulfill their wants, needs, and problems.

Solution #1: Learn from customers first, the build.

Fatal mistake #2: Hiring the wrong people

This is how Chuck Norris would dodge a painful mis-hire: He would screen and hire only A-players.

Mis-hires cost owners more than five times what those employees get paid. Quickly weeding out talent can mean the difference between success and failure in any startup. Sizing people up quickly is key to success. Hiring people on your “gut feeling” alone can be dangerous.

Here’s part of the Chuck Norris “dodging bullets and throwing knives” approach to hiring a dream team: The book Topgrading is your new Bible when it comes to any hiring venture. It’s 500 pages, which no human has time to read. Skip to pages 438 and 439. Every question you’ll ever need to hire true stars is there.

Solution #2: Use powerful, proven hiring questions from experts in the field.

Fatal mistake #3: “Spray and pray” spending

In a word, shotgun approaches to marketing new products will always fail. It’s not an effective way for a startup to spend money.

When you get a windfall of money (a large venture capital round, for example), it can be a rush and a heavy burden at the same time. These issues will come up in conversations about marketing:

• What opportunities are we missing out on?
• How long will it take to find out?
• What direction will pay off?
• What’s the next step?

To battle these questions, outline strict test budgets to prove ROI (return on investment). If you can’t measure it, don’t mess with it. Call it old-fashioned, but pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a powerful tool to measure results and build viral messages. This approach can grow revenue, increase traction, and position your product aggressively in a competitive vertical.

In the same way that Chuck Norris takes down armies single-handedly while getting paid like a rock star, PPC advertising can transform your business overnight. It can scale your business to dominate a market, test whether your business model is profitable, and test marketing messages in real time.

Solution #3: Set strict budgets, use measurable marketing, and test core messages.

Evan Peelle is a Los Angeles-based marketer with experience in web-based startups and conducting online marketing campaigns, including PPC, mobile, and search marketing. He can be contacted directly at evanpeelle@gmail.com.

On Twitter, in a haiku.

Today, Schwartz, a serial entrepreneur of sorts, is unwrapping his newest venture, CareZone, which has nothing to do with IT and everything to do with normal, everyday people.

The new startup addresses some basic insecurities many of us face: How to I care for my parents as they age, for my children when they’re young, and for my siblings or others in my family with special needs?

“The number one emotion that people experience when you start talking about caregiving is anxiety,” said Schwartz in an interview today with VentureBeat. “What happens when I’m in charge? There’s no school for that; it’s just life. It’s totally scary.”

Schwartz’s product lets you store important documents, keep detailed (or simple) notes, send updates to “helpers” (who might be family members or other caregivers such as nurses or babysitters), track prescriptions, and more, all from a site that’s as easy to use as Facebook.

Best of all, Schwartz is charging users a low monthly subscription fee for the service.

Wait, wait, why is charging users a good thing?, you ask with furrowed brow. Isn’t the Internet supposed to be free, man?

The reason the fee is good news is that it means CareZone can provide its service with a high degree of privacy and security. Since you’re paying for the service (at a rate of $5 or $10 per month, give or take), Schwartz and his colleagues don’t have to sell your data to advertisers. For once, dear reader, you are the customer, not the product.

And since the service revolves around sensitive stuff like information about your kids and healthcare for your aging relatives, the extra measure of privacy is well worth the $5 per month.

In building the service, Schwartz and Walter Smith, Schwartz’s longtime friend, thought about the questions fundamental to most people in their age group: “Where are we spending a lot of our time? When family calls, you drop everything, and it becomes 150 percent of your life,” said Schwartz. “In a perfect world, it’s when you choose — you decide to have a child. But in most of the world, it doesn’t happen that gracefully.”

So, when family calls, we each experience pretty similar needs. We need a safe place to store important facts and documents, whether that’s a desk drawer or a server in a far-off data center. Schwartz said we also need a simple way to get our hands on that information and modify it as needed.

And finally, we need an easy way to connect with other family members who are also involved in caregiving. “Very rarely are people doing this in isolation,” Schwartz noted. CareZone accomplishes this by allowing account creators to pull in other family members and send the group email notifications when documents are uploaded, conversations updated, or notes entered into the profile.

“The AARP is a big part of our demographic,” he continued, referring to the often-overlooked baby boomer age group, which often cares for parents, children, and grandchildren simultaneously.

“When you’re taking care of a child, there’s no question who’s in charge. When you’re taking care of your parents… you have to negotiate who is making decisions. You have to work together.”

No matter who we’re caring for, we inevitably end up using online tools, even if it’s just emailing the sitter or a sibling. But these web-based services leave something to be desired, Schwartz said.

For example, in trying to communicate with a cross-country sibling about an aging parent’s power of attorney or bank passwords or social security number, he said, “I could do it through Gmail, but when I do, ads come up on the side that just piss me off… I know there’s a profile that Google is building about me.”

And for those kinds of web services, “Privacy is toxic,” he said.

He said CareZone will never collect user data and will never sell data of any kind to any company. Data can be downloaded by the user or deleted completely if the user doesn’t want to keep it around.

Schwartz is careful to note this app isn’t about healthcare. While it will help you to manage medications and communicate with health professionals, it’s more about “the mundane things that take place between doctors’ visits. Health is what doctors help with. Care is what families help with. But we can connect into [hospitals' technology] systems as they’re built.”

Over the next three months, the startup will add Spanish-language service as well as mobile apps. Currently, the service includes a mobile web app that Schwartz said looks great on smartphones and the iPad. As the service matures, he said, the service will continue to add features that maximize CareZone’s usefulness without detracting from its ease of use.

From now until March 15, people can get accounts free for one year. On March 15, new accounts will cost $5 per month if you’re managing care for one person; $8 if you’re caring for two people; $10 for three people, etc.

The startup’s development team is based in Seattle, and its business team is in San Francisco. To date, the seven-person company has been bootstrapped, but Schwartz expects to be raising institutional money sometime in the future. Whether or not that investment happens in 2012, he said he anticipates the company’s growth to triple by the end of the year.

Five permanent vertical-specific shops are opening, one for each day of the week. And each shop will totally refresh its inventory every seven days.

The Vintage shop will have fresh catches every Monday. Tuesday will be the new-stock day for the Fashion shop. The Kids shop will refresh on Wednesday; the Pets shop on Thursday; and the Food shop on Friday. It’s good enough to make a doo-wop song out of.

“The verticals… are all categories that have performed very well so far and ones that our members have asked to see more of,” said Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg in a recent conversation with VentureBeat.

Goldberg said that while the kids/food/pets/etc. verticals aren’t the most popular categories for the site, “They are in the second tier and have shown tons of potential.”

He said Fab also felt these shops would cater to a variety of Fab members with special needs. “Some people are interested in kids’ stuff, some not. The same with pets. We felt like we could do these categories best by segmenting them out from our normal flash sales.”

The Kids shop will feature children’s clothes, baby accessories, toys, kids’ furniture, and books, with age-appropriateness ranging from newborns to teens. The Pets shop will stock toys, treats, pet mags, pet furniture, and the latest word in pet fashions.

In the Food shop, Fab members will find an assortment of non-perishables, from spices and grains to candies and preserves. The Food shop will even offer DIY kits for making your own cheese or beer, as well as kitchen hardware and accessories.

The Vintage shop is the widest-ranging vertical, with items in artwork, furniture, and clothing categories. And finally, the Fashion shop will feature (duh) fashion for men and women, as well as fashion magazine subscriptions.

So, while it started as a simple catch-all site featuring three-day flash sales with a focus on great design, Fab.com now includes the original three-day flash sales, 30-day themed shops, and the new week-long specialty shops.

Is the glut of new features going to turn a site known for its slick simplicity into a cluttered mess a la eBay or Amazon? we asked Goldberg.

“This is actually a fun UX challenge: How to go from 3,000 unique products on the site per day (December 2011) to more than 10,000 while increasing the usability of the site versus detracting from it,” he said.

“Fab is known for our clean and simple browsing and discovery. We’ve been very careful as we introduce new features to make sure we only improve the discovery process.”

The idea of “shops” as navigation categories was introduced to the site a scant month ago. Originally, sales were organized only by designer; the new organization allowed for browsing by category or even by color.

Finally, Goldberg said, the new days-of-the-week shops will likely keep specific Fab members coming back to the site on a more regular basis.

“We’re confident that the new shops will bring more people back to Fab throughout the day,” he said.

“To date we’ve seen about 70 percent of our daily visits and orders come within three hours of launching our morning flash sales. We’re hopeful the new evening sales will see a broader distribution of visits and orders throughout the day.”

Image courtesy of cristovao, Shutterstock

Leila Janah, cofounder of Samasource

Muhammed Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank, sparked a movement with the simple question: “If you are a socially conscious person, why don’t you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?”

Today’s young tech entrepreneurs have inherited Yunus’ vision, and are changing the way we do business. Their space, “social business,” is nothing new, but these under-35s are attempting to alleviate global poverty, climate change, and even armed conflict through commercial enterprise.

There is no clear-cut definition, but most social entrepreneurs would agree that their overarching goal is to use business and business process to drive social or environmental impact.

“There is a growing group in Silicon Valley that believes that social business and technology can change the world,” said Leila Janah. Janah, at 29 years old, is the founder of Samasource, which provides outsourced computer work to women and youth in the poorest pockets of the world, including India, Kenya, and Pakistan.

Impact investors, once a niche group, say they are now inundated by opportunities in this space.

“I was doing this in the mid to late 90s and I felt very lonely in that pursuit. There wasn’t even a language for social or mission investment,” recalled Stephen DeBerry, founder of Bronze Investments and partner at Kapor Capital. “But for young entrepreneurs today, it’s considered the right thing to do and is viewed as being cool.”

To illustrate the “straightforward business proposition,” DeBerry delves into a discussion about his firms’ energy efficiency strategy. In New York, schools are literally dripping mercury on children, he explains, with hazardous florescent lights from the 70s and 80s. “We pay to upgrade your lighting and make the money back over time as you realize the savings on your energy bill,” said DeBerry. Someone has to change these light bulbs, which in itself is a job creator, and there is no shortage of buildings. “We could do this for a long time,” he said.

Nick Flores is a recent Stanford Graduate School of Business alumni who sources early-stage social businesses for the Investors’ Circle, a network of angel investors and venture capitalists that uses private capital to promote a transition to a sustainable economy.

Flores, the Director of Investor and Entrepreneur Services, said there should ideally be a “yin and yang” between social and financial returns. It is Flores’ job to locate small businesses that are capable of making a real impact in the world, and prepare them for a pitch at the firms’ biannual fairs. Investors’ Circle’s greatest success to date? “Zipcar reduces carbon emissions and has a really scalable business model,” he said.

After a series of successful acquisitions by Amazon and Motorola, Danny Shader, a serial entrepreneur, approached DeBerry with an idea for a payment system for virtual goods. DeBerry suggested that Shader focus on an under-served market, America’s low-income “unbanked” population. One in four households don’t use credit cards, and are locked out of electronic commerce as a result.

Shader founded PayNearMe, a Mountain View-based startup, in 2009. Although the company is profitable, it has a social mission at its core: enabling millions of people to pay for online goods and services with cash.

“I’d like to take some credit for mentoring him, but not all the credit,” said DeBerry of Shader. “Danny is a smart guy, and I pointed him in the right direction. He saw there was a huge market there.”

Zipcar and PayNearMe, which DeBerry terms “profit-aligned social businesses,” have caught the attention of the tech community.

“There was a great hubris in Silicon Valley to create huge, billion dollar companies, but that’s changing,” said Janah. The Harvard-educated entrepreneur owes the success of her nonprofit to traditional tech companies like LinkedIn and Intuit. These clients immediately saw the value in Samasource: They need people to sort through mountains of data, and there are bright, young, employed Kenyans who are more than capable of doing the work. “It’s really a no-brainer,” she said.

On the other end of the spectrum, social investors are taking on some of the world’s most complex problems. One example is The Portland Trust, a non-profit with a mission to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians through economic development and fostering entrepreneurship. The Trust is in the process of establishing a Social Investment Task Force to reduce the social gaps in Israel through the private sector.

“What we’re seeing now is a movement of both investors and entrepreneurs to the massive spectrum of opportunity in between the charitable NGO’s and purely for-profit companies that solely care about their bottom line,” explained Ophir Samson, project manager at the Portland Trust.

Samson, an exceptionally articulate 20-something, said social investment is not fully developed but it is “getting there and is growing extremely fast. There’s a lot of money and talent from all sides of the market going into this.”

The movement has had its ups and downs; perhaps the most prevailing problem is that there is no unit to measure impact. Generally speaking, it also costs more to do the right thing. Social investment is not about making fast cash. It is often a slow-burning, high-risk process that will not make entrepreneurs millions overnight.

With 50,000 visitors to its website per day (higher than any other nonprofit with the exception of Wikipedia), Kiva is often cited as the premier success story in this space. Kiva’s President, Premel Shah, recently recognized as a young global leader by the World Economic Forum, said social investment involved “being more cognizant of how you consume and how you invest.”

Kiva provides loans to institutions around the world, effectively enabling ordinary people to become social investors. Every four days, Kiva raises $1 million. Shah likes to describe Kiva as “social investment meets Match.com.”

Kiva offers loans to institutions in far afield countries, including Palestine and Yemen, but also provides funding for small businesses in U.S. cities like Oakland. “These are places where there’s not a lot of commercial investment because the risk profile is too high. This is exactly where a social investor can step in and be a little bit more patient with their capital,” Shah explained.

One such investor is Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, who will soon announce plans to invest $1 million in small businesses through Kiva’s lending platform. “Kiva’s innovative use of technology as a tool for crowd funding empowers everyday people, companies and major lenders to be social investors,” said Hoffman.

Yunus had the seeds of the idea for the Grameen Bank in the 70s, but it’s our young generation, then in diapers, that is realizing the full potential of his vision. Thanks to their efforts, social enterprise is flourishing, and even the most traditional investors and entrepreneurs are on board.

As VentureBeat’s own Ciara Byrne put it: “What’s cooler than a million dollars? Changing a million lives.”

Christina Farr is a Bay Area-based writer with a graduate degree from the Stanford School of Journalism. She covers entrepreneurship, technology, and investment trends. Christina works for, but does not speak for, Eastwick, an agency in Silicon Valley.

So of course, when the couple welcomed their first child, the world expected the child to, you know, live up to the family standard. But there was a slight roadblock.

“Laurie had a lot of trouble just finding simple, solid-colored clothes without some kind of horrible logo on it,” said the Percival patriarch during a phone conversation.

“She likes putting outfits together herself, and here was a huge gap in the market.”

Percival, who had previously worked at MySpace and who was itching to get back into the e-commerce space, saw his wife’s stress and frustrations with trying to maintain basic baby-fashion essentials as an opportunity for entrepreneurship.

Kids, especially the youngest of youngsters, go through clothes at a breakneck pace; while some subscription commerce sites might be a stretch, this vertical was one that truly did call for a constantly refreshed supply of basics, from solid tees to tasteful onesies.

Percival’s solution is Wittlebee, a service that lets busy parents fill out a size and style profile and, for $40 per month, get a monthly delivery of a box of clothes that will (likely) work for their kid and their needs.

Wittlebee is the third startup this month from new Los Angeles incubator Science. The incubator is headed up by Mike Jones, former MySpace CEO who said he loved working with Percival during his days with the social network. The first Science startup to launch was Eventup, headed by Tony Adam, also a former MySpacer and friend to Jones; Eventup’s site went live just a week ago.

Percival said Wittlebee’s boxes provide a pleasing variety of choices with an American Apparel-like simplicity. Items are chosen based on the parent’s choices in color and style, with consideration for the child’s personality (e.g., a “diva” would probably get different pieces than would be delivered to a “messy” kid).

These are separates that are intended to work together for good, and best of all, it comes without the nightmare of dragging a toddler through a department store.

“The retail experience around kids’ clothes is really bad,” Percival said. “The racks are a mess; the teenage associate doesn’t know how to help a mom; and there are often no dressing rooms. And the biggest issue is companies put a huge markup on everything.”

To get started with an initial list of a few hundred beta customers, Percival shopped clearance items and overstock, building subscription boxes around the pieces he found. Nowadays, being in a major manufacturing and distribution hub for fashion, the Wittlebee team is making wholesale buys. Soon, the startup hopes to start producing its own label, as well.

Ultimately, Percival said, the boxes will include a mix of big-brand items, boutique finds, and Wittlebee-only private label pieces.

“Every mom thinks of their child differently,” Percival continued. “‘My daughter has really long legs; my son is husky; this brand doesn’t work for him.’ It’s hard to get items that fit correctly.” So, Wittlebee will include intelligent recommendations that take into account the discrepancies between sizes produced by different brands.

Eventually, Percival hopes to not just send out new clothes but to do intake for old clothes, too. “I want to create a system where we give a return envelope when we send a box and then we donate the clothes to a local charity,” he said.

Currently, Wittlebee’s stock cuts off at around age five; soon, the range will extend to around 12 years old.

One of the most interesting parts of Wittlebee, especially from an entrepreneurial perspective, is its customer service. Noting that we live in “an Amazon world” where fast shipments and great service are expected, even for scrappy startup, Percival said the service had its first growing pains within the first couple months of beta testing.

To take care of his customers better, Percival hired a few stay-at-home mom Wittlebee members as customer service reps. This army of moms is armed with Grasshopper and Olark, which Percival uses to direct customer service calls and issues.

So when current customers call Wittlebee, he said, “They’re calling people who are intimately familiar with our system and how it works. It’s not some call center in India; it feels more natural. They have a personal connection with us at every step of the way.”

Percival, who is expecting another little one to join his family soon, is also thinking about another high-turnover vertical for kids: books.

“I have a strong affinity for kids’ books,” he told us, “and I’m thinking about ways to reinvent the book club.”

On February 14, 2012, at the Computer History Museum, Women 2.0 will be hosting the fifth annual PITCH Conference & Competition focusing on product innovation leadership.

Attendees can learn from the product innovation leaders who built Flickr, Facebook, Zipcar, TaskRabbit, LARK, and popular startup products and services.

We will be discussing how to manage ideas and people from concept to lift-off, the successes and challenges of seeking investor funding, and future visions for the next generation of innovation and disruption.

Both men and women working in technology (from early-stage startup to corporate environments) are invited to hear speakers share best practices, growth strategies, and stories of disruptive product development.

Speakers include Caterina Fake (Flickr and Hunch co-founder), Katie Mitic (Facebook’s platform and mobile marketing lead and an eBay board member), Robin Chase (Zipcar co-founder and Buzzcar CEO), Leah Culver (Grove founder), Leah Busque (TaskRabbit founder), Julia Hu (LARK founder), Danielle Fong (LightSail Energy founder), Cathy Edwards (Chomp co-founder), Sheila Lirio Marcelo (Care.com founder), Deena Varshavskaya (Wanelo founder), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC founder and managing partner), and Jean Hsu (Obvious engineer).

Also, the PITCH Competition finalists will make live presentations to a panel of investors for feedback and prizes. Judgesinclude Aileen Lee (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner), angel investor Christina Brodbeck, Dave McClure (500 Startups founder), Rachel Pike (Draper Fischer Jurvetson investment professional), Joy Marcus (DFJ Gotham Ventures partner), Joanna McFarland (AT&T Interactive vice president), Margit Wennmachers (Andreessen Horowitz partner), Naval Ravikant (Angel Hacks co-author), Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (JOYUS founder).

During lunch, speed-mentorship sessions will take place. Participants will also be able to network with more than 800 attendees at Women 2.0′s biggest event of the year.

To register, visit http://women2.org/conference2012 and save 10 percent with discount code “VENTUREBEAT.”

This sponsored post is produced by The Telecom Council of Silicon Valley.

Every company strives to get maximum return on investment (ROI) for its marketing investments, but for startups it becomes a matter of survival. Startups don’t have the luxury of steady cash flow and established lines of business to rely on, and they need to make sure every dollar counts.

When it comes to trade shows, startups don’t just ask “Should we set up a booth?” They also need to consider, “Will it be worthwhile to spend the money and send the staff to manage a booth?” In this article, we’ll try to look at some of the factors to consider in that decision, and introduce the option of participating in the trade show through a “pod,” or a small station inside a larger pavilion.

Trade show pavilions are a growing phenomenon, centered around the idea of providing an option for companies that aren’t quite big enough to set up their own 10-by-20-foot booth, yet have a valid reason to exhibit at the trade show. The trade show organizer wants to give these startups a voice, since it is from the startup community that we see the broadest innovation, and the tremendous value creation. Usually the pavilion is centered around some kind of theme, such as a region or a technology type.

But the pavilions often offer more than lower prices. Many amenities, furniture items, and business services are usually included. This makes the job of exhibiting MUCH simpler, especially for startups that don’t have staff on-hand that have extensive trade show experience. For example, exhibitors in normal booths need to specifically plan for, arrange, manage, and pay for the following: electricity needs, network needs, rugs, underpad, installation by union workers, shipping, stands, chairs, drayage, displays, garbage bins, and housekeeping. Usually, larger companies will have a trade show booth which they can set up at multiple shows through the year. These booths need a few months prep to build, and cost upwards of $40,000 for a 20-foot square. Pavilions, in contrast, usually bundle up most of these amenities into a single fee and pre-defined package. The startup can contract for a pod, and only needs to bring their own collateral to pass out.

If you choose to be in a pavilion, you need to consider whether it will meet your marketing goals. You want to meet new business contacts and get your word out, but of course, you need to have the right audience. That’s where the type of pavilion starts to matter, as well as your pavilion mates. Everyone knows the importance of location, location, location. Not only do you need to worry about whether your pod attracts traffic, but you need to worry about whether the pods around you also attract traffic, and create a halo effect for each other. Is the theme of the pavilion an attractive one for foot-traffic? Is it self-filtering such that even though you don’t compete directly with the other pods, you have a common audience? Is the conference organizer and the pod organizer investing in marketing the existence of the pavilion, and the theme of the pavilion to your target audience? If so, the pavilion stands a good chance of generating successful engagement for the pods.

Now, I must concede that the pavilion concept is not for every company, but most of the downsides are probably obvious to you already. You are limited in space, and don’t have full liberty to customize your pod. But the pod does offer you visibility to every attendee at the show. And if you make an effort, your pre-event marketing can drive more traffic to your pod, and set up appointment times for meetings, too. Whether you get a pod, booth, or even nothing, our firm belief will always remain: if all your customers are gathering in one place, wouldn’t you want to be there, too?

So, admittedly, this is a sponsored post. I’ll stand behind what I’ve written with all my credibility, but I do have an ulterior motive. My organization, The Telecom Council of Silicon Valley is partnered with the CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association) to create a pavilion at CTIA WIRELESS in New Orleans, May 8-10 2012. Our pavilion is focused on just young companies that bring innovative solutions to the wireless telecom industry, and we’re screening the companies to make sure they’ve got the right stuff. The Telecom Council and CTIA have put together a package that includes floor space in a pod, marketing, stage time, logistics and more in a simple bundle. If you are a VC with a portfolio company, or a suitable startup, you can learn more here, but think fast because our deadline for applicants is February 10!

New Orleans is one of America’s best destination cities, and the CTIA show is always laser-focused on wireless telecom. I hope to see you there, whether as an exhibitor or guest in our pavilion, or just eating a bowl of gumbo around town.

Liz Kerton, analyst for The Kerton Group and president of the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley, follows innovation across all telecom sectors.

“To be honest, I didn’t think we were going to win, mostly because Fab isn’t very much integrated into the whole tech scene… We’re definitely mainstream.”

Being mainstream can be both a blessing and a curse for a tech startup. Massive numbers of users outside the Silicon Valley bubble doesn’t necessarily translate well when you’re fundraising, for example, or trying to get advisors or engineers on your team.

“That said, it’s nice to win,” said Goldberg in an email conversation with VentureBeat. “We hope that we won because people truly like our Fab website and apps and the products we sell. We hope it’s authentic. We strive to be authentic in everything we do.”

Still, Fab.com’s bread and butter — and there’s plenty of bread and butter to go around at the revenue-happy startup — comes from a much more general audience that’s growing like corn in Kansas.

“The way people have taken to Fab is truly incredible and humbling,” said Goldberg. “There seems to be a movement around it — a groundswell — that we could have never anticipated.”

Goldberg’s not the only one who is impressed and pleased with the startup’s insane growth rate. Investor Pravin Vazirani from Menlo Ventures is a Fab board member.

“Fab.com is one of the fastest growing companies we’ve ever seen, not just compared to other Menlo Ventures portfolio companies, but e-commerce companies in general,” he told VentureBeat this morning.

“They’ve obviously struck a chord with consumers and are capitalizing on that in a major way.”

Goldberg revealed that just after passing its seventh full month of online sales, the startup has 2 million members and has grown by 450,000 new shoppers within the past 30 days. Sales volume and average order value are also on the rise.

While the growth rate has astounded Vazirani, so has the young company’s ability to crank out new features. “The iPad app was launched in record time, and now accounts for a significant portion of sales,” he said.

Of course, we had to ask Goldberg what’s coming next for the startup.

“We’ve got so much in the works it’s exhausting,” he told us. “Fun, but exhausting. As we’re known for, we’ll be launching a flurry of new features and enhancements the next few weeks. We have no less than three really big announcements already in the works for February alone. It’s going to be a busy Fab month.”

And you can expect Fab.com to announce more funding in the future, as well. Goldberg said the company would continue to take funding in order to keep up its rapid growth, and Vazirani said Menlo would “absolutely” be participating in future rounds.

“Our scale in mind is Amazon-size scale, so, yes, we’ll raise more money in the future,” Goldberg said. “Amazon raised billions to be what it is today. We have Amazon-size ambitions to deliver great design options to people everywhere across all categories at all price points.”

We asked Vazirani, who has seen many, many startup comes and go, if he thought the Amazon-scale aspirations were reasonable for a company barely a year old.

“All indications are that it is realistic,” he said. “Jason is the type of CEO that consistently overdelivers on expectations.”

Rumor has it that this Chicago sculpture is filled with VC cash

You don’t have to live in Palo Alto to become a software billionaire, though it can help.

For decades, people with ideas, programming talent, and the ambition to make their fortune as entrepreneurs have been moving to Silicon Valley, just as Mark Zuckerberg did shortly after founding Facebook.

But now an increasing number of them are staying at home.

Take, for example, Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon, who started the company in Chicago in 2008 and kept it right there in the Windy City through its initial public offering in November, 2011.

Or 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeyer Hansson, who started a web design firm in Chicago in 1999 and kept it there even as the company grew to become a small but influential provider of project management tools and an even more influential blog about effective startup management.

You might think that Chicago was turning into a hive of startup talent, and you’d be right. According to BuiltInChicago.org, the number of digital startups created in the Chicago area in 2011 increased 56 percent over the year before, to 128 new companies.

Even more impressive, the funding raised by those companies was up 431 percent over 2010, to $1.45 billion. Excluding the massive pile of cash that Groupon alone raised ($972 million), Chicago area companies still raised 76 percent more than the year before.

One thing that might be helping is the presence of J.B. Pritzker, a Chicago native who founded New World Ventures in 1996 to invest in technology startups.

Pritzker is a wealthy man, one of the heirs to the Pritzker family fortune, he’s worth an estimated $2.5 billion. He is literally as rich as Rockefeller (David, that is), though that much wealth only qualifies him for a seven-way tie for 159th richest American, according to Forbes.

I had dinner with Pritzker and a group of venture capitalists and journalists recently, where the conversation focused on what it takes to create regional innovation hubs. According to Pritzker, Chicago’s entrepreneurial scene has taken off in the past few years, and it’s not just thanks to the recent success of Groupon’s initial public offering. It’s not just having a rich guy bankroll things, either, though clearly that helps.

Rather, the VCs at that table agreed, what it takes to create a startup ecosystem–whether that’s in Chicago, New York, Salt Lake City, Detroit, or Boulder–is the presence of serial entrepreneurs. Someone has to take that first leap, start a company, recruit talent, and then stick around long enough to do it again.

Serial entrepreneurs can provide capital, by becoming angel investors or even venture capitalists. Their employees form a base of recruitable talent: people who have worked at startups before and understand that the work is not like a job at an ordinary company. Serial entrepreneurs also provide leadership, by serving as an example and as a magnet for talent: Smart people want to hitch their wagons to a rising star, in other words.

“The thing is the pull of jobs and the pull of the serial entrepreneur,” Pritzker said.

In a way, it’s easier to start a company outside Silicon Valley than inside it. Competition for talent is lower, because here in the Bay Area everyone needs engineers, driving their starting salaries into six figures, even for kids just out of college with no significant experience. Elsewhere, you don’t have to pay such rich prices. That may be one reason why Silicon Alley startups are coming up fast.

And, because of the abundant infrastructure provided by the Internet, it’s easy to offshore jobs that you can’t get done locally. Need more designers or more engineers? Turn to India, or the Philippines, or Romania.

Still, not everyone is convinced. I talked with Verdi Ergun, a cofounder of point-of-sale system startup Own, which recently moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan to San Francisco.

“We went from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond,” Ergun told me. “We hit this point where we needed more access to engineers and more access to capital, given the stage that we were at.”

Own’s prospects for success will be very dependent on the company’s ability to form partnerships with other tech and social networking companies, many of which are in California, so the move makes sense strategically as well.

But for an increasing number of companies, you don’t have to make it here: You can make it anywhere.

Note: As part of our global DEMO tour, VentureBeat will be traveling to Chicago on February 27th, where we’ll be partnering with one of the city’s top incubators, Sandbox Industries, to find the best startups in town. If you’d like to meet with us, please fill out this form, and we will be in touch shortly with more details.

Cloud gate photo: Kara Allyson/Flickr

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We took some time over the past couple of weeks to talk with Pham and Jones, as well as at least one entrepreneur who’s working with the Science team on a new startup.

As a longtime veteran of the LA startup world, your correspondent sensed a distinctly new energy during these conversations. There’s more organization, more optimism, and more stability than ever before from the tech scene to the south.

“Science is bringing infrastructure to LA that hasn’t been there before, including access to capital,” said Tony Adam in a recent trip to VentureBeat’s San Francisco office. Adam is head of Eventup, the first Science startup to reach a public launch.

Science, still a small outfit with a $10 million fund, is launching a string of startups this year, and each one has solid revenue potential. It could be the start of a new era for Los Angeles tech — and a new opportunity for NorCal investors to take the area a bit more seriously.

From MySpace’s ashes

The Los Angeles community is replete with former MySpacers, and Science itself is built from a tight-knit cadre of onetime MySpace executives still loyal to Jones. Adam is among that group, as are Science partners Mike Macadaan and Sean Percival.

But this isn’t just croneyism at work; MySpace accounted for a lot of the LA-based tech talent pool. And as the larger community evolves past MySpace, former MySpacers are taking on new roles, building new companies, and continuing to push the area forward into the technology fray.

“These are guys that I fell in love with,” said Jones in a phone conversation with VentureBeat. “I’ve worked with them for years. Coming out of MySpace … these are the guys I love to work with.”

“The alumni network [from MySpace] is actually pretty large,” said Pham, one of a few Science affiliates who wasn’t involved in the social network. “Those folks are re-participating in the community.”

Jones emphasized that the painful experience of taking a once-strong company through layoffs and a fire sale was a trial by fire for all parties involved, but that it made the core team of his confidants stronger.

“These guys understand the landscape,” he said. “They’ve been through the ups and they’ve been through the downs … and they can build the next generation of fantastic businesses.”

Money talks, empty tech walks

Noting that yes, of course, San Francisco still trumps LA when it comes to the sheer size of its talent pool, Jones countered, “In LA, there’s not that many large tech companies, so there’s not too many opportunities to build out your team. But there’s more opportunity to build out your revenue … People here want to build real businesses with profit.”

Jones advocates what appears to be a prominent theme among LA startups: real revenue from the get-go. You’re likely to see fewer tech platforms down south, but much more likely to see actual businesses with consumer-level customers either waiting in the wings or already putting their money down for product.

“We’re gonna build a whole breed of businesses over the next year that are incredibly successful,” Jones said. “I think Science will be a conduit for Silicon Valley investors to feel comfortable investing in Los Angeles.”

A conduit for cash

Bringing San Francisco’s capital down to LA’s entrepreneurs was a theme that came up frequently when VentureBeat talked in person with Pham, as well.

“A personal mission of mine is to get some larger firms to open up offices down there, to bring down a partner to invest personally,” Pham told us.

“Right now, though, I want $250 million of Sand Hill money coming down to LA, and it’s starting.”

Pham rattles off a string of recent LA-based startups that have raised money from top-tier Silicon Valley firms. “I’m getting amazing committments and term sheets being signed for deals,” he said, speaking with the energy and confidence of someone who was born for this job.

“Our plan for Science is … to bring cash in and actually start other funds down in LA,” Pham continued. “It’s starting with pockets of angel investing, and there will be a billion-dollar fund in LA within the next three to five years.”

The money from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles has been a trickle; Pham is convinced it will become a flood. All that’s needed in order to turn that vision into a reality is a bit more structure of the kind Science is providing.

“What’s been lacking is guidance and leadership,” he concluded, “and we think Science can be a tent pole.”

(Editor’s note: VentureBeat is partnering with Science on Feb 23, in our quest to find great companies to write about, as well as to invite to DEMO.)

Eventup, a marketplace for hard-to-get event venues, can make that happen.

Eventup is a brand-spanking-new startup launching today in Los Angeles, and we have to say, a startup idea like that could only have come from Los Angeles, the longtime home of entertainment of America.

“More events are thrown in LA than anywhere else; there are more venues here than anywhere else,” said Eventup CEO Tony Adam. “This couldn’t happen in San Francisco … our business could only start successfully here.”

And this particular startup idea couldn’t have happened without Science’s trademark mix of local talent and Valley capital. Science is the area’s newest tech incubator, and Eventup is the first Science company to reach a public launch.

Adam, a former MySpace employee, came by the VentureBeat office in San Francisco to chat about the company.

“You don’t want to be the bride at a hotel ballroom and watch another bride walk by,” he explained. “You want your event to be unique and memorable.”

He and the rest of the Eventup team are focused on creating entirely unique and highly memorable experiences for normal consumers. It’s a bit like Airbnb for upscale events.

“Unattainable properties are now attainable,” said Adam. “Rodeo Drive houses, Malibu beach houses … we even have access to The Bachelor mansion.”

The idea sounds hip enough, but Adam emphasizes the business model behind it, too. The company is “focused on solving a real-world consumer problem,” he continued.

“I’ve planned conferences and I know how hard it is to find a venue. I’ve spent days doing it, and even event planners can take as long as 18 hours just finding a place.”

We talked to one of Eventup’s backers, former MySpace CEO Mike Jones. Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham founded Science to bring ideas like this one to market.

“When Peter and I were originally working on this, we started with marketplaces, places we could find underused inventory and find buyers for that inventory,” said Jones.

“At first, I said, ‘Venues — is that really that big?’ We eventually realized there are very few aggregated venue directories. We started talking to high-end real estate companies and homeowners, and we realized that these people wanted to rent out their homes.”

Eventup ended up sourcing around 400 venues in the greater Los Angeles area alone, creating a consumer marketplace just as Jones had wanted.

And the fun doesn’t stop with the venues. “We now have access to catering, insurance, DJs, entertainment, valets — once you have the venue in place, it’s just the start of the funnel of the events industry,” Adam revealed. “We’ll be getting into that, too.”

The company has created a financial planning tool that lets anyone who works in a tech company test their options for selling stock after an initial public offering.

Andy Rachleff, chief executive of Wealthfront and co-founder of Benchmark Capital, said in an interview that the company is targeting tech professionals in their 20s and 30s who are sitting on a lot of startup stock and need advice about what to do with it.

“Very few people know the answer to the question about when they should sell stock,” Rachleff said. “It’s always the No. 1 question we get from people that we work with. Another popular question is when should I exercise my stock options.”

The Wealthfront tool promises to help employees figure out the optimal plan for selling off stock. Rachleff, who has been on the boards of a lot of tech companies and is on the faculty of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, often tells employees that they should cover their bets with an investment strategy that fits their risk profile. It might make sense to sell off 10 percent of your holdings in a post-IPO startup every quarter. Or another plan might fit.

“If you spend years working for a company, you deserve the fruits of your labor and should liquidate some of your holdings,” Rachleff said.

The tool allows folks to test various strategies against the actual stock behavior of five types of tech companies that went public in the last decade. You can tell how well each strategy would have worked with the different kinds of companies. The post-IPO trading price may increase, decrease, hit a peak and fall, or fall and recover, or simply oscillate back and forth, Rachleff said. Sometimes the best solution will be to sell all of your stock after a lock-up period ends.

You never know what pattern will happen. But you can test different strategies against different trading patterns. Since you don’t know how the trading will go, the best strategy is usually covering your bets by selling 10 percent of the stock per quarter after your lock-up period ends. That helps you benefit from multiple trading scenarios.

Wealthfront is a low-fee online financial advisor service in Palo Alto, Calif. The plan is to create a low-fee company that tech professionals and others can trust more than high-priced brokers and wealth consultants.

The company, formerly known as KaChing, has about 20 employees and has raised $10.5 million from DAG Ventures, as well as individual investments from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital’s Bruce Dunlevie and Dave Beirne, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ Kevin Compton and Doug Mackenzie, and others.

Facebook’s core values include a powerful, results-oriented, anti-theoretical philosophy called “The Hacker Way,” according to founder Mark Zuckerberg.

“The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration,” Zuckerberg writes. “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”

The remarkable “letter” from Zuckerberg appears in Facebook’s S-1 form announcing its intention to go public, which the SEC released to the public today. No starting price has yet been named, but Facebook said in the filing it expects to raise $5 billion in the IPO. The transaction may leave the company valued between between $75 and $100 billion.

The Hacker Way, Zuckerberg writes, is embedded deeply into the company’s culture. It prioritizes code-based solutions over theoretical arguments, practicality over perfection, risk-taking, and iteration (creating things quickly, testing, then refining).

It’s a remarkable codification of principles that many programmers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have understood for a long time. The 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeyer Hansen elaborated a similar philosophy in their book Rework, and Eric Ries touts an entrepreneurial version of the code in his book and blog, The Lean Startup.

Reading a business book is one thing; seeing the principle outlined in the SEC documents filed by a company planning to go perfect is another. It’s a sign of how deeply the hacker ethos has transformed the way the tech industry works.

Among other things, the philosophy appears in sayings that Facebook employees frequently repeat.

• “Done is better than perfect.”
• “Code wins arguments.”
• “Move fast and break things.”
• “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.”

Leaving nothing to chance, the company also ensures that all employees are steeped in this worldview by putting them through a Facebook “Bootcamp.”

“To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach,” Zuckerberg writes. “There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.”

Another prominent part of the company’s culture: Frequent hackathons, all-out coding marathons that produce code everyone gets to see and comment on. Some of Facebook’s most popular features emerged from hackathons, including the new Timeline, chat, video, the company’s mobile development framework, and even some infrastructure elements.

Zuckerberg’s letter also shows a sharp awareness of the shift in human interconnectedness brought about by the internet and mobile technologies. The company was “built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg writes. Facebook does that, he says, by helping people connect to one another, starting with the most fundamental relationship: That of two people to each other.

Here’s the full text of Zuckerberg’s letter.

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

Facebook wall photo: M.POLLO Menswear/Flickr

This sponsored post is produced by MicroVentures.

Investing in a start-up is no longer a game of having the right connections. Just a short ten years ago, you had to have an “in” with a lawyer, an accountant, or a friend of a friend who’d give you a referral to a promising tech start-up looking to raise money. Or they would invite you to be part of a select few to invest with them.

Participating in the most exciting part of entrepreneurial efforts had a second barrier to entry: You needed a lot of money, in many cases at least $50,000. And many start-ups coming your way were based far away and hard to get a good handle on. That traditional scenario left a lot of interested angel investors sitting on the sidelines.

Fast forward to early 2012, and we’re looking at a different world. Even Washington is taking note how crowdfunding can light much-needed entrepreneurial fire under the lukewarm U.S. economy. The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, recently approved by the House of Representatives, for the first time recognizes microlending to start-ups as an integral part of future growth.

The debate over the measure’s merits and risks may be ongoing, but microfunding done right is anything but uncharted territory where investors have to worry about placing risky bets on opaque start-ups. Quite the opposite is true, as investment sites like MicroVentures demonstrate.

Thanks to such pioneering crowdfunding sites, it has become a lot easier to be an angel investor with anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 at their disposal. MicroVentures vets all companies with a thorough and complete due diligence process. It then provides additional documents so investors can conduct their own due diligence to make the final decision.

That way, even small investors are able to focus on high-growth companies, particularly those in the high-tech space, that offer a large upside, rather than the mom-and-pop stores that have traditionally been associated with micro-lending.

MicroVentures founder Bill Clark argues that crowdfunding for entrepreneurs and their ideas for hot new technologies can be done right — if one focuses on three key pieces:

1) Access to good deal flow to identify potential winners.
2) The ability to invest in multiple deals to gain experience.
3) The tools and skills to filter out those companies and founders who will succeed.

Clark faced all three hurdles as an investor himself and turned adversity into an advantage when he founded MicroVentures. Like many others interested in angel investments, Clark wanted to invest smaller sums in more companies, allowing him to spread out his risk and increase his chances of picking a winner. What’s more, he wanted access to high-growth candidates beyond his hometown of Austin, Texas.

The quick uptake of his venture seems to prove him right. Since launching MicroVentures a year ago, more than 2,000 investors have joined. “MicroVentures helps investors learn about companies they may never have heard of, and to invest smaller sums in them, “ he says. “It’s a long overdue break with investment traditions where the small guys get access — and can prime the pumps of innovation for the whole country.”

When you sign up to be an investor be sure to put “VentureBeat” in the referral code and MicroVentures will send you a $100 gift card after you make your first investment.

Despite spending years in school and hours at the workplace, without knowing how to code you can’t create your vision. You’re left with two options: learn to code (Codeacademy is worthy investment of your time if you can fit it in), or find a programmer (an undertaking that warrants its own article). Given the frustrations, many would-be entrepreneurs give up on their vision without giving it a real chance. That’s a pity, and it doesn’t need to be that way.

Here are some tips and tool-recommendations to help you build a Web business without learning how to code.

Simulate your vision with visual tools

Recommended tools: Powerpoint, Balsamiq, iMovie

As an entrepreneur, your goal is to assemble the necessary resources to create your idea. Finding the required talent and money means selling your vision. The first knee-jerk reaction is to write a business plan. Although useful, a business plan is not the best communication tool. It can be jargony, dense, overly-complicated, and simply put, it doesn’t showcase your idea. (If you write anything, go for a 2-3 page executive summary.)

Instead, I recommend building a website mockup. Show each page’s function and simulate how they behave by linking them to one another. Powerpoint is a great tool for this since you can link buttons to each slide easily. I recommend investing in a mockup tool (my personal favorite is Balsamiq), which is very user-friendly given its drag-drop functions. If done properly, your mockups can have the look and feel of a real website. Now friends, investors, or potential co-founders can see your vision instead of reading a long, dry document. If you want to take this to the next step, make a video by “screen recording” your mockup (I use Snapz Pro) and adding some narrative and music using a basic movie editing software like iMovie.

Create a prototype using widget-based website creators

Recommended tools: Weebly, Wix, WordPress, Google Analytics, Qualtrics

Prototyping is all about validating individual portions of your concept. Use widget-based website creators to quickly and easily put together a prototype.Weebly, Wix, and WordPress (just to name a few examples) can be very powerful when mixed with a little creativity.

Letting potential users interact with something will give you valuable data, which you can easily capture using data analytics. My favorite is Google Analytics because it’s free and easy to implement (it just got a great upgrade too). If you can’t capture particular data, use surveys (Qualtrics is a fantastic tool which lets you capture 250 surveys for free) to engage users.

How do you get testers? Put the page up on your Facebook wall, send e-mail blasts, or offer a raffle or a perk (for example, first to get access to your site once it’s built). Having data in your pocket will both educate you and provide compelling information when you’re trying to recruit others or raise funds.

Brand your vision

Recommended tools: CrowdSpring, 99designs, LaunchRock, Facebook, Twitter

We live in a world where the smallest startup can look and feel like one of the biggest companies out there. Make sure you snag a good domain name and create an attractive logo. You can inexpensively outsource design jobs to sites like 99designs or Crowdspring.

Once you have some visuals and an identity, cover your bases: Create a landing page for your site (LaunchRock is a good tool for that), set up a Facebook page (claim your facebook.com/yourbrand), and start developing an audience through Twitter. Family and friends will want to support you, and potential clients will be interested in learning about your company. Having an online presence gives you a stage where others can share in your journey. You’ll have a community of eager users ready to support you faster than you think.

Enjoy your launchpad and raise money

Recommended tools: Kickstarter, AngelList

Your company is now live. You’ve established a presence and have powerful tools to sell your vision. If you want to hire talent, you now have somewhere to point applicants. If you need support, you can show family and friends a preview of what you want to build. If you want to raise money, you can go on Kickstarter or AngelList with a bit more credibility (and hopefully a mockup video in hand).

Tony Navarro (@hoostony) is founder and CEO of Streamcal.com, a venture that redefines the way schedules and calendars are published, shared and consumed across the web. He has an MBA from Wharton and an MPA from Harvard, and currently lives in Boston with his wife. He is also a member of The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs.

Ostrich image via ShutterStock

Watch out! There’s some adults-only vocabulary in Startup Land.

For this week’s video show installment, we decided to deliver a very special VBWeekly addressing the dangers of myopia and jargon.

Also, we decided to slay what’s left of the “Sh*t People Say” meme.

Since we get a lot of press releases, talk to a lot of VCs and entrepreneurs, and live the dream ourselves as startup employees, who better to skewer the startup community than VentureBeat, we figured.

We took a liberal amount of this script from real life (the number of times we’ve heard “We don’t have any competitors” is astronomical), but some of it is fictional.

Generous thanks goes out to @MochaSips, @CynthiaSchames, @dabent, and @matthewcyan for their Twitter suggestions.

And to the many, many hard-working developers, founders, VCs, angels, bloggers, and PR folks whose work we quote directly, please know that we’re laughing with you, and we know very well that VentureBeat wouldn’t have anything to write about without you. We mock only with the greatest love.

Special thanks to “the talent” and “the crew”: Sarah Mitroff, Meghan Kelly, Garrett McCullum, Amanda Lopez, Matt Marshall, Jason Spangenthal, and Jolie O’Dell.

If you want to mingle with top venture capitalists and angels, who are funding the next wave of innovative powerhouses, join us for Splash SF at Cafe du Nord on the evening of February 2, 2012. Ten early-stage startups selected by their peers share the stage with rockstar CEOs who share their secrets to success with the crowd of 400 startup CEOs, investors, service providers and bloggers.

Splash is an event that brings together blue-chip high-tech startup investors, who give you insights into how they think when it comes to investments. They’ll also talk about their investment philosophies in light of the new and abundant sources of early-stage capital.

Get your 15% discount on tickets by using the promo code “VB15” here. The best deal is in the demo tables, which include three tickets to event and afterparty, plus signage and exposure at the event. As always, there will be an open wine bar, starting at 4 pm, courtesy Cannonball Winery, and an afterparty performance, starring Coverflow.

The two keynote speakers onstage are Jeff Fluhr, founder and CEO of Spreecast, and co-founder of Stubhub, where he served as CEO, building the company from the ground up until the sale to eBay for $310 million, as well as Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box, which is currently valued at a reported half-a-billion dollars. The VC/investor list includes Michael Brown (head of Twitter Corp Dev), Craig Sherman (Meritech Capital), Saad Khan (CMEA), Charles Moldow (Foundation Capital), Mike Hirshland (Resolute VC), Jed Katz (Javelin Venture Partners), Sharon Wienbar (Scale Venture Partners), Raj Kapoor (Mayfield Fund), Howard Lindzon (prolific angel investor), Frank Artale (Ignition Partners), Josh Stein (DFJ), Darcy Frisch (Hearst Ventures), Shayna Modarresi (DLA Piper), and David Hornik will be back for another segment of “Late Night with David Hornik.” The online judges include Jules Walker (KPMG), Xander Mahoney (DFJ), Craig Stern (head of Corp Dev, Nextag), and Freeman Murray (prolific angel investor). And, of course, there is the afterparty band – Coverflow, with Raj Kapoor (Mayfiled), Tim Chang (Mayfield), Phil Kaplan (ADHD Labs), Prashant Fuloria (Facebook), Ethan Beard (Facebook), and the musician timekeeper – The Mule from Smule.

Interested in attending? Get your 15% discount on tickets by using the promo code “VB15” here.

The Teens In Tech incubator started last year as a way for ambitious, bright teenagers to accelerate their business and app ideas.

This year, the Teens In Tech gang is welcoming a second class and is taking applications now.

Last summer, six teams went through the incubation process. Nine out of thirteen founding team members were still in high school, but they presented unique approaches to problems most adults couldn’t even perceive.

For the 2011 class, Teens In Tech partnered with Appcelerator; that partnership is continuing this year. Other incubator sponsors will include Microsoft, SoftLayer, Globumbus, and others.

“The 2012 Teens In Tech Incubator is an eight week, hands-on program for young entrepreneurs between the ages of 13-19 who are serious about building products,” Teens In Tech founder Daniel Brusilovsky writes in an email to VentureBeat.

“We have more than 65 industry mentors in the program to help with engineering, marketing, communications, legal, finance, business development, and many other fields.”

Would-be teen entrepreneurs can apply to the program starting today; the application window will close April 25, 2012. This year, only five teams will make the cut.

“We’re not looking for world-class companies, but instead, world-class young entrepreneurs who are serious about learning about entrepreneurship and crave real world experience,” said Brusilovsky.

Young founders at the last Teens In Tech incubator demo day

“We learned a lot of things from the first batch, but I think the biggest was how much we didn’t anticipate the technical knowledge of some of the teams,” Brusilovsky told VentureBeat.

“Instead of jumping right into design, usability and other product work, we had to take a few steps back and bring in some technical mentors to help the teams learn the basics. We lost a few weeks, but it’s something we’re definitely going to be on top on for 2012.”

The Teens In Tech founder said that the 2011 class alumni “all walked away with a lot of experience and knowledge.” Some alums are still working on their incubated projects, while others have returned to high school and academic life.

The speech focused heavily on leveling the playing field between the U.S. and other countries so that America’s economy could be more competitive, and included key calls to action that would directly affect the startup community. He asked for an end to regulations that prevent entrepreneurs from getting financing, tax breaks for small businesses creating jobs, immigration reform, and more training for technology jobs.

There were some Silicon Valley notables in the audience. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger was a guest, mostly likely invited to drive home the dual points that startups create jobs and responsible immigration reform creates startups. Also in the First Lady’s box was Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow. Obama name-checked the Apple co-founder while talking about the importance of encouraging talented people in business:

An economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country… we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.

Obama wasn’t the only one to drop the late Steve Jobs’ name for dramatic effect. In the Republican response immediately following the State of the Union, Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana used him as an example of the kind of businessman Obama is supposedly against.

Contrary to the President’s constant disparagement of people in business, it’s one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs, what a fitting name he had, created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew.

On the topic of startups and innovation creating jobs, Obama had this to say:

Innovation is what America has always been about. Most new jobs are created in start-ups and small businesses. So let’s pass an agenda that helps them succeed. Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs.

Obama cited the need for job training to meet our current needs, applauding existing partnerships, like those between companies such as Siemens and community colleges, that provide specialized job training:

Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job.

Obama asked for immigration reform for non-citizens already in the country, especially children and educated immigrants with skills and ideas that could contribute to the economy. The solution, a law that allows them to earn citizenship, isn’t a new idea. The DREAM Act, which would give some immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors a path to citizenship, was reintroduced to the Senate in May 2011.

Hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.

The President also announced the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit to crack down on practices by other countries that he feels have negative impact on the U.S. economy. The unit will focus on counterfeit goods and monitoring unfair trade between the U.S. and other countries, with a special focus on China.

It’s not right when another country let our movies, music, and software be pirated.

No mention was made of the recent pushes by lawmakers to crack down on pirating of American movies, music, and software with the SOPA and PIPA bills.

This sponsored post is produced by Doug Renert, Co-Founder of Tandem Capital.

Remember during the dot-com era when your mail carriers and cab drivers were giving you stock tips? Now it seems as though they’ve all become angel investors, pitching their countless early-stage portfolio companies to anyone and everyone who will listen.

Yes, the arrival of the “lean startup” model — and the heightened exposure of entrepreneurs through online media, pitch events, and social networks — has blasted open the double doors of early-stage investing. And despite the ongoing doldrums of the overall economy, there’s a mob of aspiring angels and VCs rushing in to try their hands at it, hoping to strike gold with the next Facebook or Google.

Some of these new-wave angels keep their focus and commitments narrow. They select a certain domain to invest in and make just a few bets at a time. Maybe they even dedicate their time to working with each founding team as a part-time executive or advisor, helping refine and scale the business. These folks can add tremendous value if they have the right experience, skills, and network, and there’s a culture and personality fit with the founding team.

But many investors take the more traditional approach of portfolio diversification, looking for the equivalent of an early-stage index fund. This wave of “spray and pray” investing will leave a wide swath of carnage in its wake.

When it comes to public companies, we all have the same access to information and stocks as Warren Buffett, and we can buy and sell at the times and prices we see fit. But in the private company world, investors have to create their own deal flow, and their moves are limited once they invest their money. Only a fraction of companies make it to liquidity, and today’s early-stage deal economics make it challenging for the small number of successes to pay for the more common failures. This means that “spray and pray” investors have to be able to spot the best companies and move when they do. Only a few of these investors have the brand and skills to do this. The overwhelming majority will simply lose money during this frenzy. At least it will mostly be their own.

Entrepreneurs can avoid getting burned by this pending fallout of “spray and pray” investors. Here are three key limitations of spray-and-pray investors to watch out for along the way:

1. Limited face time

If an investor is making five bets a month, he simply won’t have any time to spend with you. Even if it’s an investor group, they will be spending most of their time selecting their next companies or managing details across their portfolio. This means that you’ll end up with a meeting now and again, hopefully along with a helpful network of fellow entrepreneurs in the same boat. Before you accept money from any investors, ask to speak with their other companies and find out exactly how much time the investor spent with them and what results were delivered.

2. Limited attention span

The definition of “spray and pray” is that you make lots of bets and count on the few that “make it” to bring home the returns. As all entrepreneurs know, things very rarely go as planned from day one, so it’s critical to have the support of your investors even during the tough times. Unfortunately, spray-and-pray investors have a hard time justifying putting more money or time into the majority of their companies along the way – their model forces them to narrow their funnels quickly and ruthlessly. Another useful step when checking out potential investors is to talk to portfolio companies that went through tough times and see how their investors handled it.

3. Limited domain knowledge

Far too often, angels and seed funds invest based on some broad criteria of market size or monetization potential, or who else is involved – not based on their areas of expertise. They might know the basics of SaaS, group buying, or HTML5, and maybe they can rattle off top stories from the tech blogosphere, but this really doesn’t help a budding entrepreneur. For an entrepreneur building a business, the only thing that matters is how much people around the table know about the company’s competitors, users and partners, as well as the key tricks of the trade. The mobile space, for example, might seem like a quick learn, but there’s a lot to learn. There are particular ways to move apps into the top charts; there’s a science to monetization; and there are relevant partners to know (including device manufacturers, carriers and development platforms). Having firsthand knowledge of these industry-specific requirements is critical.

The good thing about this early-stage investing wave is that strong entrepreneurs now have many potential sources of capital. They should use this dynamic to their advantage and partner with investors who are focused in their specific sector and are active with their companies. In other words, founders who have the luxury of choosing their investors should bring in those who will add value at the outset and will stick around over the long haul.

Doug Renert is the co-founder and ‘deal maker’ at Tandem. He has nearly 20 years of tech experience building and helping startups at Oracle, DLA and Tello. Follow him on Twitter @dougrenert.

Like most great ideas, the inspiration for this article came to me while at a bar at approximately 11:37pm on a Thursday night.

It must have been 11:37pm because I had been working on a report to present the next morning until eleven o’clock.

My roommate convinced me to go grab a drink at our local bar and I agreed because I needed to take my mind off work for a few minutes before going to bed.

So when a guy at the bar asked me what I did and wanted to hear about my startup I snapped at him. “I’ve been working all night. Work is the last thing I want to talk about.”

But it turned out he also worked at startup. And was also a History major in college. This guy’s startup deals with finance so almost everyone else he works with studied finance or engineering in college. He gets asked all the time why he studied history and his response was so good that I made a mental note to remember it for the next time someone asks me why I studied history.

“Being a history major taught me how to be an analyst. I learned how to distill incredible amounts of information into a thesis statement. It’s easier to write a ten-page paper than a two-page paper. History teaches you perspective,” he said, “I don’t know how anyone who studied history isn’t in Silicon Valley right now.”

And that’s just it. Silicon Valley is the boomtown of our age. This startup scene will someday be romanticized the same way Mad Men depicts advertising in the 1950s, Pan Am shows air travel in the 1960s, and some movies present Wall Street of the 1980s.

Those of us who are working long hours in the hope that our company will be the next Facebook, Twitter, or AirBnB are living in a historic moment. The hotbed of excitement in our era is right here in Silicon Valley.

Almost.

It took all my strength not to book a one-way ticket to Burma when I found out that the United States restored relations with the country. As a journalist, I have an itch to be where the news is. That, and I have a personal connection to the country from doing some NGO work there. Burma is also having a historic moment. I’d try to liken it to this same moment in the tech industry, but that’s not just fair.

At least if I can’t be part of one historic moment, I can be part of another.

Being a history major in the tech industry has other perks.

For example, I understood the analogy when our CEO said a venture capitalist once compared the old conflict between Facebook and Zynga to the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the potential for mutually assured destruction if Facebook didn’t let Zynga use its platform.

Also, I could sympathize with the CEO when he was explaining the challenge of distilling all the ideas our company has into a two-minute pitch to a venture capitalist who hears thousands of pitches. It’s just like trying to answer whether Peter the Great was a hero or a villain in a thesis statement or explaining the causes of World War I in a paragraph.

A late-night chat in a bar reminded me that it’s not necessary to study engineering, marketing, or business if you want to work at a startup. There are benefits to studying other disciplines as long as you know how to argue that what you studied gives you a unique and valuable perspective.

Previous Startup and the City columns:

A startup vocabulary lesson

Lessons from landing my first startup job

View from the other side of the hiring process

Fake it until you make it

Tiensin Treaty image via ShutterStock

People outside of China often wonder why the Chinese love to copy things. The answer is that it’s the way they’re taught to learn. Follow the teacher, recite books, and don’t challenge authority. This mentality sticks with people as they mature. Moreover, I’m sure many startups think, “Why shouldn’t I copy?” if the business model has been proven overseas and they know how to adapt it for China. Not copying would almost represent a missed opportunity.

When I interviewed the co-founder of Match.com, Peng Ong (now a Partner at GSR Ventures) he said “Copying is a form of innovation. The best companies never just copy; they copy and then localize. It’s like jazz, you have a basic rhythm and structure and you move around that. Is jazz copying? I don’t think there is any original idea. Google is a copy.”

I’ve realized that the word “innovation” can be interpreted in many ways. In China, I feel it means to adapt and improve. To some degree, everyone learns by copying. But where it becomes a touchy subject is when Chinese knockoffs don’t just copy the business model, they copy everything except the logo!

Since the Chinese are expert copiers of everything from Nike shoes and Italian-made furniture to tech startups, this skill ought to be commended.

We’ve compiled a list of the best tech clones of companies that were hot in China over the last year. We picked the winners based their market leader position in the market perception. Of course, all the original startups ideas that made it big originate from America, particularly in Silicon Valley.

Here we go, drum roll please!

1. Groupon – First and largest group buying site in the world

Winner: Meituan, finished 2011 as number one group buying site by revenue.

Honorable mention: Lashou, put up a good fight against Meituan.

2. Airbnb – First and largest vacation and private room rental site in the world

Winner: Airizu, the earliest Airbnb clone in China.

Honorable mention: Mayi, operated by one of China’s largest classified sites, Ganji.

3. Tumblr – Largest light-blogging platform in the world

Winner: DianDian, incubated by Innovation Works and raised US$10M.

Honorable mention: Lofter, spawned from Internet giant, NetEase.

4. Pinterest – The hottest social bookmarking site right now, with fast growth and salivating VCs

Winner: Huaban, from the makers from the best Flickr clone.

Honorable mention: J.RenRen, from the makers of China’s Facebook, RenRen.

5. Gilt – Exclusive discount luxury goods site

Winner: Xiu, satisfying China’s insatiable demand for luxury and brand names.

Honorable mention: VIPstore, recently raised a new round of funding from Intel Capital.

6. Flipboard – First and most popular iPad magazine app

Winner: Zaker, the earliest Flipboard clone emerged when Flipboard was blocked in China.

Honorable mention: Xianguo, from the makers of a popular RSS reader.

7. Kik – Popular mobile messaging apps 

Winner: Weixin, a mobile app that is rolling Kik, Talkbox, Foursquare, Bump into one

Honorable mention: Miliao, from Lei Jun, regarded as China’s Steve Jobs

One trend we noticed is that the best clones are often created by very large Chinese tech companies with existing resources and money. It shows how tough the environment is for grassroots startups trying to compete against the big guys. It is also telling of the health of China’s startup eco-system — big companies can and will simply crush anything they see as a threat. This dynamic explains why the mergers and acquisitions market is not as active here as it is in America.

Now that we are already flying through 2012, we’re looking for the next hot clones to emerge out of China.

This article originally appeared on TechNode, a VentureBeat editorial partner based in China.

Dachshund photo via ShutterStock

I knew what I wanted to say in these posts but I struggled to find the right words to express my thoughts. I knew my blog needed an objective — a common thread between my posts that would drive home the bigger message. But finding the right chemistry between that objective, the words on the screen, and the tone and attitude that would define my voice was no easy task. Increasingly, it took more time and effort than my schedule allowed.

So I hired a journalist.

Actually, he’s a former journalist; a longtime beat reporter and editor who has worked for some high profile publications and is pretty well-respected for his expertise. Unlike many of his newspaper colleagues, he was not handed a pink slip. Instead, he walked away from a journalism gig that was both high-profile and frenzied, and launched a business that offers “content strategy” services to companies looking to enhance their online voices. I was one of his first clients.

Now, he and I collaborate regularly on my blog posts and other writing projects. We’ve developed a objective that centers around positioning me as an expert on safe online marketplaces. He reigns me in when it comes to tooting my own horn. He helps me practice some restraint and diplomacy when I feel compelled to blast my competitors. He makes sure that I’m not just repeating headlines but focusing my thoughts around particular news events.

He’s making me relevant.

More importantly, he’s charging me a fraction of what a PR firm might charge me for a bunch of other services that I might not really need. Because he’s juggling a number of other clients, he’s not devoting 40 hours a week to my blog strategy and content, and that’s OK with me. My blog is an important part of my business but it’s not a full-time element.

We’ve agreed that payment by-the-hour or by-the-word isn’t a good approach for us. Neither of us is interested in watching the clock or counting words. Instead, we have agreed upon a flat-rate price for a set number of posts, an approach that ends up costing me hundreds of dollars of per blog post instead of tens of thousands of dollars per month to retain a PR firm — not that a PR firm could even offer such expertise without former journalists on its staff.

Granted, I could have hired some random freelance writer to help me blog, but I’m getting so much more with a traditional journalist on my team. Our conversations are filled with insight into the news business. He knows how newsroom editors think. He knows how to lure readers into online discussions. He knows which topics will spark some buzz and which ones will generate yawns. And yes, he says, headlines matter.

From what he and I have been able to find, relationships like ours are pretty unique. We’ve heard of only a few instances of companies turning to former journalists to help them develop content for their sites, and most of that is project-based, instead of ongoing. We’ve also found — anecdotally, mind you — that journalists aren’t necessarily out there hawking their skills and going after business relationships with companies.

Truth be told, many of them don’t recognize how much they bring to the table when it comes to meeting business needs. Journalists have made careers out of gathering information and then using words to clearly explain, inform and educate other. They become experts in their beats. And yet they aren’t big on selling themselves or their expertise.

A working journalist who covers the same field isn’t usually available to be hired by a company like mine, due to ethics and and the need to avoid anything that might compromise those values. However, media is a tough industry, and some writers are looking for a career shift into new fields where they can get paid to apply their journalism skills.

The good news for these people is that companies outside of the news business are starting to recognize what they bring to the table. In the long run, as they put their hands on more content outside of traditional news outlets, the core values of journalism — along with some quality writing — could seep into this new, expanded blogosphere, raising its credibility and eventually changing the perceptions around blog posts as forms of journalism.

Greg Collier is the founder and CEO of Geebo, an online classifieds site. He is a California native who now lives in McLean, VA with his family.

Typewriter image via ShutterStock

Benjamin Popper

Hi VentureBeat! I’ve just joined VentureBeat as East Coast editor, based in New York. I can’t wait to get started on Monday.

I didn’t know much about the Silicon Alley scene until the day I stumbled into NYC Resistor, a hacker collective in Brooklyn. That was about three years ago. The air smelled like burning metal and people were talking about laser cutters and 3D printers and robots that dispensed drinks. It was a little slice of geek heaven, I thought, and maybe a good focus for my career as a journalist.

Fast forward a few years, and New York’s tech scene has exploded with activity. Makerbot, the company that sprang from this same group of hackers, has gotten $10 million in funding and won the best emerging tech award at CES – just another sign of New York’s momentum. The past three years have seen New York turn from a dot-com bust backwater into a legitimate contender to Silicon Valley in many areas.

We do things differently in New York. Our venture capitalists aren’t afraid to strut the catwalk and declare their support for Occupy Wall Street. Our Mayor wouldn’t miss a tech ribbon cutting if his life depended on it, that is if he’s not too busy learning how to code. And our entrepreneurs aren’t afraid to admit on their blog when they’ve failed. In fact it helps them lay the groundwork for their pivot into the next big thing.

I learned a ton working at the NY Observer, and building my own site, Betabeat. It was the guidance of editors like Aaron Gell and Elizabeth Spiers, who challenged me to skip the cheerleading and write the big features no one else would touch, that let Betabeat put the tech scene on notice in less than 9 months. And it was the hard work and sense of humor that my colleagues Adrianne Jeffries and Nitasha Tiku brought to our site every day that made it a must read for New York tech types, something that will continue as they build out the site.

Venturebeat is one of the top tech publications on the web with a killer national team. I’m excited to help them establish their first office here and blow up their coverage of the New York scene. Expect a few more puns in the headlines, snark in the posts and stories that make some of the people in power a little uncomfortable or downright furious. There will be scoops, not just funding stories every tech blog breaks at the same time. And there will be longer features profiling the companies and characters that are disrupting tech on the East Coast. If the Mayans were right about this whole 2012 thing, it’s going to be a hell of a year.

Photo by Ben Duchac

ProcessUnity: Operational, compliance, and technology risk Management

I first met with ProcessUnity, based in Concord, MA, way back in 2003, and I thought the firm sounded promising because it had developed workflow software that to me looked like “McKinsey in a box.” Since then, ProcessUnity has significantly enhanced its functionality and, in the process, begun to build a marquee customer list.

The financial collapse of this recent recession has forced companies to think about governance, risk and compliance (GRC) in a proactive, rather than reactive way. Demand for GRC applications is growing almost 30 percent a year, and cloud solutions are closer to 40 percent.

ProcessUnity has cloud-based feature sets that help firms manage operational, compliance and technology risks. Its rules and workflow engine helps financial institutions assess investment manager and sub-advisor risk. For the finance department, ProcessUnity’s software automates tracking of global incident reporting, end of month financial closings, 38a-1 Tracking, SAS70 calculations and Sarbox reporting.

For example, one large consulting firm uses ProcessUnity to enable risk incident reporting worldwide. A large Boston mutual fund company deployed ProcessUnity in three months for its retirement management unit. The firm said the competitive solution would have taken two years and $5 million to get up and running with the company’s existing software vendors.

Longer term, we expect the most successful risk management software vendors will transition from selling compliance (defense) to forward looking simulation (offense). While you will always need some compliance as insurance, firms that use risk management proactively, both internally and extended out to partners and vendors, will achieve significant competitive advantage. ProcessUnity looks to us like they could be one of the firms that allows this to happen. If so, ProcessUnity has a big future ahead of it.

Approximate size: $50-100 million in revenues

Implications for public company investors: Some adjacent competition for the big tools firms like CA, HP, IBM, BMC, Progress and Pegasystems. The more successful SnapLogic becomes, the better it will be for the pace of adoption of cloud applications.

Globoforce: Employee recognition

I met with CEO Eric Mosley and CFO Steve Cromwell of Globoforce recently. Based in Southborough, MA, the company operates in the emerging segment of HR known as employee recognition. In an economy in which margins and spending are under constant scrutiny, one of the most cost effective means of rewarding and incentivizing employees is through non-monetary gifts. If you can give the recipient a choice of reward gift, that’s even more effective.

Globoforce has built a cloud-based fulfillment platform that some of the world’s best companies can access to set up rewards programs for their employees. This includes firms like Amgen, Avnet, Dow Chemical, DHL, Fairmont Hotels, Intuit, Polaris, Symantec and Thompson Reuters. Globoforce competes with both firms that manufacture rewards (posters, cubes, etc.), and the recently Sequoia-funded Achievers.com.

Approximate size: >$125 million revenues.

Richard Davis is managing director of enterprise software for the brokerage firm Canaccord Genuity. Before joinging Canaccord, he spent 10 years as a senior analyst at Needham & Company. Previously, Davis was at Tucker Anthony, where he launched the firm’s Internet and enterprise software coverage.

Tightrope image via Shutterstock