Dylan’s Desk: What it takes to compete with Silicon Valley
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 … Continue Reading
Rainn Wilson calls on Silicon Valley to give back this holiday season (video)
There are a few ways to give back to your community. Have a bake sale, donate clothes to the Goodwill, or call up your good buddy Rainn Wilson and throw a party in Palo Alto for charity.
That’s exactly what Payam Zamani, chief executive officer of Reply.com, did to raise awareness for an organization close to his heart: the Mona Foundation, which is focused on improving education around the world, particularly for women.
“He’s one … Continue Reading
Stats show startups spend a chunk of their seed funding on legal fees (infographic)
New statistics from Silicon Valley’s top law firms show that new startups spend around $80,000 on legal costs.
AttorneyFee, a website that compares lawyer’s fees, pulled recent numbers from Silicon Valley’s most prominent law firms. The digits reveal the average amount of money startups spend on legal fees, the annual increase in new businesses, and an boom in law firms’ digital presence.
Startups usually face several legal hurdles in the early phases of creating their … Continue Reading
Accel Partners announces $100M Big Data Fund — to invest in Hadoop, NoSQL and other cool stuff
Venture firm Accel Partners has carved out a $100 million “big data” fund to invest in companies focused on building new IT infrastructure or on applications than run on that new infrastructure.
Accel, based in Palo Alto, Calif., at the heart of Silicon Valley’s venture capital community, has invested in companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Cloudera and Etsy.
As such, the firm has seen how companies like Facebook have been forced to exploit new technologies to … Continue Reading
How the tech industry can remedy its race problem
The U.S. tech industry has a race problem.
Anyone who’s worked in Silicon Valley for any length of time will have noticed the alarmingly large number of white guys occupying positions of power. There are good-sized groups of Asian entrepreneurs among the entrepreneurial and venture capital classes. But there are not many women and there are almost no black or Hispanic entrepreneurs or VCs.
Despite the incredible diversity of the Bay Area, the people at … Continue Reading
How Airbnb failed its way through “the trough of sorrow” to a $1B valuation
Today Airbnb is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups, but it has definitely failed its way to glory.
That made yesterday’s Failcon — a San Francisco event where entrepreneurs revel in their most humiliating defeats — an ideal venue for co-founder Joe Gebbia to talk about his company’s five-year journey to legitimacy, and some serious revenue generation.
The key to success is finding your way out of “the trough of sorrow,” where an entrepreneur’s true … Continue Reading
Vinod Khosla: Freedom to fail is key ingredient in success
The willingness to fail is the key ingredient in success, billionaire investor Vinod Khosla told the audience at the Failcon conference in San Francisco today.
Failcon is an annual event where people gather to talk about failing their way to success, a unique forum that celebrates mistakes.
Khosla (pictured) has had may successes, but he also knows about failure first hand. He was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, as well as a partner … Continue Reading
Protestors block bank entrance, snarl traffic in San Francisco
San Franciscans took to the streets today to express their frustration with banks and a host of other economic institutions.
About 200 protestors blocked all three entrances to the Wells Fargo headquarters downtown, chanting, singing songs and waving signs. While the protestors offered a variety of opinions and messages, they all seemed more or less unified around the feeling that most Americans — “the other 99 percent” — are suffering while a tiny minority of … Continue Reading
Getting money from Foundation Capital: What VCs think about investing today (video)
There are three things that matter in Silicon Valley: the people, the technology and the money.
Foundation Capital general partners Charles Moldow and Ashmeet Sidana sat down with VentureBeat to talk about their role in bringing those three things together.
There is a reason why some investors are called “angels.” Venture money and the experienced investors behind it can rescue a startup from irrelevance. It provides an open door for a company to expand its … Continue Reading
AdGame goes from zero to startup hero in one week
One week ago, AdGame didn’t exist. Today, the company has a customer, a little bit of funding, and the attention of a crowd full of potential investors and partners.
The idea is to make web display ads into incentivized, educational quizzes that not only engage the viewer, but also teach them the kind of facts that would be helpful on a standardized test.
For example, a test ad for Gucci asks, “Which city is the … Continue Reading
Markets will punish Apple for the loss of its master magician
[Update: I probably should have specified a timeline for this market reaction. There's short term and long term. The market punished apple immediately in after market trading, as pointed out below. And yes, a week later, Apple's stock is actually higher than it was last week, as Gruber points out, BUT that comes after a week where the overall market had a nice upturn. Apple doesn't look so great in this perspective, where it appears … Continue Reading
Entrepreneurs will strut their stuff at Mega Startup Weekend
[Editor's note: VentureBeat is co-sponsoring Mega Startup Weekend.]
Education and healthcare remain two of the biggest social issues in need of innovation. To help tackle the challenges, entrepreneurs will gather under one roof for 54 hours during Mega Startup Weekend. Their goal: Solving problems in these industries, perhaps by using gaming as a vehicle.
Hosted by Microsoft in conjunction with DEMO (which VentureBeat is co-producing with IDG) and Startup America, Mega Startup Weekend … Continue Reading
Silicon Valley startups saw high valuations in Q2. Will the good times last?
A new report shows startup valuations increasing at pre-2008 levels — but can these soaring numbers weather the recent market instability?
The most recent Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey from tech-focused law firm Fenwick & West looked at 117 Silicon Valley-based technology and life sciences companies that took funding in the second quarter of 2011.
During this time period, the firm tracked “up rounds” (in which the company receiving funding takes the money at a … Continue Reading
Silicon Valley VC Tim Draper: “U.S. just dropped a notch”
The biggest question on every mind in Silicon Valley relates to our collective worst nightmare: Could a macroeconomic collapse trigger another dotcom-esque bust?
For at least one VC, Draper Fisher Jurvetson partner Tim Draper, the market for U.S. startups just got noticeably chillier.
“In investing in start-ups globally, we at Draper Fisher Jurvetson try to view governments as competitors for our capital and for the great entrepreneurs of the world,” Draper told VentureBeat.
“Countries with … Continue Reading
Grubwithus founders want you to get out and meet people
Two lonely entrepreneurs in Chicago, far from their homes in Los Angeles, hacked together a site in 2010 that let people sign up to meet them over lunch or dinner.
Their novel idea was an instant hit, and now, one year later, the founders of Grubwithus find themselves at the helm of a fledgling startup. Is this yet another shiny social service for venture capitalists to scoop up, or is the concept rooted in something … Continue Reading
Investor confidence falters in Silicon Valley, VCs cite bubble concerns
Investor confidence in Silicon Valley slumped in the second quarter of 2011, according to the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index.
Although the index saw a year-over-year increase, the metric was lower than in the preceding three quarters, registering at 3.66 on a 5-point scale. The index for this quarter represents venture capitalists’ estimations of the entrepreneurial environment in the San Francisco Bay Area over the next six to 18 months.
Some of this dip … Continue Reading
Full of hustle, Los Angeles tech takes on Silicon Valley
L.A. isn’t just a mecca for film and video game studios. In the past three years, the Los Angeles tech scene has evolved from a small cadre of social media-happy party animals to a legitimate and sustainable tech community to rival Silicon Valley.
“Los Angeles is a town that spins a million stories every day,” says local technophile Sean Percival. “It’s the perfect backdrop for a techie looking to tell his or her own … Continue Reading
Silicon Valley singles all about queer, decadent robots in online dating profiles
Quick: what words are Silicon Valley singles more likely to use than other Americans when describing themselves on Internet dating sites?
Try these: queer, decadent, robot, raiding, wacky and telepathic, to name a few.
Musician and exerimental media dude R. Luke Dubois aggregated data from 21 online dating sites in order to create this awesome visualization of the 20,262 unique words found in the dating profiles of more than 19 million single Americans. He then … Continue Reading
Silicon Valley is abuzz with bubble and recovery stories — too soon?
The bulls are back in Silicon Valley in a variety of ways. Let’s hope reports of the recovery are true and that the optimism doesn’t get overheated too fast and turn into a bubble of the dot-com era’s scale.
The front pages of the San Jose Mercury News and the New York Times both have stories today about the return of good times in Silicon Valley (and let’s not forget the Los Angeles Times). They … Continue Reading
Why Silicon Valley trumps Boston (data)
I love Boston. I lived there for five of the best years of my life, when I was working at D. E. Shaw & Co., and then when I attended Harvard Business School.
If anyone asks, I always tell them, “if Boston had the same weather and career opportunities for me as Silicon Valley, I’d move there in a heartbeat.”
But the sad fact is that Boston isn’t in Silicon Valley’s league as a startup … Continue Reading
