July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Manish Dudharejia is the co-founder of two Internet companies, E2M Solutions and OnlyDesign.

We’d all like to believe that we’re past the stage where marketing matters. If your product is good enough, shouldn’t the blog reviews and viral attention take care of itself? Isn’t our world transparent enough that nothing worth buying can stay under the radar?

Unfortunately, no.

It doesn’t work that way. The whole six degrees of separation thing? It’s a myth. Great products fail all the time because they never find their way in front of the public eye. Your product needs an audience, and if you really want it to succeed, it’s best if you get the audience before you launch.

Here’s how.

Step #1: Launch a free side-product

If you want to reach a large enough seed audience to make a dent in your industry, you’re going to need press coverage. If your product is innovative enough, there’s a chance you’ll be able accomplish this with little more than a well-placed press release, but it’s best not to leave that up to chance. You want to be able to make the rounds and show up in sites like Mashable, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, LifeHacker, and so on.

One of the best ways to pull this off is with a free side-product. Remove the obstacle of payment, and tools have a way of going viral with minimal effort on your end.

Consider what Freckle did when they launched EveryTimeZone.com.

Freckle is a simple, paid time tracking tool. To promote it, they launched a free side-product. EveryTimeZone is a simple tool that tells you at a glance what time it is in every time zone across the globe. And to find out how that changes, you just move a slider back and forth.

The tool is anything but rocket science, but it got them press coverage in LifeHacker, CNN, The Next Web, Gigaom, and even Basecamp’s blog.

A free side-product doesn’t have to be a big, extravagant project. It just has to solve a basic problem related to your core product in a way that’s worth talking about.

The key is to put something together that’s worthy of press coverage. Audiences love free tools, and publishers love making audiences happy.

Step #2: Pull a stunt

If you think launching a free tool is just going to waste precious resources, it’s not the only way to earn press coverage. You can always go for the old-fashioned publicity stunt.

The aim here is to make sure what you do is newsworthy. Holding a contest or some kind of promotion does not qualify. You need to ask yourself whether this is the kind of thing you’d actually see talked about in a newspaper or magazine.

Tim Ferriss is one of the best examples of how you can pull this off with minimal resources. To promote his book, The 4-Hour Work Week, Ferriss put the ideas in his book to the test by asking just how far personal outsourcing could go, and outsourcing his love life. Other stunts he’s pulled include videos of him peeling eggs without breaking the shell, losing weight and packing on muscle in a month, and putting together movie-quality trailers for his next two books.

These stunts might make Ferriss look like a hack or a try-hard to many potential customers, but there’s no doubt that it’s earned him press coverage and long-term spots on the bestseller’s list.

Remember, journalism is all about having a story to tell. The best stunts have elements of surprise, humor, and intrigue. Relevancy must play a part, but it doesn’t necessarily come first.

Stunts don’t have to make you look like a circus act, though.

Hipmunk orchestrated a stunt of their own last year that earned them coverage in Fast Company and CBS News. The travel site added a “spite” feature to their list of tools. The new feature allowed users to sort the results by most “agonizing,” presumably to send your hated boss on an unpleasant business trip. The spite feature, of course, was just a tongue-in-cheek way to promote the site’s ability to sort results by least agonizing, as opposed to just price.

Step #3: Get the timing right

No matter how you choose to grab that much needed press coverage, timing is huge. Start too late, and your product launch will flop. Start too early, and the buzz will turn into a fizzle by the time you go to market.

Google+ makes for a perfect example of coming in with the buzz too soon. While some studies suggest that Google+ is now bigger than Twitter, that probably never would have happened without Google’s already ubiquitous presence.

In its first month, Google+ was the fastest growing social network in history. But it was also in beta at the time, open on an invite-only basis. Google was trying to artificially replicate the exclusivity that Facebook had when it launched. But they waited a full three months to launch it to the general public, and by that time, most people had already lost interest.

(One has to wonder if Google Glass faces a similar fate.)

Within 8 months of the public launch, Google+ was declared a ghost town, with the average time between posts weighing in at 12 days. The subsequent Google+ rebound wouldn’t have happened if it were a startup project.

For the best results, you need to launch your product at the peak of virality, when excitement has only just started to plateau. In order to pull that off, you should actually have a working product before you begin a pre-launch marketing campaign. By all means, please iterate during the campaign, but be prepared to launch at a moment’s notice.

Step #4: Capture the audience

This step is more important than any of the others. All of that attention and publicity is useless if you can’t convert those brand impressions into subscriptions. And despite the hype surrounding social media, email subscriptions are still more effective. In fact, email outperforms both search and social media as the best source of conversions, according to a recent study.

Make no mistake, a social following is good to have, but it’s better to get brand impressions on a platform that isn’t algorithmically controlled, like Facebook. Think about it. You probably don’t open every email you see, but odds are you at least see the subject line. But do you dig through your entire Facebook stream to make sure you didn’t miss anything? No. Only the most obsessive social media junkies spend their time doing that.

It’s also worth noting that “dark social,” the social activity that takes place in emails, instant messengers, and so on, is actually responsible for more referral traffic than all the public social networks combined.

Mint.com owes much of its success to an audience of 20,000 email subscribers that they captured before beta. They did this by sponsoring small blogs, advertising, giving out badges, and most importantly, by testing their landing page.

Approach landing page design the same way you approach software design: test and iterate. Use broadly targeted ads complete with A/B testing to “perfect” your landing page before you ever aim for massive traffic.

You want broadly targeted ads because your stunts and free tools aren’t going to bring highly targeted traffic.

You want A/B testing with statistical significance so you know the page is actually going to convert and build up a list of followers.

You want a landing page with a high conversion rate before launching a massive pre-launch campaign or you’ll end up losing a lot of the traffic.

Even with all the upfront testing, you’ll want to keep split testing your landing pages during the campaign as well. Referral traffic is never quite the same thing as ad traffic.

Stay away from the hard sell — it rarely works in this day and age. Reciprocity tends to work better than scarcity. Identify their fears and address them before they have a chance to feel them. Keep things short but not ambiguous. Remove any fears they have about wasting their money.

Mint.com wisely gave these initial subscribers “velvet rope” treatment as well. These initial customers are more than profit generators. They’re an investment. Nobody can market your product better than a seed group of satisfied customers.

Step #5. Be press friendly

Finally, you want it to be easy for bloggers and the press to talk about you. This goes beyond making sure your stunts are newsworthy and your free products are worth talking about. It means it should be easy to find information and photos so that journalists don’t need to do a lot of digging in order to turn your stunt into an article.

Take Lockitron’s press page as an example. It features a simple intro page with an overview, high res images, YouTube embeds, external pages, and an email contact. As somebody who writes a lot of blog posts, I can tell you that the presence or absence of a press page like this could easily be the deciding factor for whether or not I’ll bother.

Your press page should be easy to find: either in the navigation bar or the footer. You may also want to include links to all of your press releases and any noteworthy media coverage. If personal stories are important to your brand, be sure to get some entertaining bios in there too.

The key is to think like the journalist. If you weren’t the one developing the product, what would you want to know if you planned on writing an article about it? What would be the hook and the story? The easier it is to write about you, the more coverage you’ll get in return.

The takeaway

Your best chances for success start with a pre-launch audience. Pulling that off takes media exposure, and it’s going to take a free product or a creative stunt to make that happen. You want to have a product ready to launch before that buzz dies down, and you need to capture that audience so that they’ll know it as soon as you do. Keep the press in mind, and make sure it’s easy to write about you.

Don’t let a stupid thing like marketing ruin the launch of your killer product.

Manish Dudharejia is the co-founder of two Internet companies, E2M Solutions and OnlyDesign. He has 6+ yrs. of hands-on experience in implementing innovative Internet marketing strategies for the projects he worked for. He loves to work with technology startups that have new concepts and to help them enhance their concept and market it to a wider audience.

photo credit: mkhmarketing via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This post was originally published on Jason Cohen’s blog

Isn’t entrepreneurship about having an amazing idea, and building a living around it?

…yes, except every advisor and blogger warns that “your idea sucks you prima donna pompous asshole.” You end up using your first idea as a foil to find out what is actually an amazing idea and then following that path, whatever it might be. The only thing we’re sure of is that you’re instincts are wrong and you need get that fixed.

At a certain point, I have to wonder, how is that even “your company” anymore?  Those are someone’s else’s ideas, not your own.

Isn’t the fun of a company to build a product you know the world needs, even if (especially if!) they don’t even know they need it yet? Something they couldn’t or didn’t know to ask for. You can’t envision an iPad until one is placed in your hands.

But every advisor and blogger proclaims that you couldn’t possibly have insight in a vacuum, so instead you must conduct 50 ego-busting interviews in which a pack of clueless “end-users” with no experience building products or companies, and certainly no experience providing constructive insight, will somehow coalesce under your non-directed, open-ended line of questioning into a brilliant roadmap to success.

How is that even “your company” anymore?  That’s the culmination of everyone else’s product ideas, a design-by-committee which we all know typically leads to shit.

Aren’t some of the greatest moments of a startup’s life the point where you pick a name, create a logo, write your headline on your new home page, craft your teaser and your bi-line, stamp your personality on every page, and implement your own philosophy on pricing, service, language, and exposition, attaining your own voice and not the collective voice of the Marketing Department?

But advisor and bloggers will often direct you to A/B tests and landing page experiments and advertising alternatives and failing fast where “failing” means 3 percent fewer people clicked X than clicked Y, because when it comes to pricing your “philosophy” doesn’t mean shit if rearranging the tiers and using unholy language gets you $20 per month more revenue per customer, and your clever tag lines don’t mean shit if language designed for 7-year-olds and written like a 2am-infomercial means a 1 percent lift in click-through rate.

That’s not your voice, that’s a million monkeys slapping keyboards hoping that one stumbles upon a better conversion rate.

Is your startup an expression of your own identity and vehicle by which you are master of your destiny, or are you randomly iterating into a different identity, some other destiny? Are you an inventor, or an explorer in a world you didn’t ask for?

I love the Lean Startup movement because it demands introspection and honors data.  It defines “progress” even in the ineffable mode that progress is achieved in the messiness that is early-stage startups, where it’s nigh-impossible to separate the paths of success and failure.

But I worry that the pendulum can swing too far. Mantras prevail that amount to “guess and check,” because it’s easier for advisors and investors to drive by metrics rather than by insight, and by funnels rather than by a strong point of view.

So what’s the answer?  I refuse for the answer to be “it’s a balance” or “it depends.”

It’s this:

You create children in your own image, literally.  You can’t help it – half their variable DNA is yours. After rebellion, as they age, they “find themselves” and of course discover you were lurking there all along.

At the same time, what kind of parent intentionally molds their kid into their own notion of what the “perfect child” should be?  Well, what kind of startup parent are you to stubbornly mold it to your preconceptions rather than exploring the synthesis of your ideas, your values, your perspective against what is actually true in the world – facts you simply haven’t yet uncovered?

What kind of parent takes pleasure in preventing a kid from fulfilling their own destiny rather than noticing what their kid is naturally drawn to and encouraging and feeding that nature?  Well, what kind of steward of your startup’s destiny are you to predetermine its course, ramming its assigned future down its throat, rather than being the guiding light, helping it find its own way, even while sharing your DNA at its core?

What kind of parent allows a kid to indulge in unhealthy behavior that of course a 3-year-old desires but which isn’t acceptable? Well, what kind of startup builder are you to focus on the easy stuff, the safe stuff, rather than tackling the parts you’re not good at and challenging the assumptions that haven’t been vetted?

If you believe you’re the master and the startup is your slave, then I do believe you’re almost surely destined to fail, because that’s not what a startup is, and that’s not how the world works outside the little bubble where you’re convinced that your ideas are amazing and your product is marketable, and the world will know it when the homepage is unveiled.

Rather, you are a parent. A shepherd, a steward, a guide, a mentor, a director for what is almost a new life – a thing that has to live and grow and thrive and interact with the real world.

It’s not an amalgamation of other peoples’ notions, but an imperfect copy of yourself that needs guidance as it finds its own way to success.

It’s your startup.

Jason Cohen, is the founder of WP Engine & Smart Bear Software.

The Y Combinator-backed startup officially launched in mid 2012 with a Segway-like telepresence robot that balances on two large wheels, uses any iPad as its screen and eyes, and rests on a smart kickstand when not in use. And, of course, lets you virtually visit locations, participate in remote meetings, and show your smiling face to distant colleagues.

“We’ve begun shipping production units,” cofounder David Cann told me via email today. “In fact, we’ve already shipped the first 100. We’ll ship another 1,000 units by September.”

That’s good news, Double Robotics said, not just for themselves, but also for hardware startups in general. There was a significant amount of skepticism that a $20,000-$40,000 Y Combinator-style investment would get the hardware company up and running, but Double Robotics was able to generate enough interest — and $1.2 million in presales — to pull off what would have been seen as impossible just a few short years ago.

“Now that Pebble, FORM 1, Oculus Rift, and Double have all begun shipping, I think it’s clear that hardware startups are legit and here to stay,” Cann says.

There’s one more bit of good news for anyone who wants a telepresence robot.

Source: Double Robotics

Nasa CIO using a Double Robotics telepresence robot to attend a conference.

To celebrate the shipping milestone, Double Robotics is extending the pr-order pricing of $1,999 for one more week. That preorder pricing was low at least partially to cover the perceived risk of buying something that was not yet shipping — a problem that no longer applies. After June 6, however, pricing will jump up to $2,499.

Using a telepresence robot just helped NASA CIO Dr. Sasi Pillay — stranded in Washington, D.C. due to federal budget sequestration difficulties — attend the CIO Leadership Forum in Huntington Beach, Calif.

Who could have guessed that a national budget crisis would be a smart startup’s marketing opportunity?

Image credits: Double Robotics

At least, according to Vancouver-based project founder and core architect Rastin Mehr.

Mehr’s open-source framework for making everything social won a spot in the current Mozilla WebFWD accelerator cohort, which the organization best known for the Firefox browser created to help open-source organizations build successful companies.

It’s like an MBA program for a startup, says Mehr.

“Anahita is a social networking platform framework that we’ve been building for the last four years,” Mehr told me yesterday. “We think in the future a lot of the web services are going to run on some kind of social networking structure as an underlying layer.”

That sounds a lot like Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of building a social layer for the Internet. And the world’s biggest social network has made a lot of that vision reality by becoming the first social network with one billion users.

How can Anahita compete? Primarily by not competing.

“Mark Zuckerberg has done it but it’s not an internet social layer, it’s a Facebook social layer,” Mehr says. “What Anahita provides is a platform for building social apps. We have all the tools we need to build and validate apps faster than anyone else.”

Anahita focuses on helping developers make their internal and external applications for web, enterprise, and startups social. Not by copying App.net, which is primarily the plumbing to which you can attach a social frontend, and not by layering in social on top of an existing framework, like a Gigya gamification solution or a Janrain social login integration … but by building an app from the ground up within a social ecosystem.

“You can’t add social things, you have to build on top of social,” says Mehr. “We provide all the generic building blocks … for a network of salespeople, or the location of products, or which people have been working on those products, or anything.”

That’s because at its core, Anahita consists of three objects out of which developers can build the entire universe of their application: Nodes, Graphs, and Stories. An Actor node, for instance, has an identity, a story to tell, a graph of apps that it can use, and a social graph of people to which it is connected.

Source: John Koetsier

Cofounder Ash Sanieyan.

“Once you define these, you can build a person, build a group, build a spaceship, or build a Cylon,” Mehr says with a smile. “These are all actors … what you see as a profile on a social media site is essentially an actor.”

The framework is LAMP technology, built in PHP and intended to be released on Linux. With it, clients and users have built online learning portals, websites, Internal social networks, social e-commerce experiences, online magazines, and niche social networks.

But building a business with the open source software is another matter. That’s where WebFWD comes in.

“You always have holes, weaknesses … but when you go thru WebFWD, they help you patch all these missing elements,” Mehr told me. “You learn what path to go to find a business model.”

Anahita has had a freemium model, allowing developers to download the software for free, but charging for premium support via annual subscriptions. The challenge that Mehr and cofounder Ash Sanieyan faced, however, was focusing an infrastructure that can literally be used to build almost anything to a finer point that business partners, users, and investors could grasp.

Again, WebFWD helped.

“They work with you on how to pitch … they bring public speakers and pitching coaches, and on the very first day we had to pitch 4 times to four different audiences,” Mehr said. “And they rip you apart in public, so you develop a very thick skin by the time you come out.”

The ripping and the thick skin have come in handy. Since joining WebFWD, Mehr and Sanieyan have pitched four VCs, built their network of contacts in the Valley, and become much better prepared to meet potential investors.

Although WebFWD is an accelerator, it doesn’t provide capital and doesn’t take equity. Instead, it operates simply to give back to the community by helping open-source innovators build successful companies while staying true to open-source ideals. Anahita’s goal is to build that kind of successful company by becoming the go-to infrastructure for anyone to build online social software — just as Linux has become the go-to infrastructure on which to build server platforms, Mac OS X, Android, and more.

I asked Mehr if WebFWD had paid the team’s expenses to make the trip down to San Francisco.

“No,” he said. “But they give you a lot of free food.”

photo credit: tobimcfly via photopin

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Mystery funding of the day? That’d be YesGraph, a stealthy startup in the recruiting space founded by Ivan Kirigin, a former product manager at Facebook and Dropbox.

Kirigin today secured $1.2 million of a $1.8 million round, according to a Form D. A total of seven angel investors participated in the funding.

“The financing has enabled us to build a good product and hire talent — there is a lot that is hard about this space,” said Kirigin on a phone call.

Ivan Kirigin

Kirigin would not say much about the product at this stage. But he did reveal that YesGraph is building tools for tech companies to improve the hiring experience — and not just the “output.” To that end, Kirigin just released a survey, an attempt to find patterns in how startups make their first hires.

“Companies have a hard time hiring good people — we are trying to help them,” he added.

Serial entrepreneur Kirigin is also the founder of a micro-payments service called Tipjoy, which both Facebook and Twitter considered acquiring, TechCrunch reported. After negotiations fell through with Facebook, the company made Kirigin an offer, and he joined in 2009 to work on a virtual currency product. He would later join Dropbox, where he claims on his LinkedIn page to have helped drive growth 12X over 2 years.

Investors in Kirigin’s previous company Tipjoy include Chris Sacca and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham.

Top image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by startup lawyer Mick Bain. 

As a lawyer who advises startups, I’m increasingly asked by clients how to make the company more appealing to venture capitalists.

This doesn’t surprise me, given the industry’s navel gazing over the so-called “Series A Crunch.” And it’s true that the growth in the number of new startups has outpaced growth in venture capital outlays, creating a more competitive funding environment.

So what do I tell startup founders who ask this question? I often respond by asking, how killer is your idea? That’s still what matters most to VCs.

But the conception of what constitutes a good idea has evolved in the last several business cycles. Like most of us in today’s economy, VCs are under pressure to do more with less. Venture asset classes have lost value in recent years, so limited partners are favoring startups that aren’t capital intensive, and that can demonstrate a strong likelihood of generating real revenues in the first few years.

The upshot is that VCs are favoring ideas that solve big but practical problems. Often these ideas respond to large-scale needs of businesses, rather than consumers. The ideas also don’t require the imagination of a futurist to understand their potential market value. They are a product or service that is clearly needed now and is likely to be adopted with relative alacrity and limited risk.

If a VC is sold on an idea, he or she will then consider other factors that influence a startup’s success, such as talent, experience and technical resources. Unfortunately for first-time entrepreneurs, those who have already started a successful company will have an advantage in this area.

VCs also prefer companies that don’t require big capital expenditures for expensive assets like manufacturing equipment or telecommunications infrastructure. Doing more with less is a watchword that continues to carry weight in Silicon Valley, Boston and New York.

It’s also important to demonstrate a keen understanding of the micro and macroeconomic trends and dynamics that affect the broader economy and your market niche. Show that you know your sector well enough to adapt to changing circumstances. It can take months, or years, in some cases, to bring a new product to market. During that time conditions can change — are you prepared to make the quick decisions needed to remain a viable force for growth?

The last thing I often tell startup founders anxious about first round funding is to remember that many companies have been successful without it. Today’s technology is relatively affordable and accessible, often allowing entrepreneurs to create valuable companies with very little overhead. Part of being an entrepreneur is finding a path to realize a vision regardless of the barriers. In the end, vision and commitment of this kind are the most important assets of any emerging company.

Mick Bain is the partner in charge of WilmerHale’s Waltham, Massachusetts office and co-chair of the firm’s Emerging Company and Venture Capital practices.

Top image of a consulting lawyer via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Junket alert!

The Ontario ministry of economic development has invited VentureBeat to check out the center of the universe, AKA, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And I’m the lucky guinea pig.

We’ll be in Toronto from Monday to Friday this week, checking out startups like Hubba, WattPad, and Fixmo, and talking to local venture capitalists as well as angel investors. In addition, we’ll be getting an intro to quantum computing at the University of Waterloo and taking a tour of Google’s Waterloo facility, where Googlers work on Android and Chrome technology.

I’ll also be at Extreme Startups, an accelerator in Toronto that has a cohort of startups just in the middle of their program.

In between, however, it’d be great to meet a few other founders for coffee, dinner, or drinks. Or just to say hello and put a face to an email address.

Best place to get in touch with me is Twitter: @johnkoetsier.

Let’s chat!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Naveen Tewari is the CEO and founder of mobile advertising company InMobi.

When I co-founded InMobi in 2007, we took a novel “east-to-west” approach to our growth, starting in India before moving into other developing markets, then finally into more traditional “Western” markets as well.

Because this method of expansion didn’t have any precursors, and mobile advertising was at the time still a very new field, we had to chart our own course and set our own example. And as a corollary, we would have to deal with a number of challenges as we discovered that the mobile landscape was different in each geography we entered, and learn to quickly recover from mistakes.

I’d like to talk about some of the challenges we faced and how we dealt with them, as I believe it will be of relevance to other businesses that are trying to build a global footprint:

Learning while doing

Because we were experimenting with a new business model, we often had to rely on intuition as we calculated our next moves. When you are trying to expand across multiple geographies at a rapid pace, you are bound to slip, and we were no exception. For example, our first forays out of India into other geographies, starting with Indonesia and South Africa, did not yield initial success, and we could not gain a strong foothold in the market. Our lack of understanding of the ways in which brands, advertisers, and consumers communicated and interacted in these markets, and incorrect hypotheses about the overall advertising ecosystem, led to delayed revenue streams. But we learned how the ecosystem worked and began expanding our reach in these emerging markets.

Likewise, when we had to extend the capabilities of our platform to serve multiple regions/countries, we almost ran the risk of jeopardizing existing business in India by shifting focus away from it.

We learned quickly from such wrong moves, and this helped us templatize our forays into new countries, and that is the key takeaway:

An experiential learning approach works well if you can recover from your mistakes quickly and identify patterns and models from within a few iterations.

Recalibrating world view frequently

Working with an evolving technology and business model, and one that had numerous dependencies on the moves of key players in the mobile device and platform platform markets, brought with it another set of challenges: frequently making informed decisions on the roadmap of our technology platform, which was the pivot of our business.

In addition, our geographic expansion plan also compelled us to be agile and flexible.  Once we had tasted initial success, we laid out a plan to simultaneously expand in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore), Western Europe and Japan. Each of these markets had its own characteristics and was very different from one another. Western Europe was developed, and so was Japan, but the latter is a contained market with little in common with the European market. The emerging markets, on the other hand, were evolving and needed a totally different approach.

Clearly, we had to tailor our approach to suit each market, and this meant that we literally had to revisit our assumptions and plans every quarter.

In all of the above, our overall commitment to speed — in thinking and in action — helped, and our approach of trying out and making course corrections, rather than waiting and watching, stood out. To me, the key takeaway from this experience is staying committed to a strategy for the future, while adapting the tactics to the present.

Shaping Management Mindset

While the first two sets of challenges emanated from the market, the third was more internal and had to do with adopting the right mindset.

As a startup with global ambitions, we had several mental hurdles to cross. Learning to think big while being small was one of them. Some of us had a tendency to want to do one thing very well as opposed to developing broader competencies and skills, which is a prerequisite to build scale. Another issue was balancing our short-term needs with our long-term goals. Nowhere was it a bigger challenge than when we opened offices in new geographies and set out to hire the regional anchors. How much to pay, how long to wait for the right candidate, what profile should we opt for?  These were real questions we had to find answers for. We made a few errors of judgment here as well, like hiring candidates about whom we were not completely convinced, before we made the tough call to wait for the right candidates and pay them the right compensation.

The last thing we had to do, of course, was to transform our thinking, speaking and actions to reflect those of a truly global organization, and make the transition from being part of an “Indian” team to a cross-cultural one. This entailed creating a consistent corporate culture with frequent interactions between teams based in India and those in the other markets. By encouraging two-way travel, we ensured that teams from India understood market and cross-cultural nuances early on.

In sum, we learned to be open, introspective and aware of the consequences of your behavior and actions.

Thinking back, what allowed us to surmount the challenges we faced and mold our thinking and actions to suit the purpose was our total commitment to our vision and the excitement of creating an innovative and valuable business model.

That is the overarching message I’d like to leave you with: clarity of vision and purpose is the glue that binds a team together and acts as a lubricant to mitigate the friction caused by obstacles along the way.

For more information on InMobi’s East-to-West strategy, see Naveen Tewari’s first post, here.

Naveen Tewari is InMobi’s CEO and founder. He graduated from Harvard Business School and worked at Charles River Ventures and McKinsey & Company before starting InMobi. InMobi, based in Bangalore with offices in Singapore and San Francisco, currently employs more than 900 people and has taken $216 million to date in venture funding.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Updated 2:58 p.m. Pacific with new Amazon stock price data.

Amazon stock is up down $10 in after-hours trading today as the company reported first quarter sales that grew 22 percent to $16.07 billion — and income that decreased 37 percent to $82 million.

It’s like the opposite of Winston Churchill’s Battle of Britain quote: Never were so many products sold for so much money by such a huge company for so little profit.

For years, Wall Street has been giving this company a pass for never-ending promises for the future — essentially, startup style economics and pricing — and it still is, 16 years after Amazon was founded. While sales grew to $16 billion, free cash flow decreased 77 percent to just $177 million. Part of the reason for that, of course, is Amazon spending $1.4 billion on corporate office space and property in Seattle. The quarter’s income of $82 million compares to the year-ago quarter’s $130 million — already not a huge amount of profit for sales in the mid-teen billions.

But there is a considerable amount of truth that Amazon is still very much in land-grab mode. And the company’s earnings press release highlighted that aspect.

In fact, a full 12 of the 15 highlights Amazon chose to feature in its earnings release are related to digital content, cloud services, and Amazon’s vehicle for delivering that content and services, the Android-based Kindle Fire. And Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ first quote in the release is about content — television content, no less:

“Amazon Studios is working on a new way to green light TV shows. The pilots are out in the open where everyone can have a say,” Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “I have my personal picks and so do members of the Amazon Studios team, but the exciting thing about our approach is that our opinions don’t matter. Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production. We hope Amazon Originals can become yet another way for us to create value for Prime members.”

Interesting.

Guidance for the future is not much better, with Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak saying that the company estimates income for the coming quarter at between $0 and $350 million. Which doesn’t really appear to be much guidance at all — a very Szkutakian quality, apparently.

Wall Street, at least seems to be buying it.

For all its vaunted reality-distortion-field capabilities, Apple’s got nothing on this company.

Photo credit: public.resource.org via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The largest accelerator in Canada, the biggest seed investor in Europe, and one of the top seed funds in Australia are joining forced to put on one major demo day for 15 of their top startups Wednesday, May 1, in San Francisco.

“I think it’s a first … I’m not sure anyone has ever done this before,” FounderFuel’s Ian Jeffery told me yesterday when we chatted about the big demo day.

The three organizers include FounderFuel, an accelerator based in Montréal whose last demo day had a massive 800-strong audience; Seedcamp, which runs Europe’s most prolific seed funding program out of Google’s London campus; and Startmate, which helps startups grow in Sydney. Together, they’re doing something a little unprecedented: showcasing their best 15 startups on one day at one time, right in the heart of global startup central: San Francisco.

The event is on Wednesday, May 1 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., and registration is limited to AngelList members: Sign-up and investor authentication is all being done via AngelList.

“The best startups, while sometimes ending up in Silicon Valley, are increasingly formed outside of the Bay Area, and FounderFuel, Seedcamp, and Startmate each play pivotal roles at the epicenters of startup communities outside of the US.,” the group said in a statement.

Here are the participating startups, with brief bios provided by the accelerators:

FounderFuel Companies

Epilogger: The Center of Attention http://epilogger.com
Find photos, videos, blogs, and conversations from any event. Epilogger is the entire event collected from everyone automatically into one place. It claims it’s the web platform and app to experience the event before, during, and after. Epilogger is a growing community and the central destination for all content from any event big or small in your city and around the globe. Whether it’s that great conference, that inspiring movement or humankind’s next giant leap, it claims it’ll be there: “We are the event.”

InfoActive: Bring life to data http://infoactive.co
InfoActive makes it easy to create mobile-friendly, interactive infographics with live data. Drop live data streams into interactive infographics that scale to any device and double your engagement metrics with interactive, data-driven content. It won “Best Bootstrap Company” at SXSW 2013.

MyCustomizer: Empowering the Customization Revolution http://mycustomizer.com
MyCustomizer empowers brands and retailers to offer outstanding product customization experiences with a ready-to-use SaaS platform. Market leading brands sparked the customization revolution by investing massively in “design-your-own” online experiences. Whether they offer sports equipment, shoes,  suits and ties, chocolate, or even cars, MyCustomizer empowers businesses to join the revolution by seamlessly connecting brands, retailers, and consumers through a unique customization SaaS platform.

Also see: MyCustomizer: If mass customization is the future, here’s the tool to create it

OOHLALA: Energize your Campus experience! http://gotoohlala.com
The Mobile platform that connects post-secondary students with their campus.

Seedcamp Companies

Maily: Your kids first email http://maily.com
Maily is e-mail reinvented for kids. Children can create email using five tools adapted to their needs: pencils, brushes, photos, backgrounds, stamps, and their own words. Maily accounts are created and supervised by you, the parents. You decide who your children can communicate with. More than 50,000 kids are using Maily, and more than 600,000 Mailys have been sent so far.

Crowdprocess: Web-based supercomputing http://crowdprocess.com
CrowdProcess is an online market for supercomputing. It enables developers to process data on the web browsers of people who are visiting websites. CrowdProcess sells this processing power as a service, and it pays the websites’ owners. In summary, CrowdProcess does distributed computing on web browsers via websites.

QAMINE: Code analysis platform for the cloud http://qamine.com
QAMINE is an “automated software testing as a service” platform that analyzes developers’ commits without disruption to their workflow and with a one-click installation solution. With over 12,000 registered repositories (acquired in less than two weeks) and a concrete/revolutionary roadmap and vision for the future, it wants to become the world’s best code analysis tool for the cloud.

Blossom: Lean product management http://blossom.io
Blossom is a project management tool for building modern web and mobile applications. Unlike other project management tools that focus on managing vast amounts of tickets in the backlog, Blossom helps you to focus on the current iteration, who’s doing what, and what they can ship next. It introduces just-in-time production concepts from lean manufacturing to the world of software development. The ideal project management tool for agile companies that ship early and often.

Campalyst: Cutting edge social media ROI analytics suite http://campalyst.com/
Campalyst’s enterprise-level social media management suite empowers brands with the unique ability to connect monetary ROI to their social media efforts and fully understand how and why social media contributes to their bottom line revenue. No more buzzwords, no more guesswork, it promises; it provides actionable financial performance analytics built for the age of social media marketing.

Startmate Companies

BugCrowd: Crowdsourced security vulnerability testing http://bugcrowd.com
Bugcrowd is crowdsourced security for web and mobile apps. It runs managed bug bounties as a service for our customers. A bug bounty is where a group of friendly security researchers are invited to compete to find security flaws. If they’re the first to report a new bug, they receive a reward of cash and Bugcrowd Kudos points.

Edrolo: Great education = great teachers http://edrolo.com
Edrolo delivers high school students great grades when it counts. It has more than 2,000 paying customers in the U.S. and Australia, and its team members have left jobs at Google, Goldman Sach, and a successful startup because they believe great teachers should impact hundreds of thousands of students not hundreds. It finds the rock star educator for each subject, curriculum, and exam and partners with them to build on-demand video, quizzes, study notes, and more.

Goodcall.io: Convert and retail customers with a phone call http://goodcall.io
Good Call helps online businesses convert and retain customers with outbound phone calls. It’s a long proven practice that it has redesigned for web applications. Its customers create events in their web app that trigger outbound calls. An agent is notified, and an outbound call is made through the platform. Customers can use their own internal agents, or choose from our marketplace of outbound professionals. All calls and metrics are recorded and presented to its customers.

Kinderloop: Bringing the simplicity of Instagram to the lives of child care providers http://kinderloop.com
A web and mobile application that brings the simplicity of instagram to the lives of child carer providers worldwide. Care providers use the app to quickly and securely post video, photos, and news. Parents receive immediate updates.

Shiftr: Simply swap work shifts http://shiftrapp.com
Shiftr is an employee-facing mobile app for hospitality and retail enterprises. Its mobile app gives employees flexibility and involvement in the scheduling process while giving managers the information to make the right decisions quickly. Shiftr has traction in fast-food franchises and retail enterprises.

photo credits: davidyuweb via photopin cc, Eva Blue via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Last week I published the story of Sarah Hanson, the 19-year-old developer who auctioned off 10 percent of her future income in exchange for a $125,000 investment into her startup, Senior Living Map. Subsequently, many other news sites picked up on Hanson’s amazing story.

Today, I’m wondering if Sarah Hanson really exists.

When I originally contacted Hanson to chat about the auction, her startup, and why she’s skipping college to go straight into the tech startup world, she didn’t want to talk on the phone. Instead, she asked me to conduct the interview via email. That happens from time to time, so I said OK.

Source: 32auctions

Sarah Hanson, according to the 32 Auctions site

But then a TV network reporter called VentureBeat, telling us that Hanson asked to be interviewed via email for a segment she was planning to do. Not only that, the reporter said, Hanson absolutely refused to do a phone interview. A VentureBeat reader contacted me and questioned whether Hanson was too good to be true. And when a journalist at another publication asked me if she was real or existed, I had to dig a little deeper.

My story began when Sarah Hanson, or someone purporting to be a 19-year-old girl named Sarah Hanson, contacted VentureBeat via email about how she funded her startup:

Hi, I wanted to follow up and let you know the auction ended at $125,000

http://www.32auctions.com/organizations/7349/auctions/8138/auction_items/167988

It’s the result I hoped for but I’m still a bit stunned.

A couple week ago, I was sitting at my desk trying to come up with an idea that would enable me to work on Senior Living Map full-time.

Today, I have someone willing to invest $125,000 in me. The beauty and power of the internet. It’s amazing.

Sarah

An email conversation ensued, and after she asked to be interviewed via email, I sent her a list of questions. I also checked for a LinkedIn account or a Twitter account, but didn’t find one, and put that down to her age. At that point, perhaps I should have been more suspicious.

Her answers, as you can see in the story, are superb and reveal a precocious teen (or someone) with insightful answers such as “my definition of being an underserved market is the lack of a solution that provides the maximum amount of value with the minimum amount of complexity,” which she credited to Aaron Levie, the founder and CEO of Box. But there’s also a lack of specificity to her answers that some people find suspicious: no mention of which college she’s attending, no city or location, and no name for the angel investor who won the auction by bidding $125,000.

The website itself, Senior Living Map, is light on details about the company, organization, or people behind it. It lists no address, no location, and no phone number. There is an email address, feedback@seniorlivingmap.org, but no other contact information. One clue, however, can be found in the sites terms of service, the legal framework under which it can be accessed:

Governing Law

Any claim relating to Senior Living Map’s website shall be governed by the laws of the State of Washington without regard to its conflict of law provisions.

A search of the Washington State corporation records turns up no company called Senior Living Map. Neither does a search of Nevada or Delaware corporations, other tax and investor-friendly places where many companies incorporate.

That doesn’t necessarily prove anything: The company could be listed elsewhere, or it could be listed under a different name.

But pair that with the fact that I can’t find a Twitter account for a Sarah Hanson who is running a startup, or a LinkedIn account, or a Facebook account for a Sarah Hanson who seems to match the profile, and there’s a massive lack of corroborating evidence. In short, I have no idea whether the Sarah Hanson I thought I was dealing with actually exists, is who she says she is, built Senior Living Map, or even took a $125,000 investment.

I contacted Madison, Wis.-based 32 Auctions to see if I could learn more. The answers I got were less than satisfactory, mostly due to the auction sites’ design:

I’m including a general response which we are providing to reporters in regards to this particular auction.  This should answer most of your questions.

We built 32auctions in a way that makes it very easy for anyone to host a silent auction online without needing to work directly with us.

In regards to this particular auction…

We have had no contact with the auction administrator.  We first saw mention of this auction on April 14th through Twitter.  From what we’ve seen, the auction looks legitimate.  However, only the parties involved will really know.

The majority of auctions hosted on 32auctions are fundraisers for non-profits, schools, churches, friends/family with a significant life event, and businesses looking to help their communities.  This is the first time we’ve seen someone auctioning off their future earnings to fund a start-up.

Anyone who complies with our terms of use can host a silent auction on 32auctions.  Auction administrators are responsible for the content of their auction.  It’s also up to the auction administrators and winning parties to finalize the transaction.

In response to further requests to speak on the phone, the 32 Auctions contact apologized and said that “we only offer support through email.” I hate to say that this is starting to sound familiar, but frankly, it is.

I have also attempted to contact Sarah Hanson multiple times via email. I told her I would like to give her a chance to set the record straight and prove that she is who she says she is.

I have received no response yet.

So here we are. I can’t guarantee that the woman I wrote a story about exists. And I can’t disprove it at the moment, either. All I can do is lay out what I have learned so far, and keep digging to learn more. If I have written about a fake, constructed persona, and have been the victim of an elaborate hoax, either for publicity or kicks or some as-yet-unknown reason, I apologize to VentureBeat readers.

One additional note: My original Sarah Hanson story has  been picked up by a massive number of publications, with Huffington Post, CBC, Yahoo, GeekWire, and AOL writing about Sarah Hanson and Senior Living Map.

If this was an attempt to gain publicity, it was massively successful: There are no less than 242,000 Google results for “sarah hanson senior living map,” many of them stories about how she crowdsourced her startup funding.

So if the original story is accurate, I ask Sarah Hanson to please stand up … and take off the mask. As you said in your first email to me, the beauty and power of the Internet is amazing.

Just not always the way we hope it would be.

photo credit: gato-gato-gato via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Who wants to go to college if you can start earning money right away?

That’s one of the questions that Sarah Hanson, a 19-year-old developer and entrepreneur, asked herself. Especially since she knows exactly what she wants to do with her life already.

Last year, Hanson helped her grandmother find a assisted living home. It was time-consuming, tedious, and a horrible experience — exactly the kind of problem that an aspiring entrepreneur loves to find.

Because, of course, solving problems is the core of any business.

UPDATE: Sarah Hanson may not exist, may be a hoax

Source: 32auctions

Sarah Hanson

So she funded a startup to make finding care homes for the elderly easier and better. She built a functioning first version of the product, and she’s looking for funding in an innovative source: her own future income. This past week she successfully raised $125,000 in seed money by auctioning off 10 percent of her future income for 10 years.

Hanson talks about her experience, why she auctioned off her future income, and how she plans to build the business:

VentureBeat: You sold 10 percent of your future earnings for 10 years. Does that make you feel free? Or burdened?

Sarah Hanson: I’ll say this. Is this the most ideal path? No but it’s a path that gives me freedom of time, and that’s the most valuable asset I have.

VentureBeat: What made you decide to do this?

Hanson: The idea of sitting in classes, taking tests, writing papers, et cetera, for the next three years, learning a lot of things that won’t be applicable to my career, seems pointless to me. A lot of people go to college to figure out what they want to do. I know. I started playing around with code when I was 12. So for me, it doesn’t make sense to spend the time and money that it would take to get a degree.

Everything I need to learn to be the best I can be is available online at no cost. Some people need the structure of a class to learn. I learn best through doing, through creating which I can do for free.

When you want something you get creative. I want to fully devoted to Senior Living Map to see what I can make up it.

This money is my runway. It gives me a 1-2 year window of time to put all my effort behind growing Senior Living Map into hopefully something that can provide income for me for the indefinite future.

It’s an opportunity to never be an employee, never work a job I hate, never have a boss. It’s an opportunity to invest all my time in something I love, creating something hopefully other people love.

All reasons that will keep me highly motivated.

VentureBeat: Who bought your 10 percent of your future income?

Hanson: I’ve exchanged a couple emails with the winning bidder. She’s asked that I keep her name confidential.

She lives in San Francisco. I’ll be flying down there next week to meet with her.

She’s a pretty accomplished person in the tech world. I’m not sure if there’s any point in mentioning that. I’m sorry; I can’t get more specific. The last thing I want to do is piss her off

VentureBeat: You only got three bids, but it turned out to be enough. How many requests or inquiries did you make?

Hanson: I emailed 1,000 investors I found on angel.co to make them aware of the auction. It was quite a tedious process, but I figured I’ve got one shot at this, I’ve got to try my best to get myself the best shot of getting bids.

VentureBeat: You’re planning to start a company, Senior Living Map. Is this an underserved market?

Hanson: It’s started; the site exists at www.seniorlivingmap.org.

Is it an underserved market? Based on my experience of going through the process of finding a senior living home for my grandmother, I would definitely say yes.

My definition of being an underserved market is the lack of a solution that provides the maximum amount of value with the minimum amount of complexity … a line that I have to give credit to Aaron Levie for. …

Currently, the dominant model for finding a senior home for your parent, relative, or other loved one is to use a “Care Adviser,” who would take into account the type of home and care you are seeking and then provide some recommended options at no cost to you.

Sounds great, right?

But how does the Care Adviser make money if they are not charging you for their services? Well, when you choose one of the locations they recommend, that facility will pay them a “placement fee,” which is often thousands of dollars.

Hmmm … is it just me or does that seem like a conflict of interest? Are people really getting recommendations for the best matches, or rather the homes that the Care Adviser stands to profit from the most?

There may be a home that is a perfect match for your parent or relative; however, if your Care Adviser doesn’t have a contract with them, there’s no motivation for them to even mention it to you.

That’s why I created Senior Living Map. I wanted to create a resource that lists all senior and assisted living facilities available so that people can be equipped with information to determine what senior homes are the best match.

I view Care Advisers like travel agents. Before Expedia,  you had to book travel through a travel agent. They controlled all the information. Travel sites like Expedia came along and gave all the power to people and made travel agents irrelevant. They provided people will all the information they needed to make travel decisions on their own.

That’s what I want to do with senior housing. I want to provide a super-simple resource for people that provides them with a robust amount of information so that they can make a decision on their own without the need to go through a third party.

It’s really shocking to me that no site exists that does that but I’m excited that I have the chance to be that site. It’s probably because senior homes aren’t a very sexy or glamorous thing so it doesn’t get much attention

VentureBeat: What’s your monetization plan for the site?

Hanson: That’s something that’s to be determined. There aren’t any ads or anything on the site currently to generate money.

I feel like the site will evolve over the next year, and I feel like if I make a decision on how the site will make money today it will steer me away from creating the best user experience because it may conflict with how the site will generate money.

It’s like companies that are being disrupted by the Internet. They are so use to making money a certain way that they have a hard time going away from what made them as powerful as they are.

The problem with that is you’re fighting against an inevitable force that will slowly take the company to its grave.

My number one focus is on creating the best experience possible for users. Once I feel like I’ve reached that point, I’ll figure out a way to layer some business model over that experience that makes the most sense.

VentureBeat: Does the 10 percent of future earnings include anything you make from Senior Living Map?

Hanson: Yeah. The 10 percent includes any income I receive from any source for the next 10 years.

VentureBeat: Are you a developer or programmer?

I coded the site myself. I’m an army of one.

VentureBeat: What kind of features do you want to add to the Senior Living Map? Reviews? Testimonials? Inside camera shots?

Hanson: The site is pretty bare-bones right now. Long term, I’d like to make it much more robust with all the things you mentioned and more. Also, additional filters so that just like booking a hotel or flight on a travel site, you can narrow down your options to something very specific. Like a home that only accepts women or a home that speaks a certain language.

It’s quite an undertaking to collect all that data but that’s the long term goal of the site.

VentureBeat: Why’d you choose 32auctions to run the sale?

Hanson: 32auctions doesn’t have any closing fees like eBay and other auctions site do.

VentureBeat: And how is your grandmother doing in her home?

Hanson: She’s doing good It was a bit of a process, but we ended up finding a great place for her where she seems to be happy.

She says they take good care of her

Image credit: ShutterStock/Sold at auction

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Peace Corps is supposed to be “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” Today, Code for America and Google announced a new program to make the tech version of this a little easier.

Code for America and Google for Entrepreneurs are partnering to form an incubator that will support Code for America fellows as they try to turn their ideas into companies.

Code for America (CfA) describes itself as “a Peace Corps for geeks.” Its mission is to improve the way governments work through the creative and intelligent use of technology. The organization operates a fellowship, an accelerator, a brigade for civic organizing, and a peer network that all work toward this goal.

The fellowship program connects web developers, designers, and entrepreneurs with cities to find innovative solutions to municipal problems. The 11-month program also includes government training, professional development, and networking. When the 2012 fellowship concluded, three teams of fellows were interested in launching full-fledged businesses to scale their products and expand nationwide.

This is where the incubator program steps in.

This new “no-nonsense, highly focused experience” will last for six months and help transition early-stage civic entrepreneurs into startup mode as they develop business strategies, improve their products, and acquire customers. The first companies to participate are LocalData, BlightStatus, and Textizen.

“Google’s been with us from the start, and we’re excited about their continued interest in transforming government by investing in a new generation of disruptive entrepreneurs,” said CfA’s founder Jennifer Pahlka in a blog post. “These startups are developing light-weight, flexible, affordable tools that help cities work better and are becoming the foundation of a new market for civic innovation. Google’s support in this effort is invaluable.”

The partnership is not Google’s first with CfA. The search giant funded its 2012 programs, including the launch of a civic startup accelerator program that took on “disruption as a public service.” The accelerator program chose seven companies out of a pool of 230 to “turbocharge,” providing them with opportunities to raise awareness of their project, access training and advice, and be introduced to a network of potential investors, civic leaders, and partners.

This incubator program as the same fundamental goal — to bring government operations up to date — but it also serves as a bridge for CfA fellows rather than independent startups tackling this issue. Sustainability is key here, not only to create businesses and products that endure, but also to retain talent and creativity within the civic space.

Peace Corps volunteers and entrepreneurs share a great deal in common. Serving in the Peace Corps honed my determination, resourcefulness, adaptability, creativity, and ability to think outside of the box (not to mention my spice tolerance). Many of the qualities that make a successful Peace Corps volunteer make a successful entrepreneur, but in both cases, a support network is necessary to create change. The challenge for both, is to develop projects that not only sustain on their own, but grow.

Photo credit: Code for America

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Roey Brecher is co-founder and CTO of pricing intelligence startup WisePricer.

As I’m writing this post, I’m sitting in an apartment that our business development guy is renting in Oakland. I’m practically homeless at the moment but I couldn’t care less.

If there’s anything the past year had taught me, is that owning less stuff keeps me happy. I (partly) own one big ‘thing’ that I’m most proud of, and that is WisePricer. The clothes I wear are either startup t-shirts (x3 @olark, so thanks @ben) or Uniqlo whites. I take next to nothing from the business account but I’m positive better days will come. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.

We launched WisePricer in 3 months.

It was a dirty alpha version with core functionality missing, but we got a few paying customers right off the bat. There was (and is) a real need for what we came up with, even in its barely functional state. That proved to be the first lesson which is something most entrepreneurs know these days but as I came from the corporate world, I had no clue.

Moving forward and getting early traction while trying to raise seed money was another eye opener. It wasn’t before long that we realized that our product was suffering from the time we spent talking to investors. We did raise a small amount but made a mental note to focus on generating revenue. It worked.

Scaling efficiently was our next big challenge. We learned not to solve any problem before it was real and actually hurting us. You only begin to understand your true power to persevere when your server crashes 40 minutes before an important demo. If you can keep yourself from tending to tasks that are fun but you are not entirely sure will be fruitful (like developing that awesome feature your team considers really cool), pat yourself on the back, that’s how it’s done.

Spending money is another big thing. As we soon decided that we would try to minimize our dilution by growing slowly through earnings rather than investments, we started to take our cash flow seriously. We spent December’s holidays in a cheaper country (rent, food, booze and whatnot). We relied on some good friends and set up office in their conference room (they have kicked us out since, all on good terms).

I won’t tell you how three of us shared a two-bedroom apartment … but let’s just say my co founder knows my snoring pattern pretty damn well.

We were also hustling. When attending demo days or conferences, asking for discounted admission tickets is nothing to be ashamed of. Paying for a booth? Not in our budget. You will be amazed how many people you can meet when you are actually waiting around a conference hall premises and engaging in conversations.

There’s another truth I learned: Always ask for discounts. And if you are getting something for free, ask for an extension (Yuval from our team will say, ask for two). In one five minute phone call my cofounder saved us $12,000 in hosting fees.

Are we making enough money to live long and prosper? We soon had to face that question when we wanted to bring more people on board. More people means more expenses, but our time was devoted to onboarding new customers. And the B2B world is different in that you need to have a solid sales funnel.

We went back to Israel only to realize we needed to be in Mountain View two weeks later for a YCombinator interview. That interview didn’t go as expected (unless you are expecting to not get picked which I can honestly say we didn’t). It did however gave us the push we needed to pivot into the enterprise world. Think big and you shall receive.

I learned some things about working while spending your spare time with your co-workers. In a normal world, you rarely see your co workers outside of work. Heck, you rarely think about work outside of work. In a startup world, you are spending so much time with your team you sometime want to drive a fork through their hearts and twist it, but you don’t, because that’s illegal, and you need them.

Jokes aside, it can be most stressful. Learning to push aside differences and keeping non-work issues where they belong (outside of work) is how you grow.

It all comes down to Ego. The more you have of it, the less you will be willing to compromise.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Series A crunch has left the realm of Bigfoot and Nessie and is entering the realm of truth, at least according to Fenwick & West.

The law firm released the results of its 2012 Seed Financing Survey today, which found that the number of startups obtaining Series A financing after a seed round declined significantly in 2012.

“Of the companies funded in 2011, 27 percent had raised a Series A financing by the end of the following year [2012], while 45 percent of the companies funded in 2010 had raised a Series A financing by the end of the following year [2011],” the report said.

The Series A crunch is a Silicon Valley urban legend of sorts. Some say it is fact, and others dismiss it as myth. The basic idea is that the number of seed-financed startups far outnumbers the amount of venture capital firms willing to invest in an institutional round. The cost of launching and operating an Internet startup is fairly low, and a strong angel investment community supports young companies as they get off the ground. However, companies that are unable to quickly establish a revenue stream or get acquired need venture capital to keep going, which is where the “crunch” comes into play. Without additional financing, they go under and turn into “zombie startups.”

A significant driver of this phenomenon is a changing scene for seed financing. There has been rapid growth in seed financing over the past few years. As opposed to 472 deals in 2009, Fenwick & West found that there were 1,749 seed deals in 2012, while the number of Series A rounds only rose from 418 to 692.

A few key trends are behind this bottleneck. First, venture capitalists are becoming increasingly involved in seed-stage deals. The percentage of seed deals that venture capitalists led increased from 27 percent in 2011 to 34 percent in 2012. Furthermore, accelerator programs are multiplying like rabbits, which adds to the number of promising startups getting attention from investors. The JOBS Act and the emergence of crowdfunding provide more flexible alternatives to traditional seed financing, and platforms like Angelist help establish a cohesive network between early companies and investors.

Basically, it is easier than ever before for a startup to nab seed funding. The challenge is creating a product strong enough to attract venture dollars (or sustain itself on its own).

“These results show a continued strong and diverse seed stage financing environment in the internet/digital media and software industries,” said Steve Levine, a partner in the Fenwick & West Startups and Venture Capital Group.  “However, the decreased percentage of seed funded companies that had received Series A investment by the end of the following year emphasizes the importance of companies demonstrating traction with the seed investment they receive, in order to obtain Series A funding.”

The survey also found that seed stage deals are beginning to look more like traditional, institutional deals. The number of deals structured around “preferred stock structures,” as opposed to convertible notes, increased, and valuation caps increased in deals based on convertible notes.

Fenwick & West drew these results from an analysis of 61 transactions in 2012 with a high concentration on Silicon Valley. It is a small sample pool that does not necessarily reflect “the larger, geographically dispersed, seed financing environment,” but like sightings of Bigfoot, the thrill is in the mystery.

Photo Credit: Ben Cumming/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

‘Clubhouse for entrepreneurs’ Founders Den held its Spring demo event today where seven startups presented their products to a room filled with the elite investors.

Founders Den is a ‘selectively curated startup community’ that focuses on experienced entrepreneurs and graduates of accelerator programs. The startup scene in the Bay Area is saturated with entrepreneurs, and Founders Den’s invite-only, referral-based approach seeks to surface the most promising founders, house them in a SoMa coworking space, and allow them to share ideas, network, and be part of the inner circle of Silicon Valley.

Here are the companies presenting today:

Survata runs online surveys for leading brands, agencies, and universities. Founder Chris Kelly said the company takes a more comprehensive approach to online surveys than competitors by offering services for all three parts of the process-  creating the survey, finding respondents, and analyzing respondents. “Companies need to be more scientific than friends and family but more cost effective than a traditional panel study,” he said on stage. Survata sources respondents through its publisher network that reaches 2 million consumers. Clients include high-profile companies like Disney, Microsoft, Harvard, and McKinsey. Founders Kelly and Aaron Wegner have been friends for twenty years. Survata is also backed by Y Combinator.

Rollbar helps developers track and fix errors in production.  Founder Brian Rue said as development migrates from “boxed to cloud” there is no good solution for debugging. Rollbar’s error tracking technology notifies developers immediately when something goes wrong. The product works as a small library you install in the code. The library talks to the API, aggregates data, sends alerts, displays it on a dashboard and sends developers analysis tools to identify and solve problems. “The objective is to bring time to fix an issue from days to minutes,” Rue said on stage. Over 200 companies are currently using Rollbar, including hot startups like Instacart, MessageMe, Everest, MapMyFitness, and CrowdFlower. The technology is already processing 1 million events per day

VidIQ helps enterprise brands get more views and subscribers on YouTube. It operates at the intersection of video, social, enterprise technology, and offers optimization tools as well as analytics. Founder Rob Sandie said that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and so far, VidIQ has already optimized more than 15 billion views. VidIQ has raised a $810K seed round from Mark Cuban, David Cohen and others.

Clothia is a fashion site and iPad app that allows consumers to create looks they find online and share them with the community. Founder Elena Silenok was a computer science major who realized upon moving to New York City that her usual ensemble of hoodies and sandals wouldn’t fly. She created Clothia where users can mix-and-match items to create outfits, virtual closets, and share them with friends. Silenok said the way to turn social media into actual brand sales is through iPads.

Archy is a Barcelona-based company that seeks to revolutionize the way users interact with Google Drive. Archy centralizes all user data into one place and provides a set of functionalities to simplify collaboration. You can share with anyone using drag-and-drop, and people can put comments inside of comments and folders rather than adding to an endless chain of emails. Founder Christian Almenar said 72% of companies use more than 2 cloud services, and so Archy’s target market are businesses. As a result, the company makes security.

Movl provides creation tools for multiscreen content on smart tvs. Developers can use Movl to deploy and sync content across multiple platforms. Consumers and networks like Movl for its bringing together of television, tablet, and smartphones. Movl has eaised $2 million from Mark Cuban, Bert Ellis, and others.

Namo Media provides native mobile advertising. Founder Gabor Cselle formerly founded DrawChat and experienced the challenges and annoyance of mobile monetization. He went on to start Namo Media, which places ads in the stream of an application’s content to provide a more seamless and pleasant user experience, and a higher value proposition for advertisers. Namo Media has raised $1.9 million seed round from Google Ventures, Andresseen Horowitz, Betaworks, and Trinity Ventures, as well as angel investors.

Founders Den has fostered 85 companies to date. Of those, 43 have collectively raised $140 million. 12 raised between $0 and $500K, 5 raised $500K- $1 million, 12  raised $1- 2 million, and 13 have raised more than $2 million. DataSift recently raised $15 million, and five Founders Den companies have achieved successful exits, including SocialCam and Kaggle. Three have folded, but you can’t win them all.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dror Oren is the executive director at SRI Ventures.

In case you haven’t been reading technology news, 2013 is being heralded as the year of the enterprise renaissance.

And while I believe that to be true, the trend begs a bigger question of exactly what it means to be “enterprise” today. The lines between enterprise and consumer are increasingly blurred, and only becoming more so.

The conventional wisdom is that the innovative forces in the consumer market are now being redirected to the enterprise and “consumerizing” it. There is even a Harvard Business School class on the topic.

When people talk about the blurring lines, they typically think about things like ubiquity of consumer platforms (amplified by the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon) and consumerization of enterprise software’s user experience. But there’s something more fundamental going on here.

What we’re seeing today is not a swingback to the enterprise with the add-on of consumer models. What we’re seeing today is a swingback to more diversified revenue models and a refreshing change to the traditional go-to-market approaches … a head fake if I ever saw one.

Many of us have the inclination to track what investments are winning each year, pitting consumer against enterprise tech. But we’d be wrong to do that today. Over the last few years these two categories have become non-exclusive and less correlated, as once believed. To say, if one is projected to do well, it doesn’t necessarily mean the other will do poorly. So why is enterprise so appealing to investors right now?

First, this is all happening after 2012 investment levels dropped from 2011, and VC’s are being a lot more discriminating with where they’re placing their bets. That was more than confirmed according to the most recent report from Moneytree.

There’s less appetite for risk in the market.  Yet the traditionally risky investment in enterprise is, all of a sudden, the safer bet.

Here are my reasons why VC’s and entrepreneurs are flocking (for good reason) towards enterprise in 2013.

Consumer (and prosumer) first models have been fully validated

Consumer-first and prosumer-first models have shown to be very successful entries into the enterprise market over the last few years.

Prosumer success stories like Dropbox, for example, first started out as a consumer app that then later became widely adopted in the enterprise and were one of the first startups to show how you can get into the enterprise without employing a huge salesforce.

Other companies like Basecamp and Evernote have both lived very similar lives. And the list of examples goes on with Google Apps, Box, and more.

What investors are looking for is the next Evernote or Dropbox, where an app gains bottom-up traction in the enterprise and spreads quickly amongst professionals.  Most investors don’t like laying their money out for businesses that need to enlist a big salesforce. But taking the leap to the consumer-first enterprise model five years ago was even more frightening than a salesforce, so things have definitely evolved.

Now that the model has enjoyed so much success, it’s clear that investors and entrepreneurs alike have gotten over their fears, and in truth, are starting to look at enterprise as the next great, golden calf.

Consumer-first reduces risk and increases odds of disruption

While some of the assumed downsides of the consumer-first model have been disproven, there is an emerging understanding of the upsides of this new approach and why we’re all reading more headlines with the words “mobile-first, consumer-driven enterprise” in them.

The consumer-first approach creates two revenue models within one startup (over several phases in the lifecycle of the company) and allows companies to naturally expand their revenue streams when the time is right.

On one hand, you aren’t excluding yourself from the potential of hockey-stick growth and viral adoption with a consumer product. And on the enterprise side, you’re creating a direct path to near-term revenue and major long-term growth (enterprises are still spending way more money on IT than consumers).

Even more importantly, the startup can parlay early consumer traction into the enterprise offering, which is an advantage that most incumbent vendors have traditionally struggled to achieve. These startups can iterate on the product with real end-users long before they demo it to an enterprise. The time between MVP and a mature enterprise product is shrinking by the day. The new paradigm replaces a long lead time for an enterprise-level product with an early consumer product that evolves to a mature enterprise product with the help of early consumer adoption.

The consumer-first approach also increases the odds of enterprise disruption.

Typically enterprise software sales has required you to go through the CIO, which is a hard won process for even the savviest salesperson. With a consumer-first approach you immediately throw the formal processes out the window and enter the enterprise through the back door.

Every CIO on the planet struggles with consumerization, but the decision to buy back control when 60 percent of your employees are already using the free version of a SaaS application is a no brainer. Add security and BYOD to the mix, and the CIO almost has no other choice but to formally adopt a SaaS application that becomes popular.

In essence, you have a better chance of disrupting incumbent vendors by changing the rules of the game.

While they’re going door-to-door glad-handing CIO’s to get a pilot going, the savvy startup has skipped straight to end-user adoption. Hence, what seems like a shift from consumer to enterprise is just the result of a smart go-to-market decision by enterprise companies.

Lastly, barriers to entry are plummeting

Creating software, hosting it and deploying it is easier today than it ever has been in the history of technology. The inevitable merging of cloud, SaaS and mobile over the past year has caught the IT market by storm, and most importantly, lowered the barriers to entry not only for the startups but for investors too.

Ten years ago an enterprise Series A was a hefty round of funding by any measure.  Today, you can start that company for a fraction of the price.  Enterprise is finally becoming as lean as consumer.

More importantly, IT buying habits are changing rapidly.  The enterprise is getting more comfortable with SaaS and cloud technology, and the spending priorities have shifted. Even traditional and heavily regulated industries are joining the party.

Furthermore, the IT department isn’t the only group with IT buying power.

Historically, whenever the marketing or customer support department of a big business needed a piece of software, they had to literally walk to the IT department and make their case to the CIO.

Today, however, the marketing department has quickly become one of the fastest growing buyers of IT and are increasingly Chief Marketing Officers are buying the technology they need directly from enterprise service providers. In this 2013 IT spending report, it’s obvious that every budget has become an IT budget. All of a sudden, the enterprise startup is selling to a market that’s the same size as their consumer counterparts.

How this will continue to evolve is uncertain. All we know for sure is that the lines between the two will continue to blur, giving way to never-before-seen opportunities in the enterprise as walls continue fall and rules continue to get broken.

Dror Oren is the executive director at SRI Ventures, leading venture efforts from raw business concepts through to value proposition and the creation of a stand-alone companies.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself mobile app & mobile website platform for small businesses, and Bizness CRM, a CRM platform designed to make selling to small businesses easy.

With all the buzz these days about how sexy and cool the enterprise has become, there is a segment of business customers that startups are overlooking: small businesses. Small businesses tend to have far less capital than large enterprises, but as customers, they offer startups a number of advantages that make them ideal customers to focus on.

Below are some of the advantages that make small businesses such desirable customers to have:

1. The market is massive

In the U.S. alone, there are over 5 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. For startups looking for a global reach, the worldwide number of small businesses is far greater than the number of big companies.
The number of big companies in the U.S. with over 1,000 employees is around 10,000, and the worldwide number is correspondingly small. Accordingly, chasing the small business market enables a startup to address an audience that is orders of magnitude larger than the enterprise audience.

2. It’s rewarding

Small businesses are generally one-person shops run by someone chasing a dream. Helping them succeed can be extremely rewarding, and along the way you can meet some very interesting people.

When serving the enterprise, it can be hard to make the connection between your work and the end product. But when you serve small businesses, you can often see a direct impact on the lives of others. Building your startup can be daunting, but this model can help motivate you in your day to day.

The folks over at 37signals, makers of Basecamp, have demonstrated this point pretty well.  They serve the “Fortune 5,000,000,” a term they use to refer to all of their small business customers.  In an insightful post, they highlight the fact that, when you serve small businesses, your buyers and your end users are the same people.  They interact regularly with their end users, and the effort to keep them happy is, in the words of 37signals co-founder Jason Fried, “An absolute pleasure.” Sounds pretty rewarding, right?  Compare this to selling to the enterprise, where the software buyers are not necessarily the company’s end users, and a painful disconnect can arise that makes development a sad affair.

3. Small businesses may be “sexier” than enterprises

You may take part in your share of exciting, high profile projects when working with enterprise-level clients, but small businesses can offer the exact same thing. Indeed, the “common wisdom” says that large businesses, due to bureaucratic slowdown, may be less likely to innovate and work on “sexy” projects. Whether this is a myth or not is up for debate. It has been suggested, however, that likelihood to innovate is controlled by culture and policies, not size.

If this is the case, you’ll find interesting, forward-looking projects when working with small businesses. In my experience, small businesses are more likely to adopt a strategy of innovation in order to break into the market, as opposed to adopting a strategy of trying to marginally improve on current offerings. This is because differentiation and taking market share from the market leader are often too difficult without some kind of advancement to promote.

If you’re looking for “sexy” projects, small businesses are more open to approach things in new ways and take big risks as they fight for a place in the market.

Take SquareSpace, for example.  If anything needs to be beautified and sexied up, it’s small business websites.  When websites are done hastily by someone who has their mind on a thousand other things (hello, small business owners!), they can actually wind up hurting a business more than helping it.  SquareSpace has clearly decided to bring sexy back, and they didn’t have to target massive enterprises to do it.

4. The path can be easier

It doesn’t take a year to complete a sale to a small business. Many deals can be completed with a few phone calls. This means you don’t need an enterprise-level sales team to get a deal done. Selling to a small business also means you can keep your first products or services simple. There aren’t complex systems that you have to integrate into, there aren’t multi-layered policies to comply with, and there aren’t a bunch of departments that all need to approve the deal.

Small business deals are very streamlined – you can simply find a need and meet it. This simplicity can be a huge help when the tasks involved in getting a startup off the ground demand a lot of attention and are distracting you from attending to your main mission.

5. Product opportunities are endless

Small businesses, by definition, have a small staff and many gaps in their operation that they need help with. That is, almost every aspect of their business has room for development. There are opportunities to help small businesses with mobile strategy, social marketing, web technology, communications, transaction processing, and more. Want examples? Here’s a small sampling of successful companies that have addressed small business needs.

Save small businesses time, money, or both, and you’ve got a startup with a ton of potential!

Another take on this point comes from Bigcommerce, a company that helps small businesses create online stores with enterprise-level features and functionality.  What’s interesting here is that small business had a gap to fill once upon a time – selling online – and it was filled, by companies like eBay and Amazon … but at a price.  Bigcommerce is able to disrupt this setup, or perhaps offer a supplemental solution, which tells us that even where solutions already exist, there tends to be room for variation.

6. You can serve a greater purpose

What makes technology startups so special is that you have the opportunity to help people and businesses of every size at an unimaginable scale. If your product or service is useful to small businesses in your area, it may be useful to others around the world. And since the percentage of businesses that are small may be quite high in certain developing countries, your company can be a major force for the global good.

At the end of the day, small businesses offer many, many advantages to startups looking to develop their first customers. Compared to enterprises, it’s easier to design a quality offering, reach a decision maker, make a sale, and administer a working relationship going forward. Small businesses let you be flexible, obtain immediate success, and provide learning and development opportunities that are virtually endless.

Essentially, my point is this: When you chase the biggest game, you may spend a ton of time, money, and effort, and still go home with nothing. If you go after small game, on the other hand, and you’ll almost always come home with something.

And for a startup, obtaining “something” is cause for celebration.

photo credit: Robert Scoble via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This post is written by VentureBeat contributor Jon Soberg 

I recently wrote a post entitled “Hiring B players will kill your startup” and I got some great feedback, ranging from supportive to visceral. I would expect nothing less from a topic so important.  A few of the comments addressed a related topic — the growth and development of B players to become A players — so I decided to write a follow-up piece.

Let me start with a simple statement: B players will not become A players.

Why not? 

I make this statement because moving up is difficult, and it rarely happens.  B players in an organization either don’t have the right skills, the right drive, the right fit, or a combination of all these.

Does this mean if someone is an average employee, they can’t be a great person?  Of course not.  One of my favorite comments I received involved deciding on a brain surgeon. Would you opt for the best (the A player), or the average (C player) surgeon with better bedside manner?  I think nearly everyone would opt for the best surgeon.

If you need a specific set of skills, attributes and attitudes, and a person doesn’t have them, you will be hard-pressed to discover them hidden somewhere.

The best managers can’t optimize everyone’s performance 

Before the comments flow about how this is not black and white, let me delve into context.  I am fully aware that I am not talking about inanimate objects, and that these are not absolutes.  I’m also not going to try to argue with anyone about exceptions.  Of course there are exceptions.  The world doesn’t fit nicely into a bell curve.

That said, the world grades on a curve.  Valedictorian status is given to the best student, not to everyone for giving their best effort.  This isn’t Lake Wobegon — all employees are NOT above average.

Leadership, culture, and many factors contribute to each person’s performance, both in absolute terms, and on a daily basis.  There is no question that environment plays a big role.  There is a full nature versus nurture argument, but organizational culture rarely adapts and even the best managers are hard-pressed to optimize everyone’s individual performance. Many people believe that a great manager can make everyone perform at their best.  I totally agree, but the A players working for that manager will outperform the B players. The best teachers in the world still have some A students, some B’s and some C’s and below.

B players won’t become A players:

1. Within the same organization;
2. Within their role.

Suffice it to say here that taking someone who is coasting in one role and shifting them to another rarely turns them into your best employee.  How many great managers reading this post can relate to having one or two “go-to” people on the team who always rise to the challenge?

A Players versus B Players

The difference between B players and A players is not measured by intelligence, education or raw skill.  It isn’t about who went to Harvard, and who didn’t.  A players possess the rare combination of drive, intelligence and pride in their work that is above and beyond the norm.  They don’t associate their names with anything short of excellence.  The best of the best are those with the lethal combination of natural talent coupled with drive.

At the top of the spectrum, A players are dynamic leaders and visionaries — they take on huge challenges that would seem insurmountable by others. But A players can be great at any level, and in different roles.  We have all had the experience when we spoke to a great customer service person who went above and beyond.  A players tend to transcend roles; they excel, wherever they are.

As soon as I mention the term “A Player” most people have images of Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, or Steve Jobs. These people are obviously A players, but the key to their success is only partially their innate abilities.  Renowned for their extreme drive, work ethic, and attention to detail, none of them wanted a flaw in their game or their products. A Players don’t have to be selfish, prima donnas, or arrogant.  Plenty are, but that isn’t what makes an A Player.  Some of the most accomplished people I know are humble team-players.

Some will argue that coaching and leadership can make B players into A players.  In some circumstances, that is true, but in most business cases, it just doesn’t happen.  Work ethic is tough to change.  Initiative doesn’t simply appear.  Attention to detail is not simple to coach.  Not saying these areas can’t improve, but you don’t normally see quantum leaps.

Bottom Line

Everyone cannot be an A player.  This is the harsh reality.  In the US we idolize people like Jack Welch, who famously advocates cutting the bottom 10 percent of an organization every year.  It gets more difficult when the worst people are already gone, but at the end of the day, even when it gets difficult, some people perform better than others.  In our competitive world, only a small percentage of people are truly A players, and moving into that echelon from below doesn’t happen often.

Jon Soberg is a Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, where he invests in early stage companies, specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and eCommerce. Prior to joining Blumberg Capital, Jon has been a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in multiple companies including Ditech, Broadband Digital Group and Adforce, which had a highly successful IPO.  

A CFA Charterholder and adjunct faculty in the Wharton Marketing Department, Jon earned a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from the Wharton School, where he is a Palmer Scholar.

Top image via wavebreakmedia // Shutterstock

Top image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

After a long day at work, you open your fridge and are greeted with a forlorn-looking piece of cheese and some rancid smelling milk. We have all experienced this pain and that weary reluctance to make a trip to the grocery store.

A startup called Instacart is fast becoming a favorite in the Bay Area for its mobile and web service that lets you order food and beverages in a snap. The app is available for free on Google Play and the App Store.

Since it launched in August 2012, Instacart has found a niche with busy, urban professionals — but it’s also used by office managers at local startups.

To make it easier for roommates or colleagues to order items for a shared kitchen, Instacart has launched a new feature called “Shop with Friends.”

Click the “Shop with Friends” button to access a communal shopping cart, which anyone can access by clicking a custom link. ”The idea is to give people the flexibility they have at the checkout counter,” said Instacart’s founder, Apoorva Mehta, in an interview. Mehta is a former supply chain management engineer for Amazon.com, who saw an opportunity to fast-track online grocery delivery.

The company plans to beat out the competition with its focus on customer service and user experience design. Simply login via Facebook or set up an account, open a shopping cart, add a few items, share the link if you’re shopping with friends, and tap to place the order.

Thousands of items are available and will be delivered by Instacart’s team of personnel at home or an office in under three hours.

Instacart recently partnered up with yuppie chains WholeFoods and Trader Joe’s, and also delivers groceries from Safeway. The startup makes its money by charging a convenience fee ($3.99 for orders over $30) and an additional $14.99 for one-hour delivery.

We first reported on Instacart at a recent demo day for Y Combinator, the highly competitive accelerator program. At the time, we described it as an “Uber for grocery deliveries.” Similarly to Uber, Instacart has butted heads with city regulators (in this case, over its ability to sell wine and spirits).

In future, Instacart plans to bring in new revenues by selling an enterprise subscription to larger companies. The company has raised $2.3 million in seed funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Robert Siegel is a General Partner at XSeed Capital.

As a general partner at XSeed Capital, I was recently asked by one of our portfolio company CEOs my opinion on a potential strategic investor into his firm.

This is not an uncommon question that arises – what are the plusses and minuses of taking in money from a corporation versus a financial investor? Does it align incentives in a partnership between a large and small company? Can a startup get a higher valuation from a strategic investor vs. a pure financial investor?

Having been a strategic investor while at Intel, a CEO who took in strategic investment capital, and also as a VC who has co-invested with large corporations into startups, my key learnings on this situation are four-fold:

The strategic investor will always do what is in their selfish self-interest

One hypothesis is that if a strategic investor owns stock in a startup, the large firm will have its incentives aligned with management and the other financial investors. This is simply not true.

The broader economic interest of the larger corporation will always outweigh the small financial interest it has in the startup. It is not necessarily bad, per se, that a strategic investor owns stock in a startup, but don’t be mislead into the belief that this will “align incentives.”

A large corporate partner will act in whatever way it believes is in its financial interest, and they will not care about the consequences of getting what they want — including killing a startup in which it has made an investment — if it believes that this is the right thing for it to do.

Not all strategic investors are the same

Certain companies have a substantively more progressive POV towards investments. They see startups as not only sources of product innovation, but also partners and potential acquisition targets (for both products and people).

This is not the case with all large firms, however.

I will posit that many (most?) Silicon Valley large companies have a more “enlightened” approach in these relationships as there is an ecosystem that encourages acquisitions and collaborations between large and small firms. Outside of Silicon Valley this is not always true — in fact, oftentimes there is no history of such strategic relationships in an industry.

As such, a CEO should consider if there is a history of positive interactions in an industry between large and small companies when considering taking on a strategic investor. If there isn’t, be cautious.

Separate the commercial agreement from the investment

At times large companies like to tie development agreements or commercial arrangements to investments. This becomes a convenient way to put cash into a company that needs it, while getting some extra value via stock.

This is almost always a bad idea for a startup.

If a commercial arrangement makes sense for two companies, a structure can be found that is non-dilutive and works for both sides. If a large firm wants to make a strategic investment alongside a commercial arrangement, that can be fine as long as there is no correlation between the two agreements.

In other words, if the commercial arrangement no longer makes sense for one or both parties, the strategic investor should not be able to cause unnatural acts to the shareholders (including both employees and financial investors) or exert undue influence through its stock ownership.

Later is better than earlier

In the earliest days of a company, a startup is at its most fragile state. As such, a strategic investor has the ability to have disproportionate influence to encourage a young entity to do things that may not be in the long-term best interest of the startup (but might be good for the strategic investor).

As a young company gets more established, it has the ability both to survive changes in the status in a relationship with a large strategic partner, and also to push back with alternative choices if incentives end up not being aligned with the strategic investor.

. . .

While the above four pieces of conventional wisdom aren’t always true, I have found them to be consistent guidelines that help describe some key learnings of whether a startup should take an investment from a strategic investor.

Robert Siegel is a General Partner at XSeed Capital, bringing extensive innovative leadership in strategy definition, operational execution, and international sales and marketing for companies large and small. This post originally appeared on his blog.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Launch has a little something for everyone in the startup world.Thousands of entrepreneurs, influencers, developers, designers, public relations people, booth babes and investors are attending the Launch festival and everyone is searching for something different.

There are the core companies that use Launch as an opportunity to break out of stealth mode and snag their 15 minutes of fame. Some are looking for exposure, others for investors, and many, of course, are looking for both. Others are simply here to soak up the scene, eat free sandwiches, and mingle with their fellow startup friends who are inevitably present as well.

Flyer.io presented yesterday afternoon and quickly shot up to the top tier of the leaderboard. The company takes real estate flyers to the next level with a well-designed, video-centric interface. Rather than creating old school flyers or holding regular showings, brokers can take footage of the space they are renting or selling to create a dynamic, information-packed ad. CEO and founder Isaac Herrera said that the real estate is a 500 billion market that still relies primarily on Google Docs, PDFs, and worse, and he trying to evolve it into modern times.

“I think we got such a response because we are one of the few companies that has a way to make money,” he said at the Flyer.io booth at Launch. “Even being based here in San Francisco, it takes a long time to network with the right people, it is like a social club. While we were here, we accomplished in three days what it would take months to do. Some of the people we tried to contact in the past who never responded and reached out to us, now that they see the product in the market.”

Other companies are not actively fundraising or presenting on stage, they are primarily here for marketing purposes.  Tealet is a marketplace that connects tea drinkers with tea growers with a high-end tea subscription service. The company participated in 500 Startups and presented at 500 Startups Demo Day. Founder Elyse Petersen said she is at Launch in an effort to reach her target audience, 20-40 year old men making over $100,000 a year.

“At 500 Startups Demo Day, we polished our pitch and presented on stage to investors,” she said. “Here, we are looking for geeks and gamers who are obsessive tea drinkers because thats who are our first adopters. They are the people who want to have everything before it becomes cool who are interested in niche connoisseur products. If we were trying to launch a mobile app for a feature that was the same as six others, the crowds would be difficult, but for us, the more the merrier.”

Tealet’s table stands between banners for boring-sounding (but sexy!) enterprise software and ads for dating apps. Down a small flight of stairs, you have a massage “digital detox” area. In another, robots. Walking through the hardware section of the teeming room is a landmine of self driving cars, furry educational smart toys, and even little light-up robotic balls that are guided with an iPhone.

Amidst all the gadgets is Nomiku, a device that raked in over $580K on Kickstarter and is the highest funded project in the food category.  The Nomiku is an at-home sous-vide device that costs just $355, as opposed to the couple thousand dollars of other market options. Founders Lisa and Abe Fetterman were relaxing on their couch one night watching Top Chef when they decided to build their own emergent circulator. Considering Abe is an astrophysicist, this was actually in the realm of possibility. The couple built a prototype, headed to China to participate in an accelerator program and get to know their supply chain, and returned home to get married and roll out a Kickstarter campaign that ended up being extremely lucrative.

“Everyone is so ready to make perfect food,” said Lisa as she fed me sous-vide pears. “Why waste your life eating shit food? Life is so short eat well, its so easy. Put your food in a freaking bag and let exact science take over.”

Hardware and consumer-facing startups are popular with attendees, attracted by tag lines like “travel reviews worth sharing” and “eat out, feel at home”, and names like “My Cute Friend” (where every guy comes recommended). Business-to-business startups are also doing well however,  as this tech-savvy crowd responds well to phrases like “data-driven lead generation” from Zillabyte and “cross-channel, data-driven  ad campaigns” from AdStage.

Many of the attendees are not pitching themselves, but work for more advanced companies that are here to check out the competition and look for potential partnerships. Alex Kouts is the director of product at Razoo, a crowdfunding platform for non-profits. He spent three days at Launch listening to presentations and talks, making partnerships, and picking up ideas about user-experience and design.

“Launch felt like it was put on by the startup community, as opposed to for it,” Kouts said after the pitches were done. “Every event is the product of the startups they can get to come to it. Some of the startups are really strong, but there is also a lot of chafe. Overall, it felt very entrepreneur-friendly.”

At large demo events like this, the pitch presentations often run together in a muddied stream, which is why I was initially skeptical of impact launching a startup here could have. However, after three days of talking with people from all sides of the tech community, I understand that the value is not what happens on stage, but rather what happens off. Whether it is expanding your professional network, exploring potential partnerships, selling your product to early adopters, or receiving constructive feedback, there is something to be said for being one of many in a crowd, when the crowd is this entrepreneurial.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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SAN FRANCISCO – - It would take a small army to cover everything happening at the Launch festival. Fortunately, a crowdfunding app is here to help the most intriguing startups attract attention. The idea is to let the crowd indicate interest in real time and create a leaderboard where the best companies rise to the top.

Since the conference began yesterday, only four have passed the 300,000 threshold. Here are the top three startups that have presented at Launch, according to the laws of crowdsourcing.

Zillabyte

Zillabyte easily has the most points, with a total of  651,000 toward the end of Tuesday afternoon. Zillabyte bills itself as “Pandora for sales leads.” Built off a database of wto billion pages and 11 million unique companies, Zillabyte’s engine helps businesses search for prospective customers.

“The technology connects buyers and sellers more efficiently in the business-to-business space,” said founder and COO Roger Huffstetler in an interview at their booth. “I used to work in sales for Twilio, and I know cold-calling sucks when you are selling technology. We are taking an anecdotal understanding of sales and making it analytical.”

The site first prompts visitors with the question “Find me more companies like… .” It then prompts sales professionals to answer “yes or no” to potential clients to create a list options, based on the input. These results are further filterable by geography, size, and so on. Huffstetler said that the really exciting feature, however, is the alert system that notifies businesses when a new customer is found that satisfies their criteria. Zillabyte is based in Palo Alto.

Jawfish Games

Currently in second place with 546,000 Launch dollars is Jawfish Games. This startup claims to produce the world’s first real-time, multiplayer tournament games for mobile devices.

“There are currently 135,000 games in the app store, and none of them are as fun as these,” said CEO Phil Gordon. “Live tournaments are really hard to do technically in terms of scaleability, latency, bandwidth, and all the back-and-forth. Many of the big gaming companies are not great at complex software engineering. We are a complex software engineering company that is good at making games.”

Jawfish partnered with “casual” gaming company BigFish to produce three games. Players join the game and compete against each other in 3- to 4-minute tournaments that ultimately yield one winner. They are quick, simple, and apparently a hit with the audience at Launch. Jawfish Games is backed by $2.6 million, led by Founders Fund. It is based in Seattle.

Instaradio

With the bronze medal is Instaradio, which turns smartphones into personal radio stations.

“Instaradio lets you broadcast from your own phone to any device in the world and anyone can listen in real time,” said CTO Andrew Opala. “This is not an easily bracketed application. It is a voice platform that is open-ended and can be used in many different ways, like Twitter.”

Use cases include a parent wanting to read a bedtime story to their child from afar, a garage band sending new music out to their fans, and for emergency situations. It is also useful at an event (like Launch) where people can stream live audio from interesting speakers to people who are not there. To activate, users press a button and start talking. People on the other end receive a notification via email, Twitter, SMS, and so on about the broadcast and tune in. Instaradio currently has 352,000 in Launch commitments.

AdStage

AdStage got off to a hot start, racking up 327,000 within hours of presenting. AdStage is a “single ad campaign manager to rule them all.” The platform lets medium-sized businesses easily create cross-channel ad campaigns across at the same time and track and tweak all of them from one dashboard.

“A lot of advertisers think it is bad practice to post the same ad on multiple networks, but why not kill multiple birds with one stone?” said founder Sahil Jain. “We allow you to fine-tune the ads and targeting per network. We are not targeting agencies or the enterprise. We are a mid-market tool that is great for online tech businesses. Everybody at Launch is thinking about how to get more users. We make advertising super easy and it is fun to use.”

In addition to campaign creation and editing tools, AdStage also offers analytics so businesses can see how various ads are doing, what are the top key words, and also recommends budget allocation shifts based on the findings. AdStage also announced that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Freestyle Capital, Quest VP, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Digital Garage, XG Ventures, Mark Mullen, Stewart Alsop, John Battelle and Rich Lefurgy.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more coverage of Launch, a three-day pitch event where 50 stealthy startups present their products to an audience of thousands in the hopes of gaining exposure, funding, and momentum.

A stealthy startup called Armor5 wants to alleviate fears about employees and remote workers bringing their own devices to work.

The Santa Clara, Calif., based Armor5 has a new way for mobile workers to access their company’s applications without sensitive data hitting their handset. The beta version is available for free as of today with a self-service sign up.

Chief executive Suresh Balasubramanian, a former general manager of antipiracy at Adobe, believes that BYOD (employees bringing their own devices to work) is a big problem for IT departments; they have “no choice but to deal with the issue,” he said. But it also raises “significant security, compliance and cost problems.”

You’ve been living under a rock if you’re not concerned about the security risks of BYOD. The topic was the center of discussions at the RSA Security conference, particularly given that the sophistication of attacks on corporate firewalls are increasing.

Balasubramanian told VentureBeat that competitors — including mobile device management and desktop virtualization (VDI) vendors — don’t address IT’s growing needs. MDM software used by an IT department to manage employee’s mobile devices is hard to administer, he explained, and VDI can’t deliver on all app functions.

A lot of companies have attempted to solve this problem by locking down certain apps or enabling IT to access specific parts of a personal device.

But Amor5′s approach is a bit different: The technology connects to a company network via an existing VPN, virtualizes Intranet data and cloud apps, and generates a URL for mobile workers to access content safely from a personal or company-issued device. The entire process takes just a few minutes.

Balasubramanian was brought on as CEO after the company incorporated in 2011. Its founders are former engineers from Microsoft, Adobe, and Motorola.

“CIOs are understandably concerned with data security given the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices inside their organizations,” said Fred Wang, the general partner at Trinity Ventures, the firm that led the seed round.  ”Its [Armor5's] singular focus on the intersection of data security and BYOD, and its unique approach to solving the problem, is the reason we are investing.”

The startup has emerged from stealth mode today with $2 million in funding from Trinity Ventures, Citrix, and Nexus Venture Partners. 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

An emergency contact network might not, at first glance, seem the kind of idea you’d see from a venture capital-funded startup. But it’s the sort of concept that has the potential to grow huge.

And ePACT co-founder Christine Summers says such a network has a fairly impressive viral component.

Summers calls the company, which graduated from the GrowLab accelerator in Vancouver tonight, the “LinkedIn of emergencies,” because it’s a cloud connector of individuals’ emergency notification information that also functions as an alert system for organizations like schools, clubs, daycares, and youth sports teams.

“The vast majority of organizations put their emergency [contact] information on paper,” Summers says. “This is an opportunity to leverage networking technology for safety.”

The second co-founder, Kirsten Telford, saw that need firsthand. She was living in Japan when the massive tsunami of 2011 wreaked havoc on the coast, killing 15,000, and devastating the country’s infrastructure. And based on what she saw there, Telford recognized that we’re completely unprepared for a similar-size emergency in the US.

ePACT works by operating as a single source of emergency contact information. Everyone puts their data in, including allergies and medications, and organizations and people that need to access it request your permission. You grant permission to authorized organizations, like schools your children attend, or companies you work for, and they now know what to do and who to contact in case of emergency.

“If there’s an emergency, they can blast messages to the whole network,” Summers says. “Schools, for instance, can communicate out to families through text messages, a mobile app, email, and the web, and families can communicate with their network.”

That sounds like a prototypical good thing, but hard to monetize. But in fact, according to Summers, many types of organizations are federally mandated to maintain emergency contact lists. Schools head the list, but community organizations, sports teams, some clubs, fitness centers, and other organizations also need emergency contact information. According to ePACT, organizations in North America alone ask for emergency contact information 900 million times a year.

And it’s all on paper right now. Which means the emergency contact “industry” is ripe for disruption.

“The Toronto School Board, which we’re talking to right now, would save $1.75 million using our system,” Summers says. “Right now it costs them $10 per student to manage via a paper process.”

The co-founders had already raised $800,000 from angel investors before entering GrowLab. The company has five full-time employees, and Summers says it’s on track for 2,500,000 users within its very first year. And each user who joins, spreads the message.

“For every family that joins, we get another three families joining,” Summers told me.

So why join an accelerator?

“GrowLab held our feet to the fire,” she says. “It upped the ante for us … they made us think big and pushed the message: go hard or go home.”

photo credit: selva via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Julie Fredrickson is a three-time founder whose current startup is PlayAPI.

I have a confession to make. I’ve recently become obsessed with being liked by a certain crowd: “Tech.”

As a woman generally unconcerned with being palatable to others, making this admission is really painful for me.

I’ve always been contrarian, sometimes deliberately, even going so far as naming my first blog after the premise that I was always “almost” appropriate for a given situation. But the truth is that I have always been a profoundly non normative person.

But for some reason over the last 6 months or so I started caring about being liked.  Liked by the Silicon Valley set. Liked by venture capitalists. Liked by the kind of men that determine who is or is not “one of us” in tech.  I’d say women but there aren’t enough to warrant being concerned about.  I wanted to be one of those founders, you know, the type that gets silly valuations and love from the name brand ventures firms, the type that gets written up by the tech press, the sort that powerful angels vouch for and send around glowing intros for as being “the next big thing,” and the sort that jets around to conferences.  In other words, I got wrapped up in the idea of having myself and my business being hyped instead being a genuinely successful business.

Source: LinkedIn

Julie Fredrickson

I was making justifications to myself at night about how they “should” love my startup. We had all the pattern matching basics down pat. We are second time founders that have worked together for the better part of a decade. We had a successful exit. We are solving a major problem for a growing market. We’ve experienced the problem personally and are building for the pain points we know. We have A-list clients. Celebrity (well in tech at least) advisors. We are even in the “hot” enterprise space. We have a female co-founder! Don’t you want to show that you aren’t biased? LIKE US GOD DAMN IT.

Now as someone who has manufactured desire and cool for a living let me tell you the first thing you can do to kill being “it” is by trying to get the people who set those standards to apply and judge you by them. Being cool has never been about begging to be liked. But I started doing all the things that a “poser” does. We did the functional equivalent of changing our hair, our wardrobe and even our personalities to be liked.

And of course it didn’t work. We weren’t being ourselves. But I kept taking advice on how to be more appealing. And then I wondered why I was miserable. I was floundering in the tech world’s Mean Girl clique and like Lindsay Lohan I was starting to hate myself for it.

I got caught up in the perception market and lost sight of the fact that I’m supposed to be serving an actual market.  And I was doing pretty well at it.  Because ironically, while we were floundering at being liked by tech, our business was great. All the objective signs of a successful business abounded. It turns out I’ve got a startup that happens to be a business. You know what that means?  We make money.  In the reality markets people pay us. And they pay us more for the product than it costs to create it.  By a great margin. And more and more people are going to have a need for this product in the future, aiding our margins even further. I have real clients that believe my product is serving a genuine need and are willing to pay to have us solve their problem. Maybe it isn’t the glamor that the men in tech seek but not for nothing I’m a Weberian Protestant and I’m happy to serve with an unwavering work ethic. I actually like my clients. I believe in my product. Serving our market makes me happy. You know what doesn’t make me happy?

Serving tech’s capricious standards does not make me happy. 

Because as it turns out the market for being an “it” founder and a flavor of the week startup isn’t the reality market. It is the perception market. Plenty of successes in the perception market fail at being real businesses which is ostensibly what all of us are trying to achieve. Hell, the jury is even out on whether venture capital itself is even a decent asset class.

So you know what? Fuck you guys. I don’t really bear you any malice but since this is a personal exorcism of a ridiculous ego driven emotional burden I hope you don’t mind if I curse you a little bit. I need to get you off my mind, you see. So, I don’t need your approval. I don’t need your hype. And I have no idea why I was even seeking it. I need the approval of the markets. I need the approval of my clients. And so far I’ve got it. But if I spend too much time changing who I am (aka our product) to please you then I might lose that. So I’m going to stop caring and go back to working. And I will be patient and diligent. And if the “IT” crowd ever comes calling I’ll wait a few days to return their calls.

photo credit: zalouk webdesign via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

I’m sitting in the dentist’s office on my last Friday morning as an entrepreneur. My daughter is having a cavity filled.

Monday will be my first day free from any job title or official company in 22 years, and I’m grumpy. “Equity owner” sounds good, but capital constraints won out and equity didn’t pay my mortgage. My first, “starter” startup is pretty much dead in the water.

Nine months ago, I embarked on this journey with two partners, cash, gorgeous offices and a hot new tech company with a vision that I still believe in: crowdsourcing jobs and enabling all of us to be recruiters for our friends. The highs were high: Launching at DEMO 2012, channel partnerships being built, seed round about to close, a growing base of supporters.

But like a roller coaster ride, we came to a screeching abrupt halt and for a whole host of reasons chose to fail early.

Now, there’s nothing for me to do but reflect on my nine-month “startup MBA,” hope the company and the patent-pending technology still gets acquired in the next six months, and prepare for my three job interviews next week.

I told an investor friend that the whole experience left a smile on my face, but trust me, there are a few gashes too. Here are five lessons I learned the hard way:

Failure leads to success — maybe

Sometimes you fail early to go on to something else. Luckily we didn’t take the seed-stage investor funds we raised when we realized it would take a lot more money to market and get traction to go to scale. I learned that failure is an option, and better to do so early. After a 20-year career that I held onto like a protective pit bull, there is a strange freedom here to move on more intelligently.

Pigs are amazing

As an entrepreneur, you want to work with pigs. Brilliant pigs.

Okay, that sounds bad. My friend Mark, a prominent VC, asked me after hearing my story if I knew the difference between a between a chicken and pig. When you’re sitting down to your IHOP Sunday breakfast of eggs and bacon, he explained, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed

“Mark are you really calling me a pig?” I asked. “Yes” he said.

I’d prefer to be a pig and put my all into something even if it fails.

YOLO

Do it! No fear! No regrets! Think of your startup as a child or darling pet you are raising. Yes, you might fail and not get to see it grow up, but you also might build something worthy and phenomenal like Apple, LinkedIn, or Chipotle.

On a practical note, have money saved so you can live at times without salary. I had a good base salary and didn’t put myself in good stead to live without it. Too many trips to Starbucks and visits to Amazon Prime; I should have stashed more away for rainy days ahead.

Get good advice

Get advisors. Build a brain trust of people who will weigh in as coaches and mentors on your business. Don’t think you have all the answers all the time.

Be wary of brilliant minds who think they have all the answers. It’s best to listen a lot as you build and make strong decisions based on analytics and early customer feedback. If you don’t listen, they won’t help. People who help will also introduce you to worlds of potential customers, learning, and investors. Speak to entrepreneurs who have a lot of traction and have already had a successful exit or two.

Embrace the fall

It’s hard to put this into words. After a 20-year career as a social entrepreneur, this stint lasted just nine months, but there was something so awesome about the roller coaster ride and the learning.

I heard about Silicon Valley investors only wanting to invest in you if you’ve had failure and that learning by failing doesn’t always make sense in mainstream career thinking.

I guess what I am saying is, don’t be ashamed if your starter startup fails. Shed a few tears, grab your phone, and start again selling the brand you have been building all along: you. Reach out to your fabulous networks and begin to identify opportunities or people you might want to build with.

But this time, start smarter and use your lessons learned so you can build a more lasting relationship with your next company.

“Mommy your situation — it’s like my cavity,” my daughter said on the drive home from the dentist.

“My teeth hurt a lot for a while, but then they filled it. You still have tons of good teeth, and now you need to move on.”

Julie Kantor blogs weekly for Huffington Post and In the Capital on issues around social recruiting, job search, entrepreneurship, women in the workforce and more. She is the co-founder of Barrel of Jobs, a startup that made its debut at DEMO Fall 2012.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Comedian John Oliver may joke that SnapChat is designed for sending penis pictures, but the company is destined for a lot more.

SnapChat, an app that lets people share fleeting images, has closed $13.5 million in its first round of funding led by Benchmark Capital.

Oliver joked about the popularity of “sexting” while hosting the Crunchies, an awards ceremony that honors achievements in the tech world. SnapChat won the award for “Fastest rising startup” and is heralded as an example of the startup Holy Grail:  viral growth. A report in the New York Times states that the app sends more than 60 million messages a day and has millions of users.

The popular mobile social photo sharing service, based out of Los Angeles,  enables people to share a photo with another person or group of people who can only be viewed for a very short time (a few seconds). The person you send that photo responds with one of their own, which is also only available for a few seconds — hence the name “SnapChat.”

Photo sharing is one of the obsessions of our generation. Whether it is baby pictures on Facebook, a hipster coffee shop on Instagram, roasted chicken with bread on Foodspotting, room decor on Pinterest, or that day’s vintage-inspired ensemble on a fashion blog, taking and posting images is almost second nature. Sometimes, it feels like if no-one documents the moment on the internet, it doesn’t exist.

However, not every photo needs to live forever, which is where SnapChat comes in.

People can send images to their friends that may not merit (or be appropriate) for public, permanent display. A majority of the users are between 13 and 25, and wary of embarrassing content coming back to haunt them later in life. The story of the job-seeker denied a dream job due to a unflattering Facebook photo is something of a modern urban legend.

Speaking of Facebook, SnapChat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy claim that Mark Zuckerberg met with them in December, just before launching its own self-destructing messaging app Poke. The competition has not seemed to diminish SnapChat’s success. The company is now valued at $60 to $70 million.

Rumors arose in December that SnapChat was raising an $8 million round at a $50 million valuation from Benchmark’s Matt Cohler. The rumors were half true, as rumors tend to be.

In fact, it was Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky who spearheaded the financing after hearing about SnapChat from his teenage daughter. Benchmark is also an investor in Instagram, the world-famous photo sharing app that Facebook bought for $1 billion in 2012.

After returns like that, it is no surprise that the firm is going down the rose-lined photo sharing path again.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Portland may be best known for dark beer, bird-adorned crafts, and beflanneled hipsters, but it also has a burbling startup scene.

Upstart Labs, an early stage fund and startup incubator in Portland, is continuing to churn with added funding, new investments, and an expanded team. Today, it formally announced a partnership with Oregon-centric firm Rogue Venture Partners and revealed two joint investments.

Upstart puts its own, distinctly Portland spin on startup accelerators. Just as a stout requires care and personal attention to brew, so do startups need hands-on guidance. By taking a “craft approach” to building companies, Upstart said its model is “well-suited” to the startups in the Pacific Northwest.

“Unlike a typical startup accelerator – in which a group of founders attend a ‘startup bootcamp’ together, Upstart’s team partners with companies one at a time and offers hands-on help with strategy, design, development, marketing and sales,” the company said in a statement.

The program lasts for three-to-six months, where entrepreneurs find themselves surrounded by mentors. The team includes designers, developers, marketers, and entrepreneurs that work “side-by-side” with the founders to support their growth. Kevin Tate and Joe Stump are joining Upstart as partners. Tate has 17 years of software marketing and sales experience, most recently serving as the CMO of ShopIgniter. Stump was the lead architect at Digg, founder if Simple Geo which was acquired by Urban Airship, and co-founder of Sprintl.y. He is an angel investor and already an advisor to a dozen companies.

Portfolio companies include Chirpify, MoPix, Taplister, PivotPlanet, Menuish, and Celly. The first joint investments with Rogue Venture Partners are in music discovery platform Juke, and Measureful, which automates digital marketing insight.

It’s almost midnight, and you’re stuck on a math problem that is due first thing in the morning.

In stressful situations like these, online tutoring startup Instaedu can help. The Silicon Valley company specializes in finding stumped students a tutor or homework assistants at any time of day or night.

When the company launched, its core innovation was the pay-by-the-minute model, and the on-demand access to tutors. But with its new features, the startup is moving into the realm of personalized learning.

The Instaedu team is honing its abilities to better match its students with tutors based on their academic needs and interests, so they’ll be tempted to set up regular sessions.

Currently, there are 1,500 tutors signed up from top colleges like Harvard and MIT, but the founders aren’t disclosing the number of registered students. Tutors are paid a fixed rate of $20 an hour (Instaedu keeps the rest), and working hours are flexible.

The tutors connect with students using video chat, text chat and document editing — it’s all online, so there are no travel costs. Alternatives include Edoboard, which provides tutors with online tools, and TutorCentral.net.

“The goal is for our students to get to know tutors better before even having that first lesson,” said Alison Johnston, Instaedu’s 25-year-old cofounder (pictured above). So the new features also make it a bit easier to schedule a regular time to meet with the best possible tutor. They include:

• Real-time messaging so a student can chat with a tutor before scheduling a lesson (this makes it easy to connect with a tutor who is currently online);
• “Smart messages” for students who need to be matched with a tutor that can help with an advanced or niche subject;
• Tutor reviews which are displayed publicly so students can browse tutor profiles.

Instaedu has raised just over $1 million in seed funding from the SocialxCapital Partnership.