Divorces are traditionally terrible. But Wevorce, a Y-Combinator-backed startup that has just launched into general availability, wants to change that and make the process of divorce more amicable and less expensive.

Wevorce first caught our eye at March’s Y Combinator Demo Day. At the event, Wevorce founder Michelle Crosby [above] told the story of being dragged through her parents’ painful divorce when she was 9 years old. Her parents fought for 15 years and they still don’t talk to this day.

So Crosby grew up and decided to make a solution that could help people like her parents. Instead of a two-lawyer arrangement, Wevorce assigns a single attorney to a case and gives a divorcing couple software to make the process easier to understand. Wevorce claims the software helps its attorneys complete paperwork in 60 percent of the time it normally takes to go through the process.

“Divorce tests as the second most stressful event in an adult’s life,” Crosby told us via email. “Wevorce is humanizing the transition from one household into two for families. Not only does Wevorce address the legal implications, we also address the emotional and financial aspects that are inherent in every divorce.”

Besides making the divorce process more understandable and speedy, the company also claims to make it cheaper. Wevorce says its set fees range from $3,500 to $15,000. The company says the average case costs less than $10,000 while traditional divorces can cost upward of $27,000.

To date, Wevorce has only been available in a handful of U.S. cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Boise, San Jose, Calif., Oakland, Calif., Asheville, N.C. But now the service is available so any lawyer in the U.S. can tap the software and any divorcing couple in the U.S. can connect with lawyers through the service.

Check out the video below for more on Crosby’s inspiration to create Wevorce.

Screenshot via Wevorce/Vimeo

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SAN MATEO, Calif. — The maker movement has helped start many companies. This year, the Maker Faire is giving them a place of their own, with a “Startup Pavilion” that highlights 20 new maker-centric companies.

It’s part of a growing recognition that the do-it-yourself spirit is not just a fun hobby, it’s a rich source of economic potential.

“There is a kind of maturation happening to the maker movement,” said Maker Faire organizer Dale Dougherty, when I spoke to him last week. It’s still dominated by hobbyists, but now there are an increasing number of startups, entrepreneurs, small companies, and even big corporations looking to get involved with the DIY spirit.

Related: Google embraced the DIY spirit last week with more than 400 Arduino-based sensors at its Google I/O conference. Find out how Google made the sensors and integrated all the data.

“At the very first Maker Faire, they really were all amateurs,” Dougherty said, of the exhibitors. After a few years, the Faire started hosting vendors — primarily makers of parts and components, like Arduino boards, used by makers. Now, the Faire is highlighting maker-inspired startups. Here’s a selection of the 20-odd startups at Maker Faire:

• SeeedStudio, an “open hardware company develops and brings to market innovative and cost-effective prototyping solutions for hobbyists and aspiring inventors.”
• RedBearLab, which makes a wearable BlueTooth 4.0 board you can use to interface with an iPhone or Android device.
• Formlabs, makers of a high-resolution 3D printer aimed at engineers and design professionals.
• Deezmaker, another 3D printer vendor, this one aimed at making an affordable printer called the Bukobot.
• BioLite, a company that aims to reduce third-world pollution with a small wood-fueled stove that converts heat from the fire into usable electricity, improving combustion while allowing users to charge small devices.
• BlinkM, makers of multicolored, programmable LED lights for use in your electronics projects.
• Smitten, a maker of handmade “artisan truffles.”

Big companies are getting into the act, too. Autodesk, for instance, has a fruitful partnership with 3D printing pioneer Makerbot. Autodesk makes an easy-to-use set of 3D design tools called 1-2-3D, and the 3D files created by those web-based tools can easily be printed on a Makerbot. This year, Autodesk’s large booth at Maker Faire includes a 3D scanning station, where you can get your head scanned and turned into a 3D digital file suitable for printing.

General Electric is also a sponsor of Maker Faire, and has been working with O’Reilly Media (the parent company of the Faire) on the Faire as well as the two-day Hardware Innovation Workshop that preceded it earlier this week.

“It’s a long, slow process of a company trying to understand the maker movement and engage with it,” Dougherty said. GE wants to encourage its own engineers to think more entrepreneurially, but it also sees the value of DIY, maker-type activities for encouraging and education the next generation of engineers.

Even Motorola, the phone manufacturer now owned by Google, is starting to embrace the maker spirit, Dougherty said, by making phones that are easier than most phones to hack, modify, extend, and repair.

“What would the maker community want to do with a cellphone as a platform, not just a fixed device?” he said.

Photo: Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis holds a bunch of 3D-printed heads at a recent New York event. Photo credit: VentureBeat/Ricardo Bilton

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Source: John Koetsier

The actual, real, live fire pole.

Like a full regulation fire pole that people can actually use to drop down a floor. Or an officially certified slide to get down to the lobby after a long day. Perhaps a cushioned and enclosed chill room.

Or even, believe it or not, a cattle walkway.

On a recent trip through Ontario, I toured Google’s first office in Canada — and talked to the engineer who leads Google Canada, a former startup guy in Silicon Valley and native Canuck, Steve Woods. If you use mobile Gmail, a Chromebook, Google Maps, Google Calendar, or Google Fiber, there’s a good chance you’ve touched something built at Google’s offices in Waterloo, Ontario.

And if you ever get the opportunity, those offices are definitely something to touch as well.

“Startups are great, because you start from scratch,” Woods says. “Startups are awful, because you start from scratch. At Google, you can literally launch a project that affects a billion people.”

That’s one reason he decided to accept Google’s offer to leave the Valley, return home, and “figure out what we should do in Canada and do it.”

In 2008, when Google opened the office, Waterloo and London were the company’s two centers of mobile excellence — likely due to Waterloo’s proximity to then-leading smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry. So Waterloo and London pioneered the mobile version of virtually every service Google offers: Maps, Gmail, Calendar, mobile search, and more. Waterloo, which now boasts about 200 engineers, also hosts the team that built Google Fiber’s user interface and critical software for the Chrome Pixel, Google’s answer to Apple’s retina display, with full touch integration.

The office is located in a formerly industrial building that once housed a tannery, believe it or not (hence the cattle walkway). Google shares it with a number of accelerators, startups, and coworking spaces that together make up Communitech, a startup mecca with strong connections to Waterloo University, angel investors, and venture capitalists.

Source: John Koetsier

The Googlers who work here. After a year, their drawing gets colored in.

Woods, whose recruiting strategy is to get ex-patriate Canadians to move back as well as to draw new talent from the nearby Waterloo University, says that it’s an attractive place for Googlers for a variety of reasons — not just the fire pole or massage room.

“There’s fewer bosses here, or at least they can’t find you,” he jokes. “At least a third of the people here have moved back from California.”

Source: John Koetsier

The actual cattle walkway

Woods says that Google’s most internally unpopular and controversial product ever was built in Waterloo as well: Conversion Optimizer. That’s a piece of software for advertising buyers that Google calls the “just trust us and push the button button,” which essentially hands your advertising campaign over to Google to optimize for the cheapest and most effective ads.

“It was extremely unpopular in Google,” Woods told me. “People were wondering: How much money will we lose? They were worried that advertisers would optimize their ad spend early in the month, hit their caps, and stop buying.”

Google’s known for taking risks, however, and the company ultimately decided to go ahead despite the chance it might actually lose money. Now, the product is one of Google’s most popular for advertisers, and it manages “many, many billions of dollars.”

“It took a Nobel prize-winning economist to prove that was untrue,” Woods said. “It’s great for Google, great for advertisers, and great for surfers.”

And another product Waterloo build that Woods is particularly proud of is what he calls “the largest project Google has ever done.”

It’s the first mobile search transcoder, which was an infrastructure that rendered web pages on Google’s own internal servers, decided which bits were most important for mobile phone web users, and sent only those bits. It sounds like something for the presmartphone days of historical antiquity, but not so.

“It’s still a very fast-growing project,” Woods told me. “The volume is staggering … billions of pages per day in countries in the third world, and even in the U.S., it’s still growing.”

So … why in Waterloo, Ontario?

Source: John Koetsier

Communitech, the community in the building that includes Google.

“Something interesting is happening here,” Woods says. “The university produces an amazing kind of talent … and people that come into Google from the University of Waterloo do disproportionately well.”

Worldwide, he says, Waterloo has been one of Google’ top three or four recruiting centers for some years now. And, he adds, not everyone who wants to work for Google wants to live in California.

“This area has a very high proportion of startups to population,” he adds. “Google loves startups, and we love to hire entrepreneurial people.”

Oh, and the slide?

The office has a plastic red slide down from the second-floor Google reception area to the first-floor entrance. It has a prominent sign, “For Googlers Only,” which a PR rep told me was placed there because Ontario’s provincial slide inspector (yes, they have one, apparently) raised some concerns about safety.

I was bad, however, as I frequently am, and went down the slide anyways. The PR rep forgave me, as you can see in the video below:

Image credits: John Koetsier

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Except, of course, at a hockey game. And, increasingly, in Ontario, where startups, government, industry, universities, angels, and venture capitalists are working aggressively to try to create the world’s leading technology hub.

Source: John Koetsier

Inside Waterloo, Ontario’s new $160M center for quantum computing.

“We want the world’s next biggest tech company to be built in Ontario,” the most populous Canadian province’s minister of research and innovation, Reza Moridi, told a small group of journalists recently in Toronto.

That’s aggression — even if spoken in a kinder, gentler way by an urbane, mild-mannered politician.

It also might strike some as hubris, given that Ontario’s biggest technology story to date is that of a dying smartphone manufacturer, BlackBerry (formerly known as Research In Motion).

But it’s not just words, and it’s not just the government that’s behind this effort.

Ontario’s reverse brain drain

Ontario is home to about 40 percent of Canada’s population and accounts for 48 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product. It’s the fourth-largest population center in North America, after Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles, and it produces more cars than any other region in North America, including Michigan. Ontario also has the Americas’ second-biggest financial services sector, after New York.

More to the point, it’s North America’s second-leading cluster for technology companies, after California, and has the third-largest concentration of life sciences companies on the continent.

Source: John Koetsier

Google bought local startup BufferBox in late 2012

The government has invested $3.6 billion in those sectors, primarily, over the last decade, with two-thirds going to research and development, and one-third focused on building the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

That money has had an impact.

For years, countries like Canada and the U.K. have complained about a brain drain, with the best talent heading stateside for more options and better pay. Not anymore. In fact, quite the reverse.

“My co-founder left Silicon Valley to come here,” Cream.hr CEO Kateline McGregor told me.

She’s starting her company at Communitech, a thriving, almost frenetic community of startups, accelerators, massive technology companies, students, and coworkers in Waterloo, Ontario. An hour’s drive up the 401 from Toronto, Waterloo is a city of 98,000 that saw more than 500 startups take root in 2012. And the massive burst of innovation has not gone unnoticed.

“Something very interesting is happening here,” Google’s top Canadian employee, Steve Woods, told me. “This area has a very high proportion of startups to population. Google loves startups … and we love to hire entrepreneurial people.”

Woods himself is a Silicon Valley refugee, returning home to Canada after building several companies in the Valley. Google recruited him over the course of several years to lead its Canadian operations.

He points directly to U.S. immigration policies that pose a critical problem for both startups and large, wealthy corporations such as Google. Getting into the U.S. to build a company or join a startup is notoriously difficult and expensive.

Where Woods works: This Google office has a real fireman’s pole, slide, cattle walkway, and more (gallery)

Meanwhile, Canada has just recently taken even more steps — such as the Startup Visa — to make it simpler, quicker, and cheaper to come to Canada.

“Because of visa situations, Canada has received a disproportionate amount of the talent that is coming into North America,” Woods said.

All of that translates into a significant competitive advantage for Canadian startups and tech companies.

More education, more startups

Another competitive advantage, particularly in the Waterloo region, is the constant stream of high-quality students coming out of engineering, math, and computer science schools. I heard this ad nauseam from government representatives I met with, and credible sources in the industry confirmed it.

Source: John Koetsier

University of Waterloo students build startups at Velocity Garage, a for-credit accelerator-like program.

“Waterloo University produces an amazing kind of talent,” Woods told me. “It gives students a great grounding in computer science, but also by the time they graduate they’ve passed through four summers of co-op programs, so they’ve worked at Facebook, at Google, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or other companies.”

Ontario’s 44 universities produce about 30,000 computer science and engineering graduates each year, a steady flow of new talent for the province’s startups as well as established IT, life sciences, and aerospace companies.

By contrast, California — a state with about three times the population of Ontario — produces only 21,000 STEM graduates per year. The results are clear, at least for Woods.

“People that come into Google from the University of Waterloo do disproportionately well,” Woods says.

Source: John Koetsier

One of the meeting rooms at Communitech, a startup mecca in Waterloo, Ontario. Google also has an office here.

Rob Crowe, executive-in-residence for Waterloo-based Institute for Quantum Computing, the second-largest quantum computing research center in the world, agrees.  And he points out another advantage that translates to more startups coming out of key Canadian universities.

According to Crowe, a key difference between the U.S. and Canada is that many Canadian universities have followed the European model of education-funded research and development. Essentially, professors and researchers at the University of Waterloo own any intellectual property they develop, not the institution they work and teach for. That’s an incentive for academics to put their best foot forward while on faculty, and to kickstart companies when their ideas result in a viable product or company.

“This is the university that throws off more startups than any other university in the country,” Crowe told me.

Less tax, more benefits, more investment

All of the above regional traits are excellent for students, researchers, and startups, but there’s also good news for investors. Moridi’s ministry of research and innovation has helped reduce corporate tax, while also providing significant tax credits for companies doing innovative work.

“Ontario has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in North America, at 22 percent,” says John Marshall, president and CEO of the Ontario Capital Growth Corp., Ontario’s voice in two venture funds totaling about $500 million. The funds were raised partially by government, which recently announced intentions to pump in another $50 million, but mostly by venture capitalists and institutional investors.

Source: John Koetsier

Google has invested significantly in Waterloo, Ontario, hiring 200 engineers for its Canadian engineering headquarters.

The goal is simple: Invest in potential high-growth venture-stage startups in Ontario via a fund-of-funds approach that ensures industry participation and leadership in every specific investment. In other words, Marshall puts money into funds assembled by local VCs such as Omers, Northleaf Capital Partners, and Rho Canada. Those VCs in turn drive the actual investments into companies like Shopify, Desire2Learn (which recently closed an $80 million round), Polar Mobile, and BlueCat Networks.

“Our overall aim is to build the ecosystem for innovation,” Marshall says. “That includes the demand side, with accelerators and startups, and the supply side: seed funding, angel investors, and venture capitalists.”

The fund-of-funds strategy appears to be working. Two years ago the average fund size in Canada was $60 million, compared to $180 million in the U.S., but now the average Canadian VC fund is $90 million. Other venture entities, such as Intel Capital and Samsung Venture Investment, are following the money and making their own investments.

When that money gets into the hands of actual startups, it goes further, according to the companies I talked to. The reason is Canada’s federal and provincial research and development credits, which the Ontario government says are “among the most generous of the OECD countries.”

Source: John Koetsier

Ontario had 500 startups in 2012 in Waterloo alone.

Taken as a whole, those credits can reduce the after-tax cost of $100 worth of R&D to just $57 for corporations and just $39 for startups.

Fixmo CEO Rick Segal, an ex-patriate American, says those tax credits are one of the key reasons he chose Toronto as the location for his latest mobile security startup. The CEO of online advertising startup Chango, Chris Sukornyk, told me the same thing.

Marshall says that the credits simply add on to a startup environment that has long stretched every single dollar as far as it can go.

“Our entrepreneurs have already been so capital efficient by necessity,” he says, adding that now that Ontario’s entrepreneurs have access to more money, they’re still using it wisely.

That capital is starting to flow more freely lately, with VC investment up in Ontario in the past few years. But startups, who benefit most from the R&D tax credits, also have additional benefits. Almost every startup that graduates from a major Canadian accelerator such as Hyperdrive and Extreme Startups in Ontario, FounderFuel in Montréal, and GrowLabs in Vancouver, gets offered a $500,000 convertible note by the Business Development Bank of Canada.

That’s cheap and none-dilutive money, and provides more runway for startups. Most of which, realistically, need more than a three-month stint in an accelerator program to become real companies.

Ambition, meet reality

There’s no doubt that Ontario is taking smart steps with the ultimate goal of dominating the business of technology. But can it really out-innovate the innovation capital of the world, Silicon Valley?

Toronto currently ranks eighth on the Startup Genome’s list of global startup ecosystems, just above another Canadian technology hub, Vancouver. Tiny Waterloo ranks 16th with its population of just under 100,000, bringing to mind Tel Aviv, the super-fertile startup ecosystem of 400,000 people that currently holds third place.

Source: John Koetsier

Toronto’s CN Tower

In addition, Ontario officials quietly let me know that they believe Ottawa would have won a spot in the top 20 as well, if Startup Genome had analyzed the data just a bit differently. That would, of course, have given Ontario three cities in the global top 20.

But even considering the province’s leading contender, there’s still a long way between eighth and first. And every country in the world, seemingly, wants to follow the Silicon Valley model to the yellow brick road of employment and riches.

Few succeed.

VC investment in Canada overall is still just a fraction of that in the U.S., with about $1.5 billion invested in the entire country over all sectors in 2012, compared to $8.3 billion invested in the U.S.  in software alone, and another $6.7 billion just in web-based startups. In Ontario specifically, VC investment was just $603 million, compared to California’s U.S.-leading $14.1 billion.

And RIM, with revenues of $18 billion in fiscal 2012 dropping to $11.1 billion in fiscal 2013, is still probably the province’s biggest tech company.

That’s not a good sign.

Turning to BlackBerry for inspiration

Despite the small numbers, startups are increasingly choosing Ontario as home. Taxation and immigration policies as well as investments from blue-chip funds like Union Square and Kleiner Perkins are having a massive cumulative effect.

Even BlackBerry is feeding the culture of innovation in Ontario, despite being in what are perhaps its death throes.

Fixmo CEO Segal says BlackBerry has been an amazing influence in Ontario, and continues to be influential. “There are lots of alumni from RIM, both voluntary and involuntary,” he says with a wry grin.

Marshall says the growth of BlackBerry from nothing to its heights as the first key innovator of the smartphone revolution has had its own impact, regardless of the company’s current situation.

“Now you’ve got kids coming up who saw their parents do it,” he says. “So they believe they can do it too.”

500 new startups in Waterloo in 2012 alone attest to that fact.

In the against-all-odds world of the startup, belief is the key ingredient of success.

Image credits: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Ontario’s ministry of economic development invited VentureBeat to visit the province, and paid my expenses. My reporting, however, remains my own.

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New York-based Crowdcases wants to bring together a community of designers to raise funds for nonprofit organizations.

Each week, the startup picks a charity, and asks artists to submit a design for a custom iPhone or Samsung Galaxy case. These cases are sold on the website, and the profits are split between Crowdcases and its charity partner. The nonprofit receives $7 for each case sold.

In addition, the winning designer is rewarded $500 in cash. “Not only do they win money, but their designs can go to work to save lives,” said CEO Dwight Peters.

It’s a deceptively simple idea that might just work.

Peters plans to scale the site by partnering with high-profile nonprofits with a large social media following.

Jamaica-born Peters is a keen advocate of social entrepreneurship, the idea that change-making and profit-making should be aligned. Successful companies in this space include online petitioning site Change.org, and Kiva, an online lending platform for the developing world.

This isn’t Peters’ first foray into entrepreneurship; his first website, QuarterWaters, features interviews with founders of “tech for good” companies.

The next challenge takes place on May 26, and Crowdcases is currently accepting applications from nonprofits and designers.

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Kevin Leu is the founder of GirlsOnAMap.com.

There are lots of dumb things you could do as a startup entrepreneur — like base your company out of Bakersfield, allow yourself to be acquired by Groupon in an all-stock transition, or pitch your growing U.S.-based startup to the Samwer brothers — but nothing could be more dumb than throwing your hard-earned venture capital money at a public relations firm.

Sure, many startup founders out there don’t have the first clue about how to “do” public relations for their startup. They’ll think long and hard before finally plopping down that $12,000 retainer fee — with a required six month commitment — out of their precious Series A investment.

Don’t do it.

As a former journalist who entered PR for a few years (working in-house, managing PR firms, working with them on joint announcements, and consulting with other startups) I can tell you that most PR firms I worked with are full of sh*t. I’m not saying there isn’t some value, but the value is nowhere near enough to justify the cost, given your limited resources.

Here are five reasons PR firms are crap:

1. They don’t know how to tell a story

I’ll be honest, working in “professional” news and reading press releases every morning really honed my sense of what does and does not make a story. I was able to sift through all the hyperbole from clichéd PR specialists and figure out a way to tell an interesting story. (At least I hope it was interesting!)

So when I joined the ranks of PR, I always thought backwards: from the point of view of the specific trade journalist, to writing the press release so that the journalist would see those points.  Unfortunately, most PR people don’t know how to do this.

I’m not saying that someone who studied “Public Relations” in college can’t tell a good story, but they’re immediately limited by the conformity of a non-innovative industry.

2. They rest on their laurels

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with PR firms who tout their “previous clients” — which are indeed impressive — but who are no longer clients. Or the executives who handled those high-profile clients are not the ones who will be working on your account. Sure, those executives will show up for the first few meetings, then they’ll pass off the duties to a couple of underlings: one mid-level manager (6 – 8 years experience), and the other just a few years out of school. It’s also called Bait-and-Switch, which I learned about from Mike Seaver on Growing Pains. It was a good episode.

3. They act like they know everything

Well, it’s probably mandatory they speak like they know everything, which is how they convince many a startup that their services are needed and the commitment will be rewarded. I have found this bravado to be annoying. Maybe it’s because in Silicon Valley we value humility over braggadocio.

I would be much more impressed with a PR person who showed curiosity and asked a lot of questions about my team and product. There is no one who knows the product as well as you, but if a PR person is any good, he/she’s going to try and get as close to your knowledge as possible.

4. They take more credit than they deserve

During every press campaign, PR firms mark down every publication and online newspaper that “picks up” the story, which for them means whomever re-prints the press release word-for-word. This is an automatic thing that is triggered from release sites like PR Newswire, Business Wire, and PR Web, and does not require the services of a PR firm. Startup entrepreneurs are always impressed by these links when they shouldn’t be. How many people go to the Jacksonville Business Journal and read the re-printed press releases from that day?

Entrepreneurs should be putting a premium on original stories that are being written, not these automatic pick-ups.

I’ve also seen PR firms take credit for stories that were facilitated by me or someone else within the startup, even when they had nothing to do with it.

5. They’re a rip-off

At a market-rate of $12,000 a month, which is pretty standard, they supply you with about 20 hours a week, total, of two junior employees, who they pay anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 a year.

If you’d like me to do the math for you, they’re charging you $144,000 a year for a half-assed job that costs them maybe $50,000. Did you also know that those employees have other clients? So, even if they do get through to a reporter, their interest does not lie squarely with you. It’s kind of like a taxi driver who gets paid commission to bring a customer to several different places. Wouldn’t you like that taxi driver to have the singular purpose of delivering that customer to you?

Now, PR firms aren’t all bad, and PR is important. This brings me to my key recommendation. Hire an in-house PR specialist, manager, director, whatever you want to call this person. You can pay them much less than $144,000 a year, and get triple the value. Heck, if you hire a journalist (they’re losing their jobs everywhere you look), you could probably pay them $80,000 a year, have them working 60 hours a week alongside the rest of your team, doing much more than crafting the occasional press release and conducting a launch. They can work on the site’s overall message, the outbound emails to clients, a company blog (which builds organic SEO), business development, press contacts, and they can write those press releases – full-time!

If you do want to go with someone trained in PR, put out a listing for a PR Manager with several years experience. I’m sure you’ll have more than enough quality candidates coming from within several of the PR firms you’re considering anyway.

Don’t get me wrong; PR firms do some things really well. Their presentations are always beautiful and concise. And, as people, they’re always very presentable and well-spoken. Okay, okay, okay.  They also know how to coordinate a launch. Whether that’s a website or a product launch, they do it very succinctly and efficiently. They are excellent at scheduling briefings with journalists and getting everyone to agree to a certain embargo for maximum coverage. Still, you can accomplish this with someone in-house.

If you’re going to bring on a PR firm — against all my recommendations — make sure you insist on having one of the senior-level executives working directly with you and that all communication does not go through the recently-hired college grad. It also wouldn’t hurt to know that this executive came from the ranks of journalism (I’m biased! Sorry!).

For an additional test, during the pitch and courtship period, send them an email during non-office hours and see how quickly they respond. Too many times I’ve dealt with PR professionals who didn’t respond to emails for hours, sometimes days, which baffles me. If I had been a journalist on a deadline, an hour’s delay would’ve meant me finding another contact and writing the story without your company.

Remember one final thing: PR firms are like cell phone companies. Once they lock you into a contract, you’re not getting out of it unless you pay them a penalty, even if their service is spotty and you’re unsatisfied with their work. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?

[Editor's note: Since publishing this story, we've had a number of people from the PR field contest its conclusions. Be sure to check out the rebuttal story -- "Here we go again: 5 reasons hiring a PR firm is good business" by long-time PR exec Patrick Ward.]

Kevin Leu is a former television reporter and PR specialist who has worked with various venture-backed startups. He recently launched his own startup, GirlsOnAMap.com, which is a combination of Hot or Not and Tripadvisor that relies on user submitted content to provide travel advice for singles. You can follow him @SVBachelor.

Top photo credit: Mark Z. via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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I’m in Ontario, Canada, on a press junket put on by the government to highlight the startup scene in Canada’s most populous province.

40-50 percent of venture capital in Canada is put to work in Ontario, which is pushing past traditional industries and looking for investment and jobs in high-growth technology-focused companies. Those traditional industries include automotive — more cars are built in Ontario than anywhere in North America, including Michigan — and financial services, which employs more people in Ontario than anywhere else in the Americas besides New York.

But the most interesting stat is about the burgeoning startup scene, particularly in Waterloo, Ontario. Toronto is the big kahuna in southern Ontario, with a population of over 2.6 million. But Waterloo is where Google, Oracle, EA, and Intel have set up offices, where BlackBerry grew from nothing to leading the smartphone industry, and where startups are popping up incredibly fast.

BlackBerry, of course, is quickly returning to nothing, but as often happens in the tech industry, the cycle of creative destruction is resulting in a whole new cohort of hot young startups.

“Waterloo and the culture of startups there is because of RIM,” John Marshall, the president and CEO of the Ontario Capital Growth Corporation says. “You’ve got kids coming up who saw their parents do it.”

While it’s a little early to call BlackBerry dead, the fact is that former Research in Motion is indeed in motion, downwards. Apple, Google, Android, and Samsung have taken over market leadership in mobile phones, and Microsoft looks to be passing BlackBerry with Windows Phone.

But the result has been a two-track acceleration of southern Ontario’s entrepreneurship engine. First, as Marshall says, new blood sees that global success is possible. And second, the high-tech workforce shed by a downsizing BlackBerry feeds the founding and growth of small startups.

That’s music to the ears of Ontario officials like Bill Mantel, the assistant deputy minister of the Ministry of Research and Development, which has invested $3.6 billion over the past decade in the startup ecosystem: R&D, seed funding, and ecosystem improvement.

“We want the world’s next biggest tech company to be built in Ontario,” Mantel says. “It’s about job growth … about half of all job growth is provided by the 3-4 percent of high-growth companies.”

That includes companies like Desire2Learn, located about 12 minutes away in Kitchener, Ontario. Desire2Learn has gone from 400 employees to 800 in a matter of months as it took the largest VC investment into a single company in Canada — $80 million — just last September, after bootstrapping for almost a decade.

The results are also visible elsewhere.

“In the StartUp Genome report from last year, Ontario had two cities in the top 20,” Mantel says. “Toronto was eighth, Waterloo was 16th, and we think Ottawa should have made the list too.”

There hasn’t really been the emergence of a BlackBerry mafia, in the sense that the PayPal mafia has kickstarted whole waves of startups in Silicon Valley. But perhaps, in a backwards sense, BlackBerry has had a similar effect in southern Ontario.

photo credit: miggslives via photopin cc

Disclosure: Ontario’s ministry of economic development paid VentureBeat’s costs to send me on this tour of Ontario companies and the venture capital scene. My coverage, however, is my own.

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A startup called Madison Color aims to reinvent the home hair care experience, starting with color. The company raised a $4 million funding round today led by True Ventures, a firm that sees a massive market opportunity for high-quality, home-delivered hair products.

Madison won’t publicly launch until the fall, but the founders say they plan to develop an online service for customers select, buy and apply hair products. Madison Color will begin by offering ammonia-free products, which can be ordered online or via a mobile app, and delivered straight to your doorstep. Think of it as a Warby Parker for hair products.

Cofounder Amy Errett [left] secured a smaller investment from her former firm, Maveron LLC, where she had worked as a Bay Area-based venture partner. Errett is a big name in startup circles; she sits on the board for companies like SAY Media and General Assembly, and previously worked as the chief executive officer for Olivia.com, a lifestyle and travel brand for lesbians.

In a statement, Errett said she’s excited by the opportunity to bring new technology to a “market with high existing consumer demand that hasn’t changed in decades.”

Investors are making a bet on the Madison Color founding team, which also includes Home Value Protection cofounder Eric Hutchinson, Zynga cofounder Andrew Trader, and former Threadsy CRO Sabrina Riddle. As part of the terms of the funding, True Ventures’ Jon Callaghan will join the company’s board.

Top image via Shutterstock

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Andrew D’Souza is COO of Top Hat Monocle

Two years ago, most top-tier VCs would not have touched an education technology company with a 10-foot pole. That’s all about to change – in fact, it’s already changing.

Take a look at some of the recent bets placed by big-name firms on exciting education companies over the past 12 months: Accel with Lynda, NEA with Desire2Learn and Edmodo, Emergence with Top Hat, a16z with Udacity, Benchmark with Minerva and the list goes on.

The education space is massive, very broken, barely touched by technology and has been largely underserved by entrepreneurs and investors. The opportunity for disruption, significant value creation and outsized returns is huge.

Companies that are focused on the education space right now have arguable advantages over their consumer and enterprise technology peers:

Advantage #1: Ability to attract high-caliber talent

With consumer web falling out of favor, top talent is beginning to look elsewhere for career opportunities.

Horizontal SaaS companies may be lucrative in the short-term, but those companies always run the risk of being commoditized by lower-cost providers or outsold by more focused vertical players. More importantly, horizontal SaaS providers can have trouble articulating a compelling vision, which is what the most passionate talent needs to perform their best and why consumer web companies often have an advantage attracting high-profile talent.

Passionate employees can see themselves working for a company out to “make the world more open and connected” than one trying to “transform how businesses operate so they can achieve their business vision”.

Vertical SaaS companies, on the other hand, can present a vision for a particular industry that resonates deeply with those who care about that space. There are fewer industries that draw a more passionate response from a broader swath of the population than education. Almost everybody has a view and almost everybody would jump at the opportunity to have a significant positive impact on the space.

Historically, executives have thought about “getting involved” in education through board affiliations or philanthropy in the twilight of their careers. That perspective is changing as more talented individuals earlier in their careers are realizing that they can build successful, highly lucrative careers while impacting a space they care deeply about (vs. say, hawking daily deals).

Advantage #2: Public interest

Education stories are mainstream. The challenges surrounding student debt, international competitiveness, unemployment and equality are problems that affect everyone, not just those in the education space. If you’re building a company to address these problems in an innovative way, the world wants to know about it and you will get noticed. Outside of Silicon Valley (maybe even inside), I’m willing to bet that more people have heard of Salman Khan than Peter Thiel.

This is a huge advantage ed-tech companies have over every other kind of tech startup.

Like it or not, access to capital, talent, customers and partners is directly affected by the public perception of you and your company in the media. Those who know how to tell their stories appropriately have access to an unlimited amount of public interest coverage and a passionate audience who can’t get enough.

Advantage #3: Market timing

The education system is under attack from all angles. Education outcomes aren’t keeping pace with the requirements of today’s job market. Budgets are continually slashed. Higher education institutions are struggling to remain relevant and justify rising tuition fees in the face of open, free educational resources. The last industry that experienced these kinds of pressures was traditional media, when technology companies who were on the winning side of the disruption turned into billion-dollar businesses seemingly overnight.

If those within the established institutions are smart (and we would hope they are), they will embrace technology as the catalyst for much-needed change. If they ignore the disruption, they’ll face a similar fate to newspapers and radio. Either way, it’s a good sign for those starting companies in the space.

Advantage #4: Word of mouth spread through the industry

Unlike vertical SaaS providers, EdTech companies’ customers don’t compete with each other. Universities are certainly rivals in athletics and are always looking to improve their brand among prospective students, but for the most part, education institutions are collaborative and cooperative. This is even more true in K-12.

If an instructor or an institution discovers a product that improves learning outcomes, they want to spread the word to their colleagues and peer institutions. At the most, they’ll want to be identified as the forward-thinking school which “pioneered” this technology, but overall they’re happy to share their knowledge with others. This is a unique dynamic which exists in education that other enterprise tech companies can’t really benefit from.

Advantage #5: Competitive advantage of outside perspective

Right now, education technology is much less competitive than consumer or enterprise tech. The bar to build better products, execute better and displace incumbents is relatively low.

Historically, many EdTech companies have been started by passionate educators, but haven’t always had business or technical leaders on the founding teams. Their competitive advantages were institutional lock-in and long-term contracts. These structural barriers are disappearing in education, in the same way that the cloud and consumerization of enterprise technology shook the foundation of enterprise software incumbents.

These startups need perspectives from outside the education industry if they’re going to be truly disruptive. Many of the VCs who made great returns on “old world” education companies are too focused on pattern recognition, and they end up chasing after (or worse, forcing their newer companies to adopt) broken business models. Companies rely on their board for outside perspective.

Rather than looking in the rear view mirror to see what worked in education in the past, they should be checking their blind spots to see what tactics worked in other industries which may work for us. Having Gordon Ritter from Emergence on our board has allowed us to learn from what worked at Salesforce, Yammer, Box, and Veeva as they scaled their businesses, and that gives us a competitive advantage over education incumbents who are steeped in their ways.

The investors who get significant exposure to this space in the coming years will see some big wins, while those who continue to shy away will miss one of the biggest opportunities of the decade.

photo credit: sciencesque via photopin cc

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And, while founders are seeing evidence of an A-round crunch, angels and accelerators are picking up the slack.

Mark Cannice, professor of entrepreneurship and innovate at the University of San Francisco, recently completed his 37th consecutive survey of Silicon Valley venture capitalist confidence. And VC confidence is up for each of the last three quarters, hitting 3.73 on a 5-point scale.

This quarter, even the depressed exit market for venture-backed firms typified by Zynga and Groupon was not enough to dampen VCs’ increasingly rose-tinted view of the future.

I talked to Cannice this morning.

VentureBeat: VC confidence is up. Why?

Cannice: It runs a little bit counter to some of the quantitative numbers that have come out recently, however, there’s confidence in the future over the 6-18 months.

Part of the reason is that VCs tend to have a longer-term horizon, they look further down the road, so even though current measures of performance for Q1 aren’t that good, it looks like some of the pressures on the VC model will ease somewhat, and acquisitions from corporations are likely to pick up.

VentureBeat: Which Q1 measures aren’t good?

Cannice: The national VC association measures each quarter for IPOs and fundraising, and they found that for fundraising the amount raised is not that different from a year ago, but the number of funds is down.

What that points to is a concentration in funds which corresponds to a lot of funds closing up over the last year or so.

In addition, acquisitions and IPOs of venture-backed firms and capital raised is down significantly over the last year.

VentureBeat: Which Q1 measures aren’t good?

Cannice: Particularly in life-sciences … some of the regulatory hurdles have tightened up over the last few years. That extends the time for approval, and extends the time for medical device and life science companies to appear to be good investments. And, of course, it requires more money.

When you change the structure … then the finance and metrics may not work. As a result, most of the funds are not able to perform as well; therefore the LP investors are started to draw the purse strings tighter.

The long-term effect is less private capital available for some life science related new ventures, and this will have an impact on the level of innovation in life-sciences.

In clean-tech … some of the headlines like Solyndra have had a negative impact.

But some of the lower venture captial requirement industries like software have been more effective.

VentureBeat: We’ve been hearing in the last few months about an A-round crunch. What’s going on?

Cannice: There’s a few things at work here.

Over the last few years the overall return on funds hasn’t been great. So while there’s more money going into venture capital, it’s tending to concentrate into fewer, name-brand funds.

But that requires some of those funds to make larger investment than if they were smaller, so some of the dynamics are working to necessitate larger investments … which tends to squeeze out some of the earlier, lower capital needs business.

Which has opened up a opportunity for smaller, angel-type funds and accelerators to replace them – angel groups are filling the hole.

VentureBeat: VC confidence has been boomeranging around the last few years. Why?

Cannice: There’s a clear correlation with the macro-economic environment, which has boomeranged too.

And there’s also — from a government point of view — the oversight of the industry is not necessarily as popular as it could be.  When there’s external influences that has a negative impact on any part of the VC business model, that tends to find its way into the confidence levels.

VentureBeat: What’s the take-away for founders and entrepreneurs?

Cannice: What I’ve seen really consistently is while there’s waves of positive and negative sentiment related to macro-economic factors, throughout all that, I’ve always seen confidence in both venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

That’s never wavered.

And that’s the hope for the future, that Silicon Valley continues to attract many of the best and brightest of the entrepreneurs around the world.

photo credit: dariusmonsef via photopin cc

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Today, we saw an inordinate amount of funding announcements from startups based in Silicon Valley and in tech hubs around the world. As far afield as Japan, disruptive companies raised multimillions to bring their products to the next phase of growth.

Whether it’s 3D printing or a new take on enterprise search, here’s our list of today’s cool tech funding deals.

Not your grandmother’s search: SRCH2 launches ‘Google-like’ tech for the enterprise

SRCH2, the startup with a new take on corporate search, was founded by a group of ex-Googlers. Today, the Irvine-Calif. based company raised an undisclosed amount of seed capital from a roster of high-profile investors, including Data Collective’s Zachary Bogue and Matt Ocko, Redpoint’s Brad Jones, Horizen Ventures, and TenOneTen Ventures. Read the full story on VentureBeat. 

Chris Dixon and Andreessen Horowitz invest $30M in 3D printing marketplace Shapeways

If you weren’t sure whether this whole consumer 3D printing thing was going take off, Chris Dixon and Andreessen Horowitz may have answered your doubts. Dixon and company made a hugely symbolic $30 million investment in Shapeways, a 3D printing marketplace where designers may upload and print their 3D creations. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Japanese translation service Gengo gets $12M from Intel Capital

Gengo, a Tokyo-based startup specializing in people-powered translation, has just taken its second round of institutional funding. The deal, which totals $12 million, was led by Intel Capital with participation from previous investor Atomico as well as new investors Iris Capital, Infocomm (Singapore), NTT-IP (Japan), and STCV (Saudi Arabia). Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Infer raises $10M to help companies win customers with their data

Infer is a new predictive data applications company founded by the former architect of Yahoo BOSS Search Vik Singh.  The company claims its already profitable and counts Box, Jive, Yammer and others among its first competitors. The first round of funding was led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership, and Sutter Hill Ventures.

SkyKick raises $3.7M to hustle businesses onto Microsoft’s cloud

SkyKick publicly launched an application suite today to help migrate small and medium-sized businesses to Office 365. It also announced a new $3.7 million in funding. SkyKick is headquartered in Seattle. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Ad startup Nativo gets $3.5M

Another day, another online ad startup funding deal. Today, it’s a Nativo‘s moment in the sun. The startup’s first institutional round, totaling $3.5 million, comes from  Greycroft Partners with participation from Signia Venture Partner and e.ventures. Nativo makes a platform that lets advertisers and publishers deploy and manage native ad campaigns across multiple media properties.

Zooz’s people-first payments platform zooms off with $2M

Zooz is a payments platform that helps e-commerce vendors create the “ultimate checkout experience.” Today, the company announced closing $2 million in funding to add new products, customers, and partnerships. XSeed capital led the first institutional round. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Investor buys $2 billion of MSFT, says Microsoft ‘will win out’ as stock jumps 4%

Hedge fund manager Jeffrey W. Ubben disclosed that his fund, ValueAct Capital, has taken a $2 billion position in Microsoft stock, causing an almost immediate 4 percent jump in the stock. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Top image via Shutterstock

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Specifically, this strategy led to growing Udemy consistently 20 percent almost every month for the last few years, helping Lyft’s launch in LA be more successful than San Francisco, and a host of other successes that are not yet public.

What made us more effective than other growth hackers? We applied lean startup methodology to marketing (“Lean Marketing”). Of course, we’re not the only ones to do this, but somehow the art of customer development has been largely lost in the fad that is growth hacking.

To be an effective marketer, you can’t just be great at running and analyzing large swaths of data. That’s table stakes these days. Everyone knows how to A/B test, what the cost/benefits of each channel is, what viral marketing is, and the basics of LTV/CAC analysis.

With all of our obsession over quantitative (“performance”) marketing, we’ve forgotten one of the core ideas of building brands. Brands are built by understanding the customer. The better you understand the customer, the better you are at everything growth hacking:

• Copy and calls to action are more compelling. You pick words that convert the highest because you understand why customers will buy your product and what triggers their curiosity to learn more.
• Images convert better. You know who your customer is, what they look like, and what they’re attracted to.
• Better channels. You understand what your customer reads, where they eat, and who they follow on Twitter.
• Improved targeting. You’ll be able to create personas of your ideal target customers and use those to build better targeting on your ad spend.

The problem is that most growth hackers spend too much time in spreadsheets and not enough time out of the building. They obsess over numbers and prefer to work behind a screen. That’s a necessary skill set for effectively building viral loops and optimizing performance marketing campaigns, but it is not enough. Even the best marketers could be better if their initial tests were better. Say you have 50 ideas for copy that could work on a Facebook ad. How much time would it take to A/B test all 50 ideas? How much money?

What if instead, I could tell you what the top five of those ideas were with a reasonable level of reliability? All of a sudden, I’ve saved almost all that money and a hell of a lot of time. The best marketers know how to pick those five, and you can be one of the best too. Just get to know your customers better.

What’s the best way to know your customer? Meet them. Go out and do real user research — just like UX designers or lean startup entrepreneurs. Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Janice Fraser provided us with an incredibly good framework by which to do said research. Apply the same thing to marketing.

Three methods for success:

1. Interview your customer. Get out of the building and pick up the phone. Talk to your customers — at least five of them — and make sure they are fairly representative of your user base or target market (I usually find that after five, it’s repetitive).
2. Pitch your customer in person. Take what you learned from step 1 and start testing copy by pitching customers in person. If you are a food app, set up shop at a farmer’s market. If you are a payments company, go pitch startup entrepreneurs at a tech event. Whatever you’re selling, go to where people are buying and convince them. Iterate on your pitch constantly, and by the end of the day you’ll have an incredible understanding of your prospective user. This is often faster and far more cost-effective than A/B testing. Now you have a shortlist of amazing phrases that you can then A/B test the shit out of online.
3. Repeat periodically to “refresh” your understanding and test new ideas. Just like with Lean UX or Lean Startup, this process doesn’t end. It continues indefinitely — you and your team should constantly be bringing in users to interview them and understand their motivations for buying.

Ultimately, marketing is part art and part science. As a startup community, we’ve done a great job recently of perfecting the science. However, the best marketers are good at both. You can be too; just get out of the damn building.

Gagan Biyani is an entrepreneur and growth hacker. He co-hosts with Erin Turner the Growth Hackers Conference, which is on May 3, 2013 in San Francisco. Also, he has led marketing at marketplace startups Lyft and Udemy. You can follow him on twitter: @gaganbiyani.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

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This is a guest post by Boris Wertz

On Thursday, March 28, Canada announced that a new startup visa program would begin accepting applications.

Governments can be notorious for slow change, especially in the eyes of entrepreneurs who move at an incredibly fast-pace. But Canada’s federal government moved impressively quickly to implement this new visa, which is aimed at encouraging entrepreneurs from all over the globe to call us home.

What does the startup visa accomplish?

Immigrants — who are 30 percent more likely to start a business than non-immigrants, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration – can now be fast-tracked into Canada if they receive a $200,000 investment from a designated Canadian venture capital fund or $75,000 from a designated Canadian angel investor group. This makes it much easier for entrepreneurs to avoid bureaucratic red tape and the stress of immigration status uncertainty.

But the program doesn’t just make it easier for immigrants on a financial level. It makes it easier on a volume level as well. In 2012, a mere 700 of the old startup visas were issued, while the new program has carved a path for up to 2,750 entrepreneurs to launch their startups in Canada per year.

While the Canadian government is garnering praise for making the visa a reality, the truth is that in order for the program to come to fruition, everyone had to make it a priority: government, investors, and entrepreneurs worked together for two years to make things happen. Everyone, to use startup terminology, hustled.

How Summify provided the impetus for Canada’s startup visa

But what started it all? To find the answer, look no further than a Canadian startup success story: Summify. Romanian founders Mircea Paşoi and Cristian Strat overcame everything that was wrong with Canada’s old system, creating a popular company that was acquired by Twitter for a tidy sum in January 2012.

Summify’s founders came to Canada in 2010 to start their company and were quickly backed by top-tier venture capital. Yet Paşoi and Strat — who turned down Silicon Valley jobs at Facebook and Google to build a company in Canada — could only get six-month visas, forcing them to leave and return to the country repeatedly.

They also weren’t allowed to work for their own company because the old immigration law book considered the two entrepreneurs to be potential drains on Canadian society, even though the opposite was evidently true: Summify was creating jobs in Canada and attracting significant investment.

It was their story of frustration and adversity that inspired me and other Vancouver-based entrepreneurs Danny Robinson (co-founder of Perch) and Maura Rodgers (co-founder of Strutta) to lobby for an easier way for foreign technology entrepreneurs to start their company in Canada. Fortunately for us, the government expressed strong interest to push our initiative forward.

A startup visa for the U.S.?

So now you’re wondering, what about the U.S.? Where is its startup visa? And how did Canada — a smaller nation with a less established technology ecosystem — beat its neighbor to the South on this front?

It would be easy to argue that the U.S. doesn’t need any help attracting entrepreneurs. It has Silicon Valley, which was ranked by Startup Genome as (to no one’s surprise) the world’s best startup ecosystem. Entrepreneurs from every corner of the planet are naturally drawn to the Valley. But to make that argument would be to go against the very nature which made the Valley so successful: if the US sits back and watches other countries implement startup-friendly visa programs, it’s going to get left in the dust — just like when a big company is disrupted by a scrappy startup.

Startupvisa.com, a site dedicated to raising awareness about the situation, contends that U.S. immigration policies are “now hurting our competitive edge in the global economy.”

Last year, four of the world’s five top-ranked startup ecosystems were American cities. But Canada has two cities in the top 10 (Vancouver and Toronto) and a third in the top 20 (Waterloo). If Canada continues to beat the US to the punch on important issues such as these, it won’t be long before the tables are turned.

The importance of foreign entrepreneurs building their companies in the US cannot be underestimated. Few realize that nearly half of Silicon Valley startups are founded by immigrants. Without them, the Valley would not be the world-leading startup ecosystem that it is today.

But there’s a problem — this trend is reversing. From 1995 to 2005, foreign entrepreneurs founded 52 percent of Valley startups, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Yet since then, they’ve founded just 44 percent. A startup visa would get immigrant entrepreneurship back on track and allow Silicon Valley and the rest of America to retain its competitiveness.

Unfortunately, there’s a major drag on the U.S. initiative’s progress in the form of political battles. While in Canada everyone generally agreed the startup visa was simply about improving entrepreneurship, in the US the initiative became a political issue. And we all know, things don’t usually don’t move forward so long as they’re mired in politics.

Many Americans have made the startup visa a priority, like Canadians did — just not enough of the ones who have the power to make it a reality. With the legislation already out there, foreign entrepreneurs are now stuck in limbo as it sits in the House and the Senate. At this point, they still don’t know whether politics will push it past the finish line or kill it.

In the meantime, they can always apply for a Canadian visa.

Boris Wertz is one of the top tech early-stage investors in North America and the founding partner of Version One Ventures. His portfolio encompasses over 40 early-stage consumer internet and mobile companies, including GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce), Indiegogo, Top Hat Monocle, Indochino, Summify (acquired by Twitter), Wattpad, Sparkbuy (acquired by Google), Julep, Suite101, Yapta, Chloe & Isabel, Edmodo, and Flurry. Before becoming an investor, Boris was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com, which was sold to Amazon in 2008.

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You guessed it: startups.

U.S. immigration rules are extremely challenging for foreign-born engineers and founders to navigate, with many spending years and thousand of dollars working through the byzantine maze of rules and regulations … all while their businesses potentially languish and cofounders, employees, and customers suffer the consequences. Silicon Valley has been prominent in the fight – particularly around the Startup Act – to admit immigrants who want to start businesses and create jobs.

The precisely what Engine is working toward as well, with the backing of technorati like Google, SV Angels, 500 Startups, and many other technology-focused startups and organizations, such as Mozilla, Yelp, and the Startup Genome.

The problem, Engine’s Michael McGeary says, is that the startup community is typically underrepresented in government. Today’s speech is just the first step in redressing that imbalance and putting immigration — as well as startups’ other major concern, software patents — on the top of the government priority list.

Here’s the full text of McGeary’s presentation:

REMARKS, AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY MR. MICHAEL MCGEARY and ENGINE ADVOCACY BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON SMALL BUSINESS

Chairman Rice, Ranking Member Chu, Members of the Committee, thank you for having me here with you this morning.

I want to spend my time talking about issues that will impact the true engine of economic growth in this country: our startup community. Startups promise the rebirth – - and rejuvenation — of the American economy. Far from the idea held by many about startup life — of bespectacled youths in ironic t-shirts gallivanting around Downtown Palo Alto or the Flatiron in New York, spending their days writing code for the next great game about unicorns which we can all play on the subway on our way to work — the startup community in America reflects the best of American business. It’s dedicated men and women, working in coffee shops, and co-working spaces, office parks, and garages in Kansas City and Austin, and Nashville, and yes, San Francisco and New York, creating economic growth and multiplicative effects not seen in any other industry, helping power not just their own business, but in many cases countless others across the country.

These men and women have created all of the net new job growth in this country for the last quarter century, and according to our recent study, Technology Works, are projected to create 4.3 jobs in local communities for every job created in a technology concern.

It’s for these reasons, and so many others, that a few of us got together to form Engine Advocacy. For those unfamiliar with Engine, we got started about a year and a half ago with the intention of connecting the startup community with government at the federal, state and local level. We did so with an eye towards turning some of the workarounds, good ideas and innovative solutions to common problems faced by the startup community, into new legislation or government programs that can help make it just a little easier to start and run those businesses here in America.

We do that in a number of ways for a community that has largely been under represented in the halls of government. Our work is balanced between direct advocacy, convening our members from all over the country with leaders in government, and educating all of the players by arming them with good stories and strong data that point to the impact that startups can have in driving economic growth.

And that’s why I came here today. If you took a survey of startup founders and entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, developers, engineers, and the myriad others working in startups today, they would tell you that two issues more than any others threaten the promise and progress of their companies. These issues — immigration reform and software patent reform — are Engine’s immediate priorities and will form the basis of our advocacy work this year.

First, immigration: despite our historical competitive edge, we in the United States are facing a growing gap between the jobs we can create and the skills and employees needed to fill them.

In the long term, we need to continue to work to evolve our American education system to help power that growth and give young people the skills they need to compete in a global marketplace. But in the short term, we must also realize that our most valuable resource, talent, is already on our shores attending the University of Wisconsin, or Kansas University, or Stanford, and that, unfortunately, we seem to be looking for ways in the current system to send these smart, talented, entrepreneurial individuals either back to their countries of origin, or to places like Canada, Chile and South Korea where they have hung out the welcome sign to these promising minds, as we did for so long at Ellis Island and Angel Island. It’s imperative that we find a way to keep knowledge here, working and building business in America so that our economy can continue to grow and our businesses continue to thrive.

Second, for those who do stay and others who start business, another spectre is lurking, threatening to choke off innovation nearly at its source — the danger of patent trolling. According to recent findings by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, patent trolls, forgive me, “Non-Practicing Entities” account for 56 percent of all lawsuits filed against innovators. This environment creates a legal and regulatory thicket which many young companies of two and three people find incredibly hard and costly to navigate.

We must find smart ways to protect innovative intellectual property, and as the constitution says, to promote science and the useful arts. The current system in place does no such thing — in fact, it even threatens to chill innovation as young companies find fewer and fewer avenues for capital as the prospect of patent troll lawsuits grow.

In the end, what’s good for startups is good for small business on the whole, because startups power small business. Consider the single mom making jewelry in Boise who is able to sell to consumers all over the world thanks to Etsy. Or the rural doctor in Kansas who is better and more readily able to diagnose cardiovascular problems in a patient because of increased computing power, and new data culled from existing MRI scans paired with three-dimensional flow visualization — a technology being pioneered in our own office in San Francisco by Morpheus Medical. And the bakery in my neighborhood in San Francisco’s Sunset District that accepts credit card payments via Square on their iPad rather than having to buy a costly point-of-sale system. The promise and potential of America’s entrepreneurial future is also so much more — we can create gaming apps that distract and delight, but also technologies that save lives, bring people closer together, and allow us to see our world, and ourselves, from a reframed perspective.

Startups can power the next generation of growth in the American economy if we let them, and it will be in working with this committee and other allies in Congress which can allow for that future, our future, to be prosperous.

Thank you.

photo credit: laverrue via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Started a health-tech company? Apply for the Innovation Showdown at HealthBeat 2013 in San Francisco by April 19.

Facebook and Twitter are not the appropriate venues to share that your back is feeling achy or that your bowel is acting up.

Launching today, HealthKeep is a place for people to post about their everyday aches and pains and ask the community about potential symptom relievers. Unlike Facebook, it’s completely anonymous (rightfully so), so you won’t need to hide the gory or embarrassing details.

“People love to share about their health, but because of privacy issues, they shouldn’t use Facebook,” said founder Lyle Dennis (pictured, above) by phone. Sign up for a profile, and you’ll be asked about previous surgeries and procedures, as well as your date of birth, but your name will never be requested.

The site was founded by Dennis, a physician, a neurologist and self-described technofuturist. Dennis has been developing the site with a technical cofounder for over three years, so its database is fairly extensive: The site has profiles for every practicing physician in the country, which those physicians can “claim.”

Once a physician claims their profile, they can use the site to interact with patients and share resources, including medical discoveries and relevant articles. HealthKeep plugs into about 50 mainstream news sources, so it’s easy to share information.

For patients, it’s a means to interact with a community with similar health issues and keep a record of symptoms. If you post that you’ve developed a rash, this will remain on your “health timeline” and might be useful for your primary care physician to track.

HealthKeep’s user community is still small, as the founders haven’t done much marketing, but the company hopes to eventually compete with WebMD or HealthTap, which offers tips and advice from physicians.

I ask Dennis whether he envisions the site being used by hypochondriac types who obsessively monitor their health. “The majority of people assume they have cancer, no matter what the symptoms are,” he observed. “The site might help to allay these fears.”

In the future, Dennis plans to make money through targeted advertising. The site is a self-funded effort, and he hopes to close a seed round of venture or angel financing in the coming months.

Would you use something like this to share information about your health? Leave your feedback in the comments section below. 

This is a guest post by GoodData CEO Roman Stanek

For everyone giving European entrepreneurs a hard time, consider this: Christopher Columbus created a model for the modern entrepreneur to follow.

Think about it.

Columbus spent seven years pitching his business plan to Genoese bankers (the world’s first angel networks) before convincing Castile’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to fund his crackpot scheme. He underestimated the risks of the voyage — stocking only 60 days’ worth of food and water. And he had the confidence to turnaround a mutiny when common sense told everyone else to quit.

Rational people don’t take these risks. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, thrive off of them.

Over the years, I’ve realized Columbus was the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur — with the same personality traits that, for better or worse, we all share. I also recognized that insight into his personality can give all entrepreneurs greater understanding into their own motivations, enabling them to chart their own course to success.

So here are four lessons entrepreneurs can learn from Columbus.

Lesson #1: Confidence attracts money.

Columbus had the superhuman confidence he needed to raise the funds for his venture. His conviction that he could reach Asia by sailing west into the unknown, (at a time when sailors still hugged the shore), eventually persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella that a new route to Asia would disrupt Portugal’s monopoly on Asian exploration and give Spain new sources of commerce.

Today, that same self-assurance helps all entrepreneurs raise money. In fact, I’m convinced that the higher your confidence, the more likely you are to attract bigger valuations, build larger companies and gain customers.

Lesson #2: ‘Unreasonable’ risks achieve the impossible.

Like all entrepreneurs, Columbus also miscalculated the risks of his westward voyage, assuming the earth’s circumference to be only about 18,000 miles. This might surprise some, but I believe this is a critical component of an entrepreneur’s personality.

We constantly underestimate the risks involved when we start our ventures. It’s a kind of cock-eyed optimism that enables us to tackle hurdles when the more-cautious around us tell us we could never succeed. More than that, it pushes us and the people around us to achieve the impossible — much the way Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” drove colleagues, partners and suppliers to create insanely great products.

Lesson #3: Your belief in yourself is contagious.

An absolute faith in our vision also defines us as leaders. With it, for example, Columbus fended off a near-mutiny by convincing his crew that newly sighted birds and floating vegetation meant Asia was (literally) over the horizon. This may have been the first case in history of an entrepreneur being able to pivot a venture to capitalize on changing conditions. Today, every entrepreneur I know possesses this certainty to some degree.

It’s that certainty — in ourselves and in our vision of what the world will look like in six months or six years — that makes us successful leaders and able to rally our teams in adversity, drive them to excellence and attract customers.

Lesson #4: Technology founders have a competitive advantage.

The traits discussed above clearly define today’s entrepreneur. But I also know that the quintessential startup personality isn’t enough for success. Founders also need a deep understanding of the technologies and markets they aim to disrupt. Five hundred years ago Columbus was a navigational genius who understood the westerly Trade Winds better than just about anyone else.

Today, technical entrepreneurs have similar advantages. Andreessen Horowitz says they always invest in technical founders because they have the knowledge, the commitment, and the passion to achieve their goals. That’s especially important in the tech industry, where there’s a new trend almost everyday, and you can’t rely on business advisors to tell you how to steer your company. Instead, it’s for us to suss out which steps hold promise and which will lead to disaster.

Sadly, that’s where Columbus got it so terribly wrong. Despite his glowing reports back to Spain, Columbus had no riches to send back from the New World. In desperation, he forced Native Americans into slavery to dig for gold. And he was hated for it. Entrepreneurs can learn from that, too, and make it a point to never act out of fear.

Columbus might not have been the great hero that early history books make him out to be. Even so, I praise him. By charting a route to the New World, he showed that confident entrepreneurs willing to take great risks — and who can pivot at a moment’s notice — can achieve world-changing disruptions.

Isn’t that what being an entrepreneur is all about?

Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a company that offers a range of business intelligence software and reporting tools to help companies monetize big data. Prior to this, he was the founder of NetBeans.org, sold to Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, which was acquired by HP. Follow him on Twitter @RomanStanek 

Christopher Columbus via Shutterstock 

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If you’re a security startup you may want set up shop in Virginia, not Silicon Valley. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell officially opened the doors to a security-focused startup accelerator today called Mach37.

The accelerator is modeled in the same form as Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars, according to a release by the organization. Each year, Mach37 will accept two classes of startups that will be mentored by security industry veterans, technology professionals, and investors for a 90-day period. Those startups will receive a round of investment at the beginning of the session and another after the successful completion of a demo day.

Mach37 will be based out of Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology and is getting its first funding from the Commonwealth of Virginia. It will then look to private investors to fund the startup and keep the accelerator running.

At this point, only 8-10 companies will be admitted in each class, compared to the 40-50 companies Y Combinator admits. No word yet on how much money each startups will receive. The accelerator hopes, however, that the amount of advising and access to industry professionals will help speed up the time it takes to get these startups into the wild.

“The active ingredient that enables the accelerator to reduce startup development time is CIT’s sophisticated network of cyber experts, technologists and investors that will be integrated with entrepreneurs from the start of the 90-day session and throughout their early years of company formation,” said Virginia Secretary of Technology Jim Duffey in a statement.

A number of high-profile companies and organizations helped set up the accelerator, which Governor McDonnell hopes will make Virginia a destination for cyber security needs. These companies include Capital One, the CIA, DOD, Department of Homeland Security, General Dynamics, In-Q-Tel, Lockheed Martin, McAfee, New Enterprise Associates, and more.

Mach37 image via Mach37

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Skype founders Taavet Hinrikus and Niklas Zennström have teamed with überinvestor Peter Thiel, Virgin magnate Sir Richard Branson, and a handful of heavyweights from around the world in a new $100 million initiative to help startups.

The gist of the campaign: The partners will give away $100,000,000 in free international money transfers to help EU startups boost their international game.

“This innovative idea for shaking up the financial services sector while helping startups in a practical way has caught the eye of many new businesses already — as well as established brands like Virgin,” said Branson in an emailed statement on the news.

The transfers will be doled out to 1,000 young companies and will help the startups by minimizing bank fees for international financial transactions, from payroll and accounts payable to funding deals and office expansions.

“I remember all too well how depressing it was to throw away the precious little resources we had in the early days of Skype,” said Hinrikus in a statement. ”We didn’t have investment and were struggling — every pound and euro needed to count. Working between London, Tallinn, and Stockholm meant we were constantly wasting money on banking fees. It was important to me to do something about this for other startups when I got a chance.”

Interested startups two years or less from their launch date can apply online to participate in the program on a first-come, first-served basis. Each company can claim one voucher valid for one year and worth up to $100,000 in transfer fees. Applications will close on May 10.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Early stage startups are going to be happy with today’s funding daily. A new $282 million fund is being put to use in your honor.

Foundation capital raised the large sum of money and is scouring Silicon Valley and beyond for early stage startups to invest in. Indeed, all of the investments announced today had to do with a first or second round of funding.

So get excited, up and coming companies. It might just be your turn next.

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

Foundation Capital raises 7th funding of $282M for early stage startups

Foundation Capital announced its seventh fund today, a $282 million pool of money that the venture firm plans on investing in early-stage startups. Monlo Park, Calif.-based Foundation Capital has handled a total of $2.7 billion since it was first founded 17 years ago. This firm primarily invests in early-stage companies and plans to focus this current fund on consumer technology, information technology, and clean technology. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

ParElastic pulls in $5.7M for its NoSQL & NewSQL database alternative

ParElastic closed a $5.7 million first funding round today for its technology to help companies scale their cloud-based database. Founder and CEO Kenneth Rugg (pictured, above) said the company is delivering a solution so customers won’t need to change an application code or “move off the reliability of tried and true relational database servers.” Rugg is a former vice president at Progress Software, a public company that sells business infrastructure software. The funding comes from General Catalyst Partners with participation from existing investors, including Point Judith Capital. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Treehouse gets $7M to bring learn-to-code programs to high schools

Treehouse, a startup that’s a big part of the learn-to-code movement, has just closed a $7 million round of funding. Today, the company is also announcing it’s expanding its services to include high school classes in computer science. In the high school programs, Treehouse will come into schools with little or no computer coursework and will provide curriculum and virtual instruction, changing the lives of teens who might not otherwise get the opportunity to learn how the Internet really works. The second round of funding comes rom Kaplan Ventures and The Social+Capital Partnership. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Nexgate nets $3.5M from Sierra to track & protect your company’s social accounts

Enterprise social media protection and compliance startup Nexgate has raised $3.5 million in its first round of funding to protect businesses’ social media accounts from spam and hijacking, the company announced today. The new funding was led by Sierra Ventures, which focuses its efforts on early-state capital investment. Nexgate used to be called Social iQ Networks, and it launched a full enterprise suite in 2012 focused on discovering, protecting, and ensuring compliance for social media accounts associated with companies. Nexgate said its service is in use by “dozen multinational and enterprise” companies, but it hopes to push its service out to many more customers and improve its technology. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Eduson.tv brings business education to professionals in emerging economies with $1M in funding

As Brazil, Russia, India, and China advance towards the next stage of economic development, people in those countries want to advance their careers as well. Eduson.tv launched an online business education portal geared towards people in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries to help them improve their skill sets and earn a degree. The company raised $1 million from abel invests, including the founders of Groupon Russia. Although one-third of the courses are free, others charge enrollment fees and Eduson pays royalties to the lecturers. The goal is to add one new course a week. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Laughing baby image via Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Foundation Capital announced its seventh fund today, a $282 million pool of money that the venture firm plans on investing in early-stage startups.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Foundation Capital has handled a total of $2.7 billion since it was first founded 17 years ago. This firm primarily invests in early-stage companies and plans to focus this current fund on consumer technology, information technology, and clean technology.

Eight of the venture firm’s partners will invest from this funding, including Charles Moldow and Ashmeet Sidana who we chatted with last year about the state of venture capital and then unique relationship VCs have with each other. Moldow refers to it as “coopatition” a little cooperation and little competition mixed in together.

Some of the most well-known companies that Foundation Capital has invested in includes Chegg, Ebates, and Netflix.

Money image via Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Starting a company is a possible at any age.

To prove that innovation isn’t just a young man’s game, we gathered together a group of founders from successful companies like Box, Hubspot, and Poshmark.

These entrepreneurs say that it’s time we shattered Silicon Valley’s age bias. Many venture capitalists have openly stated their preference for funding bright-eyed, youthful founders. And thanks to initiatives like venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s “20 under 20,” which offers students $100,000 to forgo college, entrepreneurs are getting younger and younger.

“People under 35 are the people who make change happen,” said venture capitalist Vinod Khosla in 2011. “People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”

“It may sound bizarre to outsiders, but we — investors — are keen on paying a premium to partner with very young first-time founders that simply think differently before the rest of us,” said Niko Bonatsos, a principal at General Catalyst.

And yet, a number of reports have surfaced in recent years to reflect that more experienced entrepreneurs can think differently too. The Kauffman Foundation posted a report on how 5,000 startups launched in 2004 fared over time. They found that “firms surviving through 2008 were much more likely than firms that exited over the period to have primary owners older than age 45.”

Still, starting a company is a highly-personal decision. So if you’ve ever wondered what’s it like to start a company as a teen, twentysomething, or much later in life, this one’s for you.

Teens: ‘Why wouldn’t you invest in passion?’

Daniel Brusilovsky, 20, Founder of Teens in Tech

Brusilovsky’s is a Silicon Valley Internet boy genius. We have seen his star rapidly rise, only to crash and burn, and revive again.

TechCrunch offered the young hacker when he was 16. By 17, editor Michael Arrington had fired him for allegedly receiving bribes in exchange for coverage. Since then, he has gone on to launch his own organization, dubbed “Teens in Tech Labs,” and he now heads up business at Ribbon, a selling platform that prominent investor Tim Draper backed.

Most investors don’t have qualms about investing in teens, given that Facebook’s CEO Zuckerberg was just 19 when he launched theFacebook.com in a Harvard dorm room. “At a certain point, they can’t get much younger, or we’re going to be invested in preschool,” quipped venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in a recent interview with Reuters. Brusilovsky views teens as the most passionate and optimistic age group, and asked, “why wouldn’t you want to invest in that?”

In our interview, I asked about the core distinction between child stars in Hollywood and teen tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. “Unlike Hollywood, you don’t start a company for fame or to become a billionaire,” said Brusilovsky, who said teens are motivated to “fundamentally change the way that something is done.”

Words of wisdom? “Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you,” Brusilovsky said.

Other teen success stories: Summly was founded by Nick D’Aloisio at 15; Matt Mullenweg started Wordpress at 19; Jessica Mah started InDinero in her dorm room at age 19.

20s: ‘We have this focus on disruption and speed’

Aaron Levie, 28, cofounder and CEO of Box

The “grand slams” of entrepreneurship most often come from inexperienced twentysomethings, according to Forbes.

Why do college-age founders rule the pack? ”We have this focus on disruption and speed, and we’re high-energy,” said Levie, whose cloud company Box has raised almost $400 million in investment from high-profile investment firms like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and New Enterprise Associates.

Levie started Box when he was 20 to solve the problem he perceived in sharing files online, and he did not originally intend to sell to businesses. “You don’t know how the rules work so you can redefine how things get done,” he told me. “We were able to start from scratch without any preconceived notions.”

Best piece of advice? Levie recommends playing around with ideas during college or university, a time when there are “few responsibilities.”

Other twentysomething success stories: Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google at 25;  Apple’s cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were 21 and 26 respectively; 20-year-old Bill Gates formed Microsoft with 26-year-old cofounder Paul Allen.

30s: ‘We have grown into our ideal customer’

Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, both 33, cofounders of Atlassian Software

The Aussie cofounders of Atlassian Software say thirtysomethings are still crazy/energetic/naive enough to start companies but have the experience to “pinpoint the right problems to solve.”

Married with young kids, the software entrepreneurs say they have needed to cut down on travel and late nights. But days feel fuller, as they’re up by the crack of dawn to drop the kids off at school.

Thirtysomethings with family responsibilities (young kids, mortgages, car insurance payments, and so on) will struggle with the rigorous demands of starting a business. But on the other hand, they are likely to have a better work/life balance. Farquhar said he has learned to prioritize tasks over the years and won’t spend hours and hours plugging away at minor problems.

Words of wisdom: “The best time to be a boss is when you’ve just had a kid,” said Cannon-Brookes on a Skype call from the Sydney office. “I’m more understanding and encourage employees avoid getting burned out.”

Other thirtysomething success stories: Jeff Bezos started Amazon at 30; Ryan Howard started Practice Fusion at the age of 30; Jack Dorsey cofounded Twitter at 30; Jobs bought Pixar from LucasFilm at 31; Reid Hoffman cofounded LinkedIn in 2002 at 35; Elon Musk launched SpaceX at 31; Huddle cofounders Andy McLoughlin and Alastair Mitchell are 33-years-old.

40s: ’My time is freeing up on the other side’

Brian Halligan, 45, CEO of Hubspot; and Manish Chandra, 45, CEO of Poshmark

To find out what it’s like to start a company after 40, we spoke with two entrepreneurs at the same age but with very different life experiences.

Chandra is tackling a consumer space (women’s fashion) and has two teenagers at home, but said his time is starting to free up. Halligan has never been married, and he juggles a teaching gig at MIT and a successful business-to-business venture.

Still, they see benefits in starting a company later in life. Both would describe themselves as masters of focus and execution: “We have to achieve with less movement and more wisdom,” said Chandra. In other words, they are strategic about product, and revenues are top of mind.

Likewise, “gray hair” types, Silicon Valley’s moniker for mature founders, have a few key advantages in B2B space. Frankly, it’s easier to sell enterprise subscriptions to senior-level execs when you’ve got a few years on their college-age kids.

Experience and a network of contacts has proven beneficial, but Halligan still recommends pursuing entrepreneurship at a younger age if you can. ”Experience also builds fear,” Halligan told me.

Don’t assume that you’ll have work/life balance figured out at 40. “I have always worked a ton,” said Halligan, who is also a senior lecturer at MIT. “If someone fired me at Hubspot tomorrow, I’m sure I’d write a book and start another company.”

Words of wisdom? Chandra advises “staying relevant” when it comes to the latest tech. After making the decision to develop a mobile app, he went from being a bit of a Luddite to forcing himself to do everything on an iPhone.

Other fortysomething success stories: Ron Meritt, the founder of Meritt Electronics, started the company after being laid off from a corporate job at 44; Mark Pincus started Zynga at 41, Eric Schmidt was 46 when he joined Google in 2001; Sam Walton built Walmart in his 40s; Jobs’ most most significant innovations — iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad — came after he was 45.

50s: ‘I know about the old way, but I’m curious about what’s new!’

Wendy S. Lea, CEO of GetSatisfaction 

When Wendy S. Lea joined GetSatisfaction, it was just a 12-person team in a tiny office in San Francisco. “I fell in love immediately — we were taking traditional customer relationship management software and turning it on its head,” she told me.

The startup has benefited from Lea’s experience and contacts from large companies, like Oracle and Acclivus Solutions. As a fiftysomething executive, she’s independently wealthy, but she’s nowhere near ready to slow down. ”I’ve worked 15 hours a day for 15 years,” she said. “But, to borrow from the late Steve Jobs, I want to make a dent in the universe.”

Words of wisdom: Investors shouldn’t discount entrepreneurs with a heavy corporate background. If anything, it takes a lot of the risk out of an equation. “If you’re younger, you wouldn’t see the markets that need to be served,” said Lea.

Other fiftysomething success stories: Arianna Huffington started The Huffington Post at 54; Patti Lee-Hoffmann and Gayle Mills were approaching their 50th birthday when inspiration struck for Flutter Eyewear; Timbuk2 founder Rob Honeycutt raised funds for a hot new hardware project on Kickstarter; Peter Schoon started the Thinking Company in his 50s and wrote a book about the experience.

60s: ‘Build for your friends, wife, uncle — not just your kids’

Mark Snow, 63, CEO of SafelyFiled

“We know from our work and research that people in their 50s and older have a significant interest in entrepreneurship,” said Jodi Holtzman, the AARP’s senior vice president of Thought Leadership.

One such entrepreneur is Mark Snow, who recently launched a document storage system geared at seniors and professionals dubbed SafelyFiled.

When asked about the best time of life to start a business, the serial entrepreneur said, “when you’re very young or the kids are out of the house.” The choice between playing golf or launching a company was a no brainer. The bet appears to be paying off — he recently recruited a CTO, Terri Caldwell, who previously worked at Cisco Systems; and a senior engineer, Susan Hinrichs, who lectures on computer security at the University of Illinois.

Still, it takes guts to launch a startup in your 50s and 60s: “I could see it in their eyes — people thought I should be retiring,” said Snow.

Words of wisdom: Snow advises making sure your medical insurance is under control, especially if you decide to use your own money to build a prototype. He also suggests taking advantage of all the experience you’ve built up over the years. “Don’t think of the computer first,” he said. “Think of it second — and build for your friends, wife, uncle — not just your kids.”

Other older success stories: Mac Lewis started FieldSolutions in 2006 at the age of 60; Liz Dahl, 61, started the travel website Boomeropia.com; Poppy Bridger, owner of Anaheim Test Labs, started the company at 72; the infamous Colonel Sanders launched his business at the age of 65, using his first Social Security check as his seed funding.

At what age did you start your first business? When wouldn’t it have been possible for you to juggle the demands of a startup with a personal life? Let us know your story in the comment section below. 

photo credit: jdlasica via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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It’s been a big day for the deals beat with Marketo and Tableau filing for hotly-anticipated IPOs.

It’s also the beginning of a furious startup funding season in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs. We saw a significant uptick in funding today; almost a dozen companies closed rounds in diverse industries, such as sports, consumer-tech, and political-tech.

But as always, in this funding mayhem, VentureBeat has you covered. Check out the full list of deals here in no particular order.

Auctionata modernizes the auction house with $20M from VCs

Auctionata claims to be the first patented online producer of live auctions. And today, the company announced investors are throwing down $20.2 million to support global expansion, recruiting, and product development. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

ElectNext gets $1.3 million for its open political database

The political news media has a new weapon: ElectNext. The company gleans its information from organizations like The Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack, and Follow the Money, and it also works with open data-friendly cities like Philadelphia. Its political database can now be used by publishing partners like Hearst and The Washington Post. Read the full story on VentureBeat. 

Arkansas’ Collective Bias storms marketing scene with $10.5M in funding

This “social shopper media company” connects brands with consumers through its Social Fabric community of 1,400 influencers. These influencers tell “real-life” stories about their shopping experiences and product usage and share them on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Deep pulls in $10m in first round funding

“Big data” startup Deep Information Sciences (formerly known as CloudTree) raised $10 million from Robert Davoli and others to help its customers with a “new approach” to database architectures. The flagship product is a database appropriately called DeepDB, and it provides simultaneous transactions and analytics in the same data set in real time. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Grand St. grabs $1.3M from First Round & others for its ‘creative tech’ marketplace

There are many places you can buy cool technology products on the web — ThinkGeek, Wantful, Amazon, etc. But the next place on your list of sites to buy from might just be Grand St., an online marketplace for buying “creative technology” products that has received $1.3 million in new seed funding. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

South Asian lingerie conglomerate gets $20M for its enterprise management solution

Attune is a provider of technology solutions for the fashion and lifestyle industry. Today, the company announced a $20 million round of investment to expand its offerings “across all areas of the fashion and lifestyle value chain” to help brands to streamline and manage their operations and optimize their performance. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Sport Ngin revs up with $6M in Series C financing

Sports software provider Sport Ngin (formerly known as TST Media) closed a $6 million round led by El Dorado Ventures. Sport Ngin creates web and mobile solutions for youth, amateur, and professional sports organizations, which powers the online presence of more than 100,000 sports teams, leagues, clubs, association, tournament, facilities, and businesses around the world. This funding will support the company’s growth and accelerate product development, as well as marketing and sales efforts.

Favourit’s investors place $3.6M bet on betting

Favourit launched globally today and revealed $3.6 million in funding to expand its social sports betting platform. This Melbourne, Australia-based startup provides sports fans and bettors an online forum to wager virtual currency or real cash in regulated markets. Favourit’s “Facebook for the sports betting world” is a community that connects sports fans and their friends with licensed betting operators. The round was raised through angel investors.

Appland enter the Middle East, raises $1M

Appland has secured $ 1million for its white label app store platform. Today, the company also announced entering the Middle East through a partnership with Saudi Telecom Company. Appland’s technology supports on-click operator billing, soil marketing, virtual currency, and geo-location targeting. Appland is based in Sweden and has offerings for Androird, iOS, and Blackberry.

CreditKarma gets $30M to help flustered Americans track their credit scores

Instead of charging people $10 or so per month to monitor their scores, Credit Karma offers the service for free, supplementing it with tools for tracking other financial information like bank accounts, bills, mortgages and loans. It’s a powerful, effective, and potentially very lucrative tool — which is why it’s no surprise to see that Credit Karma has raised $30 million in a big Series B round led by Ribbit Capital and Susquehanna Growth Equity. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

KeepTree Announces $2.62 Million Investment from Japan’s Faith Inc. & Others

KeepTree, a developer of a new video messaging technology that allows people to record videos and deliver them immediately, or at a future date and time, today announced it has secured a $2.6 million investment led by Japan-based Faith, Inc, a mobile technology development firm. The Company will use the funding to expand its team and to drive the ongoing development of its business and technology.

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Professional women still want to rock the trends — but don’t want to add to an already overflowing closet.

E-commerce entrepreneurs like Mary Wu (pictured) are experimenting with a new model, a “Netflix for clothing.” Rather than buying a new dress, why not rent one and return it when it’s no longer in style?

For $25 a month, Wu will send you a monthly “box” filled with clothing from stores like Zara and H&M. Boxes can be ordered on the website CoutureSQD by theme, such as professional or date night. Each box contains three outfits, which you can keep for as long as you want. 

“I follow trends and see what’s popular,” said Wu, who developed the website on her own. “A lot of women are like me in that they wear 20 percent of their clothing, 80 percent of the time.”

Wu’s customers will get the satisfaction of wearing a new outfit, but won’t slide into debt. The website just launched, so only about 100 women have signed up, but Wu is confident about her chances with the twenty and thirtysomething professional set.

Websites like RentTheRunway.com are already well-established among young professionals who can’t afford to buy a designer dress, but are willing to fork over about $100 for a one-off rental. CoutureSQD works differently as it’s a subscription service, and specializes in lower-end trendy apparel for everyday use.

This subscription model is tried and tested when it comes to other areas of fashion; Rocksbox focuses on high-end jewelry, Shoedazzle focuses on designer shoes, and TieTry lets people rent fancy ties by mail.

Similarly to these sites, when you want to return the items, CoutureSQD will send a prepaid shipping label by email. The company covers the cost of dry-cleaning, so you won’t need to run the clothes through the wash. If you happen to like an item of clothing and want to keep it, Wu will sell it to you at a discounted price.

The site is still in the early-stages of development, but Wu has identified a strong pain-point. In the coming months, she hopes to recruit additional team-members, and procure a round of angel funding.

“The whole purpose of this is to help women mix and match, and try fashion at a lower-risk,” said Wu.

Would you use a subscription clothing service like this one? Let us know in the comment section below. 

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This month, I participated in an epic hack trip on the “StartupBus” — and it was the 12th hackathon I’ve been a part of in as many months.

I love everything about hackathons. The idea of simultaneously building relationships, teams and products for a fleeting moment under various constraints is fascinating, exciting and educational — and most of all, fun.

But post-judging, participants typically feel disillusioned. When they don’t win, the team is bitterly disappointed. When they do win, they argue over who gets what part of the prize. It happens nearly every time.

I’ve watched this again and again, and thought, “Isn’t this just about having a good time? Just relax!”

On the StartupBus from San Francisco to Austin, I got to know lots of brilliant, friendly people and was inspired by the ideas and passion of every team involved in the event. For those unfamiliar, it’s an annual 72 hour hackathon on a bus ride to the tech conference SXSW.

If there’s a better way to transition from a group of strangers to a tight-knit group of friends in 72 hours, I have yet to see it. From the lack of sleep to the sprints of work to the downtime without internet to the confined space to the rest stops to the steady stream of alcohol to the hard, looming deadline; everything about StartupBus seems designed to make you walk away with some new best friends.

As the week progressed, six buses from six cities converged in San Antonio. Emotions, stress and energy fluctuated aggressively. After the first round, half the teams were eliminated. After the second round, half the teams were eliminated. In the final round, 8 teams remained — mine included.

Each time we progressed, I was thrilled to see my team move forward, but disheartened to see the road end for other teams that worked just as hard as we did. And after each round, there was more chatter of disillusionment around the whole event. In some cases it was petty, while in others totally justified (as was the case for the teams Robert Scoble was admittedly disrespectful to.)

In the final hours, my team rallied and got really excited about our prospects in the event. We perfected phrases, designed a pitch deck, planned transitions and talked about what would happen if we won. Then we lost.

Shortly after, we joined in on the negativity party. “The judges didn’t understand our product vision,” we said. One brilliant losing team had built an anonymous chat platform called Ghostpost, so without missinga beat they created a #losers room where we could all complain behind the cloak of anonymity. One person even complained on StartupBus’ public blog. Nearly every losing team was complaining about something, myself included.

It took me a bit to realize that I was engaging in the same exact behavior I’ve watched with bemusement at past hackathons.

Once I realized that, I looked around me. I saw a group of people whom I know will be successful as they push onward, because I’ve seen them go through hell and still come out on top.

Suddenly, I was smiling again. The event was never about prizes and pitches and organizers and judges and equity. It was hardly even about product development and traction. StartupBus was about people and shared experience, and I got my fair share of each.

I’ll never forget being in a taxi at four in the morning with five people from five different countries, all of whom made the bold decision to go out to the San Antonio bars despite having slept just a handful of hours in several days. I’ll never forget working until 6am in a random town in New Mexico, as the rising sun glistened on the self-proclaimed “World’s Largest Chili Pepper” outside the hotel.

Most importantly, I often think about that ephemeral moment when I came together with three strangers and nothing mattered except moving our project forward, regardless of the outcome. Those strangers are now my friends.

Next time you find yourself at a hackathon, consider this: If you and your team want that first place iPad Mini so badly, couldn’t you find a couple of hours of contract work and buy it? If that decidedly easier path to the prize isn’t as alluring, then think for a minute about why you’re participating in the hackathon.

And if you win, great. Winning is fun, and the aspect of competition is key in making hackathons fun. Of course, I wish I had won StartupBus.

But if you participate in hackathons just to win hackathons, then you’re missing the point.

Austin Smith is the community manager at Singly, a service for transmitting personal data between applications. 

Follow him on Twitter @awwstn

photo credit: hackNY via photopin cc

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This is a guest post by Getaround cofounder Jessica Scorpio

When my co-founders and I founded Getaround at Singularity University back in 2009, we believed we were on to something big. People we knew experienced that clear “a-ha moment” when we explained how sharing cars with people nearby could help fight the problem of car overpopulation.

What concerned us, however, was that we kept hearing reasons why it wouldn’t work. People were concerned with the risks — insurance, fears around sharing a car with a stranger — they asked, how would we ever convince investors to share the risk with us?

We spent the next year working to build our technology. During that time we also addressed the primary risks by passing car sharing legislation in the State of California, and securing a primary insurance policy through Berkshire- Hathaway. With all the pieces in place, it was time to seek funding.

By August 2012, we had a raised a $3.4 million seed round, and announced a $13.9 million first round led by Menlo Ventures and other amazing investors like Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher and Innovation Endeavors.

We have been fortunate to have raised great rounds, from amazing investors — but fundraising was one of the most stressful events of my life. Despite having seasoned entrepreneurs on our team, none of us had ever raised funds before.

I recently spoke about early stage funding at Startup Grind in Mountain View. Here are the funding tips I shared with the audience:

Pick your launch pad

Today, there are countless platforms to launch your business. Before you choose a conference, hackathon or accelerator program, consider this time and space as a launch pad for your business and an important step in your funding endeavors.

Given the connection, many of our first investors were also from Singularity. That initial investment allowed us to found the company and turn our big idea into something real. From there, we spent the next bootstrapping with angel funds, solving major problems that stood in our way, and building our product to get ready for our official launch.

Raise on a high point

After our year of bootstrapping, we made our big debut on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011. At that time, we had already closed over 80 percent of our seed round and our Tech Crunch win definitely helped secure a few key investors to close out the round.

Raising funds on a high note, like a product launch or major award or recognition, can help you capitalize on your momentum in a real way and helps to create a sense of urgency among potential investors, which is never a bad thing.

Choose the best cheerleaders

Late in 2011, we started raising our first round. We already knew who we wanted to meet with with, and headed straight into coffee meetings and official pitches. And we did that all day, everyday, for three months. Those months of hard work ended with our team, sitting around a table, surrounded by term sheets — and totally stressed.

Choosing your investors is like choosing a life partner — it’s a huge commitment and it’s fine to be very picky. In the end, we chose investors who were passionate about the same goals we are. We also looked for investors who could bring experience, patience, and are supportive of the founders.

At the end of the day, raising funds is a stressful, but necessary part of being an entrepreneur. You and your co-founders are going kill yourself trying to make it happen, you’re not going to sleep, and you’re definitely not going to get any other work done.

Plant your seeds properly, strike while the iron’s hot, surround yourself by great people, and you’ll get it done.

Jessica Scorpio is a founder and Director of Marketing at Getaround, a peer-to-peer carsharing company.

Scorpio previously founded IDEAL, a not-for-profit network for entrepreneurs and young leaders.

photo credit: Jonno Witts via photopin cc

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For a billionaire, Scott Cook sure does talk a lot about failure, especially if he’s learned a valuable lesson from a screw-up.

Cook is the founder of Intuit, a corporation with almost 10,000 employees that sells financial management products to individuals and small businesses. To illustrate the company’s reach, CEO Brad Smith is fond of saying that 20 percent of the country’s GDP flows through Quickbooks, Intuit’s small business accounting software. The company pulls in about $4 billion in revenues annually.

Cook is also one of the most outspoken fans of “lean startup,” an ethos that espouses rapid prototyping, a small budget, and an acceptance of failure.

Employees with a new idea can earn up to $1 million in prize money.

How has this made Intuit any different from any other large and bureaucracy-laden company? About four years ago, Cook watched a video clip of Lean Startup author Eric Ries and shared it with Smith.  The pair reached out to invite Ries to the headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

The lean startups trend targets startups, not the Fortune 500, but Ries took the call. “When Scott Cook calls you, you do what he says,” he later told Forbes. Shortly after, Intuit brought him in so could present ideas to its workforce on the most pressing problems facing small businesses — and think up potential solutions.

A product demo from a recent “innovation” day at the Intuit offices.

At Intuit’s recent demo day, employees presented some of these new product ideas to the media. Many of them were merely at the prototype stage and included a local business recommendations service intended to provide more detail than Yelp.

Intuit has subsequently formalized a 10 percent “innovation time” policy, which borrows from the example of its neighbor, Google, giving all employees 10 percent of their time to work on new projects. Due to these efforts, Intuit is a rare example of a tech company with a seal of approval from another lean startup guru, Steve Blank. “Scott has nailed it,” he said in a recent interview.

Cook examines how he brought startup thinking to a 30-year-old business.

VentureBeat: What was your reaction when you first saw Ries’ presentation?

Scott Cook: I saw him present and thought, “This guy is explaining what we’re doing better than us.” We wound up being a chapter in his book. After we brought him on, it was an uneven process. Some teams were great; others needed a lot more work. Now we do these public coaching sessions. He’ll come in, and and we’ll broadcast it to the entire company. One of the teams will pitch for five minutes and will receive another 10 minutes of coaching. We have learned so much — you can see people’s jaws drop.

VentureBeat: Intuit is a such a long-standing company, but you refer to it as a “startup.” …

Cook: We work with small businesses. You have to try an entrepreneurial ethos before you understand them. So we had to change the culture of the company to be more experimental — we want them to get entrepreneurial ideas in front of customers for real use.

VentureBeat: How do you attract entrepreneurially-minded employees — and keep them around? 

Cook: We make it easy for anyone to get free resources. Anyone can launch an idea for five minutes. Anyone can comment on, add and enhance the idea. Need a designer? We provide an entrepreneurial matching system without the bosses getting involved. And in terms of unstructured time, we have a permission for that.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about learning from failure. …

Cook: We have always been open and honest about it. We use more recent examples of failures and learning from them. The Intuit health debit card, for instance, came out of a total failure. We launched a product in test expecting 100 users to sign up. They got four. So the team went back to understand what had happened and ended up learning enough for a whole new business.

In India, we did a test where two-thirds of signups were fraud. We learned by accident by being cheated by vendors about another segment that was bigger than the one we initially went after. The product is called “Fasal” and helps improve the income of farmers.

VentureBeat: How embedded is entrepreneurship in Intuit’s culture? Could an intern approach you with an idea? 

Cook: People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you’ll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I’d rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.

Top image courtesy of Intuit // Intuit office images via Christina Farr, VentureBeat

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If you didn’t see a wide open market for custom T-shirts, I wouldn’t fault you.

But a startup called Teespring is generating a huge buzz at Y Combinator’s demo day. The company presented today to a roomful of investors and press, and announced that it pulled in $750,000 in revenues in a single month.

“We turn affinity into money,” said founder Walker Williams. The company has tapped into niche communities on social sites like Facebook or Reddit. For instance, a Facebook page with several thousand “likes” for dedicated fans of “big trucks and bonfires” might want to offer its community a custom T-shirt.

The company hopes its sales will eclipse chief competitor Threadless by the end of the year. Developer groups like Node.js and Hacker News are already customers, and the company intends to boost sales by lining up celebrity spokespeople.

As we reported earlier this month, Teespring was started at Brown University when the campus community reacted to a police raid at a local bar. The founders realized that a T-shirt would bring students together in a common cause.

The company has a unique model that caters to amateur marketers and merchandisers. A community group creates a T-shirt, uploads it to the Teespring website, and then hosts an embedded sales page on its own site. If enough are ordered, the shirt goes into production.

I was introduced to Teespring through Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, who also serves as an advisor to Y Combinator’s startups on the East Coast. Ohanian said he’s a “huge fan” as it makes merchandising easier for startups and community groups.

“[Merchandising is] a huge pain for lots of reasons, and they’ve brilliantly solved it by making a solution that’s both economical and high-quality,” said Ohanian.

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Startup founders often make bold claims about disrupting entire industries. Dr. Tom X. Lee is one such entrepreneur, but in this particular case, his company is already shaping the future of healthcare.

Dr. Lee is the founder and CEO of One Medical Group, a chain of concierge primary care practices operating under the tagline, “The doctor’s office. Reinvented.”

As a long-time customer, I can attest that this marketing speak isn’t an exaggeration. Feeling unwell? Book a same-day appointment online or via a smartphone app at your nearest doctor’s office, show up, fill out a form or two, and you’ll be seen within minutes.

Dr Tom X Lee, One Medical’s CEO

Dr Lee is a physician-turned-entrepreneur who received an MD from the University of Washington and MBA from Stanford University. ”It was pretty clear in my medical training that the goal was to practice old-school medicine,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat.

“I noticed that the system was broken — it was really confusing, patients weren’t happy, doctors weren’t happy,” he explained.

The model proved to resonate with customers, so the group has been opening offices in new markets, including Boston and New York. And today, it just closed its sixth round of funding led by Google Ventures with participation from existing investors, including Benchmark Capital and DAG Ventures.

One Medical may not be a Silicon Valley startup in the traditional sense, but it has embraced technology from the outset. Patients can use a mobile app to schedule an appointment or refill a prescription, or chat with a doctor via instant message. For this reason, it has been an attractive option for Silicon Valley’s tech investors, and has raised $77 million to date.

Dr. Lee spent six months undercover to root out the biggest flaws with the current system. He worked in a large and unnamed primary care practice in various occupations, including nurse, administrator, physician and secretary. During that time, he learned that doctors are “overburdened” with personel, and held back by paper-based systems.

“What we are trying to do is introduce a small local office solution that has the technology infrastructure of a Kaiser, Mayo Clinic, or University of San Francisco,” he said.

By reducing overhead and administration, the company has also been able to offer medical care at a cheaper rate.

The group accepts almost all insurance plans, including PPOs and HMOs, but asks that customers pay $149 a year to support those who don’t have insurance, and enable the company to invest in new technology. For those without insurance, it costs about $150 a visit, which is still cheaper than most alternatives.

One Medical currently boasts 23 offices around the country with 13 in the SF Bay Area, six in New York, two in Washington, D.C. and one each in Chicago and Boston, and more planned to open this year.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The market is flooded with addictive mobile apps that generate millions of downloads but not millions (or even thousands) of dollars.

Where does this leave mobile-focused investors?

Skeptical, to say the least. “Millions of users does not translate into millions of dollars in revenue,” said Jenn Wei, an investor at Silicon Valley-based Blumberg Capital. In New York, FirstMark Capital’s Matt Turck shares similar concerns. He refers to mobile apps and games as a “trickier group” to fund because they have traditionally been so focused on user acquisition.

According to Sidecar cofounder Jahan Khanna, that tech entrepreneurs build apps that people think are cool — but not worth paying for — compounds the problem. “While these seem aligned, they often are not,” he said, and as a result, mobile startups often hemorrhage cash.

He continued, “The original Harlem Shake video has over 40 million views on YouTube. What does that make that dance worth?”

However, the language is starting to change. In Silicon Valley, we are starting to see a shift from observing user acquisition metrics to a more comprehensive view on engagement and retention.

One million people signing up for a service might not make it valuable, but investors are more confident to hear that 250,000 people use an app three times a week for six months.

Likewise MoPub’s CEO Jim Payne is confident that today’s mobile startups are currently investing in “resources in building and generating revenue from those users” will see success in the next two or three years.

“Many times, experts from desktop are taking their playbooks and tailoring them to the smaller screen with a lot of success,” said Payne, whose company specializes in mobile monetization.

‘We’re still early in the second inning’

According to Accel Partners’ resident mobile expert, Richard Wong, we’re still “early in this second inning” when it comes to this mobile monetization game. Indeed, his current portfolio (Angry Birds, MoPub, MobileSpaces) is poised to generate solid returns for his firm.

For mobile entrepreneurs, experimenting with new business models is part of the fun.

Mobile developers can make money by charging users and/or through third-parties who will pay to access a subset of those users. For instance, Angry Birds takes advantage of its hooked players by charging them $0.99 per download. Later, its parent company Rovio Entertainment turned the brand, which had become a household name, into lucrative licensing and merchandizing deals.

“Hard to believe it was possible to build a true global brand from a smartphone game in under three years,” said Wong, an investor in Rovio. In March, players had reportedly downloaded the Angry Birds games 1.7 billion times.

“Freemium” models have generated revenues for companies like the digital notebook app Evernote, which offers a free version for free but also offers customers a paid option to unlock special features. Meanwhile, social games publishing giant Zynga has experienced mixed success in its attempt to entice users to fork over real cash in exchange for virtual goods.

A model that works: Selling physical services

Stripe cofounder John Collinson

A cadre of mobile startups are making money by facilitating a physical service, and then taking a commission. It’s a business model that is lucrative enough — startups like Lyft and Sidecar haven’t needed to jeopardize user experience with in-app advertising.

“When you’re providing a real-world service [rather than a virtual good] that’s a more straightforward value for users,” Lyft CEO Logan Green told me.

Stripe cofounder John Collison said these opportunities have been unlocked by the evolution of mobile payment technology. Stripe is a service that makes it easy for developers to accept payments on the web and on mobile.

“With frictionless payments it becomes easier and easier to build an ongoing purchasing relationship with a customer on a mobile phone,” Collison said.

Lyft, Postmates [the founders are pictured, top], and Sidecar have made the payment experience as pain-free as possible.

With both Lyft and Sidecar, you can order a nearby car with a few taps. Riders only need to enter credit card details once, which makes them more likely to make future requests for rides.

The services also make money in a similar manner (taking a commission from each ride, which users pay for with a “suggestion donation”). Khanna said it’s working, but the company won’t rest on its laurels. ”It’s early in this industry’s life cycle, so much is left to be flushed out.”

“We expect more and more businesses to build delightful experiences like this in the future,” Collinson explained. 

However you choose to make money, most investors agree that the key is to consider revenue models from the outset. The trap that many entrepreneurs fall into is to assume they’ll make money after they reaching some arbitrary milestone.

To inspire your business strategy, we spoke to a group of entrepreneurs from startups like Lyft, Poshmark, Postmates, and Stripe. Here’s what they had to say.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Does your company rely on mobile workers? If it does, the worker likely is a “+1,” an employee who carries both a mobile device and a tablet And those mobile workers who need to access data may be using a consumer cloud like Dropbox, SkyDrive or Google Drive to get that access.

This mass migration of data to the consumer cloud, however, all happening without much IT oversight and control, may give rise to potential exposure to unknown security risks to the company. If you follow the industry, you’ve seen that there have been data breaches at consumer cloud providers.

The cloud also has given rise to lawsuits. For example, Dropbox was sued in federal court in California in a class action suit regarding alleged data security issues; the case was dropped later that year. And LinkedIn, a cloud provider of a different nature, was sued in federal court in a proposed class action arising out of an alleged hack, although it recently won a motion to dismiss the action.

Sony’s PlayStation Network, another form of the cloud, was hacked, allegedly facilitated by another cloud provider, and Sony was sued both by consumers and some of its insurance companies. Sony’s general liability insurance company, Zurich American Insurance Company, then added insult to injury by suing Sony rather than providing coverage. Zurich has asked the court to rule that other Sony insurance policies would cover the claim before Zurich’s policy, in addition to asking for rulings that Sony’s general liability insurance policies do not provide coverage for the data breach claims.

So what kind of risk do companies face when their mobile workers are using the cloud, and will their insurance cover cloud-based risks? Let’s take a look.

What are the risks?

There are two general categories of risks and potential liabilities for users of the cloud: first-party risks and third-party risks. Generally speaking, first-party risks include lost income or business because of a cloud outage, the inability to access the cloud, or lost data. Third-party risks include the cloud user’s potential liability to customers or to various governmental or regulatory entities. These potential risks include lawsuits or claims from third parties resulting from a data breach or other cyber event. Other risks, which may be seen as both first- and third-party costs, include the costs to provide notifications after data breaches (if those costs are not the responsibility of the cloud provider), payment card industry (PCI) liabilities, and other data breach- and privacy-based costs.

Will your insurance cover the risks?

When considering a move to the cloud, give thought to one of your company’s most important assets – its insurance policies. The importance of time spent with your broker and outside insurance coverage counsel to discuss and understand the potential scope of coverage under your company’s insurance policies as it relates to cyber and privacy risks is amplified when thinking about moving to the cloud.

The best place to start this analysis is, first, by reviewing your company’s cyberinsurance policy. (Haven’t bought a cyber insurance policy yet? Click here for some helpful tips for when your company does consider purchasing that type of insurance policy.)

Next, take a close look at your company’s entire portfolio of insurance policies. Coverage may be available under traditional forms of insurance such as commercial crime, first-party property, and commercial general liability (CGL) policies. Regarding commercial crime policies in particular, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found coverage for a data breach (though not necessarily related to the use of the cloud) under a computer fraud endorsement to a crime insurance policy for certain costs relating to a data breach. Also consider whether business interruption or contingent business interruption coverage within a first-party property insurance policy would provide coverage for a cloud-based interruption.

Companies should not assume that their insurance companies will agree that coverage for cyber risks related to the cloud is provided by so-called traditional forms of insurance. To protect against such risks, companies may look to cyber insurance policies that are marketed expressly as providing coverage for cyber-related loss.

What should companies look for when considering insurance for cloud-related risks?

Cyber insurance comes in many forms and variations. This growing insurance marketplace has led to a variation in forms and coverages being offered by insurance companies.

1. Look at whether cloud computing is covered specifically, and, if not, how broadly the coverage is written.

In the past, it was rare to see cloud computing in a cyber insurance policy, but now certain insurance carriers have started using that term in their forms. If the insurance policy specifically references the cloud, determine whether any special terms and conditions apply. Consider whether there are specific exclusions or coverage limitations specific to cloud-based risks.

For those policies that do not use the term “cloud” or “cloud computing” specifically, pay close attention to terms such as “network” or “computer system,” as those terms may affect directly the scope of coverage for cloud-based risks. Also, pay attention to limitations on the use of outsourcing, vendors, or other third-party service providers. Those terms may be written in a way that could encompass the outsourcing of hosting or support. If so, the insured should have a strong argument that cloud services are covered.

2. Determine whether sublimits and deductibles or retentions apply to cloud-related risks.

Modern insurance policies typically have limits of coverage that apply, capping the total amount of insurance that is available under the policy. Some policies have sublimits. Policies that contain sublimits of coverage may result in lower insurance policy limits being available for certain risks or types of claims. For example, an insurance policy may have a total policy limit of $10 million, but a sublimit of $5 million for cloud-based claims.

Also note that certain insurance policies have deductibles or self-insured retentions that apply to cloud-based risks. If so, that could limit the total amount of true coverage available for claims.

3. Consider the geographic scope of coverage.

Some cyber-security insurance policies, like first-party property insurance policies, may contain coverage based on events or incidents that take place in a certain territory, such as the United States, or for events or incidents that take place within a certain distance from the policyholder’s place of business. Considering the geographic limitations of a cybersecurity insurance policy is critical, in light of cloud providers and other vendors that may host data and software outside of the United States, as well as the increased amounts of global travel for company employees.

For companies based outside of or doing business outside of the United States, consider the issue in reverse: will the insurance policy cover any risks related to data sovereignty issues for countries outside the United States, for data hosted inside the United States (and outside those countries’ borders)?

4. Consider the scope of coverage for first-party risks relating to the cloud.

Companies should pay close attention to the scope of insurance coverage afforded for first-party losses relating to the cloud. If the company is unable to access the cloud for data, applications, or other purposes, how will the insurance apply?

Would another insurance policy, such as a first-party all risks insurance policy, apply if the risk was based on a weather-related incident? Would the cybersecurity insurance policy apply if there was a denial of service attack at the cloud provider? How long must the service be unavailable before the insurance policy provides coverage, and must the outage be continual?

5. Analyze the terms and conditions of contracts with cloud providers.

Companies also should look carefully at their contract with their cloud provider to understand what it will and won’t do for them in case of future issues. Cloud users should consider which company bears the risk of a data breach, and how much liability is transferred or retained for first-party risks, such as cloud unavailability. That knowledge will help companies in their risk transfer processes.

Scott Godes is an attorney with Dickstein Shapiro LLP. He is the Leader of the Intellectual Property Insurance Practice within the Insurance Coverage Group. He devotes a significant portion of his practice to representing corporate policyholders and insureds in complex disputes with their insurance companies. He also counsels policyholders regarding risk management and insurance coverage issues. He may be reached at godess@dicksteinshapiro.com. Mr. Godes also writes the award winning Corporate Insurance Blog and is on Twitter @insurancecvg.

Image credit: The Geffen Company

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