Startup News Archives - Page 5 of 53

Tennessee Startup Bus Knows How to Travel in Style

“We’re not taking a Greyhound,” Steve Repetti told me Saturday night at the orientation for the Tennessee Startup Bus. Well, that was an understatement.

Currently wrapped in the logos of sponsors LaunchTN, Jumpstart Foundry, and Crunchfire, the bus is regularly employed as a tour bus for rock stars and politicians. So, basically, it’s the perfect bus to host the building of the next hot startup.

I’ve never been on the Startup Bus before. The first day was an amazing experience.There’s something unique about a bus full of incredibly smart people, pulled out of their comfort zones and on course to a huge competition.

Like the team who came back to the mentoring session with a half-baked that the investor mentors tore apart.

Like all startup pitch/hackathon events, we started the trip with people pitching their ideas and the crowd picking the ones they wanted to work on. Those of us on the outside were a little surprised by this one idea–an anti-social network social network–being picked. But, hey, the crowd picked it, and the team assembled, so maybe it would work.

It wouldn’t.

All the other mentoring sessions took about 30 minutes. We helped the teams refine their ideas, think through monetization, and identify next steps. An hour into the meeting with this one team, we were still going round-and-round about what the idea even was exactly. Everyone was cramped, tired, and stressed, and we were getting nowhere with this awesome team. At this point, it’s about 8:15, and thanks to the weather, we’re running an hour behind getting into Memphis. Things looked very, very bleak.

This about the time Startup Bus magic happened.

After ascertaining that everyone was at an impasse, with no way to make this project work and no new ideas to pursue, Repetti pulled them to the front of the bus and announced to all the buspreneurs that the team needed help back at square one.

“This isn’t failure,” he said. “You only fail when you decide to quit. This is how the process is supposed to work.”

All of the teams willingly put their own tasks aside to help the 4th team brainstorm new ideas. There was lots of hilarity and very few real ideas, but as the time passed, you could see the team go from defeated to hopeful again. Just the act of being back out with their fellow entrepreneurs, being encouraged, and laughing brought their spirits back up.

Finally someone said, “What about the emergency alert app that was pitched earlier?”

Lightbulbs went off.

The team reconvened with the mentors and talked through the logistics of the idea. The guy with the original idea, who was already on a different team, willingly agreed to let the team build out his idea and consult for them as they went.

Honestly, it was an agonizing 2 1/2 hours. You think stress is bad in a normal room, where you can walk away for a minute to think? Try it on a bus, where there’s nowhere to go.

There’s a lot of time left on this crazy trip. Sundays’s stresses ended well, and the team is re-energized and focused on building the best product they can.

But will Monday end as well?

Israel-based Samba Videos the Reactions to Your Videos

We’re big Snapchat users in my house.

No, no sexting over here. Around here Snapchat is mostly used for us to receive videos of college athletes doing stupid stuff like tackling each other over a video game controller. (My husband’s a coach, and for some reason the athletes think we want to see this stuff.)

I have to admit, though, the guys’ Snapchat videos are pretty funny. More than once I thought they’d love to see Coach’s reaction as he watched yet another one.

With that in mind, I was really excited to see Samba’s release last week. The iPhone app lets you send video to your friend and records their reaction as they watch. Then, it plays the video back to you, with your friend’s reaction playing in a little circle screen. Check out the video:

[iframe src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/Z6TbaVmHLNw” height=”450″ width=”720″ frameborder=”0″]

Obviously, right now the company is targeting college and high school students (and their coaches). Those are hot markets that everyone wants to capture. But, the app could be used for more poignant moments, too. Grandparents witnessing a special moment or loved ones announcing big news from far away. Unlike Snapchat, the videos don’t disappear. So, you can replay that sweet (or hilarious) moment over and over again.

Samba was founded in Tel Aviv by Barak Hachamov, Shay Erlichmen, Ronel Mor, and Oren Meiri. They do have competition from apps like Gigglemail and Dumbstruck, but Hachamov isn’t sweating it.

“We want to win the world in this category. It’s not going to replace anything,” he told Inc. “There is always room or a gap between services to give you an opportunity to bring something new that mimics human behavior.”

Samba had the great luck of debuting last week during the WhatsApp frenzy. With everyone looking for the new next thing, they seem to have gotten a nice boost in what could have been an otherwise normal launch day.

The company was also accepted to the SXSW Acclerator and will present on March 8th or 9th to the crowd at the annual festival.

Here’s How To Know If A Startup is Really Ready for Investment

From Steve Blank

Since 2005 startup accelerators have provided cohorts of startups with mentoring, pitch practice and product focus. However, accelerator Demo Days are a combination of graduation ceremony and pitch contest, with the uncomfortable feel of a swimsuit competition. Other than “I’ll know it when I see it”, there’s no formal way for an investor attending Demo Day to assess project maturity or quantify risks. Other than measuring engineering progress, there’s no standard language to communicate progress.

Corporations running internal incubators face many of the same selection issues as startup investors, plus they must grapple with the issues of integrating new ideas into existing P&L-driven functions or business units.

DuckDuckGo: A Look at the Truly Private Search Engine

From Fast Company

When Gabriel Weinberg launched a search engine in 2008, plenty of people thought he was insane. How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we’re living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn’t seem so crazy.

In fact, DuckDuckGo is exploding.

Looking at a chart of DuckDuckGo’s daily search queries, the milestones are obvious. A $3 million investment from Union Square Ventures in 2011. Just prior to that, a San Francisco billboard campaign. Inclusion in Time‘s 50 Best Websites of 2011. Each of these things moved the traffic needle for DuckDuckGo, but none of them came close to sparking anything like the massive spike in queries the company saw last July. That’s when Edward Snowden first revealed the NSA’s extensive digital surveillance program to the world. The little blue line on the chart hasn’t stopped climbing north since.

The 20 Greatest Startups of All Time [Infographic]

What makes a startup truly great?

Is it how quickly (or for how much) you sell? Is it profits? Number of users? Social or cultural impact?

Well, yes.

Our friends at Verge Startups put together an infogrpahic that outlines the top 20 startups of all time. They took into consideration economic factors like market cap and bottom line revenue, but they also considered the cultural impact the company has made.

You’ll see the obvious on the list: Apple, Google, Facebook. But they aren’t the only companies that have affected the digital landscape.

China’s Startup Giants

Chinese companies like Tencent and Baidu are also on the list. We may only hear about them occasionally in the United States, but they have huge followings in Asia. Tencent–established 6 years before Facebook–brings social media, games, and other products to China. While they offer several digital products, including chat app WeChat, their real money is made in virtual goods, a market Facebook hasn’t seemed to be able to break into.

Baidu is China’s answer to Google, bringing search to the largest populace in the world. Obviously smaller than the American giant, Baidu still holds an impressive amount of power in China.

The Original Founders

When we think of startups, we usually think “new” and “innovative.” But there had to be someone who started it all, right?

Hewlett-Packard was founded in 1939, and its founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are symbolically credited with “founding” Silicon Valley. HP is #10 on the list, with a $52.87 billion. Not the largest, but not the smallest either. Without a doubt, HP had a cultural impact that continues to affect us all.

The Not-So-Certain Successes

The thing about startups is that even when you’re successful you could still fail.

Yahoo, eBay, Groupon, and Zynga all made the top 20 greatest startups of all time, yet many question the stability of any of these companies. Oh, they’re all hanging in there, and no one should count them out yet. But each of these companies has big obstacles to ensure ultimate success.

Yet, like HP, few would argue the impact each has had on culture, and that coupled with still-high market caps–puts them on the list.

Who’s Missing?

So, what do you think? Is this list of the 20 greatest startups of all time accurate? Who did we miss, or who shouldn’t be on there?

[iframe src=”https://magic.piktochart.com/embed/1063865-verge-infographic” height=”11510″ width=”600″ frameborder=”0″]

Turns Out Location Doesn’t Matter When Raising a Series A

kauffmanmap

From Tomasz Tunguz

Great entrepreneurs can come from anywhere. But do the locations of startups affect their ability to raise follow on capital? Do seed stage companies in the Bay Area face lower likelihoods of raising a Series A because of more competition? Or is it that New York based startups, because of a smaller ecosystem, face more difficulty?

Using Crunchbase data, I charted the financing follow-on rates across the 12 US cities in which at least 10 seeds, 3 Series As and 3 Series Bs have occured in the Crunchbase data set from 2005-2014. The first two charts below contrast the success rates of post-seed startups raising an A having raised a seed and raising a B having raised an A. The third chart shows the success rates of raising a B having raised a seed round.

Glympse Continues to Spread Real Time Location Tracking Gospel

location sharing

Today at the Mobile World Congress, Seattle startup Glympse announced a partnership with Samsung’s ChatON app. The two companies will integrate Glympse’s real-time, temporary location into the chat app that comes pre-installed on most Samsung phones. The app also crosses platforms, allowing chat from Android, Apple, Blackberry and feature phones.

The two companies feel that ChatON’s cross-platform approach and Glympse’s ability to share location with anyone at any time are a good fit together.

“There are great synergies between Samsung’s ChatON and Glympse, and we’re excited to give the app’s global user base access to real-time location sharing,” said Bryan Trussel, co-founder and CEO of Glympse. “We believe location technology should be ubiquitous and incredibly easy to use, and by putting it directly into an SMS conversation, we’re providing a rich and immediate way for people to share where they are.”

ChatON reportedly has 180 million users. It’s no WhatsApp, but 100+ million users in 200 countries isn’t anything to sneeze at, either.

The partnership allows Glympse to spread its real time, temporary location technology across still more platforms. The app is already integrated into several cars, navigation apps, and on the Samsung smart watch, Galaxy Gear.

The recent flurry of partnership announcements is a new trend for Glympse, and one the company has long hoped for. Founded in 2009, a mere 2 years after the debut of the iPhone, Glympse has always felt like the underdog.

“The conventional wisdom was, ‘How would I use that?'” Trussel told me. “It’s really nice to come into our own.”

The company has 19 employees now and has only raised $7.5 million. They aren’t profitable yet, but as they continue to license their technology to high profile partners, the future is looking bright.

“We always strive to provide our users with the best, most innovative technologies to enhance their mobile conversations and, we hope, to make their lives easier,” said Jay Park, vice president, Samsung Electronics. “Real-time location sharing was at the top of our list, and we are excited to partner with Glympse to offer their technology to ChatON users around the globe.”

[iframe src=”http://indicate.io/companies/glympse/embed” height=”450″ width=”720″ frameborder=”0″]

WhatsApp Acquisition: A New Definition of Success?

Days later, we’re all still talking about it.

Of course we are! It was the largest freaking startup acquisition in history. Twitter’s been full of “you could be X for the cost of WhatsApp” tweets. We got in that game with some surprising facts about the WhatsApp acquisition.

Judging from all the tweets, Facebook updates, and blog posts, no one’s quite sure how they feel about it yet. There’s a little awe, a lot disbelief, and more than a lot of jealousy.

For many people, news of the deal came out of nowhere. The founders aren’t exactly tech startups’ poster boys. More than a few people on Twitter didn’t even know what the app did, and suddenly Facebook is paying $19 BILLION for it?!

Remember the good ol’ days when we were shocked by the $1 billion Instagram acquisition? Doesn’t that seem quaint now.

If $19 billion is the new high water mark, where does that leave the other unicorns? Is this the creation of a new class of success–the super unicorn? The pegasus?

The Comparison Trap

With $19 billion as the new high number, what should the rest of us should be shooting for? Will startups be happy with the mere $1 billion they’ve been dreaming about for the last few years?

In the Wall Street Journal today, Box CEO Aaron Levie said that he expects the deal to spur an increase in acquisitions, with every tech giant willing to pay higher and higher prices for startups challenging them.

“It makes you depressed if you’re not selling at $20 billion,” the WSJ quotes him as saying. “I have a lot more work to do.”

Aaron Levie. Whose enterprise-focused cloud storage company will IPO this year in what’s expected to be a multi-billion dollar fashion. Who was named Inc’s Entrepreneur of the Year.

Aaron Levie is now looking at his measly $2 billion company and feeling like things aren’t quite right.

How We Measure Success

The thing about $19 billion deals is that they are very, very rare. (This the first actually.) Maybe M&A deals are only going to continue to grow, and maybe the average acquisition will increase. But in the long run, it’s probably safe to say that 99.99999% of companies will never sell for $19 billion.

WhatsApp built the right product, in the right way, grew in the right areas, at just the right time to make them the perfect acquisition for Facebook. The chances of tons of other companies doing that are slim.

And that’s okay.

Startups are about money. We’re all kidding ourselves if we think the majority of founders are starting companies but don’t care about the money they’ll make doing it.

But how much is enough? And are there other measurements of startup success to consider along with money?

For example, if your software startup sells for enough money to make you, your cofounders, and your first employees multimillionaires, is that enough?

If you build a legacy business that employs hundreds of people and provides outstanding salaries for all of them, will that bring happiness?

Or is it enough to remain a lifestyle business that supports you and maybe one other person for as long as you want it to?

These are questions we all have to ask ourselves. No one can answer them for every founder in the world. The WhatsApp deal should make us all stop and think, “Will I be happy, even if that’s never me?”

Because chances are good it won’t be.

Paul Singh’s Disruption Corporation Solves the Series A Crunch With Data

So much has been written about the Series A crunch. Lower costs of starting up, more streamlined avenues for disruption, and a general sense of optimism about the future of startups has led to increased funding in the early stages of a company. For better or worse, the trend has created more than a few startup orphans between the seed round and Series A.

Paul Singh thinks it’s worse.

“There’s a funding gap between the Seed round and the Series A — and it seems to be getting wider,” he wrote in a blog post yesterday. “Rather than writing it off as the “Series A Crunch,” I believe the investors that can systematically identify the most promising companies are positioned for great returns.”

As a partner at 500 Startups, Singh knows first hand about making tons of seed round deals. But he saw opportunity between the seed round and the Series A. Not every company is ready for a full Series A when they run out of money, but that doesn’t mean they’re doomed to failure yet.

Singh left 500 Startups in the spring of last year and launched Dashboard.io, which spawned Indicate.io. The data product tracks “indicators” for different companies to give entrepreneurs and investors an idea of how those companies are performing.

Evolving into a fund seemed like the natural next step for Singh. He believes the market is now less about “deal sourcing” and more about “deal selection,” but how do you pick the winners when there’s so much noise around startups these days?

“We’re going to use our own data, tools and research to make fewer wrong decisions about the companies we’re considering for investment,” he said.

VC investing used to be about trusting your instincts and knowing a good deal when you see it. But, with the explosion of data products–including the one created by Singh’s Disruption Corporation–it seems it’s time for VC to catch up with the rest of us.

The Crystal Tech Fund will focus on that sweet spot between the $50k seed round and the $5 million Series A. They’re looking to select companies that have achieved some level of product-market fit, and revenue would make the deal that much sweeter.

Find out more about the Crystal Tech Fund here.

10 Top Accelerators Now Accepting Applications for the Summer

Ah, summer. Time for laying by the pool, sipping a margarita, and letting the day slip by…

Okay, maybe in someone else’s world. But we’re entrepreneurs! Summer isn’t about relaxation. It’s about coming down from the SXSW/spring break high and moving that business forward.

And, if you’re an early stage startup, one of the best places to do that is an accelerator. Pages of digital ink have been spilled on the pros and cons of accelerators, but like anything else in life, you’re the one who can maximize the experience. If your team walks into an accelerator thinking you’ve made the big leagues and it’s easy sailing from here, you’re probably screwed. Go in ready to learn and maximize every opportunity that comes your way, and an accelerator could be just the thing you need.

The question is, which one? There are a lot of things to think about when picking an accelerator:

Where is the accelerator located? If it’s not in your home city, are you able to relocate for a few months?
Is there seed money involved, and if so how much?
How much equity does the accelerator take?
How successful have previous cohorts been?
Will the accelerator’s network be beneficial in reaching your company’s goals?

Once you have a general idea of what you’re looking for, it’s time to pick an accelerator. Here are the top 10 accelerators now accepting applications:

The Brandery–Based in Cincinnati, the Brandery has a great track record. Here’s an inside look at what happens at the Brandery.
Kaplan EdTech Accelerator--Powered by Techstars, this will be the second summer for the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator.
Start Co–Memphis-based Start Co is hosting 3 accelerators this year. The Seed Hatchery will be in its 4th year, and this will be the 2nd year for the women-only Upstart. SparkGap is the newest addition, focusing on logistics technology in one of the largest shipping hubs in the world.
Boom Startup–Based in Utah, Boom Startup boasts mentors from companies as diverse as Cisco and Skull Candy.
NMotion–The Lincoln, Nebraska, accelerator focuses on tech companies disrupting industries like agriculture, healthcare, education, finance/insurance, and sports technology.
Techstars Austin–Going into its second year, Techstars Austin already boasts some great companies like Atlas Wearables.
Seed Sumo–Based in College Station, Seed Sumo does acceleration Aggie-style.
Techstars Chicago–This will be Techstars first year in Chicago, but they’ve teamed up with Excelerate Labs which has graduated 30 companies since 2010.
Disney Accelerator–The newly announced Disney Accelerator brings together Techstars and the Magical Kingdom to accelerate companies focused on new media and entertainment.
Barclays London–Again, powered by Techstars (anyone seeing a pattern), the Barclays accelerator brings fintech companies to London for 15 weeks of acceleration.

See an accelerator you like? Click on the name and check them out.

In the meantime, did we miss anyone?

The Tech Trend You’re Probably Ignoring (But Shouldn’t Be)

From Sam Altman

Yesterday at lunch a friend asked me what tech trend he should pay attention to but was probably ignoring.

Without thinking much I said “artificial intelligence”, but having thought about that a bit more, I think it’s probably right.

To be clear, AI (under the common scientific definition) likely won’t work. You can say that about any new technology, and it’s a generally correct statement. But I think most people are far too pessimistic about its chances – AI has not worked for so long that it’s acquired a bad reputation. CS professors mention it with a smirk. Neural networks failed the first time around, the logic goes, and so they won’t work this time either.

But artificial general intelligence might work, and if it does, it will be the biggest development in technology ever.

Articifial Intelligence +Twitter Accurately Predicts Election Outcomes

We all know those annoying polls during election season.

The Democrats are winning by a landslide! (MSNBC)

The Republicans are running away with it! (Fox News)

We don’t know what the hell’s going on. (Normal people)

The polls are as ubiquitous as they are inaccurate, almost every year. In the US we have Nate Silver, of course, but despite the 2012 elections, humans do make mistakes.

Machines,on the other hand.

Yesterday St. Louis-based simMachines announced that they used artificial intelligence to accurately predict Costa Rica’s election earlier this month. Traditional polling methods had Luis Guillermo Soli in 4th place, but he actually finished 1st in the preliminary election.

simMachines was able to predict this accurately by using a similarity engine to study the syntax of Tweets about each party. Like traditional polls, they grouped them into classifications just like traditional polls: favorable, unfavorable, and neutral. The study analyzed 12,455 tweets and was able to accurately predict that Soli would finish in first place.

simMachines was founded by Costa Rican native Arnoldo Muller-Molina, PhD and relocated to the United States as part of the St. Louis Arch Grants program. Muller-Molina wanted to conduct the study as a celebration of democracy in his home country.

“The technology was already in place. While some people sing or dance to celebrate, we are data scientists so we decided to analyze the social space,” he said.

That technology isn’t only good for predicting elections, though. Any data can be put through the system: Tweets and other social media, blogs, media publications, and some servers. Brands can use technology like this to more accurately track the tone consumers to use when talking about them or their product.

The company compares similarity search to a “Swiss army knife,” which can be used in a wide range of data science projects.

With interest in data growing, similarity search and other data technology has all the room in the world to grow.

As Nick and I like to tell each other, “If it’s based on data, let’s go with that. If it’s based on opinion, let’s go with mine.”

Asking the Right Question About the WhatsApp Acquisition

From Benedict Evans

Facebook just bought WhatsApp, paying $16bn in cash and stock and $3bn in RSUs. WhatsApp has 450m active users, of which 72% are active every day. It has just 32 engineers. And its users share 500m photos a day, which is almost certainly more than Facebook.

This is interesting in all sorts of ways – it illustrates most of the key trends in consumer tech today in one deal.

First, it shows the continued determination of Facebook to be the ‘next’ Facebook. It’s striking to compare the aggressive reaction to disruption shown by Google, Facebook and other leading web companies today with how some of their predecessors a decade ago stumbled and lost their way.

Second, the winner-takes-all dynamics of social on the desktop web do not appear to apply on mobile, and if there are winner-takes-all dynamics for mobile social it’s not yet clear what they are. There are four main aspects to this:

10 Surprising Facts About the WhatsApp Acquisition

Watching Twitter during a big acquisition is fun. You get absolutely no work done, but the level of intelligence, snark, excitement, and sour grapes that comes across your feed makes it totally worth it.

On the off chance you missed it, today Facebook announced the acquisition of WhatsApp in a $19 billion (BILLION) deal. The messaging app–which has enormous international usage–sold for $4 billion cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and $3 billion in restricted stock.

In case your math is as bad as mine, that’s 19 Instagrams. (We always thought Instagram sold too early.)

Here are some other little known facts and stats about the WhatsApp acquisition:

1. WhatsApp’s founders made about $5 billion EACH. (click to tweet)

2. Sequoia Capital, WhatsApp’s only investor, made $2.4 billion or enough to buy 17 of Tom Perkins’ yachts. (click to tweet)

3. At acquisition WhatsApp is worth 2 Staples + 2 Instagrams. (click to tweet)

4. Each employee at WhatsApp created as much value as the entire Washington Post did in 137 years. (click to tweet)

5. In one day, WhatsApp processes 4x as many messages as there are humans on the planet. (click to tweet)

6. In the last 9 months, WhatsApp added 1 million users a day. (click to tweet)

7. WhatsApp has 2.5x more active users than Twitter. (click to tweet)

8. By market cap, WhatsApp is the 200th largest company in America. (click to tweet)

9. WhatsApp is worth the same as Kroger, with 6,000x fewer employees. (click to tweet)

10. NASA’s 2014 budget: $17b. WhatsApp: $19b. (click to tweet)

Bonus fact: WhatsApp is worth more than Southwest, Coach, Chipotle, News Corp, Under Armor, Dr. Pepper & Tiffany. (click to tweet)