Myth Busters: Money Does Not Grow On Trees In Silicon Valley [video]

Neil Parikh,Communly,Silicon Valley,startup,startup tips,launchyourcity

Communly co-founder Neil Parikh talks with Memphis based entrepreneur Ryan Ramkhelawan at the LaunchLounge on location in Silicon Valley (photo: NMI 2013)

We just wrapped up the LaunchYourCity, nibletz.com mission to Silicon Valley. On that trip we spent lots of time connecting to investors, accelerators, incubators, entrepreneurs and startup founders from San Francisco to Mountain View and everywhere in between.

As the voice of startups everywhere else, we kept our minds open throughout the trip and soaked up every nook and cranny of information that we could.

In working with hundreds of startups across the country, and around the world (everywhere else), we have found that a lot of people think money grows on trees in the valley.

In talking with a variety of Silicon Valley based startups in various stages we found that, that’s not the case. In some cases it’s actually harder to raise money in the valley because there’s much more competition.

Silicon Valley is like the Hollywood of statups. Founders move to Silicon Valley in droves in hopes of getting their big idea discovered. It certainly isn’t that easy.

You have to figure for every idea out there, there are three more people working on that same thing. Sure the biggest VC’s are based in Silicon Valley but they’re getting pitched every minute of everyday. One VC we spoke with said he, like Mark Cuban, routinely gets pitched in the bathroom.

Sure all startups are looking for their big funding break and all VC’s are looking for the next Facebook or Instagram, but the chances that the two will connect are very difficult.

More than one startup founder told us that they had raised money at home, and thought that was the signal that they were ready to raise in Silicon Valley and now they’ve moved onto another startup.

There are several factors that could account for this happening. One is that when you grow your startup in your hometown and can pick up any bit of local traction, your local investors know you. They’ve seen you grow and seen your failures and victories. When you venture out to Silicon Valley you quickly become just another startup.

There’s also a much better chance that an angel or VC in Silicon Valley has heard your particular idea hundreds of times, where your local investors have only heard it once, from you.

Does this mean that you shouldn’t move to Silicon Valley? Not necessarily there are advantages too that we’ll be posting about later. This is definitely some nourishing food for thought though.

We got a chance to talk to 21 year old serial entrepreneur Neil Parikh of Communly about the myth that money grows on trees in Silicon Valley. Check out the video below and check out communly here.

Find a lot more great startup tips here at nibletz.com

Gangnam (style) SpringBoard Startup Flitto Is THE Translation App

Flitto, a SpringBoard London graduate has the Gangnam style for sure, that’s because they are based in Gangnam South Korea. They are truly rockstars for graduating from SpringBoard London which has become TechStars.

When you think about Flitto don’t think translation app. Simon Lee, Flitto’s founder describes the app as: “a social translation platform that lets you access all kinds of content in your own native language. Any user can add translation and earn points and ‘karma’ from other fans for your translation work.”

Flitto serves up translation from the crowd, making it easy to get quick, real life translations on content rather than mechanical translations which can sometimes leave the user just as lost as before the translation.

“The language barrier can be broken down by hiring professional translators. But we’ve tried to be smarter than that. We can get rid of the language barrier without hiring one single translator just by using the greatest tool humans have ever made – the Internet.” Lee said on the SpringBoard/TechStars London Blog.

We got a chance to catch up with Lee at the SXSW Interactive Tradeshow in the Gangam Style startups showcase.

Check out these other stories from SXSW

We’ve got more TechStars coverage here.

California Startup Uptoke Raising A Series A To Bring Weed To The Board Room [video]

UpToke, California startup,startups,Jason Levin,Cannabis

Jason Levin, founder of UpToke. (photo: fortune.com)

California entrepreneur Jason Levin is a formally trained engineer on a mission. He’s not a hippie, a dope man, or a pot head, but he does see the opportunity in Cannabis.

His company, called Uptoke, has produced an upscale vaporizer used to inhale marijuana. The cigar like vaporizer, brings a more “professional” appeal to smoking marijuana. Even in prototype form it’s a well designed, high class looking device.

The technology, Levin says, doesn’t actually ignite the plant, but rather heats it up, incredibly fast.

The Uptoke vaporizer can get to 375 degrees, in a sealed packages so users don’t burn themselves, in under 6 seconds. The battery life lasts all day and Levin says you just charge it up like a cell phone at the end of the day.

Levin doesn’t look like a guy who would fit in a “stereotype”. He sees the opportunity in the Cannabis industry. He’s also very careful not to step on the toes of those who aren’t supportive of the industry.

He will not market his device in markets where there are no laws governing cannabis use. He has a legal team in place and has an industrial designer coming on board to help design the final product.

Levin is currently raising a Series A round for Uptoke and was just recently in Seattle pitching a group of investors at the Washington Athletic Club.

Check out this video of Levin below.

Check out these startup stories from nibletz.com

American Airlines And Their Partnership With Startups [video][AAMRQ]

When startup people talk about airlines and airplanes they are typically talking about some new startup to order up a jet plane or to help you find the cheapest fares. Well lately we see more and more American Airlines signage, and people at startup events.

Are they scoping startups for their next talent? Are they trying to find the next innova

tion? Are they looking for their next customers?

Quite frankly the answer is all three. American Airlines has been partnering with startups to get the conversation going about entrepreneurship and innovation.

They found that many people taking American Airlines these days are entrepreneurs, startup founders and small business owners. While every airline has a program for huge enterprise corporations, no other airline has started working on partnerships to fuel the next w

ave of American business, startups and small business.

Now, Amer

ican Airlines has a team set up across the country to talk with startups, entrepreneurs and small businesses everywhere about the benefits of American Airlines.

Through their Business ExtAA program, American Airlines offers similar benefits to entrepreneurs and startup founders that Fortune 500 corporate officers get. Their Business ExtrAA rewards program offers increased mileage earnings, discounts and amenities that are second to none.

They’ve also partnered with several startup organizations like Startup America, Startup Weekend

, Tech Wildcatters, Tech Cocktail, Launch Tennessee, and even Nibletz and Everywhereelse.co. They know the importance of making that connection and developing brand loyalty early on.

While programs like the Founder’s Card are great, many entrepreneurs have found out the hard way that most of the benefits to programs like those require at least a series A round or even a series D. American Airlines has made their programs accesible to even bootstrapping founders.

Their team across the country isn’t just a bunch of sales people hawing American Airlines, all of the team members are engaging and they’re connectors. While they are very up

front about their goal, to get more small businesses and startups in the habit of booking American, they are eager to connect startups with other startups and other resources in their network. For instance the everywhere else conference in 2014 will offer a special rate from American Airlines and a special rate from their partner Avis.

Down at South By Southwest Aleda Schaefer and Paul Swartz, two of the people on American Airlines’ startup team, were frantically running around introducing people, meeting people and even engaging in startup pitch contests and other events. Their attitude and likeness to startups couldn’t be more genuine.

American Airlines was one of the key sponsors for the Launch Your City trip to Silicon Valley. This trip allowed several startups and ecosystem partners from Memphis Tennessee to spend a week in Silicon Valley touring VC firms, accelerators, incubators, co-working spaces and networking. The American Airlines team also set up meetings for the group including a tour of RocketSpace and they took some of the group to a startup job fair Thursday morning to meet other startup founders, who were at the stage where they were hiring employees.

American Airlines has strategically placed one of their “startup liasons” in Boston, New York, Dallas and San Francisco, adding their Silicon Valley rep last, because they realize the importance of startups everywhere.

Check out the video below where Schaffer offers a little more insight into American Airline’s involvement with startups:

stopped.at Returns To The Dolphin Tank At SXSW 2013

Mara Lewis, the founder of California startup stopped.at returned to pitch her startup in the Dolphin Tank at SXSWi. The Dolphin Tank is a pitch panel session held at the Startup America Live stage in front of influential judges. The reason it’s called the Dolphin Tank is because the judges are instructed to give constructive feedback rather than criticism as seen on the hit ABC show Shark Tank.

This was the second time Lewis has pitches stopped.at in the Dolphin Tank. After here appearance in 2012 she was able to secure an angel investment. We ran into Lewis while on the LaunchYourCity mission trip to Silicon Valley on Thursday where she told us she’s working on raising another round, it’s time to move her startup out of her apartment and eat more nourishing than Ramen Noodles.

She’s also received a bit of traction for stopped.at which is a platform that turns users onto the newest sites on the web by recommending sites that friends are using. According to her pitch, over 150,000 websites are launched every 24 hours in the US alone.

Check out her pitch below. For more info visit stopped.at

Check out more of our startup coverage from SXSW 2013 Here!

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison On The Paypal Mafia [video][Ignition Mobile]

This morning at Business Insider’s Ignition Mobile, Deputy Editor Nicholas Carlson interviewed 24 year old Irish rock star entrepreneur, Patrick Collison the CEO of payment startup Stripe.

While there was much debate as to whether Collison became a millionaire at ate 19, one thing that’s been turning heads about this mobile payment startup is that their investors include Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk, the original founders of Paypal who are widely known as the “Paypal Mafia”.

One might find it odd that these three men who helped shape the web payment and now mobile payment space, may not want to invest in a company that competes with the one they founded.

Collison said that he believes that Thiel, Musk and Levchin, are still determined to solve the problems that they set out to solve with Paypal and the new problems that have cropped up in the mobile age.

All three founders are now removed from Paypal after selling the company for $1.5 billion back in 2002 to eBay,Paypal’s largest user.

While Paypal has been busy pushing an offline product to retail and working towards a more prominent position in the mobile space, Collison said he felt that innovation at Paypal stopped when Levchin, Musk and Thiel exited.

Check out the video below:

500 Startups Company Waygo Talks To Nibletz [video][500 startups]

Earlier this morning we brought you the interview with Spinnakr founder Michael Michael Mayernick who talked with us about laying their foundation in Washington DC which helped them prepare for and then graduate from 500 Startups in Silicon Valley.

Ryan Rogowski, the cofounder of translation startup WayGo, also talked with us about their experience in Rhode Island before being chosen for 500 Startups.

In the video below Rogowski talks to us about the much lower cost of overhead in Rhode Island, and how it allowed them to speed up their development process. Waygo was able to catch the eye of 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, who is a very frequent traveler, the kind that Waygo was designed for.

As for what they do?

Waygo is a mobile app that allows you to hover your smartphone camera over text or images and get a translation. For instance, if you want to order Chinese Food from a Chinese menu written in their native tongue, Waygo would allow you to scan the menu and get real time translations. The best part? Everything is done locally on the device side which makes the translations come extremely fast.

Waygo is designed with the tourist in mind. You can use Waygo to translate Chinese food menus, and signs on the road, bars and restaurants.

The idea came about over two years ago when Rogowski was living in China and realized how hard it was to translate things in real time.

Check out our video interview with:

Check out more 500 Startups coverage from nibletz!

Detroit Startup Glocal: Share Your Local Content With 113 Cities Around The World [video][sxsw]

Detroit startup Glocal is a new local sharing site that allows you to share your pictures, videos and other content with 113 cities worldwide.

Glocal aims to be the source for localized content, shared with the world. Content creators can share their articles, photos and videos from their city. Content consumers can use Glocal to find out what’s going on, what to do, where to eat, local news and more for any of the 113 cities (and growing) that Glocal has a community for.

The company, founded by Lincoln Cavalieri, launched back in October after a three year development period, and after raising $1 million dollar seed round from Compuware’s venture capital arm.

One of the things that makes Glocal unique is the diverse range of content being created by community members. For instance, content creators in the Memphis community have offered everything from great burger and restaurant suggestions, to photos from a tour of the Fedex world headquarters.

A quick check in Chicago has highlights captured from various Saint Patrick’s day parties, to fan pics of the Chicago Bulls and even local news like a recent lawsuit in McDonald’s.

A tour of the Berlin community turns up beautiful photos of the city, the newest Mercedes Benz and a variety of local news.

Right now Glocal can be accessed via mobile web but Cavalieri already has his team working on native apps for Android, iPhones and iPads.

You can sign up to contribute content, or peruse the Glocal offerings here at Glocal.com

Check out our quick video interview from SXSW below.

We’ve got a truckload more SXSW 2013 coverage here.

500 Startups Alum: Spinnakr On The Importance Of Laying A Foundation At Home

This week nibletz, the voice of startups everywhere else, is participating in the first annual LaunchYourCity, mission trip to Silicon Valley. The trip, sponsored by American Airlines and Uber, is a chance for startups, and ecosystem influencers from Memphis to experience the high paced startup life in the Valley.

Through Memphis native and 500 statups alum Frank Langston, and our good friend Sarah Ware at Markerly, we got to spend a good portion of the day at 500 startups.

Internally at nibletz we actually debated taking this trip up until the last minute. So while we’re the voice of startups everywhere else, there is a lot to be learned from founders out here in Silicon Valley. First things first about 90% of them aren’t actually natives, most have moved from somewhere else.

To that end, we got a chance to talk with two startups, Spinnakr and WayGo, about the role laying foundations in their hometowns played in building their startups prior to heading out west.

500 Startups has no requirement on where a startup has to reside after the completion of their 4 month program. We gathered that about half of the founders in each cohort choose to stay in Silicon Valley while the others either move back home or to cities that strategically work better for their companies.

Spinnakr is one of the startups that stayed in the valley. They actually graduated out of the 500 startups accelerator in 2012 (the 2013 class just graduated last month). Michael Mayernick, co-founder at Spinnakr, talks to us in the video below about the importance laying roots and a foundation at home played in Spinnakr’s growth and success.

Maryernick is still intune with what’s going on in Washington DC, itself a city where innovation is progressing at a very fast pace. Mayernick was named a Tech Titan by Washingtonian Magazine in 2011. He curates the DC Startup Digetst and co-organizes the DC Tech Meetup.

Check out the video below and for more info visit: Spinnakr.com

Check out more of our 500 Startups coverage at nibletz.com

Chicago Startup Bus Team: MyBestRX Pitches In Startup Bus Finals At [sxsw]

A team of ambitious entrepreneurs, that hope to tip the scale when it comes to enabling affordable local healthcare, completed the first in their suite of mobile apps, designed for just that, while on board The Startup Bus.

The idea behind MyBestRX is simple. When people purchase prescription drugs from the pharmacy, there is no standard “MAP” pricing. You could very well find your prescription at your pharmacy for hundreds of dollars, and find it a mile down the road for half of that.

MyBestRX hopes to solve the problem of looking for the best price on prescription drugs. The app will allow you to key in or speak your prescription and it will return results based on both proximity and cost.

Other features include the voice response, as described above, and the ability for the user to take a photo of their current prescriptions and have it filled by way of email or fax directly from mobile.

MyBestRx positions themselves as “A Personalized Rx Concierge”, perhaps the easiest way to find and purchase prescriptions.

Check out the video below and for more info visit nibletz.com keyword: SXSW

Xoogler Spotlight: Splenvid Zero Button Movie Creation [SXSW]

Two former Googlers (xooglers) who once worked on the UX team at the internet giant have put together something new and exciting called Splenvid. They spent over a decade at Google building maxable scalable systems so they are taking what they learned there and putting it into their new startup.

Splenvid is the self proclaimed “Zero Button Movie Creation” platform that allows users to tell stories through photos and videos uploaded to the cloud. That’s where the magic happens.

Splenvid is also fully collaborative and content can be combined to make even fuller movies.

All of the media that is uploaded from the user is then intertwined together automagically by Splenvid and spit back out as a complete story.

We got to see the pitch for Splenvid at the TechCocktail Pitch Jam event as SXSW (where I was a judge). While the app hasn’t been released yet, it may be just what the world needs in terms of easy ways to do media. Ease of operation are what make Instagram, Pinterest and Vine so popular.

Sure it’s not hard to string together movies using iMovie or a slew of other movie creation apps, but Splenvid’s value proposition is not having to do anything but upload and wait.

The app should be released later this spring. To get on their waiting list click here. Watch the video below:

Check out more of our startup coverage from SXSW here

Silicon Slopes Startup Speakerfy Is Turning Devices Into Speakers Everywhere [sxsw]

Have you caught onto the latest phenom in night clubs and parties? Yes I’m talking about the silent disco or the headphone party. These are parties where everyone is listening to the same music, typically being spun by a dj, but using headphones. We’ve been to headphone parties in Memphis, New York, Baltimore and of course on 6th street at SXSW.

The great thing about headphone parties is there is no outer noise and no need for someone to call the cops and complain. The bad part is the upkeep of the wireless headphone equipment.

Well… Utah startup Speakerfy has the solution. Now keep in mind that Speakerfy isn’t just about the headphone party we’ll go over a bunch of uses later. For the example of the headphone party though, Speakerfy allows any wifi connected smartphone to turn into a speaker. It supports up to 250 devices.

So now, if you’re holding a “silent disco” you can use Speakerfy and send the audio through everyone’s personal phone and they can use their own headphones or earbuds to join in the party. (if someone wrote a text communication app on top that would solve the anti-social part of the silent disco).

So all of the devices on the same Speakerfy hear the exact same audio at the exact same time.

Here are some other great uses for Speakerfy:

– Presentations at conferences
– Walking tours
– Museum tours
– your own personal radio station
– sharing music on the bus

the uses are really endless.

For more of how Speakerfy works check out the video interview from SXSW below:

Quick Concise Pitch From Realty Mogul, Eye Catching, And Prize Winning At SXSW [sxsw]

Realty Mogul, a crowdfunded real estate platform and graduate of the TechStars Microsoft Azure accelerator wowed multiple audiences at last weeks SXSW Interactive festival.

We got the chance to see Realty Mogul pitch on the Startup America Live stage before the Hatch Competition. It was the intense coaching they received both in the accelerator and from their Hatch coach, that got their pitch down to almost perfect.

It also resulted in them winning the Hatch Pitch competition, and judges calling the startup “Histrionic”.

The Hatch competition was in it’s second year and narrowed down the field from over 100 applicants. It’s an intense pitch contest with startups selected getting one on one coaching from industry leaders and previous Hatch winners.

“A big piece of what pitches needs to happen is to make the audience relate. What made us successful last year was we told a story about the problem. A lot of the companies don’t engage the audience that well. When you tell a story in four minutes, it’s really hard to be concise with the message. You have to treat it like you have 30 seconds instead of four minutes. That forces you to get the message down.” Distil Inc CEO (and judge for this years Hatch competition) Rami Essaid said to SiliconHills.

When you watch the quick pitch video below you’ll understand how all this work has paid off and how it led to the Realty Mogul team winning the Hatch competition. You can find out more about Realty Mogul, here or here on their Angel List profile.

Nashville: Jumpstart Foundry Startup, Jamplify, Raises $600K

One of the highlights at the 2012 Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day in Nashville Tennessee last August, was how many startup teams actually had a product ready to go. Jamplify was one of those teams.

Jamplify crowdsources people for promoting the bands, brands and products that they love. Rather than crowdsourcing for actual capital Jamplify is crowdsourcing for social capital and human capital, and then there’s the payoff.

Jamplify is like the kickstarter for fan based, crowd based musical promotion. As a fan of a band or a promotional ambassador you can agree to promote a band or musician. Based on your social graph and the amount of people that you actually touch with the campaigns short, trackable url you will become eligible for prizes from the band or artist you’re promoting.

What’s even cooler is you wouldn’t know it if you saw them pitch, but Jamplify was founded by two friends that met while they were coworkers in New York at Goldman Sachs. Andy Pickens and Moses Soyoola, left one of the most prestigious addresses on Wall Street and spent last summer iterating, developing, pivoting and reworking Jamplify to the product that it is today.

They’ve already started seeing great results. Business Insider reports that Jamplify was able to drive 190,000 views to a 15 year old pop stars YouTube video. What’s even more impressive is those 190,000 views were referred by 670 fans, meaning each fan drove about 280 views.

Their $600,000 round came from a number of unnamed Nashville and New York based investors and will allow the team to continue working on a product that’s been tried,proven and is developing traction.

Here’s their pitch video from the Jumpstart Foundry demo day:

We cover high growth technology in the South and Everywhere Else.