Entries Tagged 'startup' ↓
View original post found on (Obsolete Feed) authored by Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher
June 30th, 2008 — startup
Just like with golf, technology is as much about ensuring that your bad hits are recoverable as it is ensuring that you make great ones. We’re all going to have failures in our careers but avoiding the really big pitfalls will help you keep your company on the right growth path. Here are 10 common mistakes we at AKF Consulting see made during platform development — and the ones we believe are the most important to avoid.Â
1) Failing to design for rollback: If you’re developing a SaaS platform and you can only make one tweak to your current process, make it so that you can always roll back any code changes. We know that it takes additional engineering work and testing but in our experience, such effort yields the greatest ROI.
2) Confusing product release with product success: Do you have “release†parties? Don’t — you are sending your team the wrong message. A release has little to do with creating shareholder value. Align your celebrations with achieving specific business objectives, such as increasing sign-ups by 10 percent.
3) Assuming a new Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) will fix issues with missing delivery dates: Too often CTOs see repeated problems in their development life cycles, such as missing release dates, and wrongly blame the development methodology. Make sure you’re fixing the right thing — lack of ownership or involvement in and/or incomplete understanding of the current PDLC are among the most common root causes of late dates.
4) Allowing history to repeat itself: Organizations don’t spend enough time looking at past failures. The best and easiest way to improve your future performance is to track your past failures, group them by causation and treat the root cause rather than the symptoms. Keep incident logs and review them monthly to identify recurring problems.
5) Scaling through third parties: If you’re a hyper-growth SaaS site, you don’t want to be locked into a vendor for your future business viability; rather you want to make sure that the scalability of your site is a core competency and that it’s built into your architecture. Define how your platform scales through your efforts, not through the systems that a third-party vendor provides.
6) Relying on QA to find your mistakes: You cannot test quality into a system and it’s mathematically impossible to test all possibilities within complex systems to guarantee the correctness of a platform or feature. QA is a risk mitigation function and it should be treated as such. Defects are an engineering problem, and that’s where the problem should be treated.
7) Relying on “revolutionary†or “big bang†fixes: The degree of success of complete rewrites or re-architecture efforts typically ranges somewhere between not returning the expected ROI and complete failure. The best projects — and the ones with the greatest returns — are not revolutionary but evolutionary. Go ahead and paint that vivid description of the ideal future, but approach it as a series of small steps.
8) Not taking into account the multiplicative effect of failure: Every time you have one service call another service in a synchronous fashion, you are lowering your theoretical availability. If each of your services is designed to be 99.999 percent available, then the product of all of the service calls is your theoretical availability. Five calls is (.99999)^5 or 99.995 availability. Eliminate synchronous calls wherever possible and create fault-isolative architectures to help you identify problems quickly.
9) Failing to create and incent a culture of excellence: Bring in the right people and hold them to high standards. You will never know what your team can do unless you find out how far they can go. Set aggressive yet achievable goals and motivate them with your vision. Be a leader.
10) Not having a business continuity/disaster recovery plan: No one expects a disaster, but they happen, and if you can’t maintain normal business operations you will lose both revenue and customers. A solid business continuity plan explains to everyone how to operate in the event of an emergency. Even worse is not having a disaster recovery plan, which outlines how you will restore your site in the event a disaster shuts down a critical piece of your infrastructure, such as your collocation facility or connectivity provider. Our preference is to provide your own disaster recovery through multiple collocation facilities.
Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher are partners with AKF Consulting.
View original post found on KillerStartups.com - all authored by (author unknown)
June 24th, 2008 — startup
What it does
Startups are nothing new, nor or they confined to the insulated walls of Silicon Valley. Today, they have a global reach from Bulgaria to Australia to Baltimore. If you’ve ever wondered what the global startup spread looked like exactly, you might want to have look at StartupWarrior. Startup Warrior is a mashup of Google Maps and Crunchbase, the TechCrunch made database of technology companies. You’d be surprised how many startup hubs there actually are. There might be one in your neighborhood. It’s a good way to scope for jobs or decide whether to start your own tech company. If you want you’re startup on the map, simply update it on Crunchbase. The Startup Warrior index is refreshed weekly.
In their own words
“StartupWarrior shows the locations of computer technology companies across the globe.
Use the map to find a startup job, explore your neighborhood, or decide where you should start your own company.â€
Why it might be a killer
Startup Warrior is a simple, yet informative little mashup that lets you see the global startup spread. It can be helpful for finding startups in your neighborhood or for finding a job.
Some questions
Does it really cover all the Crunchbase startups? Is it accurate?
Updates
 » original news
View original post found on Bootstrapper.com authored by Richie Hecker
June 18th, 2008 — startup
Major Bloomberg announced last week the launch of NYCSeed.com, the first true SEED Venture Fund in NYC. , the New York City investment fund is behind it and it is run by super serial entrepreneur, Owen Davis. The goal of the fund is simple – to fund innovation at the grass roots level. NYC [...]
View original post found on (Obsolete Feed) authored by Anand Rajaraman
June 15th, 2008 — startup
Greg Linden was one of the key developers behind Amazon’s recommendations system, which recommends books, movies, and other products to Amazon customers based on their purchase history. He subsequently went to Stanford and picked up an MBA, and in January 2004, he launched a startup named Findory, which offers personalized online newspapers. It’s hard to imagine anyone more qualified to make a startup like this a success, yet Findory shut down in November 2007. In a brilliant post-mortem, Linden says his big mistake was to bootstrap his company while trying to raise funding from venture capital firms — he just couldn’t convince them to invest. He should have raised his funding from angel investors instead.
Where to raise funding is an important decision every startup founder has to make. The three viable sources at the very early stages of a company are:
- Venture capital.
- Angel investors. Usually wealthy individuals, but includes outfits such as Y Combinator.
- Friends and family. Yourself, if you can afford it.
To decide which option is best for your startup, you need to understand how investors evaluate companies. There is a range of criteria, of course, but the three most important ones are team, technology and market, and angels and VCs evaluate them in different ways. Here’s how.
How Venture Capitalists Evaluate Startups
- Market — VCs want to invest in companies that produce meaningful returns in the context of their fund size, which typically is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. To interest a VC firm, a company needs to be addressing a large market opportunity. If you cannot make a credible case that your startup idea will lead to a company with at least $100 million in revenue within 4-5 years, then a VC is not the right fit for you. It’s often OK to use consumer traction as a substitute for market opportunity; many VCs will accept a large and rapidly growing user base as sufficient proof that there is a potentially large market opportunity.
- Team — VCs use simple pattern matching to classify teams into two buckets. A founding team is deemed “backable†if it includes one or more seasoned executives from successful or fashionable companies (such as Google) or entrepreneurs whose track record includes a least one past hit. Otherwise, the team is considered “non-backable.â€
- Technology — VCs aren’t always great at evaluating technology. To them, technology is either a risk (the team claims their technology can do X; is that really true?) or an entry barrier (is the technology hard enough to develop to prevent too many competitors from entering the market?) If your startup is developing a nontrivial technology, it helps to have someone on the team who is a recognized expert in the technology area, either as a founder or as an outside adviser.
Here’s the rule of thumb: To qualify for VC financing, you need to pass the market opportunity test and at least one of the other two tests — either you have a backable team, or you have nontrivial technology that can act as a barrier to entry.
How Angels Evaluate Startups
There are many kinds of angels, but I recommend picking only one kind: someone who has been a successful entrepreneur and has a deep interest in the market you are targeting or the technology you are developing. Here’s how angels evaluate the three investment criteria:
- Market — It’s all right if the market is unproven, but both the team and the angel have to believe that within a few months, the company can reach a point where it can either credibly show a large market opportunity (and thus attract VC funding), or develop technology valuable enough to be acquired by an established company.
- Team — The team needs to include someone the angel knows and respects from a prior life.
- Technology — The technology has to be something the angel has prior expertise in and is comfortable evaluating without all the dots connected.
Here’s the angel rule of thumb: You need to pass any two out of the three tests (team/technology, technology/market, or team/market). I have funded all three of these combinations, resulting in either subsequent VC financing (e.g. Aster Data, Efficient Frontier, TheFind), or quick acquisitions (Transformic, Kaltix — both acquired by Google).
Friends and Family, or Bootstrap
This is the only option if you cannot satisfy the criteria for either VC or angel. But beware of remaining too long in “bootstrap mode.†An outside investor provides a valuable sounding board and prevents the company from becoming an echo chamber for the founder’s ideas. An angel or VC can look at things with the perspective that comes from distance. Sometimes an outside investor can force something that’s actually good for the founder’s career: Shut the company down and go do something else. That decision is very hard to make without an outside investor. My advice is to bootstrap until you can clear either the angel or the VC bar, but no longer.
But back to Greg Linden and Findory. By my reckoning, Findory passes the team and technology tests from an angel’s point of view — if you pick an angel investor who has some passion for personalization technology. But it doesn’t pass any of the VC tests. Given this, Greg should definitely have raised angel funding. My guess is that this route would likely have led to a sale of the company to one of many potential suitors: Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, among many others. Of course, hindsight is always 20-20. I have deep respect for Greg’s intellect and passion and wish him better luck in his future endeavors.
Anand Rajaraman is a co-founder of Kosmix.com and a founding partner of Cambrian Ventures. Full disclosure: He is also an investor in GigaOM.
View original post found on (Obsolete Feed) authored by Guest Column
May 24th, 2008 — startup
I work as an attorney to a lot of company founders, and I know from experience that when the time comes to negotiate a round of funding, entrepreneurs often find themselves at a disadvantage. Much of it has to do with language. There is an array of terms and issues that investors and lawyers work with regularly and understand, but that entrepreneurs deal with only once in a while. It would take many posts to cover all of them, but here is a Crib Sheet of 10 Key Terms that clients most often ask me to explain when they receive term sheets from prospective investors.
Let’s start with the basics of valuation. The three biggest questions I get are: How much is my company is worth? How much of my company will I have to give up? How is that calculated? Three valuation terms you need to know are:
1. Pre-money valuation: Investors will assign a valuation to the company and its shares before they even think about dropping a dime on it. Your “pre-money valuation†is what your company is worth before the VC deal happens.
If the pre-money valuation is $10 million and there are 4 million shares outstanding, the investors are offering to pay $2.50 a share for the company.
2. Post-money valuation: This is what your company is worth after the deal. If the investors then put in $5 million, the post-money valuation will be $15 million and the investors will own one-third of the company.
3. Fully diluted capitalization: This is how that 4 million share number is calculated. It’s not necessarily obvious. You may have issued 3 million shares to your co-founders and early employees. However you’ll need to issue more shares (in the form of stock options) to future employees, so you budget for those by creating a share pool consisting of 1 million shares. The 1 million shares have not been issued, but they are treated as if they’ve been issued when the valuation is calculated. Thus, 3 million issued and outstanding shares plus 1 million reserve shares set aside for future stock options grants equals 4 million fully diluted shares.
Once you have a command of the valuation being placed on your company, you’ll need to comprehend the many other preferred rights you’ll be asked to give your investors in exchange for their money. This will matter when you get to a liquidation event, because not all shareholders will get paid equally.
4. Preferred stock: Founders and employees of companies get common stock, which gives them bare ownership rights. Investors get stock with rights that are in some way superior to those of common stock; we call this preferred stock. At a minimum, preferred stock gets its money out first, so if there isn’t enough to go around, preferred has dibs and common gets the scraps.
5. Liquidation preference: This is the right to “get out†(get paid) first if the company is sold, merged or otherwise liquidated. What someone is paid usually starts as the amount invested per share ($2.50, in our example).
6. Liquidation multiple: Investors may ask to be paid a premium on their liquidation preference, meaning the company may have to pay back $5 for every $2.50 invested, before common stockholders get anything. That’s a liquidation multiple.
7. Participating and non-participating preferences: A liquidity event produces the potential for a “double dip†for the preferred shareholders. They get paid once in their liquidation preference, and then have the option to get paid again as if they are common shareholders. There are two buckets of money: After the liquidation preference is paid, whatever money is left over gets distributed among common shareholders and those preferred shareholders who wish to “participate.†Non-participating preferred holders take their preference payment, then let the common stockholders take what remains.
So, if the company from our example is bought for $20 million, the preferreds will get their $5 million back (this is without a liquidation multiple) before the remaining $15 million goes to common shareholders. And if they’re “participating preferreds,†they’ll get a share in the remaining $15 million, too. Bottom line: You want non-participating preferreds if you’re a founder!
Bear in mind: liquidation multiples and participating preferreds are most common in high-risk, troubled company situations. If your VCs are using these terms, be careful.
8. Right of first refusal: Investors want to make sure (i) a company’s shares stay within a small group, (ii) that they get an advantageous crack at additional financing rounds. They’ll ask for a clause in your investment documents saying that before you can sell additional shares, you must first let the company and/or the investors buy them at the price offered by the third party.
9. Co-sale right: This further locks things up by saying that if for some reason both the company and the current investor pass on the next round, the current investor can still benefit by selling his shares to a third party, alongside the founder.
10. Participation right: This says that the investor has the right to invest in any new offerings the company conducts.
These are some of the key terms that appear in VC term sheets. I’ll add to this crib sheet over time, so: What terms do you need help understanding?
Jay Parkhill serves as outsourced general counsel to startups and growth-oriented companies, and writes on legal and business matters at his blog, StartupToolbx
View original post found on ReadWriteWeb authored by Josh Catone
May 12th, 2008 — startup
Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce. The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the “wisdom of crowds” (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output. We’ve written about a number of companies that employ crowdsourcing to produce their product or service here on ReadWriteWeb, but in this post we’ll specifically look at companies that allow you to leverage the crowd to get something done.
The official definition of crowdsourcing from Jeff Howe, is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.” Last year we laid out a set of rules for successful crowdsourcing, which might be helpful to keep in mind when employing the services of any of the companies listed below.
Graphic Design
One of the most well-developed areas of crowdsourcing services on the Internet is graphic design. Generally, these sites exist in the form of graphic design contest web sites where clients put up a call for submissions for a piece of graphic design work, and designers compete for a cash prize by submitting designs.
crowdSPRING is the latest entry into the increasingly crowded crowdsourced graphic design service market. The service officially launches today, after a $5000 design competition it held over the winter to design the crowdSPRING site itself — a wise move because it shows that the founders are willing to “eat their own dogfood” and also attracted an initial set of designers to the site.
crowdSPRING is well set up, offering legal protections for both buyers and sellers and a guarantee that all projects posted on the site will get at least 25 entries. crowdSPRING charges a 15% commission on all posted projects.
99designs is very likely the largest graphic design contest site on the web. From its humble beginnings as an area on the web development discussion forums at SitePoint, to being spun off from the SitePoint Marketplace a few months ago, 99designs has experienced astonishing growth to become a leader in its market. The site now has 18,000 registered users — 11,000 are designers — with 150 being added each day. $10,000 worth of prize money is put up for grabs on the site daily and it serves 5 million page views per month.
SitePoint co-founder Mark Harbottle tells me that many designers use the site for lead generation, and that often, winning designers find that contest holders will turn into long term clients who forgo the crowdsourcing option on future projects to work directly with a designer whose work they know they like.
GFXContests is a forum-based design contest site founded two years ago that seems to attract mostly logo design jobs. Full disclosure: I was one of the co-founders of GFXContests, and sold the site earlier this year. I am no longer involved with it. An interesting note: the site’s logo was designed via a design contest held on the SitePoint Contests service (now 99designs).
DesignOutpost is one of the oldest design contest services, sometimes credited with originating the idea — though that’s up for debate. The site is forum-based and relies on a “design team” (pre-approved designers) to fill out its crowd.
Designcontest.net is another large, forum-based design contest site that also relies on the pre-approved “design team” concept.
Pixish (our coverage) is a design and photography contest marketplace launched in February by well-known designer Derek Powazek. Unlike many of the design contest services in this round up, prizes on Pixish aren’t always cash.
Others
A number of large web development discussion communities host contest areas, including NamePros, v7 Network, and Webmaster Talk. Meanwhile, Grapic Competitions is a directory of individual graphic design competitions (not affiliated with the above sites), many that offer cash prizes.
Programming
Top Coder uses a competition approach to leverage is distributed network of over 50,000 developers to create software for its enterprise clients.
The software development community — especially the open source community — has long used “bounties” to help lure developers to certain tasks. microPledge (our coverage) is an escrow service that allows people to do three things: set up, contribute to and pay out software bounties, accept donations for projects, or set up a fund/bounty for an in house project (as a developer). In essence, that means people can give the crowd an incentive to work on a software development project.
Like microPledge, Cofundos.org (our coverage) is a web service for offering and managing software bounties. Cofundos.org is focused specifically on open source software, but the team behind it has indicated that they plan to adapt the concept to other areas, including beyond software development. Expanding beyond software development (to say, event funding) is something that microPledge has also hinted at pursuing.
Customer Support
Fixya is a question and answer community, in which people ask and answer technical support queries. Think of it as Yahoo! Answers for tech support. Uniquely, though, Fixya has partnered with some companies to provide an official channel for crowdsourced tech support. Most recently, the site launched a co-branded version of their service for Best Buy.
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The goal of Get Satisfaction (recent coverage) isn’t really to crowdsource customer service, so much as to make it easier for people to get access to companies they have an issue with. However, people do provide one another with help on the site — similar to at Fixya — and companies can use it to monitor customer support issues to more quickly tell if an issue isn’t just an isolated incident.
Research & Development
IdeaScale (our coverage) does for research and development what Get Satisfaction does for customer service by providing Digg-style feature request boards. Companies are able to tap the “wisdom of the crowds” to learn what their customers want from their product or service.
featurelist.org is very similar to IdeaScale, but more public, not branded, and focused on software.
FeVote is another suggestion board web application that lets companies crowdsource their research and development. Like Get Satisfaction, FeVote aims to put the control in the hands of the users by encouraging them to make suggestion boards for their favorite companies.
CollabAndRate is “organic collaboration” software that enables companies to poll their customers, employees, or partners for new ideas. Essentially, this is the same idea as the three sites mentioned above, but with a slightly different pitch.
Whatever You Can Imagine
Amazon’s Mecahnical Turk service (recent coverage) is what the company refers to as an “on-demand workforce.” In reality, Mechanical Turk is a 100,000 strong member crowd that people can call on to complete a wide variety of tasks. See the 10,000 Cents art project as example of how one can leverage Amazon’s crowdsourcing service.
Kluster (our coverage) is a recently launched crowdsourcing site that utilizes a crowd workforce to create any sort of project. The idea behind Kluster is that a group of passionate people working together can come up with better solutions for any decision-making problem than a single person. Whether that is planning an event, designing a new logo, or creating a new product, Kluster believes their system can work, though it seems likely to be used mostly for intangibles (graphic design, copy writing, programming, etc.).
Think of BigCarrot (our coverage) as microPledge or Cofundos.org for just about anything. BigCarrot specializes in “inducement prizes,” which are basically cash bounties for achieving a specific goal. In fact, inducement prize contests and software bounties operate on essentially the same premise — dangle a carrot and let talented people fight for it. Large-scale inducement prizes aren’t easy to organize, though, so BigCarrot hopes to make it easier by crowdsourcing the prize creation process and letting anyone create or contribute to a prize
View original post found on ReadWriteWeb authored by Bernard Lunn
May 10th, 2008 — startup
ReadWriteWeb’s Alex Iskold recently described modern Biz Dev 2.0 techniques that do not involve knocking on doors and talking to people. The Internet is great at automating routine transactions and more software is being sold as a service on a simple “click here” to subscribe basis. But occasionally some contact sport is still required, and you have to resort to what we can now call Biz Dev 1.0 — what we used to call selling. You will need these skills to raise money and to sell your business, even if you never have to sell to anybody else. Fred Wilson reminded us of the most basic requirement, to ask for the order. Here are 10 other tips:
- Close on every call. Whether your call is by email, phone or face-to-face, have one single objective that you can close. It might be “please sign here,” it might be “will you have lunch with me next Tuesday?”
- Expect mutual effort. A sure sign of spinning your wheels is when you make all the effort and the buyer/investor does nothing. Ask them to do something to indicate some level of interest. If you don’t see this, move onto the next prospect.
- Wait until you hear the screams. If you have a fire engine, you are not needed until the house is on fire. The best sales people wait until they see a real need before applying a lot of effort. One way to judge this, of course, is via #2.
- Two ears, one mouth. If you only learn one lesson, this is it. This is particularly hard for technically oriented entrepreneurs with a deep passion for their product. People don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems. Find the problem and show a solution based on your product. Ask lots of open-ended questions. People are much, much better at talking themselves into buying than you will ever be at talking them into buying.
- Talk about the weather. This a lesson that I learned the hard way. Just as the buyer was about to sign, I said something that prompted a question that was critical and for which I did not have a good answer. The next day something happened, totally outside my control, that put the deal on indefinite hold. When somebody is about to sign, be quiet and if silence is uncomfortable find something banal to talk about.
- Imagine the press conference. This is a good way to focus on the one thing that really matters to your buyer. What would the buyer tell the world about your deal? Assuming the usual attention deficit, this will be one simple point. Focus relentlessly on that one thing.
- Recognize the emotional tipping point. Selling is a contact sport. You cannot do it by email or phone alone. Even in a long, complex sales cycle with multiple people in a decision team, there is one person who really matters and one moment when that person says to themselves, “I am going to do this.” Everything before that moment is preparation and everything after is clearing due diligence.
- Stomach knots, table banging, and other good signs. These agita moments show both parties that the negotiating is nearing the end. It reassures them that they are not leaving money on the table. Of course, good negotiators can fake it, and watching that can be pretty amusing. (Is that what we are witnessing in the on-again off-again Microsoft/Yahoo! negotiations?)
- Don’t take it personally. Look at every rejection as a learning experience. Really. Even if you think the guy was a jerk/idiot. If he is a jerk/idiot, how do you recognize jerks/idiots earlier so that you waste less time? More likely you did not do #2, #3, or #4 properly. In other words, it was not a good fit and he was not a jerk/idiot.
- Measure face-to-face time. Biz Dev 1.0 is a contact sport. Email and phone is great for details and follow-up, but selling happens face-to-face. Always has, always will. So measure face time. But also remember #1, close on every call. Just socializing can be good to build some warmth in the relationship but my rule is that respect is essential, liking is optional.
- Ask for the order. Fred Wilson articulated this well (and the comments are worth reading).
Even if you hire sales people to sell your product/services and M&A advisers to sell your company, some of these Biz Dev tips are likely to come in handy at some stage. Do you have any other tips? Post them in the comments.
View original post found on ReadWriteWeb authored by Josh Catone
April 28th, 2008 — startup
Tomorrow a new breed of investment firm called Prototype Invest will officially launch, though the site is available now. Prototype Invest is a unique type of early stage investment firm. Rather than put money into startups, Prototype supplies technology in exchange for equity. This is an investment firm for anyone who has ever been told, “Ideas are a dime a dozen, kid. Come back when you have a working prototype.”
Founded by web developer and Denmark native Michael Christensen, Prototype Invest will provide people who have an idea but don’t possess programming or design skills a way to take their idea and turn it into a prototype to show investors. “Think of us as a Venture Capital firm providing software, web applications and guidance, instead of money,” says the company on the site. “All we ask for is equity in your idea – you don’t have to pay anything for our services.”
The company has a network of developers and designers which it will employ to create prototypes or full products based on ideas submitted by entrepreneurs. In return, it will take an equity stake in the app it helps create. Prototype Invest will evaluate ideas submitted to it based on merit as well as the character of the entrepreneur who pitched it.
“There are so many great ideas wasted for the wrong reasons – we are here to change the rules of the game,” Christensen told me. According to Christensen, any entrepreneur who is unhappy with the results of their relationship with Prototype Invest can walk at any time.
Prototype Invest has a lot riding on trust — in fact they say on their front page that “without trust we simply can’t exist” — which means that ideally, anyone willing to fork over an idea to the service has not only been told that ideas are a dime a dozen, but also truly believes it. Prototype will work out contracts and the amount of equity taken on a case by case basis, and Christensen tells me that they’re open to signing an NDA with entrepreneurs prior to being pitched.
But there will need to be a certain amount of trust on both sides that ideas won’t be stolen or misappropriated.
Along with development services, Prototype Invest also offers to help entrepreneurs pitch their idea (and newly minted prototype) to investors, which makes sense given that Christensen and team will only make money if the app is a success. At some point in the future the team is also considering offering Y Combinator-style microfunding.
Will Prototype Invest work? It’s hard to say, but there is little doubt that they won’t lack for ideas being sent their way — they are a dime a dozen, after all.
View original post found on KillerStartups.com - all authored by Siri
April 26th, 2008 — startup
What it does
ProjectLocker is an on demand project development solution. It allows developers to create smarter code faster in a collaborative friendly environment. It tracks defects allowing users to share pertinent information on the fly. It’s got automated integration and streamlined management tools. It’s also secure—users can safely share their documents and projects on the web without worry. ProjectLocker provides users with instant Subversion hosting and Track hosting. They offer both Lite an enterprise plans to fit projects to scale. The features can be summed up thusly: Trac, a tracking tool, Build Locker, integration for Java, Wiki for team work, Document Management, Analytics, a personal storage locker and an archival system. Pricing starts at $2.50 a month for startups, and goes up to $12 a month for the Venture plan. Enterprise service offers can be solicited from the company.
In their own words
“ProjectLocker was founded in 2003 to provide on-demand tools for software developers. Guided by the simple mission of helping companies build better software, ProjectLocker’s services have expanded to include services for the complete lifecycle of software projects, from requirements documentation to build and test automation. ProjectLocker serves companies from startups to Fortune 1000 multinationals.â€
Why it might be a killer
ProjectLocker gives developers an affordable and powerful subversion host and project management tool. It’s got the features users want without the price tag. It’s quite flexible and well designed.
Some questions
How well does this handle? Is it user friendly? How does it perform overall in comparison to the competition?
Updates
 » original news
View original post found on TechCrunch authored by Erick Schonfeld
April 20th, 2008 — startup
Here are some slides from Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the National Venture Capital Association illustrating the trends in venture capital deals last quarter that Duncan mentioned yesterday. (Click on them for a bigger image). The overall amount venture firms invested dropped both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter to $7.1 billion (less than any quarter in 2007, but still above the level of investment every quarter in 2006 and 2005). The average deal size is still healthy at $7.7 million. So things aren’t so bad. The concern is whether this is the beginning of a steeper decline that we will begin to see over the next few quarters, which it may very well be.
VC money going into the software sector (broadly defined) declined 9 percent quarter-over-quarter (flat year-over-year) to $1.264 billion and was about even with the amount invested in biotech ($1.267 billion). If you cut the numbers a different way and look at Internet-specific deals, those declined 7 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to $1.310 billion, but were slightly up year-over-year. Meanwhile, the craze over clean-tech investments looks like it may have peaked in the third quarter of 2007 when $851 million was invested. Or, at least, it is taking a breather. That number has now gone down for two quarters, and was at $625 million during the first quarter of 2008.
Finally, here is a breakdown of the money going into early-stage versus later-stage deals. About 23 percent of the money invested in the past four quarters went into seed or early-stage deals, which seems to actually be a slightly higher percentage than was typical over the previous two years.
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