Startup Trek Television announces 20 City “Innovation in the Western USA” tour featuring tech entrepreneurs
Startup Trek Television, Inc. announces a Nov 10 > Dec 8, 2009 "Innovation in the Western USA" Tour:
We'll video interview six to twelve startups in each city. Interviews will be ...
Cal Poly Business School Seniors tackle pre-launch planning for new Digital Media Firm
Business School Seniors in the School of Business at California Polytechnic University (San Luis Obispo CA; "Cal Poly") enrolled in "Business 454" are tackling the pre-launch planning for a new ...
Startup Trek spent a week in Boulder, Colorado last month, getting to know some of the entrepreneurs in Boulder. We were fortunate to kick things off by interviewing leading Venture Capitalist Brad Feld, Managing Director of Foundry Group, at their offices in Downtown Boulder, CO. Segment 1, a 12-minute session, covers Brad’s prolific career from his M.I.T. days to present career building startups, Angel investments, and getting into the venture capital business.
Tomorrow’s ‘Segment 2′ covers how Foundry Group was put together, and it’s investment strategies. In segment 3, Brad shares some advice for budding entrepreneurs. For you collegiate and post-collegiate young entrepreneurs – we were able to coax three bits of advice out of Brad, for first time entrepreneurs and collegiate entrepreneurs. They are three Gems, so don’t miss it.
We covered a lot of ground in an hour, and if you listen to the interview you will learn a lot about how a VC at the top if his game thinks and operates. We also learned about TechStars, which Brad and his partner on that activity, David Cohen lead.
Startup Trek TV had the opportunity today to interview the co-founder & CEO of Digital Music analytics startup “Next Big Sound” this evening at their headquarters in downtown Boulder, Colorado.
This startup came together in Chicago during the spring and summer 2008, and moved to the Boulder area after entering and winning a spot in the competitive and selective “TechStars” program, which attracted 600 companies to the competition for ten slots (we’ll report TechStars shortly).
Alex’s story of how he went from being a College Student to a Venture Capital funded, post-grad entrepreneur is quite the informative story. He gave up a lucrative job offer, returning the signing bonus to pursue his dream, then found himself raising capital right at the start of the great recession. He worked for two months on a 2-month US tour of a band, learning the business of band promotion, both online and “the old fashioned way”, by helping them promote their tour online.
Alex also answered some of our questions about what TechStars is, and how it works. We’ll have more information on the interview posted in this article in a video interview this week.
The Next Big Sound story is quite an interesting one of how some determined Collegiate entrepreneurs, armed with steely nerves and 18 months of persistence behind an idea, can come out on top in the startup game.
While in Portland, Oregon this week Startup Trek TV waslucky to land an interview with Professor Rob Wiltbank, one of the top authorities in the US on the subject of Angel investing. In addition to teaching Entrepreneurship at Willamette University in Salem OR, Rob is a partner at a Seattle venture capital firm. He has recently raised a $300k Angel investment funds which his entrepreneurship students at Willamette Univ. are in the process of beginning to invest, in $50k chunks. Rob plans to scale this innovative, first-of-type student-managed Angel fund to $5M.
Our interview with Rob covered many aspects of Angel investing and ended up running about two hours. We have it in post-production and will break it up into a dozen “mini-interviews” on different aspects of Angel investing. We’ll have this online by Sunday, so come back for a real education on the topic!
Rob, thanks again for coming onto Startup Trek TV to share your wealth of knowledge about the topic.
Startup Trek interviewed Edgardo Nazario, VP of Product Management at Seattle Startup Delve Networks. Delve has developed a first-rate Video Publishing Platform which StartupTrek takes a close look at in this (pending) video.
Delve’s platform is unique in a number of ways. Delve has built their solution around partnerships with leading CDN (content delivery network) and elastic hosting (cloud computing) partners, so that videos hosted on their platform can “scale” in the event of traffic surges and load spikes – a common event with some of Delve’s customers, which include the Kansas City Chiefs Football team.
We had an interesting visit with Boeing Technical Principal, turned serial entrepreneur Jerry LaChapelle. In our pending series of six short video segments, Jerry discusses his firm’s new web-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) platform which provides between numerical control (NC), Computer-Aided Design (CAD), and Computer-Aided Manufacturing. The result is that manufacturers and component suppliers across many business sectors will be better able to predict the price of custom components.
We had a great time this morning at Microsoft’s new high-rise “Bravern” campus complex in downtown Bellevue, Washington.
We had the pleasure of a visit and freewheeling discussion about technology and business on camera with Charles Finkelstein, who has been a pioneer in developing computer networking protocols, email technologies, protocol analysis, collaborative computing systems, online video, and related technologies over the past 25 years (since 1992 at Microsoft).
Startup Trek Television, Inc. announces a Nov 10 > Dec 8, 2009 “Innovation in the Western USA” Tour:
We’ll video interview six to twelve startups in each city. Interviews will be published within 72 hours of being conducted, once we catch up with our backlog from the Portland-Seattle area.
Yesterday afternoon Startup Trek ventured to Sausalito, CA to visit with esteemed, senior Keiretsu Forum member Mr. Max Shapiro, CEO of innovative human resources firm PeopleConnect.com :
Unfortunately young entrepreneur, blogger, and self-proclaimed startup guru, and Sequoia Capital backed “Mahalo” CEO Jason Calacanis has chosen to launch what he calls a “Holy War to destroy the Keiretsu Forum”. He is portraying himself as Bin Ladin and calls his rage-a-thon “Jason’s Jihad”.
This absurdity started last Friday with a very uncivil series of blog posts, Podcasts, and campaign on Twitter attacking our good friend Randy Williams, Founder & CEO of the Keiretsu Forum, along with gross distortions and insinuations about the character and accomplishments of the Keiretsu Forum’s 850 members.
This week Nima Salke, a School of business senior enrolled in Business 454 at Cal Poly, asked me an excellent question: “what criteria exactly, defines a company as a ’startup’?”.
This is an not a particularly easy question to answer, and it is not a question that there is any perfect, black-and-white answer for. This question reminds me of famous quote by Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward while discussing the Larry Flynt Pornography case: ”I do not know what hard-core pornography is, but I know it when I see it”.
Defining what constitutes a startup business may be a little easier question to tackle. But it is highly subjective and varies depending by type of startup (business sector), type of financing, and other criteria.
That being said, here’s how I define a startup company
The term “Startup” generally refers to a newly founded company, but in Silicon Valley where there are a huge number of tech startups (over 10,000 new ones annually, that succeed in getting started, by my estimate) and a similar number of them that have operated for years as going concerns. The term refers to companies that have some/all of the following attributes:
A privately held and financed company. There is usually some level of outside equity and/or debt investment such as friends & family, angels, Venture Capital; occasionally a reverse merger. Some startups may be immediately profitable so they can “bootstrap”; but is the rare startup that can succeed without someone providing risk capital
A long-term goal (vision) for delivering new and/or improved goods or services, often disruptive in nature. Startups are not “lifestyle businesses” or “cash cows”. They are on a burning mission to change the world.
Most startup firms have not yet achieved several consecutive quarters of cash-flow positive financial performance. Once that occurs, they move into the real of mid-market “growth firms”.
Startups usually aim at developing new technology or taking advantage of new technology (no restaurants or REITs).
Startups go through several phases of development, with the organization changing as the company becomes larger; with profitability coming in the later phases.
Startups typically use their own stock as their (most valuable) currency, and there is almost always an equity mechanism (stock options or warrants) for rewarding investors and employees.
Some startups reach their goals (i.e. grow up). Others may be trapped in mid-development (like perpetual adolescents). Those that become stagnant move into the dreaded class of startups which are sometimes referred to as “the walking dead”. The huge boom in Venture Capital investment over the past decade has unfortunately, greatly increased the number of startups falling into this latter category.
What do you think defines a startup company?
Do you think the six criteria above are correct? How would you modify this list, and what criteria would you add? Thoughts and observations are welcome – we will modify and update this list as our own thinking about it evolves.
Thanks to Colin Mick of The Mick Group (Palo Alto, CA) for a spirited discussion and some out-of-the-box thinking to explore this question.
