"The Zuck" made me a Latte...
Hangin’ with Mark (aka “the Zuck”) late this Friday afternoon. He told me his family owns the Woodside Bakery & Cafe! Figures.
This is the bakery right next door to the legendary “Bucks” of Woodside. About 5 miles N of Sand Hill Road, the global epicenter of venture capital.
Said it helps him to unwind from the stress, doing the Barrista thing.
After selling their product to eBay, bootstrapped “computer vision” startup Occipital may no longer need to seek outside capital for growth
Startup Trek recently interviewed Vikas Reddy, engineering co-founder of iPhone application startup Occipital, the developer of top iPhone application “Red Laser”, in Boulder Colorado. Today the product was acquired from Occipital by eBay.
Occipital, as a tech startup venture, is impressive in quite a few ways. Vikas and his partner Jeff deserve some applause from their fellow tech entrepreneurs. Check them out in our 17-minute video interview, below.
Red Laser went through the Boulder TechStars program in 2008, but failed to raise Angel or Venture capital investment, despite great enthusiasm from TechStars mentors about the founders. So they were forced to bootstrap, and as a result ended up holding 100% of the equity when they sold Red Laser to eBay. That is good news, but also bad news; we will get into that in a follow-up post. Here is our video interview:
How many U.S. Angel investing groups are there? How are they organized? How do they conduct due diligence?In this 4 minute “part 2″ video segment from our educational interview series with Prof Rob Wiltbank of Willamette University, we explore how U.S. Angel investing groups are formed,
Rob has been studying, analyzing, publishing papers, and speaking about Angel investments, focusing on investment outcomes, for the past ten years.
In addition to teaching entrepreneurship, Rob is a Venture Partner with Seattle venture capital firm Montlake Capital. He has recently raised a $300k Angel investment fund which his business school students are in the process of
In this 3-minute video interview we get the story on Web 2.0 startup GoMiles from co-founder Michael Komarnitsky.
GoMiles was formed seven month ago, and is an applicant to the new “Seattle TechStars“ program for early-stage startups. GoMiles has a slick, automated solution to ease the pain of tracking those pesky, vexing travel mileage program accounts.
There are a number of nifty, surprise benefits which flow from using this “Mint.com” like site for tracking travel reward mileage accounts.
We had an interesting visit with Boeing Technical Principal turned serial entrepreneur Jerry LaChapelle. In our interview (video below) Jerry discusses his firm’s new web 2.0, Software as a Service (SaaS) application which lowers the cost of manufactured parts. The firm is in the midst of raising a private equity financing round for it’s CAD-CAM software product, which will lower the cost of manufactured parts.
In this interview, Jerry LaChapelle, Founder & CEO, shows how the MES “M-PACT” application complements state of the art Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM), and state of the art simulation processes to deliver superior, lower-cost machined parts.
Startup Trek spent a week in Boulder, Colorado recently, getting to know some of the local entrepreneurs.
We were fortunate to kick things off by interviewing Foundry Group venture capitalist Brad Feld, Managing Director at Foundry Group‘s offices in Downtown Boulder, CO. Part 1 of our interview with Brad is a six minute session, covering Brad’s prolific career from his M.I.T. days to starting to make Angel investments, well before Foundry Group and TechStars.
Cal Poly Business School seniors Lelani Torres and Brandon LaRose prepare for a remote/Skype video interview with Web 2.0 startup RememberItNow.com.
The students are conducting interviews with entrepreneurs this quarter, as part of their 3rd-party independent market research, beta testing, and business model analysis for Startup Trek Television Inc.
Startup Trek TV had the opportunity to interview the co-founder & CEO of Digital Music analytics startup “Next Big Sound” 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