I recently had the opportunity to visit with Mr. Tom Alexander, Founder & CTO of VC-funded Veriwave of Beaverton OR; and their CEO Chris Dimenico.
My report, and a photo essay are pending.
the entrepreneurship channel
Category Archives: Tech Startups
Veriwave, venture capital funded Wi-Fi startup, lights up the west side of Portland (Beaverton), OR
Is Groupon *really* worth $6B? How about Facebook @$60B? Twitter $3.5B?
On the tenth anniversary of the dot com bust, we may be running up to a second one
OK, it’s 2010… 2000 + 10 years. Groupon is supposedly worth $6B (“according to Google”, which passed after figuring that out), Facebook is worth $60B (“according to a new private investor”), and “Twitter”, which has a hazy business model (much like Facebook and Groupon, save copying Google’s ads) is worth $3.5B – according to the venture capitalists.
Does anyone think there is a good reason for these companies to be valued as such? Are we not, in a second “dot com bubble? If not, then please explain your rationale, and thinking.
There is a reason the public has no enthusiasm for high tech IPO’s…
And guess what… it’s not the $3M per startup pre-IPO overhead from Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation, as many VC’s seem to feel. That’s actually not a big problem – startups preparing to go public can afford the $3M. It may be an unpleasant hassle, and unfair – but it’s not the reason the tech IPO market has been week. It has much more to do with a little incident ten years ago, which we all remember fondly, called “the dot com bubble (and bust)”.Book review: “Do More Faster”
Brad Feld and David Cohen have created a “must read” blockbuster for every aspiring tech entrepreneur. But it’s a bit of a misnomer to attribute this seminal entry into entrepreneurship literature, to these two guys. Because Feld and Cohen have turned web 2.0 “crowd-sourcing” on themselves, and used it to create a terrific, wide-ranging collection of solid advice and insights for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.
Startup Occipital in Boulder, CO sells Red Laser to eBay
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:
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch takes on, defeats Seattle at TechFlash event
TechFlash, a Seattle blog which covers tech startups, held an event which featured Mike Arrington
This lively panel discussion featured Bill Bryant from Draper Fisher, Hillel Cooperman from Jackson Fish Market, Serena Glover of Twango, Andy Sack of Founder’s Co-Op and the founding director of TechStars Seattle,
Renegotiated Financial Regulation bill (FINREG) still stands to cripple Angel investment, job formation
The War on Reg D – Redux
Chris Dodd, an outgoing US Senator due to taking loans from Mortgage firms he helped, is pushing a bill which will strangle startups
There’s been a LOT of complaining recently about the terms which negatively impact the $26B annual world of “Angel” investing, which have been slipped into Senator Chris Dodd’s Financial Reform bill (“FINREG”). The Wall Street Journal railed about it under the banner “Angels Out of America“:
- Regulation D, also known as “Reg D” among securities types (along with Rules 504, and 505, and 506) is an area of US Securities law in which the SEC exempts certain qualified securities offerings – those made into very small start-up companies by private investors – from the requirements of “registration” for public offerings, with State and Federal Securities regulators.
- Under Reg D and the associated Rules, a start-up company can take investments from individuals without involving the investment banks, filing for an initial public offering (IPO). and complying with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) requirements – among other horrors.
- A key aspect of these Federal legal codes, is the concept of an “Accredited investor” being involved in these “exempt” (from public registration) investments. Accredited investors have to date been able to factor in their primary residence into the net worth calculation, a central tenant of Reg D.
An education in Angel investment with Dr. Rob Wiltbank – part 2
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,
An education in Angel investment, with Dr. Rob Wiltbank – part 1
This is part 1 of 14 short video interview segments with Dr. Rob Wiltbank of Willamette University (Salem & Portland, OR).
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
Seattle TechStars applicant GoMiles eases travel reward tracking
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.
Seattle CAD-CAM startup MES raises capital to lower part cost
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.