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 ...
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 ...
Interview with Brad Feld, Boulder CO software internet venture capital partner
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 ...
Next Big Sound interview – Boulder, CO Digital Music analytics startup
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 ...
I’ve heard a lot of comments about the iPad lately along the lines “someone needs to find a killer application”. Well, for business people, serial entrepreneurs, and anyone that is using GTD to manage their business… here it is: running your GTD “trusted system” on an iPad (video follows). In short, GTD on the iPad… sizzles!
[ Video tutorial here ]
I am using Cultured Code’s “Things” application to illustrate how I run my GTD system on an iPad; but other great iPad applications (e.g. Omnifocus, ToDo, etc) will suffice. After using Omnifocus on my Macbook Pro for some time, I’ve come to appreciate Things’ elegant simplicity; it does everything i need as described in my video tutorial.
[ Briefly explain my interest in, and history with GTD. ]
If you are unfamiliar with the GTD (“Getting Things Done”) system for managing your productivity, here are some resources which may be useful:
DA Books
DA blogs, forums
GTD Times
best GTD sitesshort
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.
The 36 students enrolled in “Business 454″, are “learning buy doing”, in accordance with Cal Poly’s educational philosophy (per http://CalPoly.edu) working as independent analysts and consultants on the Startup Trek business plan. They have beta tested the StartupTrek site; conducted competitive research; analyzed the demographics, studied different content types, etc. Some of the students have have now stepped into the role of “student interviewers”, interviewing both local entrepreneurs in person, and distant entrepreneurs via Skype, in order to “learn by doing”, in order to gain additional insights to feed back to the other students in the class.
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
While in Portland, Oregon this week Startup Trek TV interviewed 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 14 “mini-interviews” on different aspects of Angel investing.
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. The startup 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. They have built their solution around partnerships with leading CDN (content delivery network) and elastic hosting (cloud computing) partners. As a result, videos hosted on their platform can “scale” in the event of traffic surges and load spikes – a common event with some of their customers, which include the Kansas City Chiefs Football team.
Orfalea School of Business Student Kaila Anderson of Cal Poly “Business 454″ class, studying entrepreneurship, interviews Niites.com founder Dustin Ryen.
Q: WHAT IS NIITES.com?
A: It is a local content website for students, featuring local nightclubs.
Q: WHY ARE CAL POLY STUDENTS CONDUCTING STARTUP INTERVIEWS?
A: Startup Trek is the subject of Cal Poly’s “Learn by doing” Entrepreneurship Class, Business 454, this Quarter. More information about the program is available in this Startup Trek article.
Yesterday afternoon Startup Trek ventured to Sausalito, CA to visit with senior Keiretsu Forum member Mr. Max Shapiro. Max is a Keiretsu Forum enthusiast, and CEO of innovative human resources firm PeopleConnect.com
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 ’start-up’?”.
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.
