Written on
June 23, 2010 by
Steve
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:
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Written on
June 16, 2010 by
Steve
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,
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Written on
June 15, 2010 by
Steve
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.
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Written on
June 11, 2010 by
Steve
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,
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Written on
June 6, 2010 by
Steve
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
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Written on
May 30, 2010 by
Steve
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.
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Written on
May 27, 2010 by
Steve
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.
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Written on
April 16, 2010 by
Steve
This 6-minute video, part 4/4 of our interview with software-internet venture capitalist Brad Feld covers how
the Techstars 90 day venture incubation program works. Techstars currently has programs running in Boulder, Boston, and Seattle.
We also asked Brad what advice he would give young entrepreneurs just getting started today and he came back with several specific, detailed suggestions.
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Written on
April 16, 2010 by
Steve
Part 3 of our interview with software-internet venture capitalist Brad Feld covers how Foundry Group looks at and thinks about putting venture capital into startup companies. That is, their strategic framework for looking at opportunities. Our 7 minute part 3 video interview follows:
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