Are Venture Capitalists going to lose their shirts on Twitter?Some historical perspective on the immense bet Venture Capitalists have made:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/09/30/where-twitter-ranks-in-vc-history/
This article shows how the odds are against this investment returning funds to investors. Because Twitter falls into the zone of “VC insanity” Tulip-bulb style investing, circa the 1999 Nasdaq bubble.
Startup Trek will be at the Stanford Alumni Center next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week for our second annual coverage of Tony Perkins’ Always On Venture Capital “Summit at Stanford” with Tony Perkins. The conference features many promising tech startups, along with panel sessions and debates about key trends impacting venture capital funded startups, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs across the tech spectrum.
I am attending Henry Blodget ‘s “Startup 09″ conference in lower Manhattan today. Business Insider has done a great job of orchestrating the debut of a first-rate, high level technology industry business conference.
Thanks to Henry Blodget (CEO of Business Insider, Julie Hansen (COO) and the rest of the team at Alley Insider for inviting me to this debut tech event.
It was my opportunity on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 to present a cutting-edge collegiate, socially-enabled web 2.0 application to students in the Orfalea School of Business at California Polytechnic (“Cal Poly”) in San Luis Obispo. Professor Jeffrey Danes of the Orfalea School of Business invited me into his entrepreneurial marketing class, the third in a four-course sequence. I described the business and technology strategy of a web startup that I’ve been helping out over the past year, to the 45 business school seniors enrolled in the “Entrepreneurship” program.
Reporting Live From Web 2.0 Expo
The Web 2.0 Expo made its way to San Francisco, CA March 31st through April 3rd. There was a lot of talk about the design of mobile applications, twitter vs google vs facebook vs linkedin, and much more.
Matt’s first startup, Sitepoint.com, launched ten years ago when he was 15. While living in Vancouver Island, Canada, and his staff working in New Zealand, Matt has just opened an office for his spinoff called 99Designs.com in San Francisco. Sitepoint is the 799th busiest site on the internet, and Matt has run it magnificently. He’s a very impressive and accomplished young entrepreneur.
At 99Designs, graphic artists from around the world compete with each other to develop logos, web pages, and other graphics for corporations, small businesses, individuals, and others.
Steve Bell, consistently being one of the highest-rated contest holders at 99Designs.com since 2004, was invited into to this interview when he was in San Luis Obispo, taking photographs at Cal Poly. He spoke to CBS for 30 minutes, but only got 30 seconds of video in the edited version.
With the premise being he would give each of them his sought-after merger and acquisition advice. Quattrone recently co-founded a new tech M&A investment advisory firm Qatalyst.
The startups were: