Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz said today that it was joining well-known investors Ron Conway and DST Global’s Yuri Milner in the Y Combinator Start Fund, which gives $150,000 to each start-up in its semi-annual group.

Andreessen Horowitz will be investing $50,000 of the total in each entrepreneurial effort, starting with the next “class” of up to five dozen companies later this month in the well-regarded incubator.

The money comes in the form of convertible debt, which is a loan that can convert if a start-up raises a funding round. Start-ups can refuse the money, although most do not.

“I can’t tell you how impressed we have been with the quality of the start-ups that Y Combinator has had,” said Marc Andreessen in an interview with me this afternoon. “[Co-founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston] have become the consigliere to a whole new generation of entrepreneurs.”

Indeed. Y Combinator assembles these start-ups twice a year, giving them about $15,000 to work on their idea, but — more importantly — providing a lot of support and entree to powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Its efforts have been critical to the beginnings of many successful companies, such as Reddit, Loopt and Scribd.

“So many of the high quality seed deals have been coming from Y Combinator and we wanted to be close to all those companies,” said Andreessen. “It’s a great view of what’s coming next from the very best start-ups.”

“We didn’t become less selective,” Y Combinator founder Paul Graham said of the latest class, his program’s thirteenth. “We funded three percent of the applicants just like we always do. It’s just a larger percentage of the total pool of start-ups is coming through Y Combinator.”

The other distinction is that Y Combinator didn’t let investors snag any participants early, as it previously has. Though some companies in the new class may have raised money already, they’re all still open to taking more funding, Graham said, revving up investors with the promise of discovering the next Airbnb or Dropbox (a.k.a. the Y Combinator all-time MVPs).

Here’s how the on-the-record start-ups describe themselves.

Aisle50: Groupon for groceries — the future of CPG promotions.

Interstate: Project management software that lets you share development roadmaps with customers.

MixRank: Competitive intelligence for online advertising.

Picplum: We automatically send premium photo prints for parents with young children. They send us their best photos, we print & send them to grandparents and family once a month.

Launchpad Toys: We’re building digital toys that empower kids to create, learn, and share their ideas with friends and family around the world — the Adobe Creative Suite for kids.

Interviewstreet: Interviewstreet helps companies hire the best programmers.

Debteye: Automated debt counseling.

DoubleRecall: A new captcha-like ad type that monetizes 12x better than banners.

Envolve: A customizable chat system for your website.

Quartzy: Life science labs spend $9BB (US) on consumables, yet they use Excel to manage inventory and orders. Quartzy provides free inventory and ordering software, aggregating demand and creating a marketplace.

Munch On Me: Daily deals for food.

Paperlinks: Paperlinks is the QR code infrastructure for businesses.

PageLever: Analytics that help businesses be more effective on Facebook. Customers include YouTube, MTV, etc.

MarketBrief: Marketbrief takes SEC filings and puts them through a system of humans and computers to create an easy to understand article containing all important information from the filing.

Snapjoy: Snapjoy stores and organizes the world’s photos.

Opez: Yelp for individual service professionals.

Bushido: Hosted ecosystem and app store for web apps.

Stypi: Stypi is Google Wave done right.

Proxino: Proxino is a cloud platform that makes it easy to debug and deploy JavaScript code.

MongoHQ: MongoHQ allows you to quickly and easily create MongoDB databases for use in your applications. We offer data hosting and management, performance monitoring, scaling and optimization.

ZigFu: ZigFu is an app store for motion control apps. Developers use our tools to create gesture-controlled user interfaces and full-body motion games.

Parse: Heroku for mobile — power your mobile apps with our cloud platform. Add a backend to your mobile app without servers.

Science Exchange: Science Exchange is an online marketplace for outsourcing science experiments. We’re improving the efficiency of scientific research by making it easy for scientists to access experimental expertise across research facilities.

Verbling: Connect language learners to native speakers for verbal practice through in-browser, real-time live video. If you’re learning Spanish, we’ll connect you to an Argentine who’s learning English, for example.

MobileWorks: MobileWorks is crowdsourcing, reinvented. Businesses can outsource work to our crowd in 3 clicks and developers can add human intelligence to their applications.

Vidyard: YouTube for Business.

Tagstand: NFC platform that makes it easy for developers and businesses to incorporate near field communication into their apps.

Kicksend: Realtime file sharing and delivery for friends and family.

Vimessa: Video voicemail — the ease of SMS with the magic of video.

Can’tWait!: We use trailers to get users to tell us what upcoming media releases they want to watch or buy, and then sell it to them when the media is released.

Codecademy: Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It’s interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.

Image via Flickr user Brian Auer.

Some 100 similar programs exist, and Y Combinator too is rapidly expanding, with 62 companies expected for its next class (up from eight in 2005).

Now the programs themselves are getting topic-specific, rather than just location-specific. At least three new Silicon Valley accelerators are launching in the next few months, with focuses on education, cleantech and health, respectively.

It makes sense: The act of building a company has its own curriculum, but start-ups in different sectors will undoubtedly benefit from more specific mentorship.

The newest such program is Greenstart, a cleantech accelerator based out of a 7,000-square-foot office in San Francisco that will begin its first session this fall. It launched to the public today. Here’s the pitch:

Greenstart is led by three successful tech entrepreneurs gone green, Mitch Lowe (Jumpstart), Dave Graham (ArizonaBay Technology Ventures) and Dillon McDonald (OpenAuto/Jumpstart), Greenstart aims to cultivate the specific needs of ambitious startups with ideas for minimizing dirty energy. For their first class they seek “new cleantech” companies – those working in software, smart grid, smart sensors, mobile apps, and the clean web – versus capex intensive ideas like solar panels or biofuels.

However, Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech points out that the Greenstart leaders don’t have extensive cleantech resumes, and that most cleantech projects require considerably more funding than the $25,000 Greenstart is offering.

Elsewhere, Geoff Ralston has launched Imagine K12, an education start-up accelerator that Kara covered earlier this week. That program has the explicit endorsement of Y Combinator, which says it will refer future education-specific applicants to Palo Alto, Calif.-based Imagine K12 instead.

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham wrote,

If you want to start a startup building things for schools, we encourage you to apply to Imagine K12, because frankly, we couldn’t help you the way they can. The hardest question we always have to ask such startups is ‘how are you going to get the first users?’ Imagine K12 doesn’t have to ask that.

Also starting this summer is Rock Health, a San Francisco-based accelerator focused on health apps that has relationships with the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, Harvard Medical School, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

With able assistance from my colleague Drake Martinet, here are the official bios and snapshots of the 43 presenting companies at Demo Day Winter 2011. But–frowny face–19 of the two-minute presentations were deemed “off the record,” so they’re not included.

Y Combinator had 80 percent more applications for this class than the one six months prior, said leader Paul Graham. In January, all the participating start-ups were offered $150,000 in convertible debt from the new Start Fund. Graham said one start-up did not present because it already had a Series A term sheet with a “no-shop” clause.

Be sure to check out the gallery at the bottom. And now, the newest companies of Y Combinator:

Comprehend Systems
http://www comprehendsystems.com
Enterprise cross-database reporting and visualization.

Convore
https://convore.com/
Real-time group conversations. Chat with public and private groups on the Web, or the iPhone app IRC for everyone.

HelloFax
http://www.hellofax.com
A Web-based replacement for your fax machine.

Tutorspree
http://www.tutorspree.com
Airbnb for tutoring.

Memorable quote: “[Tutorspree Co-founder] Josh [Abrams], in his spare time, is the largest wholesaler of diamonds on Amazon.”

Earbits Radio
http://www.earbits.com
Internet radio that serves as a marketing platform for music-related products. Labels, artists and live music promoters bid for airtime.

Shortcut description: “The Google AdWords for the music industry.”

TellFi
https://www.tellfi.com
The easiest way to set up a phone system for your business.

Beetailer
http://www.beetailer.com
Beetailer helps online retailers bring their businesses onto Facebook, importing their existing Web store, providing tools for promoting it and detailed performance statistics.

FitFu
http://www.fitfu.com/s/buy/yc
Motivating mobile fitness game to keep you active throughout the day.

You Got Listings
http://www.yougotlistings.com/
The real estate platform for all properties, brokers and transactions.

drchrono
https://drchrono.com
IPad EMR for doctors.

Custora
http://www.custora.com
Google brings customers in, we keep them coming back.

Taskforce
http://taskforceapp.com
Makes your inbox work as the to-do list you’re using it for.

Lanyrd
http://lanyrd.com
IMDB of conferences.

SwipeGood
https://swipegood.com
Round up credit or debit card transactions for charity.

GiftRocket
http://www.giftrocket.com
Gift cards to anywhere.

Noteleaf
http://noteleaf.com
Mobile meeting profiles pushed to your phone.

Grubwithus
http://www.grubwith.us
Meet new people at a family-style meal. For users it has the appeal of a dating site; for restaurants, the appeal of Groupon.

AppHarbor
http://appharbor.com
“Heroku for .NET”–a platform as a service for .NET developers and businesses.

MinoMonsters
http://minomonsters.com/
MinoMonsters is a social game where you collect and battle pet monsters on Facebook, the Web and the iPhone. We are Pokemon for 2011.

Curebit
http://www.cureblt.com
We productize the world’s most effective marketing–word of mouth. We take the incentivized referral model from Dropbox and make it easily available to everyone.

Moki.tv
http://moki.tv/
Personalized TV guide for streaming video online. Aggregates Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc., and adds algorithmic recommendations. The first stop for anyone who wants to watch something online.

Like.fm
http://like.fm
Like.fm takes all of your music and makes it social. We track everything you listen to and make it extremely easy to share with and discover from people.

Sendoid
http://sendoid.com
Private, massive file transfer via direct peer-to-peer, in-browser and on the desktop.

Five Stars
http://www.fivestarscard.com
A universal loyalty card for retail businesses. The card is the first link between cash registers, customers’ email and Facebook accounts.

It turns out, however, that Milner–the chief executive of DST Global which made a splash in the U.S. by betting big money on Facebook Inc., Groupon Inc. and Zynga Inc.–was looking to offer to invest his own money in all 43 start-ups recently coming out of Y Combinator’s latest three-month boot camp.

“It’s probably one of the most surprising things that has happened so far,” Graham said.

As TechCrunch first reported, Milner teamed up with SV Angel–the seed fund run by prominent angel investor Ron Conway–to offer $150,000 each in convertible debt in each company.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Union Square Ventures partner, whose firm is an investor in many high-profile web companies including Twitter Inc., is known more to some in the start-up community for the valuable insight he shares on his blog than for the deals he actually makes. For the past couple of years, his site, “A VC,” has consistently drawn the most eyeballs among the dozens of blogs manned by venture capitalists.

But data from web analytics firm Compete shows that Wilson’s blog now ranks second in average monthly uniques. The top spot belongs to Paul Graham, who runs seed-capital firm Y Combinator.

Wilson’s blog averaged 81,483 average monthly unique users in the fourth quarter, down about 19 percent from a year earlier. Graham, meanwhile, saw his readership for “Essays” surge 35 percent to 97,227 uniques. Both blogs are considered must-reads in the start-up community.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Paul Buchheit

Buchheit has joined Mountain View, Calif.-based Y Combinator as a partner, a move that wasn’t altogether unexpected as he had been closely affiliated with the start-up incubator program. As an angel investor, Buchheit is the all-time leader for total YC companies backed. By the time the last three-month YC session had ended with a public Demo Day presentation to potential investors, Buchheit had already funded five of the 36 companies.

Buchheit is most famous for his work at Google, where he created Gmail, built the first prototype of AdSense and came up with the motto “Don’t be evil.”

Today is Buchheit’s last day at Facebook, where he had not held a particularly public-facing role. That’s in contrast to his FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor, who quickly rose through the ranks at Facebook and was named CTO in June. FriendFeed had been acquired for $50 million in August 2009.

In a blog post announcing the move, Y Combinator partner Paul Graham said of Buchheit, “He’s a good friend as well as one of the world’s best hackers; for years we’ve considered him an honorary YC partner.” Within the Y Combinator community, Graham is known as “PG” and Buchheit as “PB.”

Harjeet Taggar

Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston said that the new expanded team of six partners should allow the program to invest in more companies. YC classes have grown significantly over time; the first session had only eight companies.

“If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a Web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.”

– “Hackers and Painters” author Paul Graham answers the question “If the the Mac was so great why did it lose?”–back in 2004

In case you are not yet worked up into enough of a lather, let Weekend Update help out. iPad apps are hitting the App Store, Jobs and Schmidt are brunching together and Apple (AAPL) has run out of iPads for Day One. Developers are leaking screenshots of their latest “HD” apps, and the whole of Silicon Valley is about to explode in a sonorous collective oh yeahhh, as if everyone in a 100-mile radius were dipping into a hot tub simultaneously.

But before we can report on pad-rapture oh-10, AllThingsD has one more week of hard-hitting tech news to bring right to your humorously ancient laptop screen.

Here we go.

BoomTown started off the week meeting with VC Kevin Efrusy. Efrusy, who is at Accel Parteners (best known as the Facebook VC), is a tech geek of the highest order. You don’t get a masters degree in electrical engineering from Stanford without having some chops. Kara coaxed the typically behind-the-curtains Efrusy into one of her signature Flip video interviews. She then covered Amit Singh’s move away from Oracle (ORCL) to head up Google’s (GOOG) international sales team. Kara rounded out the week with one of her reliably awesome viral video posts, this time about TED presenter, TV Chef and owner of the world’s largest tongue, Jamie Oliver. We dare you to watch the video and not stare at it.

This just in (Weekend Update is holding our finger to our ear for no reason): In a rare Saturday post, Digital Daily is reporting that launch day iPads are sold out. We’ve heard a rumor that AllThingsD interns will be dispatched, in lieu of staff writers, to wait in overnight lines for customers waiting waiting to buy iPads at Apple stores. More to come. In an awesome techno-geopolitical twist, John wrote about China’s Unicom dumping the Google search engine from it’s Android smartphones. This confirms Weekend Update’s suspicion about the coming robo-pocalypse. Even if you cut the head off an Android, the body lives on. And in final preparation for the big launch, John reported that Apple has finally taken possession of the iPad trademark, which had previously belonged to Fujitsu. No word on what that little chestnut cost, but we’ll bet it was more than Fujitsu had been making on the original iPad, an eight-year-old point-of-sale device that runs Windows.

MediaMemo dipped below the murky surface of Internet fame this week to try to tease out the identity of Merton, the Chatroulette improv piano guy. Turns out “Merton” is not Ben Folds as some suspected, but we’re glad there is someone left out there with a sense of humor. Peter went back to school later in the week to visit with the most recent graduates of Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator start-up school. He talked with NewsLabs creator Paul Biggar, who hopes to save journalism by supplying freelancers with the kind of support they might have gotten at, say, a newspaper. He wasn’t too clear on specifics, but he did say that revenue wasn’t going to be all about the ads.

Out in Mossberg Land, Walt and Katie had a full week of reviews of the stuff you care about. Katie gave readers a much needed roundup of a half-dozen sites that bring power (and discounts) to the people through group buying. She helps even the most un-savvy deal-hunter figure things out by breaking down sites like Groupon and Woot. Walt unboxed a new Tivo (TIVO) this week to have a peek at what the DVR company has been cooking. This iteration of the popular television-recording device was billed as mixing Web and TV content in new ways. Walt reported that the new device doesn’t actually have additional Web features compared previous models. The company did change the user interface, however, but Walt wasn’t entirely sold on the new version. Finally, Mossberg’s Mailbox had hints of mountains of mail to come, leading off this week with an iPad question. Walt answered as completely as he could, but for now, the iPad questions are based on Apple’s claims, not actual product testing. Walt went into detail over a question about a Lenovo Thinkpad he tested, and gave some more details to a reader who wanted to rid her browser of unwanted cookies.

Weekend Update wishes everyone a glorious first full week of spring, and asks that readers keep pleasant thoughts in their mind about the weather in Palo Alto this Friday night. We’ll probably be out there, rain or shine, but no one likes wet geeks.

A more pertinent measure of Graham’s influence: His “Demo Day,” when his start-ups strut their stuff after three months of product-building, packs a roomful of Silicon Valley’s most connected investors and buyers. Firms I spotted in attendance yesterday include Google (GOOG), Intel (INTC), AOL (AOL), Accel, Benchmark, Spark and Bessemer.

And I wasn’t looking at name tags that closely. Because I spent most of my time watching the Y Combinator guys (and yes, there was nary a woman among the 26 start-ups) make their pitches, which were generally compelling. And at the very least, enthusiastic. One even included this promise: “This is literally the next Google.”

Gotta love that. I’ll tell you about some of them down the road.

But first, let’s talk to Graham himself about the state of the start-up world, the renewed interest in angel investing, and his definition of a successful start-up. Actually, I’ll spoil the last one for you: “The founders end up rich.”