The hackers and engineers of Y Combinator are doing what hackers and engineers do to any industry, they’re efficiently and ruthlessly disrupting the traditional model of venture capital and are going to destroy far more more wealth for their contemporaries than they create for themselves, as broadband did to entertainment, Craigslist did to newspapers, and Amazon did to traditional retailers.

– WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg

The Priceonomics Web site, which officially launched on Dec. 21, is aimed at helping sellers and buyers determine the best price for used bikes, cars, phones, TVs and other items, so no one gets ripped off.

But rather than explaining what it does in a press release, Priceonomics wrote an entertaining blog post, entitled “Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage,” detailing its experiments with selling the expensive Herman Miller office furniture in San Francisco.

Trials included finding buyers among its start-up incubator classmates, finding the chairs on Craigslist, borrowing a girlfriend’s car to get them, negotiating a lower price, lugging the chairs back to the office, and then almost losing the sale in the end, when the seller’s $1,800 check didn’t go through.

Priceonomics concludes that a business based on hauling used furniture around won’t scale but that there is a need for a centralized location for pricing information.

From its blog post:

“It’s unlikely Priceonomics could build a massively successful business arbitraging used goods if we have to take possession of them. However, it was clear that having our price guides were really helpful for identifying what were the good deals on Craigslist and how much to pay for them. So for now, we’ll just stick to building better price guides to help other people buy things on Craiglist, eBay, and other emerging marketplaces like Zaarly and TaskRabbit.”

Priceonomics may be on to something here.

Not too long ago, one way to determine the fair value of an item on the Internet was through an online auction. EBay became wildly popular as an easy way for total strangers to agree on a price for an item. More recently, auctions have become less relevant, and even eBay is decreasing the alliance of used items on its site.

That’s due in large part to today’s free flow of information on the Internet, which makes pricing more transparent. After all, you can just Google it.

Still, determining the price of an item can be time-consuming. To get a good sense of the fair value, you have to cross-check prices on a handful of sites — if not a dozen.

Priceonomics’ price guide promises to help users easily find out if they are getting a good deal, by comparing items across eBay, Craigslist and even full-priced retailers that might be offering a deal.

So, how much is a second-hand Aeron chair worth?

In the end, Priceonomics says, the chairs resell for $400 to $600 in San Francisco. The company was able to acquire four, for $375 each; it then turned around and unloaded them for $1,800, representing a $300 profit.

The problem with true hyper-growth … It’s the problem like baking a cake in three minutes.

— Marc Andreessen, talking about growth at Y Combinator’s Startup School this weekend

There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things. I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term. You don’t have to move out here to do this.

— Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview this weekend at Y Combinator’s Startup School event, noting that he would have stayed in Boston if he were founding the social networking site all over again.

Today AngelPad launches the 15 start-ups that comprise its third 10-week-long class.

This class was AngelPad’s first to be gifted $100,000 upon starting the program, in line with competing start-up accelerators TechStars and Y Combinator. Though most participants didn’t know about the six-figure funding when they applied, AngelPad leader Thomas Korte said it has had a significant effect on their development, allowing them to hire earlier and do things like pay for outside user interface help and spend $5,000 on Google AdWords or Facebook advertising.

Here is how the companies described themselves in a handout given to investors at AngelPad’s Demo Day this afternoon:

SourceNinja solves the legal pains, maintenance headaches, and security nightmares of using open source. Founders are former Symantec, PGP and McAfee engineers.

SimpleReach offers real-time social intelligence and content recommendation for publishers. Founders are experienced in building high performance ad systems and are repeat entrepreneurs based in NY.

LendFriend is an online platform for friends and family loans. Founders are Stanford grads and repeat entrepreneurs with experience at PayPal, UBS, Deutsche Bank and RBC.

Pipedrive is a pipeline tool for active deal makers helping them stay organized and focused on closing deals. Founders are former Skype engineers and experienced deal makers from Estonia.

Frugalo is a social savings platform enabling online shoppers to discover and share awesome offers through their social network. Founders previously worked at Digg and are engineers with a strong background in consumer products.

iDoneThis is a daily productivity check-in for individuals and teams to track and coordinate progress. Founders are a former Yelp engineer, physics PhD student and corporate lawyer.

Prizzm enables businesses to reward their customers for sharing feedback. Founder is a CRM veteran (Salesforce, Scopus, Siebel) and a second-time entrepreneur.

Buffer is a more intelligent way to share updates at optimal times to social networks. Founders are repeat entrepreneurs from the U.K. and Austria with a Master’s degree in computer science.

Wishery integrates SaaS applications with email clients to help business communicators optimize customer retention. Founders are a serial entrepreneur with deep marketing experience and a Microsoft engineer with a Master’s degree in information security.

Shoplogic gives e-commerce merchants an intelligent way to optimize and manage their promotions. Founders are engineers, scientists, and product managers from data-driven companies such as Adchemy and Khimetrics.

Kout is a dead-simple e-commerce/payments platform, designed to work seamlessly across social, mobile, web. Founders are hackers with deep affiliate marketing & e-commerce knowledge.

LikeAndy is a complete solution to manage and share mobile videos and the only place you need for your personal videos. Founders have PhDs in video streaming and processing and are ex-Googlers (Google Video and YouTube).

Storie is a mobile social media platform for publishing and sharing content in the form of photo-based articles and stories. Founder is an engineer and ex-Google and YouTube product manager.

Vungle is a platform for mobile developers to launch and manage video advertising campaigns. Founders previously ran a video start-up and are outrageous marketers, moving over from London.

Tapviva is mobile food ordering built atop a next-generation restaurant technology platform. Founders have been developing technology products together for over a decade.

Image via CoverHound blog.

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.”

In New York, there’s Grouper, which matches two groups (usually of opposite genders) of three friends to get drinks or dinner. And in San Francisco, there’s Outgoing.me, which organizes group events like wine tastings and cooking classes.

Both companies are more on the social engineering side of a tech company than the engineering engineering side, though they’re working to develop systems for scheduling logistics and personality matching.

Grouper and Outgoing.me — which have each facilitated only about 100 events — say they’re more appealing to retailers than Groupon and the like. Rather than tempting users with a deep discount, they ask would-be socializers to pay normal prices upfront.

Grouper, which is a two-month-old two-man start-up, says it’s already profitable. (It’s not to be confused with the last tech start-up named Grouper, which did online video and sold to Sony in 2006.)

Meanwhile, Outgoing.me, which launched in May, says it’s about to close a round of angel funding. The San Francisco-based company has a four-person team led by brothers Dan and Jeff Morin, who are two-time Y Combinator founders but still looking for their first big hit.

The Morins think their secret sauce will be facilitation and follow-up, so they’re training community members to lead events and putting an emphasis on helping attendees keep in contact with each other.

At this point, it’s murky whether these approaches can scale into larger businesses. Elsewhere, an alternative like Meetup.com is much more generic, and the somewhat similar Table For Six is all about dating. There’s also some other early stage competition, like Grubwithus and Spoondate.

Further reading: “How Big is the ‘Social Discovery’ Opportunity?“

“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 from the seed funding program and others from the accelerator, 27 companies presented to a packed house at 500 Startups’ HQ in downtown Mountain View, Calif.

This class was heavy on consumer services products, focusing on things like shopping and product discovery. A surprisingly large number of food- and restaurant-related services also demoed. And, of course, it wouldn’t be an incubator demo day without at least a few companies building services for tech companies.

McClure emceed the whole session, noting that 500 Startups had invested in 175 companies to date and plans to continue a focus on adding international start-ups to its ranks.

Below is the list of companies and products announced. The list is complete, thanks to a lack of “off the record” conditions such those imposed at Y Combinator Demo Days.

Tout
http://www.toutapp.com
Email response templates and tracking.

VidCaster
http://www.vidcaster.com
Make a video site on your own domain.

Daily Aisle
http://www.dailyaisle.com
Expedia for wedding vendors.

AppGrooves
http://www.appgrooves.com
iOS app discovery platform.

Loku
http://www.loku.com
Big data for local.

Kibin
http://www.kibin.com
“The easiest way to get feedback and editing on your writing.”

OVIA
http://www.oviahr.com
Video interviewing service for recruiting.

BugHerd
http://www.bugherd.com
Visual bug tracker for the Web.

Skipola
http://www.skipola.com
Easy mobile apps for restaurants.

LaunchBit
http://www.launchbit.com
Ad network for email.

Tinfoil Security
http://www.tinfoilsecurity.com
Protecting Web sites from outside hackers.

Culture Kitchen SF
http://www.culturekitchensf.com
“Ethnic cooking classes taught by the grandmas you wish you had.”

Storytree
http://www.storytree.com
Capture and share family stories.

DailyGobble
http://www.dailygobble.com
One-to-one marketing for restaurants through receipt digitization.

Vayable
http://www.vayable.com
Social marketplace for experiences.

Singboard
http://www.singboard.com
YouTube meets karaoke. AllThingsD‘s Liz Gannes wrote about them here.

Chirpme
http://www.chirpme.com
Connecting people through single dates.

From.us
http://www.from.us
Crowdsourced gift selection and purchasing.

Welcu
http://www.welcu.com
Managing unique high-end events.

Console
http://www.console.fm
“Awesome music with no hassle.”

Zerply
http://www.zerply.com
“Professional networking done right.”

WillCall
http://www.getwillcall.com
HotelTonight for live music and theater.

Manpacks
http://www.manpacks.com
Purchasing help for men’s accessories.

Snapette
http://www.snapette.com
Location-based fashion discovery and sharing.

CardinalBlue
http://www.cardinalblue.com
Makers of Pic Collage, a Top 10 photo app.

CoderBuddy
http://www.coderbuddy.com
Next-generation ODesk meets Heroku.

CraftCoffee
http://www.craftcoffee.com
Mobile apps for small business.

The funding is intended to alleviate founder stress and encourage faster product progress, said AngelPad’s Thomas Korte. Competing program Y Combinator has a similar deal to give participating companies $150,000 from DST investor Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, the so-called “Start Fund.”

Korte said the AngelPad money is not the same: “It’s different. It’s a real investment from a VC firm, rather than just plain capital or quote-unquote free money.”

Korte acknowledged that having funding from the get-go will put more pressure on the companies in his program to make a return for their investors. “It’s probably more of a sense of responsibility,” he said.

AngelPad is two weeks away from starting its third class of 15 start-ups, but has left one spot open for a company that may be enticed by this new funding offer, Korte said.

Korte declined to specify which VCs are putting up the money, but said they focus on investments in B2B, mobile and e-commerce, like AngelPad.

Though AngelPad has a close relationship with Google Ventures, a spokeswoman for Google Ventures said that the firm was not one of the two participants in the new funding program.

The four-year-old mini venture firm said its strategy runs counter to the Y Combinator-led trend of maximum number of companies and minimum investment dollars.

Tandem plans to select eight start-up eggs — in this case from the mobile arena — put them in one basket, and watch them carefully.

Tandem co-founder Doug Renert said he hears from start-up founders who complain that they don’t get enough hands-on time with the network of advisers at other incubators.

Calling out the elephant in the room, Renert said, “At [Y Combinator], those companies get three months in [the incubator], and get shot out, to figure it all out.”

Tandem may take issue with the big orange incubator’s tactics, but there aren’t too many people saying the model is badly flawed. Y Combinator did, after all, just spread to larger digs and is currently hosting its largest class ever.

So what is Tandem’s better deal?

Renert explained that in exchange for the standard convertible note and 10 percent of the common stock, companies in Tandem’s next class would receive “$200K, to start, and six months in our new incubator space.” Which, he added with zeal, is a snazzy little Victorian home in the Peninsula.

Tandem calls its model “muscle capital,” which seems to mean its advisers will be far more active and participatory than just offering the occasional coffee date. Renert gave an example from a previous class, in which Tandem’s staff acted as the business end of a mobile gaming start-up so the founders could focus on software development.

At the very least, Tandem’s founders should be able to provide a voice of experience for navigating the recently bubble-icious tech scene; two of Tandem’s partners co-founded Webvan, which vies with Pets.com for first place in the category of “most iconic collapse of tech bubble 1.0.”

Tandem’s test, bubble not withstanding, will be to see if it can leverage the extra “muscle” and capital to make “smaller” more profitable.

After all, the only difference between “small” and “exclusive” is smashing success.

We reported on Odio’s departure last week, and he agreed to explain this quick switch after he officially left Facebook on Friday.

Freshplum is part of the current class of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator program where Divvyshot was incubated in 2009, Odio said.

Why leave Facebook now? Odio was product manager for Facebook Photos, which is thought to be the largest online photo-sharing service in the world. It wasn’t a bad gig.

Odio said he’d been brainstorming the idea for Freshplum with co-founder Nick Alexander, who was accepted to Harvard Business School for the fall. When the opportunity emerged to join Y Combinator just before the latest session started a few weeks ago, Odio and Alexander felt like it was now or never to work together on their idea, so Odio left Facebook and Alexander decided not to go to business school.

Plus, Y Combinator came with $150,000 in immediate funding offered to all participating companies by Yuri Milner and the Start Fund, so it wasn’t that much of a leap.

Odio certainly gave up earn-out opportunities by leaving Facebook earlier than he might have planned, but he says he’s OK with the decision because he’s a start-up guy at heart.

Price optimization seems a far cry from photo sharing, but Odio said he studied economics at the University of Virginia and his first start-up was a currency exchange site called OdioWorks that he used to pay for college and fund Divvyshot.

Alexander, meanwhile, had helped manage OdioWorks, in addition to founding a previous Y Combinator company (a failed coupon site) and working as an engineer at Cisco and Divvyshot. Odio and Alexander had previously lived together when they were both pinching pennies to try to make their last Y Combinator start-ups work.

Why are Odio and Alexander doing Y Combinator again? The Mountain View, Calif.-based program is a bit different these days; the current class has 60 companies versus 14 in Divvyshot’s cohort two years ago. But the Y Combinator brand, the easy funding, the network of people associated and the pressure to build something in three months make the program worth doing again, Odio said.

Odio wouldn’t comment about Facebook’s plans for its photo products after his exit, though it’s quite obvious Facebook is working on a mobile photos offering that will include features like group and event photo sharing, which were Divvyshot specialties.

Odio maintained he was very happy with his experience at Facebook, pointing to the responsibility he was given over Facebook photos and the many features he was able to ship in just a year. “If I were to sell again as a talent acquisition I would definitely sell to Facebook,” he said. However, he said he intends Freshplum to be a different sort of company.

In the weeks just prior to its acquisition in April 2010, Divvyshot had raised angel funding from investors including Jim Young, Richard Chen and Gabor Cselle, who got a quick and small return on their investment. Odio said he hopes to raise money from those same folks, as well as others, now that he’s building something for the long term.

A version of Freshplum should be out in the next couple of months, Odio said. It will provide an API that allows, for instance, the maker of a Mac desktop client for Twitter to dynamically figure out what price to charge its customers.

Odio said he looks forward to charging his own customers for something they want to pay for, versus the constant worry of where the next dollar would come from at a photo-sharing Web site.

In fact, he recalled — despite that angel funding coming together at the last minute — Divvyshot was on the verge of running out of money when Facebook’s Blake Ross called to express interest in an acquisition. The day the Divvyshot guys drove to Palo Alto to sign the acquisition papers, they ran out of gas and had trouble buying more because their business credit card was maxed out.

This time around, Odio said, things will be different.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110621/sam-odio-i-left-facebook-to-rejoin-y-combinator-with-a-new-start-up-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110526/growlab-accelerator-takes-root-in-vancouver/ http://allthingsd.com/20110526/growlab-accelerator-takes-root-in-vancouver/#comments Thu, 26 May 2011 11:30:55 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=78657 Start-up accelerator programs are now available in every flavor and color. The latest is Vancouver, BC-based GrowLab, which says it will accept five technology companies for its first class beginning August 15.

GrowLab participants will spend three months in Vancouver and one in San Francisco, receiving $25,000, office space and mentorship, plus a promise of $150,000 from BDC Venture Capital upon completion of the program. That means effectively that GrowLab has matched Y Combinator’s relationship with Yuri Milner and SV Angel, which provide the same amount for all participating companies (though Y Combinator serves many more start-up teams–it expects to have 62 in its next class).

GrowLab is led by Canadian entrepreneurs and angel investors including folks from NowPublic and AbeBooks.com, and it will give preferential consideration to applicants from Canada. A previous Vancouver-based start-up accelerator called Bootup Labs reneged on its promise to fund some participants and seems to have been discontinued.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110526/growlab-accelerator-takes-root-in-vancouver/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110524/start-up-accelerators-get-topic-specific-education-health-and-now-cleantech/ http://allthingsd.com/20110524/start-up-accelerators-get-topic-specific-education-health-and-now-cleantech/#comments Tue, 24 May 2011 15:38:33 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=77379 The Y Combinator model of “start-up accelerator”–assemble a group of young companies at a location for a few months, give them mentorship and tens of thousands of dollars each in exchange for a small stake, finish with a day of pitching to investors–has become an industry itself.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110524/start-up-accelerators-get-topic-specific-education-health-and-now-cleantech/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110523/geoff-ralston-talks-about-education-incubator-imagine-k12/ http://allthingsd.com/20110523/geoff-ralston-talks-about-education-incubator-imagine-k12/#comments Mon, 23 May 2011 13:01:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=76424

Last week, I met up with Geoff Ralston, an Internet exec whom I have known for a dog’s age–from his stint in the early days at Yahoo and later at music service Lala, which was sold to Apple in 2009.

These days, instead of heading to another company or starting one, Ralston has joined with Tim Brady and Alan Louie to launch Imagine K12, an education incubator.

Based on Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator, the aim of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Imagine K12 is to help education-focused start-ups with a little money and a lot of entrepreneurial encouragement.

After sifting through a pile of applications for slots, Ralston and his partners picked the first “class” of start-ups, who will begin work on June 2.

Here’s a video interview I did with Ralston talking about it all:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110523/geoff-ralston-talks-about-education-incubator-imagine-k12/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110520/stanford%e2%80%99s-sse-labs-creating-entrepreneurial-buzz-in-silicon-valley/ http://allthingsd.com/20110520/stanford%e2%80%99s-sse-labs-creating-entrepreneurial-buzz-in-silicon-valley/#comments Fri, 20 May 2011 07:00:45 +0000 Scott Austin http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41323 Y Combinator is considered by many as Silicon Valley’s elite start-up school, offering selected entrepreneurs a three-month crash course to help them build companies and raise capital.

But about a five-mile drive up El Camino, on the third floor of AOL’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., another start-up accelerator is emerging as a clubhouse of choice for some talented young entrepreneurs.

Only about a year-and-a-half old, SSE Labs is drawing the attention of heavy-hitting investors in part because of its direct ties to Stanford University, nesting ground to Cisco Systems Inc., Google Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and other giant Silicon Valley tech companies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110520/stanford%e2%80%99s-sse-labs-creating-entrepreneurial-buzz-in-silicon-valley/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110518/young-ex-googlers-explain-why-they-left-to-do-a-social-start-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20110518/young-ex-googlers-explain-why-they-left-to-do-a-social-start-up/#comments Wed, 18 May 2011 07:00:07 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=6858 WhereBerry, a site to help people find and plan cool stuff to do offline, launched Tuesday.

Co-founders Nick Baum and Bill Ferrell were until late last year product managers at Google. At 28 and 27, respectively, and with five and four years at Google, respectively, they had each spent most of their careers at the search giant.

Baum was a product manager on Chrome, Android and Reader, and an engineer for AdWords and YouTube. Ferrell was a product manager on search ads and infrastructure.

Both of them had participated in Google’s “associate product manager” program, which trains young technical hires to be internal leaders. But they actually didn’t know each other from Google; they met late last year at a Y Combinator “Start-up School” event at Stanford, and ended up applying to the accelerator program together.

Having completed Y Combinator in March, Baum and Ferrell are now funded by the $150,000 Yuri Milner’s Start Fund offered to all recent YC companies.

Until Tuesday, San Francisco-based WhereBerry was being tested among a small group of a couple hundred people; now, it is open to the public. The main thing that people do on the service is post ideas for places to eat, events to attend, and venues to visit. Users receive emails whenever one of their friends posts a new proposal.

“Neither of us left because we didn’t like it at Google,” Baum said. However, he added, working outside of Google seemed like the right thing to do when starting a social Web service.

“We explored doing it internally within Google,” Baum said. “But at the end of the day that made sense for products that used Google’s infrastructure in a really powerful way, like something that crawls the web, or needs machines, or needs to hire really quickly.”

As for a social planning service? “It’s amazing that these days two people with laptops can create something that millions of people use,” Baum said. And WhereBerry was a way for Baum to return to coding, something he’d missed in his product managing days.

Plus, Baum added, “The biggest thing we got by not doing this with Google is access to Facebook Connect–which is pretty hard to do within Google.”

Connecting to Facebook won’t necessarily be WhereBerry’s ticket to success, but it does help the service be “social from the ground up,” as Facebook likes to describe it. WhereBerry bears more than a passing resemblance to a long line of online get-together planning services that haven’t really gotten off the ground, such as Renkoo, Skobee, Socializr, LivingSocial before it did deals, Pinchd, Plancast and Ditto. It’s too early to say whether WhereBerry can be sufficiently better or luckier.

Meanwhile, back to the ongoing ex-Googler start-up phenomenon, it wasn’t hard for Baum to think up a quick list of some other start-ups from people who’ve recently left Google: Beluga, Optimizely, Inporia, ReadyForZero, Firespotter Labs, Campfire Labs, TapJoy and AdKu. I’m sure readers can think of plenty more.

Baum described Google’s “bottom-up culture” and the associate product manager leadership program specifically as forms of preparation for being an entrepreneur, saying he disagrees with the perception “that Google has lost its appeal.”

Baum referred to Marissa Mayer’s comments, as reported by Steven Levy in the new book “In the Plex” about Google anticipating that its young APMs would one day leave. Levy wrote in his account of traveling around the world with a class of APMs in 2007,

I was stunned when a poll of my fellow travelers revealed that not a single one of them saw him- or herself working for Google in five years. Marissa Mayer took this news calmly, claiming that such ambition was why they had been hired in the first place. “This is the gene that Larry and Sergey look for,” she told me. “Even if they leave, it’s still good for us. They’re going to take the Google DNA with them.”

Baum, it turns out, was one of the APMs on that trip.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110518/young-ex-googlers-explain-why-they-left-to-do-a-social-start-up/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110504/web-commenting-platform-disqus-raises-10-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110504/web-commenting-platform-disqus-raises-10-million/#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 17:08:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=32473 Disqus, a startup that operates a commenting platform for 750,000 Web sites, including this one, has raised a $10 million funding round led by North Bridge and Union Square Ventures. The start-up, hatched at Y Combinator in 2007, had previously raised $4.5 million from USV and others. It faces competition from Facebook, which just launched its own commenting system; Twitter may also offer a competitive product.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110504/web-commenting-platform-disqus-raises-10-million/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20110502/meet-evan-reas-of-lal-and-his-proximity-based-social-graph-for-colleges/ http://allthingsd.com/20110502/meet-evan-reas-of-lal-and-his-proximity-based-social-graph-for-colleges/#comments Tue, 03 May 2011 01:20:07 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=6185 The start-up LikeALittle, or LAL, had fended off NetworkEffect’s reportorial advances for weeks. Funny, considering the site helps people flirt with one another.

But last week we were granted access to the Palo Alto “hacker house” where the recently seed-funded LAL team has set up shop to expand its early success into a larger vision. No, LAL is not turning its flirting site into a dating site, but rather becoming a way for people to interact with others who are nearby, as co-founder and CEO Evan Reas described in a video interview embedded here.

LAL, which started at Stanford University last fall and now is live at 450 different colleges, gets 250,000 page views per day for its message boards and Web chat service. Reas estimates 75 percent of Stanford students have used the site. But total user numbers are slightly hard to ascertain, he noted, because LAL allows people to post and chat anonymously.

Reas promises that LAL’s grand vision will become more apparent in the coming weeks, but for now here’s why he’s been able to bend investors’ ears:

• A dynamic social graph determined by users’ locations seems like an alternative to the static real-name-based Facebook social graph.
• Flirting provides enticing content for both participants and voyeurs.
• When it comes to virality, densely populated college campuses seem to be a match waiting to be lit.

LAL participated in the most recent class of Y Combinator and raised a seed round led by Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, as was reported by TechCrunch.

Here’s the full list of investors, provided by LAL: Marc Andreessen, Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Scott Cook, Charles River Ventures led by Saar Gur, Matrix Partners led by Josh Hannah, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, David King, Yuri Milner, Shervin Pishevar, Brian Pokorny, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, David Sacks and Y Combinator.

Reas told us LikeALittle was probably the seventh or eighth idea he and his co-founders Prasanna Sankaranarayanan and Shubham Mittal prototyped under the header Hawthorne Labs. The quick viral success of LAL at Stanford indicated to the three that they might have found their elusive “billion-dollar idea,” so they stuck with it, Reas said. Prior to Hawthorne Labs, Reas had been a co-founder of ProFounder and received his MBA from Stanford.

Here’s our video chat with Reas, shot in the “hacker house” backyard.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110502/meet-evan-reas-of-lal-and-his-proximity-based-social-graph-for-colleges/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110429/dr-chrono-tries-to-make-healthcare-apps-go-viral/ http://allthingsd.com/20110429/dr-chrono-tries-to-make-healthcare-apps-go-viral/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:00:16 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=6050 The Latin word “v?rus” means slime or poison, and the English “virus” has for much of its history been applied to medical infections. More recently, “viral” has been used to describe the spread of computer attacks, which likely led to its current usage for other phenomena that propagate quickly across a network, like silly cat videos. Now, a paperless medical records and communication start-up called Drchrono is trying to bring the term back to medicine.

I spoke with Drchrono co-founder Daniel Kivatinos this week about the company’s next step, which he said will be an iOS app for patients to store their health insurance and personal information, so they can easily transmit it to doctors. “PatientPad” is planned for release in about two months.

Drchrono already has an app for doctors that helps them track patients’ appointments, records, photos and videos and prescriptions. It is used by about 1,600 doctors, who pay monthly fees for premium features like phone support, speech-to-text and notifications.

The intent for the free “PatientPad” app is to connect to all sorts of personal monitoring device APIs directly to doctors, so a user can control all of his or her medical communications. Patients can use the system independently of whether their doctors use the existing Drchrono app (assuming their doctors will accept such information electronically).

But breaking into the medical industry is hard. Drchrono isn’t even trying to get hospitals to adopt its apps–instead, it’s looking to single-doctor practices. The 2.5-year-old company has moved from New York City to Mountain View, Calif., in part to raise funding.

Kivatinos said he hopes to bring a scrappy consumer market sensibility–honed through participation in the Y Combinator program–to healthcare. Getting doctors on board may require a sales team, but helping patients avoid filling out those annoying paper forms and faxing in records may be something that spreads more easily.

In reality, storing personal records is unlikely to be highly viral, but it may get the word out among patients who then tell their doctors to try Drchrono’s other apps.

Other upcoming PatientPad features, said Kivatinos, may include real-time FaceTime video chats with doctors and emergency doctor searches, where users can trigger an SMS to see who is available and at what price when they need assistance at night or on a weekend.

Kivatinos also has another distribution trick up his sleeve, and it has more to do with timing and circumstance than being scrappy: Pending certification, Drchrono apps will make participating U.S. physicians eligible for $44,000 in economic stimulus incentives for adopting electronic health records.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110429/dr-chrono-tries-to-make-healthcare-apps-go-viral/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110415/techstars-hatches-first-nyc-start-up-class/ http://allthingsd.com/20110415/techstars-hatches-first-nyc-start-up-class/#comments Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:29:24 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5572 TechStars on Thursday held a Demo Day for its first class of New York companies to present themselves to investors and the press.

I wasn’t able to attend in person, but wanted to post the list of companies as part of NetworkEffect’s coverage of spring Demo Days from other major start-up accelerators. (See: Y Combinator, AngelPad, 500 Startups.)

From an outsider’s perspective, there are some very trendy topics in here: loyalty and rewards, social classifieds, one that sounds like a sort of Priceline for Gilt Groupe. There’s also some non-typical incubator fare: Immersive, for example, says it can detect faces in order to target digital ads in retail stores.

These are the companies and their taglines:

Nestio: Best Web and mobile platform to organize your apartment search.

ThinkNear: Yield management for local merchants.

Immersive: Advertising technology for smarter digital signs.

Friendslist: Social classifieds.

OnSwipe: Platform for easy tablet publishing and advertising.

CrowdTwist: Social loyalty and rewards platform.

MigrationBox: Cloud data migration.

ToVieFor: Fashion plus e-commerce plus gaming.

RedRover: Peer-to-peer learning platform for enterprises.

Shelby.tv: Best way to discover and enjoy Web video.

Veri: Learn, teach, play. Online.

More detail can be found in these Xconomy, GigaOM and Business Insider reports.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110415/techstars-hatches-first-nyc-start-up-class/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110406/500-startups-sends-22-of-them-into-the-world/ http://allthingsd.com/20110406/500-startups-sends-22-of-them-into-the-world/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:30:14 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5238 500 Startups–Dave McClure’s seed fund, accelerator program, communal office and yes, he dares call it an “incubator”–today held its first open house to show off 22 young companies.

In attendance were many of the same angelic faces that showed up to Y Combinator’s Demo Day two weeks ago and AngelPad’s Demo Day last week.

500 Startups’ tone is more whimsical than the earnest hacker vibe of its peers; McClure, known as much for his swearing as his investing, encouraged attendees to heckle presenters, and presenters to roll with the hiccups in their presentation slides, and they did.

500 Startups participants told me that their group as a whole is more focused on consumers and less focused on advertising business models than other young start-ups.

But they are not all that unique of snowflakes: for instance, Spoondate sounds just like Grubwithus in Y Combinator’s most recent class. Not to say that helping users make new friends by arranging dinner dates at restaurants–as both companies do–is a bad idea.

In chats with participating companies, the infographic building and sharing tool Visual.ly was mentioned multiple times as one of the most promising companies in the bunch. Others that got shout-outs included MotionMath (movement-based learning games), Ninua (social news apps with 1.7 million users already), ReadyForZero (credit card debt management) and SpeakerGram (speaking engagement management tools).

Here’s the list of the 500 Startups accelerator company pitches:

InternMatch connects students with amazing internships.

Spoondate is the easiest way to meet and eat with someone wherever you go.

Punchd http://getpunchd.com: We put loyalty cards on your smartphone. Businesses get analytics & a way to recognize, reward, contact their regular customers directly.

Funny line from co-founder Reed Morse: “Punchd is a hyper-local real-time deal platform…in your pants. That sounds like a lot of buzzword bullshit, but think about it.”

Rewardli is a social commerce platform that lets small businesses pool their buying power to get cash back and discounts on their purchases.

Visual.ly is 2 things; a platform for exploring, sharing, and promoting great visualizations. And a service that connects dataviz pros, to advertisers & publishers looking for compelling content.

Wednesdays: Get connected IRL. Wednesdays makes it easy to coordinate face-to-face lunches with colleagues, interest groups, and friends.

YongoPal is mobile photo-sharing for English learning and cultural exploration.

Ninua connects readers and writers through social news exploration. Largest Facebook news app. New mobile app. 1.7M active users and growing.

Crowdrally is making videos social.

Co-founder Evan Kuo put on quite a show. His company previously built a fan page product, he said, but, “About six weeks ago Facebook tried to C&D our asses. They said you can’t monetize the stream. If we can’t monetize it, we can’t monetize it.” So now Crowdrally is building a communal remote control tool to play videos on a TV screen from a laptop or mobile device. Kuo challenged attendees to give him a million bucks so he can walk away from his existing acquisition offers.

Baydin is building the future of email.

SpeakerGram is the easiest way to book and manage speaking engagements.

955 Dreams is a new media publishing company focused on the Music and Education verticals.

500 Startups also offered a list of companies it has seed-funded, some of whom presented at the event.

Tokyo-based startup myGengo is the Mechanical Turk for translation: A platform and API for human translation at huge scale.

Ginzametrics makes website optimization for search and social media simple, fast and super-scalable.

Saygent is the world’s smartest voice response & analysis SaaS for superior customer insights

Volta is an A/B testing framework for live, outbound phone calls.

Too much email? AwayFind puts an end to constant email interruptions, only notifying you with messages that matter NOW — via mobile/SMS/etc.

Social Stork bottles the social activity of new moms and gives advice, community, and contextual introductions to the perfect baby products along the journey.

Evoz connects busy moms to their babies from ANYWHERE and delivers personalized parenting content and services based on their baby’s data.

WorkersNow is an online staffing platform that is changing the way blue-collar workers are hired.

Motion Math creates learning games for mobile, turning math’s stumbling blocks into delightful game experiences.

ReadyForZero is online financial software that tracks your credit card debt, and helps you make and follow a plan to eliminate it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110406/500-startups-sends-22-of-them-into-the-world/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110329/meet-angelpads-freshly-incubated-batch-of-start-ups/ http://allthingsd.com/20110329/meet-angelpads-freshly-incubated-batch-of-start-ups/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:30:43 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4934 AngelPad, the start-up accelerator program founded and run by former Googlers, held its second Demo Day today, debuting 13 young companies to investors and the press at its office in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood.

Half of the participants in the 10-week program had a “strong mobile focus,” said AngelPad ringleader Thomas Korte. They included a dating site founded by a woman (!), four lead-generation companies, and various tools to help developers make mashups, make games social, and track customer problems.

AngelPad’s inaugural class last fall was plucked through Korte’s contacts, whereas this group was chosen from about 800 applications, Korte said.

Many AngelPad participants formerly worked at Google and YouTube, though other credentials of the current class include stints at companies like Pandora, Palantir, Microsoft, Intuit, KickApps and Electronic Arts. As compared to zero last time, there are three female co-founders in this bunch.

The class even includes one former participant in rival South Bay start-up accelerator Y Combinator. Andrew Levy of Crittercism, which helps mobile app developers get feedback and crash reports, told NetworkEffect he appreciated the attention he got from AngelPad’s five mentors, as compared to his time at Y Combinator in 2009, when 25 start-ups shared one Paul Graham (Y Combinator has since brought on additional partners).

Many investors and start-up founders had Y Combinator on the brain, as it had its Demo Day last week. Julius Schorzman, founder of Shopobot, a product comparison tool, noted that his class had enrolled in AngelPad before learning that all Y Combinator companies would be offered $150,000 in convertible debt from the Start Fund. But he quickly added, “it’s not like fundraising has been challenging.”

About half of the companies said they already have customers signed up, with a few of them already generating revenue.

Thomas Korte

Asked to name their favorites, investors’ picks were spread quite evenly. A couple companies mentioned often were LocBox, a one-man shop that has already launched an iPad CRM app for local merchants, and Stickery, which makes learning games for preschool kids.

Samir Gupte, an associate at Comcast Interactive Capital, commented to NetworkEffect that he thought the scale of ideas at AngelPad tended to be smaller than those at Y Combinator, where last week’s demos included multiple technology and infrastructure plays.

Andrea Zurek of XG Ventures remarked that all the accelerator programs seem to be getting bigger over time, saying that she liked her options.

As for AngelPad’s track record so far, out of its first class of eight start-ups launched last November, six have raised funding, and two have shut down. Korte said many of the companies had raised venture rather than angel rounds, which is kind of interesting given his organization’s name.

Multiple people told me mobile ad service company MoPub and stealthy e-commerce company Adku seem to be the most promising from the first cohort, which was the same answer I got when they first debuted last year.

Here are the presenters’ one- or two-sentence descriptions of themselves.

Shopobot helps users with purchase decisions by leveraging experts in a user’s social graph and analyzing price volatility.

Astrid is a productivity platform for social and business groups with web, iOS and Android interfaces. It counts 1.7M downloads on Android (so far!).

Hopscotch is a mobile QR reader application providing users personalized and highly relevant information based on location and social connections.

Cloudbot is the command line for all cloud connected services a user has–providing a mobile and web application that makes it easy to access and control information scattered across different Web services.

Kismet is a mobile dating application that uses photos, visited loations and the social graph to tell a user’s story.

Splash is a plug-in module for mobile games, helping developers increase engagement and users discover new casual games.

Crittercism monitors mobile apps, providing developers with actionable crash reports and support request tools within apps.

Stickery is an iOS-based learning and game platform for preschool kids that ranked #1 in the app store for education apps, only 3 weeks after launch (with 70,000 downloads so far).

LocBox is an iPad-based CRM application and lead exchange platform for local merchants.

CompanyLine is a communication and productivity platform for business groups.

Feedgen is a sales lead management platform that enhances the quality of leads by leveraging social profiles and ranking technology.

Coverhound helps consumers choose the right insurance coverage by providing useful information and accurate comparison quotes without selling consumer data to multiple lead buyers.

Secondleap is a vertical search engine helping users to research career changes and providing personalized information about job prospects, salary outlook and schools options.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110329/meet-angelpads-freshly-incubated-batch-of-start-ups/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110322/meet-y-combinators-latest-class/ http://allthingsd.com/20110322/meet-y-combinators-latest-class/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2011 22:25:47 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4563 Y Combinator on Tuesday showed off its latest class of start-ups at its Mountain View, CA, headquarters, offering an extra-large sampler pack of developer tools; social apps; lots of services for markets like real estate, doctors and parents; and, of course, a few of its trademark productivity apps.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110322/meet-y-combinators-latest-class/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20110321/ladies-and-gentlemen-open-your-checkbooks-its-demo-day-season/ http://allthingsd.com/20110321/ladies-and-gentlemen-open-your-checkbooks-its-demo-day-season/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2011 11:00:32 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4447 Now might be a good time to invest in Red Bull or Nissin (maker of Top Ramen). Consumption of both will likely spike as participants in various startup accelerator programs hustle toward their big end-of-session “Demo Day,” at which they will themselves seek investment.

This week is Y Combinator’s Demo Day (NetworkEffect will be in Mountain View, CA, on Tuesday for coverage of one of the sessions), followed by those of AngelPad, 500 Startups and Tech Stars New York in the coming weeks. Each will feature rapid-fire presentations from the hopeful founders of the Groupon of the enterprise, or Foursquare for moms, or the Gilt Groupe of gadgets, or AirBnB for dogs (I’m mostly kidding, but you get the idea).

Demo Days are intended to attract interest from press and investors and serve as a sort of culminating experience. But these days, companies have often launched or raised money along the way.

In the case of Y Combinator, the alpha dog of the accelerator programs, the 45 presenting start-ups have already been offered $150,000 in convertible debt from Yuri Milner and SV Angel’s new Start Fund, and most or all of them have taken it. (So perhaps they’re now sustaining their late-night coding binges with fancy noodles and exotic tea.)

Some think Start Fund’s copious check-writing will mean other angel investors will have less of a chance to invest in Y Combinator companies, as the extra cash will help the start-ups skip over angels and go straight to venture capital. And many early investors, including VCs like Charles River Ventures, have already forked over investments for some of the 45 new YC startups.

The funding scene is currently so competitive, many of these companies can get money when and if they want it. And we expect to hear angels, as usual, grumble about getting shut out of the best deals.

A couple of the names I’ve heard come up as expected highlights of the current YC batch include the campus flirting site LikeALittle and the real-world friend-finding facilitator Grubwithus.

Participating founders take Demo Day very seriously. Earbits CEO Joey Flores, a current Y Combinator participant, wrote on Sunday in a blog post already viewed more than 15,000 times (the whole Y Combinator experience has become fetishized) that participating in the program is similar to joining the Marines.

It is crawling on your belly through mud with bullets whizzing over your head intense, with a looming deadline that feels like it’s going to make or break your entire existence… Everything you do between the starting of your company and that day will change how easy or difficult it is to raise money, and what value [investors] put on your company. Effectively, if YC is Marine Corps Boot Camp, Demo Day is the day we go on our first real mission with live enemy fire.

For context, the Y Combinator presentations this week will feature the six-year-old program’s largest class ever, and the first to be formally advised by new Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and co-founder of FriendFeed. Buchheit joined Y Combinator from Facebook, which recently committed to giving the program’s companies special attention and resources.

Image via Flickr user GoonSquadSarah.

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