Tag Archive for ‘Venture Capital’

Tag Archive for 'Venture Capital'

Startup Riot Update

Published on March 30, 2008 in Events, Jobs, Startups and Venture Capital. 0 Comments

So someone posted a request on my Skribit widget for an update on Startup Riot. So here we go.

A new site is in development (what, you don’t like my manual HTML hacked site?) and should go up in the next day or two. Along with that you’ll see all the details for the event which I’m pre-announcing here. Namely, it is going to be held on Monday May 19, 2008 from 9am until 5pm at Twelve Hotel in Atlantic Station. The goal is to get 45 startups on stage to present their three minute pitch on themselves. Already half of those slots are taken by companies who have pre-registered to pitch for the event. If you want to pitch, better act fast and sign up quickly. Companies may be from anywhere (not just Atlanta), may be in any industry (not just technology), and may be at any funding stage (or may not even be raising money). The audience will be made up of job seekers (potential co-founders, fresh grads, and others), potential clients (large companies and non-profits), and investors (angel investors and venture capitalists).

There are a couple of sponsors who have already agreed to support this event. I’m still looking for a few more to help pay for the overhead of doing this. After I secure those final sponsors, the event will be closed off to new sponsors or attendance by service providers. I’m going to manually approve each and every attendee to the event. Yes, it’ll be tedious but I’m willing to do that to ensure a high quality mix of attendees. Each group of attendees will have a controlled number of slots available so that there is a good mix of folks for the event. And yes, I will turn away folks based solely on my judgment as to their suitability for this event.

Finally, I’ve mentioned this to a few people but haven’t made a public announcement. We are going to have a keynote speaker at the start of the day’s events. That keynote speaker is now fully confirmed and will be Drew Curtis of Fark.com. Although a lot of people know Drew as the guy that has caused a lot of commotion, he’s also a serial entrepreneur. His talk will likely be an interesting and funny take on doing a startup. If you don’t know of Drew or Fark.com, just go read some stuff about him. Oh yeah, Drew also owns Fark TV which is hosted by SuperDeluxe.com which is a part of TBS.

I’m still working out the fees for registration but don’t worry - they’ll be far more reasonable than other events that supposedly cater to startups. There will be an option to pre-pay for a box lunch at the event as well. There are plenty of local restaurants that you can walk to if you want to do that instead. My goal is to have as few sponsors for this event as possible and one way to do that is to have each of you pay for your own lunch.

This is going to be a fun event and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing all the startups come out and do their three minute pitches. You can help by spreading the word about this event. The more high quality people that show up to the event means a better event for everyone.

Gifts for the VC You Love

Published on February 20, 2008 in Other, Startups and Venture Capital. 1 Comment

So if you thought coming up with a company over a weekend was extreme, Andrew Hyde is upping the ante. During a plane flight they launched Startup Plane and came up with a new company - VCwear.com. They’ve even racked up a few sales apparently at $100/shirt. I told Andrew that I thought they could actually sell a bunch if they dropped the price but heck, what do I know.

Below are some of my favorite VCwear.com shirts. The first cause I like Snoop, the second would be better by changing “with” to “to”, and the third cause, well, it’s true. If they were cheaper I’d probably buy a few of the last one and send it to some “friends” of mine.

Dave, Dave, Dave of the JungleDisk

Published on January 25, 2008 in Jobs, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital. 1 Comment

I’m a big fan of doing offsite backups. So much so that I compared a number of offsite backup services a long time ago. But backup solutions that require user intervention is a recipe for disaster. Personally, I’ve tried to automate as much as possible. I’ve set up a RAIDed storage server in my house (for the geeks, it’s RAID 1 with 2 live disks and 1 hot spare, each drive is 250GB) that gets the backups from the other machines in the house (everything executes automatically on a set schedule).

As I mentioned in my post on backup services, I was a fan of Mozy. I still think Mozy is a pretty good solution (more on why below) but having support only for Windows and Macs, it isn’t a complete solution. So I started looking at JungleDisk.

The Background

JungleDisk was started by Dave Wright who is an Atlanta based entrepreneur. Dave was previously one of the co-founders of GameSpy which was then bought by IGN where he was then Chief Architect. Dave started JungleDisk as a side project in 2006 after Amazon announced it’s S3 service. By creating an application that easily allows users to access and backup their files to the Amazon storage cloud, Dave had a hit on his hands. He continued working on the product and released a commercial version in August 2007. He announced pricing at $20 for free lifetime upgrades and support and use on any platform - Widows, Mac, or Linux. Oh yeah, you can use your licensed software on as many machines as you want too. Users pay for usage of the Amazon storage cloud (pricing here) directly to Amazon. This fabulous pricing structure was met with user complaints. Why? Because users thought Dave wasn’t charging enough and wouldn’t be able to build a sustainable business with this model. When was the last time you heard users complain that you were charging too little?!?

The Technology

Now for the geek stuff. The one interesting aspect of JungleDisk is that Dave releases clients for all three platforms simultaneously. When was the last time you saw a startup do that? Normally when you see people do that, it’s software written in Java. Personally, I hate full blown applications that are Java based. Sure they are fairly speedy with current interpreters but still, they’re interpreted instead of being fully compiled code. I’m a performance freak and I love my compiled code (don’t get me wrong, interpreted languages do have their place and I dig Ruby). Dave has taken the approach of doing fully compiled code across all three platforms. He does this by writing in everything in C++ and maintaining as much of the code base as possible as common through the platforms (I’d assume everything but some network interface stuff and some filesystem work). He uses wxWidgets to maintain a cross-platform GUI and then some open source libraries like libcurl and openssl.

The Competition

With my previously favorite program, Mozy, I could backup my Windows machines but not the Linux server that houses my RAIDed drives. So I still use Mozy since they give you some free space (if you signup for Mozy using this link, you’ll get an extra 256 MB of free space [so will I] for a total of 2.2 gigs free). It costs $5/month per computer to get unlimited storage on Mozy. Compare this to the flexibility of JungleDisk and the cost I’m paying per month to Amazon (less than $5/month for about 26 gigs of storage plus daily backups across four machines - no per machine cost), JungleDisk is overall a better deal. I still use Mozy for random secondary backup purposes (I mean, come on - it’s free!).

Also note, Mozy raised about $2m in venture capital and was recently acquired by EMC for over $70m. Another JungleDisk competitor, Carbonite, has recently raised $15m to bring their lifetime total to $21m in venture capital. Over all the competitors, I think JungleDisk is not only a better solution but a more cost effective and flexible solution.

The Future

JungleDisk is an absolutely phenomenal story. The company has been completely bootstrapped by Dave and now has significant revenue to continue its growth path. In fact, Dave just announced that he’s hiring. If you think you’re a hot shot C++ developer, C#/ASP.NET developer, or product manager in Atlanta, drop a note to Dave and let him know you heard about it through this blog. This is an absolutely phenomenal ground floor opportunity for someone looking for an entrepreneurial experience.

Note, Dave has released JungleDisk Plus which gets him into a recurring revenue stream and provides users with a way to do block updates of incrementally changing files. Given the length of this post, I’ll discuss this service in a future post so I can fully delve into the technical bits.

Disclosure

I paid for my copy of JungleDisk on August 12, 2007 (9 days after it went for sale). This was before I know that Dave and JungleDisk were Atlanta based.

UPDATE: I’m an idiot. I didn’t include a link to the actual company’s site. Sorry about that.

Event: Southeast Venture Conference

Published on January 22, 2008 in Events and Venture Capital. 0 Comments

So even after the $50 discount (although Jason Caplain’s site shows a $100 discount code), you thought it was too expensive to go to the Southeast Venture Conference. Well, if so I hope you didn’t buy a ticket. Jason Caplain posted a message on Facebook that you can get a $150 discount by using the code SCV150 ($440 with the discount until February 1st). Maybe if you wait a little longer there will be a code that you can use to get free tickets.

Gov. Perdue’s State of the State

Published on January 17, 2008 in Venture Capital. 1 Comment

Following up on Governor Perdue’s announcement at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce to create a venture capital fund for commercializing research coming out of Georgia colleges, here is a relevant snippet from yesterday’s State of the State address.

I announced yesterday that Georgia, along with our private sector partners, will invest $40 million for venture capital to commercialize research in areas like biosciences and medicine coming out of our universities. Friends, Georgia will lead the way as a global center for health.

So from this, it sounds like the focus will not only be solely on research out of Georgia colleges but also with a focus on life sciences. I guess everything will be a lot clearer once legislation starts making its way through the system but this is turning out to be a bigger bummer than I thought.

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