MentorMob turns textbooks to playlists
Kris Chinosorn is addicted to online learning. But the frustration of having too many windows open while trying to source good information took its toll. His answer was to create MentorMob, a site that allows users to curate online content into step-by-step lessons on any topic.
MentorMob calls these lessons learning playlists. The playlist topics range from the New Hampshire GOP primary to how to bake sourdough bread at home.
“We’re providing the platform for sharing information, but it’s really about anything you want to learn,” says Chinosorn.
He wants MentorMob to be a good source of educational content through the playlists.
“The learner playlist sets it all up for you into a specific order into a long, deep learning process as opposed to a search to find one specific piece of information. We want to focus on that good, deep information,” says Chinosorn, co-founder and CEO of MentorMob.
The website ensures quality control through its content management teams. But playlists can also be open to the public for editing.
“We have content management teams that check out the information and work with content creators to create the best content possible,” says Chinosorn. “People get really excited not only seeing their content learned, but seeing people flock around their playlists because they are passionate about the same thing. Once these people come in and are helping each other, they get excited about seeing that mobilization around one specific playlist or subject.”
Startup BitGym aims to inspire geeks to work out with iPads, iPhones
– Alastair Goldfisher is a contributor for PE Hub and acting Editor-in-Charge at Venture Capital Journal, both Thomson Reuters publications. This article originally appeared here. Any views expressed are his own. –
With more and more VC-backed personal health and fitness companies targeting the hardcore exercise fanatic, it was only a matter of time before a startup emerged to go after the less enthusiastic cardio burner.
Witness BitGym, a startup being launched out of the Rock Health accelerator in San Francisco that says it has raised “some” seed funding.
The aim of the company’s technology is to make exercise seem more like a video game rather than a workout. “Running sucks now. That’s where we come in,” the company says on its website.
Users put their iPhone or iPad on the rack of any treadmill, elliptical machine or stationary bike and the BitGym app syncs with the machine to portray, for instance, a car driving on a race track. With a forward-facing camera, the BitGym app could track the eye so that the user can steer the game with head movements.
When I told the co-founders how much I run and bike and that I don’t use treadmills, they said I’m not part of the target market.
Seattle startup raises $1.3 million to encrypt the cloud
Kory Gill’s “a-ha” moment came in the form of a lightning bolt that struck his Seattle home and fried his computers. In the aftermath, his wife’s main concern was whether their digitally stored family photos had survived the blast.
“What more of a sign do you need to go start this company?” Gill recalled his wife asking him, who used the scare to leave a 20-year career at Microsoft (MSFT.O) and launch his own online backup company.
Three years later (Reuters first interviewed Gill in 2009), Gill and co-founder Marius Nita – a former Microsoft colleague – are seeing some traction with Newline Software Inc, having launched the first version of their online storage product, Exact, into the market in August.
Gill told Reuters they have just closed their latest financing round – Newline’s third – to bring their total funding to $1.3 million. The money, raised from friends and family, will be spent on improving the product, growing the brand and building a new software platform that will allow Newline to encrypt every piece of data stored online, or in “the cloud,” said Gill.
The platform called OPTIC (Online Privacy Technology In the Cloud) is an application programming interface (API) that Gill hopes will give Newline a competitive advantage over much larger rivals such as Carbonite and Mozy.
“There are a lot of online backup products out there so we needed a way to differentiate ourselves,” said Gill, referring to OPTIC as an “index to encrypt data in the cloud.”
Newline is really two different companies: an online data storage service (Exact) where users store files and a software program (OPTIC) that is able to protect and archive sensitive data stored anywhere on the Web.
Bringing order to the unruly world of early stage entrepreneurship
This article originally appeared in the Venture Capital Journal, a Thomson Reuters publication.
Eric Ries, author of the “The Lean Startup”, offers a worthy attempt to bring the scientific method to the often intuitive exploration of young companies.
What leads most startups astray is the lack of a disciplined, empirical procedure for making decisions, says Ries, who also writes on the blog Startup Lessons Learned and is a 2010-11 entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School.
Ries is by equal measure upbeat and cautionary. He sees a worldwide renaissance of entrepreneurialism, but worries about wasted, misguided efforts.
Venture investors take heart. He has an answer, which he details in the October 2011 issue of Venture Capital Journal.
“The nice thing about relying on human judgment and using the scientific method is (we develop) a system for training judgment to get better over time,” he told VCJ Senior Editor Mark Boslet. “We will eventually start to develop better entrepreneurial instincts.”
VCJ subscribers can read the full story here, which we’re posting ahead of the October publishing date.
Some lessons learned as an entrepreneur and VC
– Chris Dixon is the co-founder of Hunch and of seed fund Founder Collective. This blog originally appeared here. The views expressed are his own. –
Note: Google was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this week. It was a really interesting conference and I got a chance to meet a lot of people I admire. For my talk, I decided to use material from some of my blog posts over the years that I thought might appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from a nasty cold/flu so I didn’t deliver the talk as well as I’d like. Below is the text.
Today, I wanted to talk about some of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years from my experiences as an investor and entrepreneur.
1. If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough
My most humbling and educational career experience was when I was starting out in the tech world. I applied to literally hundreds of jobs: low-level VC roles, startup jobs, and various positions at big tech companies. I had an unusual background: I was a philosophy undergrad and a self-taught programmer. I got rejected from every single job I applied to.
The reason this experience was so useful was that it helped me to develop a thick skin. I came to realize that employers weren’t really rejecting me as a person or on my potential – they were rejecting a resume. As the process became depersonalized, I became bolder in my tactics. Eventually, I landed a job that led to my first startup getting funded.
One of the great things about looking for a job is that your payoff is almost entirely a max function – the best of all outcomes – not an average. This is also generally true for lots of activities startups do: raising money, creating partnerships, hiring, marketing and so on.
Two Degrees co-founders draw on 35-year age gap
With nearly 30 million small businesses in the United States, it can be tricky to find a business model to set you apart from competitors.
The co-founders and entrepreneurs behind Two Degrees Food, a company that produces nutritional bars and feeds children across the world, have used one of their best assets to maximize their reach: a 35-year age difference.
Lauren Walters, 60, and Will Hauser, 25, teamed up to found Two Degrees in 2010, a move that Walters said strengthens their ability to tackle everything from solving business problems to embracing social media.
“It’s interesting to think of it as a ‘model’; I think it’s just sort of evolved,” said Walters, a seasoned entrepreneur and chairman of The Concord Consortium, a nonprofit research and development organization based in Concord, Massachusetts. “I think as we’ve been building this business for the past year and a half, these complementary perspectives make us more effective in delivering on the promise of connecting a range of people.”
Their vegan, gluten-free nutritional bars are sold at Whole Foods chains across the U.S. as well as in coffee shops, gyms, museums, hospitals, a number of large corporations (including HP, Cisco, Microsoft, GE and AOL) and will be available at college Barnes & Noble stores in October. The company uses the “one-for-one” model – meaning for every bar purchased, a nutrition pack is sent to a needy child in a developing country.
Two Degrees has donated nearly 45,000 nutritional packs to its partners in Malawi, Kenya, Somalia and Haiti. The packs are sourced from local manufacturers in whichever countries they are to be distributed. (One of their purchasing partners is Valid Nutrition in Malawi, where peanut, sugar and oil is sourced from local farmers and factories.)
Hauser, a Harvard graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst, said although the inter-generational model alone cannot explain the success of their business, “the range of customers and retailers that have gotten behind Two degrees is tremendous.”
Startup adds Hollywood flare to small business videos
Small businesses have been fast to tap social media platforms like Facebook, but their efforts to provide compelling video about their products and services have fallen short.
That’s the view of L.A.-based entrepreneur and media attorney Sam Rogoway, who is launching Near Networks, a national video service to improve those efforts, while keeping production within the budgets of many local companies.
“We saw this growth in local content and video had not caught up,” said Rogoway, 32. “Given how production costs have dropped, we thought there would be an opportunity to develop not commercials for local business, but real programming.”
Near Networks has developed a system of freelance videographers around the country who are available to shoot documentary-style video on location at restaurants (see video below of L.A.’s Tavern Restaurant), retailers, spas and other small businesses. The footage is then sent to L.A. for editing by a small staff production team.
“They shoot the video in the business after we’ve done a lot of pre-production work,” said Rogoway, noting that on the Internet documentary-style content is more compelling than traditional commercials. “(Businesses) know what to expect.”
Rogoway previously developed TripUp, the first online travel community to feature user-generated videos about destinations, which was sold to Sidestep in 2007.
Sittercity founder to launch “social recommendation engine”
– Connie Loizos is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
Genevieve Thiers is not a household name in Silicon Valley, but many Chicagoans know her as the founder of Chicago-based Sittercity, a 10-year-old online subscription-service that marries families to caregivers around the country for help with their children, pets, and aging parents.
Thiers is also among a small, but growing number of second-time entrepreneurs beginning to emerge from Chicago’s young, but maturing tech scene. Next month, Thiers officially launches her newest startup, Contact Karma, with co-founder Maureen Wozniak (no relation to Apple co-founder Steve).
Her timing looks ideal. Sittercity appears to be on solid footing. It lists more than 2 million caregivers; its corporate customers include the Department of Defense, which uses the service to assist military families; and in April, it raised $22.6 million led by New World Ventures, bringing its total funding to date to $30 million. According to Thiers, Sittercity, along with the well-financed restaurant discovery and ordering service GrubHub, may not be far behind their local peer Groupon in filing for a public offering.
“There are a number of (Chicago-based) companies that could very well IPO if they wanted in future years,” she said.
Now, Thiers — who is expecting twins in November and passed along Sittercity’s CEO role to the company’s COO last year –- is hoping to create a second, long-standing Chicago company with Contact Karma, which Thiers and Wozniak characterize as a “social recommendation engine.”
For the last few months, the two have been creating a database of recommended service providers that businesses can find both by surfing Contact Karma’s platform, as well as through daily deals that Contact Karma sends out via email. Want a marketing pro for a particular project? You can visit Contact Karma and see who comes recommended and by whom. Meanwhile, you can probably land a cheap company lunch through an emailed coupon for group takeout.
How much money do I need for my startup?
– Tim Berry is the president and founder of Palo Alto Software. This post originally appeared on his blog, “Planning, Startups, Stories”. The views expressed are his own. –
It’s an obvious question. And if you’re looking for startup investors you’d better be able to answer it well, and quickly too. No wandering eyes. No doubt. If you’re doing a pitch, have a slide for it. And be specific.
I liked this from Ben Yoskovitz’s Instigator Blog on Use of Funds:
… most descriptions of “use of funds” are incredibly generic and standard, typically involving the following: hire key personnel, product development, sales & marketing. Hhhm…the phrase, “No s!@# Sherlock…” comes to mind.
And on the other hand, there’s this about that, from Perfecting Your Pitch, by Guy Kawasaki’s Garage.com Ventures:
It should be clear from your financials what your capital requirements will be. On this slide you should outline how you plan to take in funding — how big each round will be, and the timing of each — and map the funding against your key near-term and medium-term milestones. You should also include your key achievements to date. These milestones should tie to the key metrics in your financial projections, and they should provide a clear, crisp picture of your product introduction and market expansion roadmap. In essence, this is your operating plan for the funds you are raising. Do not spend time presenting a “use of funds” table. Investors want to see measures of accomplishment, not measures of activity.
So go figure. There are two opposite points of view from two good sources.
Boomer sees business in discarded mannequins
– Kara Ohngren is a writer and editor at SecondAct. This article originally appeared here. The views expressed are her own. –
Judi Henderson-Town felt trapped. For years she was unhappy as an account executive at such industry giants as Johnson & Johnson and United Airlines. She found corporate life “soul-destroying.”
“I wanted something more entrepreneurial,” said the 53-year-old Henderson-Town. “But I didn’t know it was an option — no one I knew growing up owned their own business.”
In the past decade she’s carved out her own eco-friendly niche and launched a San Francisco Bay Area business that recycles and then resells old mannequins. Henderson-Town has become a clearinghouse for businesses looking to dump old displays that previously ended up in landfills. “The retailer saves on the disposal fee, and we gain inventory — it’s a win-win,” she said.
Her business, Mannequin Madness, is now certified green and earned special recognition from the Environmental Protection Agency for recycling 100,000 pounds of mannequins in one year. By collecting used mannequins, cleaning them up and renting or reselling them to businesses, artists or others looking for affordable displays, she’s proving green business is good business.
The “A-ha” Moment
