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.
from MediaFile:
Online education site raises $3 mil in a round led by Groupon founders
Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell have invested in online educational site (with one complicate name) Udemy through their venture capital fund Lightbank. Udemy just announced a $3 million Series A round of financing led by Lightbank that also includes funding from MHS Capital and 500 Startups.
Udemy plans to use the money for hiring and marketing and biz development.
Udemy "the academy of you" offers 6,000 courses covering all sorts of hobby-related subjects like social marketing, how to build a iPhone app, and Art 100 in addition to more traditional topics like intro to psychology. About 90 percent of Udemy's courses are free.
Online education is a pretty hot sector now -- just go ask the Washington Post and its Kaplan division which for the most part has been the driver of growth behind the company synoumous with Watergate and newspapers . Even News Corp is getting in on the act and set up an education unit focused on technology last year.
The $3 million round follows $1 million in funding from MHS Capital, 500 Startups, and several other individual investors.
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.
Employee rewards site raises $24 million from Sequoia Capital
Prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is wading into the near $50-billion employee rewards market with its $24.5 million Series C round of financing of online San Francisco-based company Achievers.
The announcement on Wednesday by the venture capital heavyweight signals a heightened interest in the space that Sequoia partner Alfred Lin said is “highly fragmented” and lacks a dominant player.
“We want to be an investor in the most interesting companies of tomorrow and we felt like this would be a company for the ages,” said Lin, who will take a seat on Achievers’ board of directors. Sequoia has had a long history of backing technology companies such as Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Google and YouTube.
The round also included previous investors in Boston-based GrandBanks Capital and Toronto, Canada-based firms JLA Ventures and the Ontario Venture Capital Fund.
Achievers has now raised $38 million since CEO Razor Suleman founded the company in 2002 in Toronto. Formerly named I Love Rewards, the company, which has 150 employees, has since expanded to Boston and San Francisco and Suleman said the latest funding will be put toward hiring in all three markets and extensive marketing of the product.
Suleman said the employee rewards and recognition industry has shifted away from the traditional model of giving workers gifts in the form of watches at the end of an extended period of service. Now he said it’s about employers tapping into the more “intrinsic” motivations and ambitions of employees through regular performance and engagement metrics and rewarding them accordingly.
One way it does this is through its “social recognition” platform that tracks and rewards employees with points that can be redeemed for gifts from companies like Apple, Visa and Expedia. Achievers customers range from firms with 500 employees up to Fortune 500 companies such as Deloitte, 3M and Microsoft.
Manning up in Silicon Valley
– Connie Loizos is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. The views expressed are her own. –
This week, Marc Andreessen announced that Ning, the social networking platform company he co-founded in 2004 and that went on to raise nearly $120 million, had “agreed to merge” with the lifestyle blog network Glam Media. Yet few believe it will be a marriage of equals.
“Merger” was almost uniformly put in wink-wink quotations in press accounts of the deal. Outside investors didn’t buy it, either. “My guess is that Glam thinks it is gaining some credibility by adding Andreessen to its board, and in return Glam is putting Ning out of its misery,” said one VC who asked not to be named.
Andreessen seemed further undermined – if unintentionally so — by Ning’s CEO Jason Rosenthal, who published his own announcement at Ning’s site, writing that Ning had “signed an agreement to be acquired” by Glam.
If Andreessen gussied up the deal a bit, can anyone really hold it against him? Andreessen clearly wanted to be respectful of Rosenthal and Ning’s founding team. He had investors to consider, particularly Ning’s later-stage investors, who bought into Ning’s $750-plus million valuation just 26 months ago. (The company is reportedly selling for $150 million in Glam stock.) And certainly, Andreessen wouldn’t be first in putting a positive spin on a less-than-sunny situation.
Still, even slight exaggeration – which runs rampant in Silicon Valley – can erode trust between entrepreneurs and investors, between investors and their limited partners, and between the larger startup community and the press.
Just one example of how centers on asset sales, or transactions in which an acquirer purchases the assets of a company, limiting its exposure to unknown, future liabilities. There are numerous advantages to the sales, including lower legal fees and potentially higher payment prices, as acquirers don’t have to worry about maintaining a reserve to protect themselves. But in Quadrus’ clubby confines, asset sales are largely anathema, viewed like some kind of high tech “repo.” In fact, investors were once “very antagonistic” about them, said Bob Latta, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who works on venture capital financings and M&A.
VC firm to form “Jedi Council” of entrepreneurs
– Joanna Glasner is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
Menlo Ventures’ newest managing director, Shervin Pishevar, is getting off to a fast start.
The serial entrepreneur turned Internet VC announced that his firm has formed a new early stage investment vehicle, the Menlo Talent Fund, which will fund rounds up to $250,000 in promising startups. As part of the effort, Pishevar told attendees at San Francisco’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference this week, the firm will be forming a “Jedi Council of incredible entrepreneurs,” known as the Menlo Founders Council, to work with startups.
The $20 million fund is all about quick action. Menlo said it will make investment decisions on startups within 72 hours. However, Menlo partners will not take board seats on any companies funded by Menlo Talent Fund.
The fund was financed last October with the closing of Menlo Ventures XI. It has already invested in eight companies, including: The Backplane, CakeHealth, Comprehend, LeanLaunchLab, Parse and Tracksby. Two companies are yet to be announced.
The Menlo Founders Council, meanwhile, will include a group of mentors, advisors and investors to support entrepreneurs at Menlo-sponsored retreats and events. One member is Troy Carter, founder and chairman of Atom Factory, a music management brand, who manages artists such as Lady Gaga.
While it’s not a newcomer to seed investing, Menlo Park, California-based Menlo Ventures’ core focus has been early stage and growth rounds for technology companies. Founded in 1976, the firm has $4 billion under management and is currently investing Menlo Ventures XI, a $400 million fund.
Why venture capitalists invest in pigs, not chickens
– Jeff Bussgang is a former entrepreneur and partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. This article originally appeared on his blog Seeing Both Sides. The views expressed are his own. –
There is an old parable about the concept of commitment when it comes to breakfast. The story goes that when looking at a plate of the traditional fare of ham and eggs, it’s obvious that the chicken is an interested party, but the pig is truly committed.
When I tell this story to entrepreneurs, my point is usually to contrast the approach venture capitalists have to startups as compared to entrepreneurs. The VC is an interested party, but at the end of the day, if their startups live or die, they typically still have their job, their office and their portfolio of other investments. The entrepreneur, on the other hand, is the pig – truly committed to the outcome, with no fallback.
But lately I’ve been thinking about the parable of the pig and the chicken in the context of the characteristics that make a great entrepreneur – and the kind of entrepreneur that we VCs in general, and my firm Flybridge Capital in particular, like to back. In short, we like to back pigs – entrepreneurs who are truly and completely committed to the outcome of their venture, have a lot of stake, and no fallback.
How do we discern the difference between the two entrepreneurial archetypes? It’s usually relatively easy, but sometimes subtle. Here are a few of the top characteristics we see in entrepreneurs who appear to be exhibiting behavior that suggests they’re more like “chickens” when it comes to their startup:
1) Prefer to wait to start their venture only after they receive funding (“We are ready to go, as soon as you give us your money.” …um, does that mean you won’t start the company if I don’t give you my money?).
2) Don’t quit their day jobs before receiving funding. (“This has been a side project for a year, and I can’t wait to focus on it full-time” … um, if you can’t wait – why are you waiting?)
Why governments don’t get startups
– Steve Blank is a serial entrepreneur. He teaches at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business School and at Columbia. He is the author of “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and “Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost”. This article originally appeared here. The views expressed are his own. –
Not understanding and agreeing what “Entrepreneur” and “Startup” mean can sink an entire country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
I’m getting ready to go overseas to teach, and I’ve spent the last week reviewing several countries’ ambitious attempts to kick-start entrepreneurship. After poring through stacks of reports, white papers and position papers, I’ve come to a couple of conclusions.
1) They sure killed a ton of trees
2) With one noticeable exception, governmental entrepreneurship policies and initiatives appear to be less than optimal, with capital deployed inefficiently (read “They would have done better throwing the money in the street.”) Why? Because they haven’t defined the basics:
What’s a startup? Who’s an entrepreneur? How do the ecosystems differ for each one? What’s the role of public versus private funding?
Six Types of Startups – Pick One
The No. 1 predictor of startup failure: Premature scaling
— Joanna Glasner is a contributor to PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
In the wake of Solyndra’s revelation of an impending bankruptcy filing, the latest report from The Startup Genome Project makes for a timely read.
The report, published this week, crunches data from a set of more than 3,200 companies, seeking to identify the qualities that make startups most likely to either succeed or fail.
Researchers found that certain factors – such age and gender of founders, location, and previous entrepreneurial experience – have little bearing on a startup’s likelihood of failure. The most consistent predictor of failure, rather, was a startup’s propensity to engage in premature scaling.
What is premature scaling? The authors define it as “focusing on one dimension of the business and advancing it out of sync with the rest of the operation.”
For example, a startup may overspend too early on customer acquisition, hire too many employees, or focus too much on engineering at the expense of customer development. It can also raise too much money too early, a problem that one of the researchers’ interviewees, venture investor Michael A. Jackson of Mangrove Capital Partners frames in automotive terms: “Getting venture money can be like putting a rocket engine on the back of a car,” he said. “Scaling comes down to making sure the machine is ready to handle the speed before hitting the accelerator.”
The report estimates that 70 percent of companies studied exhibited some form of premature scaling. They also estimate that 74 percent of high growth Internet startups fail due to premature scaling. A common mistake, they note, is confusing a few early adopters with a market.
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.
