A group of twelve Massachusetts-based CEOs and 12 venture capitalists have formed a new initiative in which they will pair off and form 12 new businesses during the next year, the group announced on Friday at The Nantucket Conference, an annual conference that brings together entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, and executives. The first “12×12” company, LighterLiving, was also announced today. The company is an online “community, blog, and marketplace for holistic fitness and well-being,” founded by Marjolein Brugman, a Pilates expert. Scott Savitz, founder and CEO of Shoebuy.com, will serve …

In angel investing, it’s the extreme distribution of payoffs that keeps things interesting.
If anything, it resembles buying a deep out-of-the-money call option, but with nonlinearity. If you win big you might find yourself in on the ground floor of the next Google or Facebook. That’s incredibly unlikely, but still possible.
More likely, you’ll end up with a solid 2x-5x return from a startup that grows into a viable long-term business. But most likely of all–by a long shot–you’ll lose your entire investment in another failed startup.
The most successful angels invest …

As Peter Drucker once wrote, “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it and exploits it as an opportunity.” Put more simply, change is good . . . of course, that’s unless you’re trying to raise capital in these trying times.
After my company BrightRoll recently closed its Series B round of financing, we took a step back to digest the lessons we learned from pitching and negotiating with a handful of VCs over our 6-week fundraising effort.
To say raising money in the current economic environment has been different …

. . . Grow VC is a new community funding model for technology startups. Here’s how it works: Grow VC will pool 75 per cent of membership fees into a community fund that gets invested back into ‘promising startups’ which are members of the platform. The fund is managed by Grow VC but all the investment decisions are left to members who determine how to invest their portion of the fund into other startup companies that they feel have the most potential. The most successful decision makers get financially …

Technology blogs are full of advice for startups: where to start a company, how to raise capital, what kind of culture to build, whom to hire. But we hardly ever talk about what makes strategic decisions meaningful: sales.
A company with strong sales can build a great culture, hire anyone and take the time to figure out its strategy. Without sales, nothing else matters.
There are a thousand books on how to sell everything from used cars to aluminum siding. But most never talk about the unique problem faced by startups: …

A couple of days ago, we wrote that Russian venture capital firm Digital Sky Technologies (DST) had invested around 180 million dollars in Zynga, the company behind popular Facebook games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars.
The same group already invested $200 million in Facebook back in spring, which got them a 1.96 percent stake in the company, and now they’ve purchased another $200 million in common shares from Facebook’s employees.
According to Russian newspaper Kommersant, DST bought the shares at $14.77 per share; altogether, this investment got them another 3 …

It’s been almost five years now that I’ve been in venture capital. I finally know what i don’t know.
The one thing I do know is how to give better advice on pitching VCs now that I’ve sat through hundreds of pitches and made 8 investments. I gave some advice in an earlier post—this one builds on it at a deeper level (three years later)
I’ve mentioned in the past that there are some key things you should include in your presentation when you are pitching a VC.  David Cowan’s post on …

In the third quarter of 2009, we saw a slight rebound in venture funding from earlier in the year. But which venture capital firms were the most active in the quarter? One of my favorite new tables in our latest TechCrunch Trends report, which is based on company data we collect in CrunchBase, is the ranking of the most active venture capital firms.
We’ve reproduced that ranking below in two interactive tables which show the top 25 most active VC firms in both the third quarter of 2009 and the …

When we first covered real-time photo-blogging service DailyBooth last August, we had noticed how remarkably vibrant the community already was, and how quickly the site was amassing tons of traffic.
The startup was launched in February 2009, received some initial seed funding from Y Combinator over the summer and has now raised an additional $1 million from an all-star team of institutional and individual investors.
Wall Street Journal blog Digits broke the news earlier this morning, and reported that DailyBooth has secured ‘roughly’ $1 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Ron …

Just over a week ago, Twitter announced its fifth round of funding. While not officially disclosed, the recent cash infusion is estimated to be around $100 million. Twitter’s new estimated worth? – $1 billion.
With all of this valuation talk floating around, we became interested in just how fast Twitter’s worth has skyrocketed. It seems that VC Expert’s Private Equity Data Center (PEDC) was curious as well, so they decided to analyze all of Twitter’s financing rounds, from the first one in July of 2007 to last month’s $100 million …

CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.
. . .
A $100 billion value for 37signals is “not outlandish,” says Aanandamayee Bhatnagar, a finance professor and valuation guru at Grenada State’s Schnook School of Business. Bhatnagar points to a leaked, confidential corporate strategy plan that projects 37signals will attract twelve billion users by the end of 2013.
How will the company overcome the fact that there are only 6.8 billion …

Fluther, a slick service that lets you outsource your questions to other members on the web, has closed a $600k round of seed funding from some of Silicon Valley’s most notable investors. Included in the round were Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, the recently launched Andreesen-Horowitz, and Dave McClure, via FF Angel. Rounding out the roster are Twitter’s Biz Stone and Leonard Speiser (Bix, Twables founder), who are advisors.
. . .
Fluther faces a few major competitors, including Aardvark, which also lets you outsource your questions to other users on the …

This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business. The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. We’ll update this post with links to his further installments.

I was one of those kids who just couldn’t stop trying to start a company. I think I just really feared working …

Here’s a stumper: In the Treasury financial reform proposal, who comes in for more regulatory retooling: Fannie Mae, or your average 14-man venture capital shop? If you said venture capital, you understand why one of America’s greatest competitive advantages is now at risk in Washington.
. . .
Neither too big nor too interconnected to get a taxpayer bailout, VCs are nonetheless critical to America’s ability to stage an economic rebound. While early-stage venture investments are tiny by Wall Street standards—often $3 million or less—they are a big part of the …

Girls has idea.
Boy likes the idea.
Boy and Girl chat the idea up.
Boy registers the domain name, starts company. Girl helps boy out.
Then the question becomes: How much is the idea worth?
Just as the idea unfolded on the web that never forgets, the new quasi-sage continues over the blog post, twits, comments, re-twits, and more blog posts.
Read, digest, process, learn

CleverClogs
TweetMeme
TechMeme

Related Articles:

If Execution Is What matters, Where Does That Leave Ideas? (TechCrunch)
ideas are just a multiplier of execution (oreillynet.com)
http://lor3nzo.com/tag/ideas

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I can live all day inside the Internet. I can talk to my friends, listen to music, watch TV, trade stocks, play games, do work – all on the Internet. From 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. every day I can spend on the Internet and it would be a day well spent.
But run for the hills when it comes to advising clients to invest in the Internet.
The days of infinite margins, 1,000% productivity gains, and growth of market throughout the universe are long over. Internet companies now should be …

Employees who took the risk and joined Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg’s social network startup Facebook back when it wasn’t so big and helped turn it into something huge are finally cashing in.
According to reports, Digital Sky Technologies has begun buying $100 million worth of stock from current and former Facebook employees at a $6.5 billion valuation.
Facebook’s current executive team is not selling any of its stock.
Employees have 20 days to decide whether or not to take the offer.
Employes aren’t going to be able to sell all their stock, so …

Too much money has been chasing too few great start-ups

ONE of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories is doing his bit to lift the gloom hanging over America’s venture-capital (VC) industry. On July 6th Marc Andreessen, who made his name in the 1990s as the co-founder of Netscape Communications, the firm behind one of the earliest web browsers, announced that he and a partner, Ben Horowitz, had raised $300m to back promising start-ups. The fund was heavily oversubscribed and attracted money from several other tech luminaries.
His is not the only …

“It’s a hard environment to do a deal,” but two things are almost certain to occur at Herb Allen’s media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho this week, according to Michael Wolff, founder of Newser.com:

Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone will be “looking to see what deals might be available.”
All other media executives will be “looking to see how amendable Twitter is to a deal.”

To be sure, Williams and Stone have publicly stated they are not interested in selling Twitter anytime soon, and Marc Andreessen tells Tech Ticker he …