12 Learnings From My First Turn As Startup CEO - socialmedian. from the guy who started jobster (here in seattle).


here comes another bubble. “blogging from the locker room. babies blogging in the womb”

Signal Vs Noise points out 2 great startup/entrepreneur posts from Dick Costolo. Dick’s co-founded feedburner and has a great blog about running a tech startup.

The Naked Truth Wiki. Panel being hosted at a bar in my neighborhood on tech startups. Pretty good line-up of people.

Curious Office » Blog Archive » Raising money for your startup. some good advice from a seattle based web entrepreneur.

alarm:clock: Yahoo Choked. Should Have Bought Facebook For $1.6B. It Now Wants $8B. “Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel told Bloomberg in December that Facebook is worth at least $8 billion”. these numbers are insane.

Bessemer Venture Partners - Our Portfolio. This VC also lists the companies it passed on. hilarious. “Incredibly, BVP passed on Federal Express seven times.”

Shelfari: Turning the lights on. a seattle-based social website for bookworms just got funding including some from Amazon.

GigaOM » Jobless in Seattle?. jobster, a seattle-based web2.0 startup which has taken a ton of VC, supposedly just did some layoffs. the web2.0 bust is coming fast.

TechCrunch - Google Buys Youtube for $1.6B. The Lead VC, Sequoia Capital, made a 41x return. The 3 co-founders will make between $100-200M.

Rondam Ramblings: Top ten geek business myths. things to know when starting a tech company.

Piczo Gets $4M - Mashable*. myspace/flickr-like site snags $4 million bucks in VC. Since 50% of it’s user are girls under 18 it’s (A) so ugly that geocities won’t even link to it and (B) heaven for pedophiles.

The new face of technology (in chicago). quick article about chicago startups (including 37signals & feedburner).

orkut in brazil. seems google’s friendster-equivalent, orkut, is huge in brazil. 11 million Brazilians use it and it’s referenced without explaination in major newspapers. it seems social network sites are huge period: estonia’s leading social site, rate.ee, just got €2.5mil and already makes €300K a year.

Lessons of Kontiki - GigaOM. you rarely get ROI analysis for VC funded startups. Om points out that p2p startup Kontiki got bought for $64M but had $41M in funding. Granted, if the company was going to tank, $64Mil aint bad.