Startups

Any entrepreneur taking a crack at a digital music startup must either be super determined, completely crazy, or a both. The chances of legal run-ins with the labels are high. And even when you play by the rules, the rights payments are so steep that making a profitable business is all but impossible.

Yet this isn't deterring Jeff Yasuda, a 40-year-old venture capitalist turned entrepreneur who's been doggedly running music startups since 2006. His latest, Fuzz (the same name as his first startup), comes out of stealth mode today after a year of building a team -- one … Read more

Anyone who works in tech is going to like this. Wealthfront, an online financial adviser based in Palo Alto, Calif., today rolled out an interactive tool (see below) that let's you see what tech jobs pay among private firms across the country.

You'll learn, for instance, that software architects make more than managers -- a mean of $183,000 a year plus equity compared with $163,000 plus stock -- and that cash compensation across all tech companies is $112,000. Another curious finding: Despite the huge demand for engineers in Silicon Valley, jobs in the northeast pay … Read more

Tovbot, a startup that wants a future full of personal robotic assistants, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Shimi, which is auditioning to be your own personal robotic DJ.

The robot -- created by roboticists from Georgia Tech, MIT, and IDC -- takes advantage of smartphone technology to play music and pick songs based on your taste or mood.

It's essentially a cute, shiny dancing robot that performs a Pandora-like service and costs $199 (unless you help fund it through Kickstarter -- it's going for as low as $129 there).

"We want it to be your little musical companion," co-founder Gil Weinberg said at TechCrunch Disrupt today during the conference's startup battlefield segment. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Square and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said today that founders must be willing to accept new ideas -- which can come from anywhere -- if they want their companies to evolve and to keep disrupting existing industries.

Opening his keynote address at TechCrunch Disrupt here today, Dorsey noted that he didn't grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur. Now that he's helped start two of the most important companies in Silicon Valley, though, Dorsey said he wanted to share some of the lessons he's learned during his career, ideas that he clearly thinks can … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz, half of the powerful Andreessen Horowitz duo, talked about how a lousy performing IPO -- are you listening, Mark Zuckerberg? -- can be a wrenching experience.

"The biggest pressure is on the employees who go home and someone in their family says, 'I read in the paper that you guys are bunch of idiots'," said Horowitz, who was interviewed at Techcrunch Disrupt by Silicon Valley veteran Bill Campbell. "It's a really hard thing to take."

Horowitz was talking about his experience as CEO of LoudCloud, a 1990s-era company … Read more

One of the most important qualities investors look for in a startup is defensibility. Can a startup's product quickly be copied? Does it have technology or patents no company has had before? Are users flocking to its product like locusts?

At the seed stage, when startups are in their infancy, I believe there are two type of startups. The first is the technology startup -- it's a company that is defensible because it has built unique technology nobody else has. The second type of start is the traction startup -- unlike technology startups, the traction startup is defensible … Read more

AngelList -- a booming site where angel investors find tech startups to back -- is rolling out a product today that should please a lot of would-be Mark Zuckerbergs and, in theory, worry a lot of lawyers.

Ultimately, it could help both.

The site, founded in early 2010 by entrepreneurs/angel investors Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, is now offering standardized online documents that will make it faster and cheaper for any of the thousands of startups on AngelList to close their first round of funding.

AngelList Docs, as it's called, breaks down the money-raising paperwork process in a … Read more

If you thought patents were intruding into the tech industry just a wee bit too much, brace yourself. Now they can be part of the recruiting process.

TalentBin, a San Francisco startup that scrapes social media sites ranging from Quora to Twitter in order to index hiring prospects for recruiters, has added the U.S. Office's patent database to the sources it scours for information on prospective employees.

Call it novel or horrifying, but I can see how it would be useful for recruiters, particularly in areas like biotech and manufacturing. And, yes, software, though you could argue that … Read more

Amazon's online shoe seller Zappos is combining the popularity of Pinterest with its own products in a new service.

Dubbed Pinpointing, the service delivers Zappos products based on what a user has pinned. In addition, the service will list products that had been pinned recently. Pinpointing lists a host of product categories, including shoes, skirts, dresses, and jeans.

In order to take advantage of the features, users can enter their own Pinterest username to see what sort of Zappos recommendations might relate to their previously pinned items. They can also input another person's username to see recommendations based … Read more