start-up

Green tech: Now comes the hard part

BOSTON--Even with positive long-term trends at their backs, a huge wave of newly created clean-tech companies will have to navigate a tricky business and regulatory environment to succeed.

At the MIT Enterprise Forum's "Power, Drugs, and Money" conference last Thursday, financiers and business people offered alternating upbeat and cautious advice on the prospects in clean tech, which has become one of the hottest areas for entrepreneurs and investors.

The positive scenario was summed up by Dennis Costello, an investor at Braemer Energy Ventures: the energy field is a great business to be in now because it is … Read more

How green-tech start-ups can take on energy goliaths

Type "green+tech+bubble" into Google search and you get 228,000 results--quite a bit considering the terms "green tech" and "clean tech" are relatively new.

Discussion of an over-investment in energy-related start-ups is hard to avoid when the amount of venture capital dollars--which financed the Internet bubble--going into the field just goes up and up.

All digital ink spilled over the bubble is justified, but for reasons that may seem counter-intuitive, according to Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight, a consulting firm founded by business guru Clayton Christensen.

Anthony contends that many business … Read more

Which fast-growing NYC start-up is getting some googly love?

Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider has started a little guessing game: which anonymous New York tech start-up is getting backed by influential ex-Googler Chris Sacca, who left his job as head of special initiatives to become an angel investor?

On Sunday, Sacca wrote on his blog that he's looking for a "Web geek" for an "edgy little content company" based in Gotham, which "needs its first full-time tech lead."

This is a big deal, because powerful ex-Google executive muscle would mean both great press and deep-pocketed connections for the start-up in question. … Read more

Overnight Web successes and their casual beginnings

Argh, they make it look so easy. I was just sitting around and I made half a million dollars, they say. Oops, how did that happen, they say. Just a random idea, I had no idea it'd be popular, they say.

Hear from three insanely successful Web entrepreneurs on how they got their start.

Read more on SiliconValley.com (registration required): "Three who had the right idea at the right time"

Open source in '08: Break-outs and consolidation

Before I was a big-shot executive, the end of a year meant rest and relaxation. Now it's crunching fourth-quarter numbers and budgeting for 2008.

A friend in Japan read my fortune and told me that 2007 was my year of "turbulence," that 2008 is my year of "reunion," and that 2009 is my year of "wealth." Supposedly, 2010 will be "peace and stabilized," but at the rate I am going I can only hope to make it that far.

One full calendar year later, I am still happy that my company (MuleSource) gives software consumers a choice about the technology they use and ultimately, we, like the rest of the open-source vendors, bet on the fact that adoption eventually equals dollars. Having been a software consumer that felt burdened by proprietary products for most of my career, I retain a strong desire to flip the software industry on its head.

There is an inevitable flow of events in which software companies will either get on the path or be left behind. If you start a software company today that is not SaaS or open source you are betting that the market will somehow revert to 1999. And I think we all remember what happened in 2001 here in the valley.

Two years after founding this company I believe more than ever that open source is a question of when, not if.… Read more

10 start-ups that show promise for '08

If it's done nothing else, the Internet has turned countless piles of straw into gold.

The latest Rumpelstiltskin-eque ideas include a site that will use your DNA to tell you which diseases and other health risks you face, a GPS device that gathers info from you such as traffic problems and beams the data to other users, a social-networking site for businesspeople and other professionals, and a site that lets you find out what the Internet reveals about you.

These start-ups and six others are the ones that Wired expects to break into the Internet's spotlight next year. … Read more

Slogging it out Silicon Valley style

Today's WSJ (login required) has a great article about Voltage Security and the less glorious side of founding and running a startup--the fact that you have to keep slogging away regardless of what's going on around you.

Every industry has its superstars and its sloggers, of course. But the tech industry of the late 1990s and earlier this decade has seen an unusual number of two-year cycles end with a lucrative sale or initial public offering. When that doesn't happen, the process can get so grueling and protracted that some VCs say they have to get creative … Read more

Entrepreneurs, the time is now!

Reading about the demise of Edgeio over on Techcrunch made me think a bit about being an entrepreneur and wonder what's happened to the valley. Having been through the tech downturn here in SF and watching two companies I worked for go public only to flame out I should be last person who felt the desire to start a company. But, what's the point of living in the bay area if you can't seize the opportunity for technology greatness?

There seem to be less startups lately and I'm starting to wonder if would-be founders are taking … Read more

Today in freaky start-ups: RentYourSoul.com

Pierre Ayotte, noted in a press release to be a "friendly upcoming Internet opportunist"--i.e. not The Devil Himself, just to be clear--would like to rent your soul for 10 bucks a week.

It's a new twist on an old nonprofit business model. He's gambling that the soul-leasing business will earn enough to keep him afloat from the charities that pay weekly to advertise on his site, RentYourSoul.com.

Ayotte swears he's not working for Beelzebub. He'll pay you $10--via PayPal, check, or bank note--and also donate $10 to the charity of your … Read more