New: Lists By Social Matchbox
About a week ago, a group of Social Matchbox Alumni were sitting around a table talking about Washington area investors. We were surprised by how hard it was to come up with names for Washington area angel investors, especially ones who had not been government contractors or telecom insiders but who had no real web [...]
TechStars To Host Invite Only Pitch Session in Reston
As part of the TechStars / Do More Faster book tour, TechStars CEO David Cohen and several other VC’s will hear from several “emerging local companies”. The event, hosted by a Northern Virginia law firm, will include the usual mix of pitch and business plan feedback. RSVP is required. Here is the is the schedule: [...]
Washington Area Faces The Tragedy of The Commons: How You Can Help Avert A Crisis
“The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently, and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.” -Wikipedia As members of the [...]
The Rising Tide of Startup Valuations
Yesterday Pui-Wing Tam, who writes for the Wall Street Journal, served up nice story about rising valuations of web startup companies titled ‘Web Start-Up Valuse Soar’. If you missed it then you may want to go read the full article here. Tam discusses the mind boggling $87.5 million valuation that Q&A sit Quora, Inc. got recently and the $46 million [...]
Pattern Recognition for Entrepreneurs, not just VC’s
by Don Rainey (blog) VC’s use “pattern recognition” to assess the viability of deals. Pattern recognition is a method of seeing commonalities between a current , novel concept and previous ideas. And while it is a great tool commonly used by Venture Capitalists, the pattern recognition tool is mostly ignored by entrepreneurs. Which is a [...]
DC Startup CardStar, Inc. Lands $1 Million in Series A Funds
If you attend DC area startup community events including Social Matchbox you have probably met entrepreneur Danny Espinoza. Danny spent a lot of time over the last few years talking about his company Mesa Dynamics, LLC and his product Amnesty Widgets. Amnesty Widgets allowed you to take a widget from the web and install it [...]
Message Systems Closes Funding Round
Message Systems, a Columbia, MD, based provider of message management solutions and services for email service providers, ISP’s, social networks and large enterprises that need to manage large volumes of email closed what they are calling a “significant” investment round involving Philadelphia, PA based NewSpring Ventures. Message Systems was launched in 1997.
