seedWatcher

Pitch Us - Y Combinator Lays Out The Startup Ideas They'd Like To Fund

I've been a big fan of Paul Graham's Y Combinator for a while now. Ryan Junee and his team at Omnisio (Y Combinator Jan-Mar '08) had great things to say about their time at the quasi-incubator. While they haven't yet had their blowout hit from an investment standpoint, Y-Comb alumni firms are quickly becoming names in the social web landscape: Disqus, iminlikewithyou, Justin.tv, and Reddit to name a few.

Now Paul is laying out what he'd like to to have pitched, aptly dubbing his list, "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund." It's a refreshing and pretty candid post. Take for example #11 on the list:

11. Web Office apps.  We're interested in funding anyone competing with Microsoft desktop software.  Obviously this is a rich market, considering how much Microsoft makes from it.  A startup that made a tenth as much would be very happy.  And a startup that takes on such a project will be helped along by Microsoft itself, who between their increasingly bureaucratic culture and their desire to protect existing desktop revenues will probably do a bad job of building web-based Office variants themselves.  Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven't taken the world by storm, and how you're going to beat that.

One common theme throughout the list is the need for not only the killer idea complete with its disruptive tendencies, but the ability to identify why it hasn't been done before. It's one thing to spot the market that is rife with bloat, but it's not always so easy to spell out why. 

On my end, I'm still looking for startups that fill the 5 Web 2.0 Services I'd Like to See (and I'd acutually pay for.) Though I have to give a nod out to Brian McConnell for pointing me to his firm, worldwidelexcion.org for blog translation services. More on this in another post, but it sounds promising.  It is, as he calls it, a "suite of collaborative translation tools for publishers and bloggers that combine machine translation, volunteers (from your readership) and if desired professionals."

Jeff Bezos and Bijan Sabet back Twitter

Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for the info, Twitter today announced that Amazon Founder/CEO Jeff Bezos, through his Bezos Expeditions, is one of the investors in Twitter's latest funding round, estaimated at around $15 million. Also participating is Spark Capital's Bijan Sabet, who is very active in the Twitter-verse. Bijan will grab a seat on the Twitter board as well. Congrats to Twitter for scoring these two guys. Jeff's expertise in scaling a rapidly growing startup will be priceless to the growing-pained Twitter.

It should be worth noting that sometimes even Bezos' golden touch may not be enough to save the day. SMS messaging service ChaCha, which he invested in just last January, hit the deadpool a little over a year later. 

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Jeff Bezos

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Bijan Sabet

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Technorati adds $7.5M more with Series D

Staying on the theme of blog search engines (see: Twingly),  today Technorati announced closing $7.5 million of a $10 million Series D round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) with Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation (operator of Technorati Japan) in as well. That brings total funding for the San Francisco-based company to just over $30 million since its founding in 2002.

From the looks of it, things seem to been stalling with the long-running authority on the blogosphere. Unique visitors to the site seem to be trending downward over the past year, one in which both the number of bloggers and blog readers has grown significantly. (see: Sifry's State of the Blogosphere report.) Not a good sign.

Interesting to note that there are no new investors in this round, another possible point of wary. VentureBeat reports that according to the regulatory filing, several of members of the senior management team and board, led by Founder/CEO David L. Sifry, including Richard Jalichandra, Sanford Robertson, Joi Ito, Peter Hirshberg, Ryan McIntyre and Andreas Stavropoulos have all invested personally in the Series D. Interesting indeed. Sure can be tough to compete with Google once it decided to get into the Blogsearch game.

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Knewton raises $2.5M to join the Online Education hunt

New York-based Knewton, Inc. has raised a $2.5M Series A from Accel Partners and First Round Capital. There's not much to share about the stealth-mode startup which is looking to join the growing fray aimed at tackling the online education market. Founder Jose Ferreira has some pedigree in the industry, having served as Kaplan Inc.'s Managing Director of New Markets, where he acquired businesses and started new business units in the online education space. Later he was a partner with New Atlantic Ventures.

As of now, the company website is just an empty placeholder, but I'd expect that to change soon. Hopefully we'll get a glimpse of what their approach will be in the months to come.

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The Hollywood Pitch for Startups

Excellent post over at Venture Hacks on the importance of having a high-concept Hollywood-style pitch for your startup. As in Alien: "It's Jaws in space."  Some great examples they came up with:

“Friendster for dogs.” (Dogster)

“Flickr for video.” (YouTube)

“We network networks.” (Cisco)

“The Firefox of media players.” (Songbird)

“Massively Multiplayer Online Learning.” (Grockit)

“The entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneurs.” (Sequoia)

“Venture Hacks.” (Guess who.)

Increo's Backboard Launches with seed round from DFJ

Silicon Valley-based Increo closed a seed round form Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) this week and kicked things off with the launch of their first product, Backboard. It's a simple collaborative tool for sharing a document, presentation, image or even a URL to a group and gather feedback over the web. Team-based collaboration tools are nothing new these days, with favorites such as Huddle, 37signal's BaseCamp, Onstage, and DeskAway.

The pro's of Backboard, are clearly it's painless setup and ease of use. No mindless registration process needed, just an email address will do. I went ahead and set up a Backboard feedback page for the seedWatcher blog. Anyone can comment on a document if they're given the specific URL, adding some basic level of protection for your shared pages.

The downside for Backboard is the lack of a decent feature set, like say, a markup tool, ala recently covered Twiddla or Stickis. I'd like to see more ways to give feedback beyond the basic text comments on the bottom of the page. It's also going to need some enhanced security beyond URL obfuscation if it's going to get wide-scale business use.

The company's been bootstrapping it for the past year on the Stanford campus before the recent DFJ investment. Increo's founders are all recent Stanford grads - Jeff Seibert, Kimber Lockhart, Rebecca Illowsky and Ray Thang, who came together as part of a CompSci class assignment to develop their own project.

For a first product from this new team, it's a good start. They whipped up a quick and dirty way to share something with a group of people in a shared space. On their site, they write, "the company's software supports teams throughout the innovation process, from brainstorming to conception." Now, they could take the approach of rolling out a suite of collaborative products that integrate together seamlessly and end up with a packaged product that could compete with Huddle and BaseCamp. Or stick to the minimalist approach to tools, which could work in its own way. If that's the case, then I would suggest leveraging some of the social networking API's and getting it so users can share directly from some of the groups I'm already engaged with online.

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That killer "Slow Maybe"

Credit a recent Twitter from Nivi over at VentureHacks who got me catching up on a series of John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) talks from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. This clip is on negotiating valuations with VCs.

Love this quote: "The great danger of dealing with venture capitalists is the 'slow maybe' - you'd always much rather have a quick yes or a quick no."