Funding Status:  Series A

Founders Backgrounds: VistaPrint

Investors:  Angels

Industry: Consumer web, content distribution

Offering Description: iSyndica is your one-stop-shop for selling your digital content on microstock sites & digital galleries. Simplify your workflow: Upload Once, Sell everywhere™

Neil Patel asks 10 successful entrepreneurs who have all created companies that are worth at least 50 million dollars, what their biggest business mistake was.

Half of the ten named a hiring related issue as their biggest problem.

If you feel you need data points to emphasize the crucial importance of effective recruiting, look no further. Hiring is important for all companies, but for start-up companies it is the bedrock that will determine the success or failure of your endeavor. One mistake with a core team hire can throw the company into a death spiral from which it may not recover. The other take away from this advice is that once you identify a hiring mistake, you must correct it quickly or risk further damage.

“wrong hiring standards in certain parts of our company. We focused too much on specific skills, and too little on fundamental abilities, raw talent, and passion”

“The biggest mistakes are always bad hires.”

“My biggest mistake has been hiring the wrong people.”

“not taking fast corrective action in dealing with a bad hire.”

“The biggest mistake I’ve made have been with hiring the wrong people. I think if you add everything up, including the cost of bad decisions, additional bad hires made by the original bad hire, and missed opportunity costs, bad hires have cost Zappos over $100 million.”

Read the blog post to see who said what.

The best advice when building your team is to err on the side of caution. If you have any doubts about someone, don’t hire them. Wait for the right candidate to come along.

To do this effectively, you must be recruiting at all times and use a lot of sources (including recruiters). It costs you nothing to see candidates from recruiters and if the candidate presented by the recruiter is the “right” one and beats those provided by your other sources, hire them.  Too much emphasis is placed on cost per hire and you should be focused on quality of hire. Each good engineer is considered to be worth $ 1 Million in an acquisition (not even considering their output) so whatever it costs you to bring a great candidate on board is well worth it and is not significant over time.

Funding Status: Seed

Founders Backgrounds: Urban Interactive, Blackstone Group

Investors: ?

Industry: Mobile Applications, Mobile Commerce

Offering Description: Stamp’s loyalty program is a different breed. Points, rewards, customer management tools — sure, we have that. But we also provide the spark to help you build real relationships with your customers.

Genotrope Record: Project Concord seems like a tempory name

Funding Status: Series A

Founders Backgrounds: Pixamo, Endeca

Investors: Alpond Capita *see comments

Industry: Video, Online Entertainment

Offering Description: convenient and legal access to top movies and TV shows – but without the unwanted commercials or the need to reach into your wallet.

They have known founders and are embarking on a new venture in emerging markets. It should be interesting to watch as they lauch their products or services this year.

Akiba is based in Boston and the founders come from Nexaweb, Fundtech, Fortelligent and Bladelogic.

They are developing a database virtualization solution that enables effortless scalability of a database across nodes, both within the enterprise and in the cloud.

Nasuni is a Natick based company with founders hailing from Archivas and other executives from Leostream and BCG.

They will be providing enterprise-class features, while removing the existing obstacles to cloud storage adoption for companies of all sizes, with or without IT resources. We believe our offering will propel cloud storage into a segment of the market that is prime for the cloud, but not currently being served.

Performable is a virtual startup based in Cambridge. The founders come from Compete and Lookery.

Operating in stealth mode for now, the most they have said publicly is that Performable is a marketing platform for start-ups and online businesses. Without knowing exactly what they are doing,  a data point regarding the product’s viability was provided by Sean Ellis (Performable advisor) who said he could’t live without the product. That is enough to get our attention and is a good indication they are on to something.

Yottaa is another stealth mode startup based in Cambridge. The founders and executives are out of Nexaweb and Tazz Networks.

Their vague offering description says Yottaa is a cloud computing company building a new generation of cloud services revolutionizing what we know about the Internet. Ray Stata is involved with the company which is a fairly strong indication of strong underlying technology.

Of course this is a partial list of the cool technology companies coming out of the Boston area in 2009.  If there are any additions you would like to make, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Funding Status:  Seed Round

Founders Backgrounds:  Okena (Cisco), Entegra, Akamai

Investors: ?

Industry:  Mobile, Consumer Finance, B2C Marketing

Offering Description: Micronotes interactive direct marketing system enables consumer brands to mass-produce face-to-face sales interviews to deliver highly relevant offers to a target audience driving sales at lower cost than existing platforms.

Genotrope Record: thredUP

currently hiring

Funding Status:  Seed

Founders Backgrounds: Microsoft, Foley Hoag,

Investors: ?

Industry: Consumer Web

Offering Description: We did some real thinking and figured out this whole idea of more efficient exchange makes a lot of sense for two reasons. First, most people bore easily, clothes included; second, buying stylish new clothes on a regular basis is expensive. So we thought it would be cool if you could exchange the clothes that you were bored of (old to you) for new ones (new to you). Thats really it: out with old to you, in with new more…to you. Then we got all fancy with being a personal shopper and a refresh button and starting a closet revolution. No matter what we call it, its the same great experience.

Funding Status: Seed

Investors: ? TBD

Industry: Storage Software, Cloud Computing

Offering Description: stealth mode storage offering. Experienced founder.

Funding Status: Series A

Investors: North Bridge Venture Partners, Foundation Capital and angel investors.

Industry:  Software, Data Virtualization

Offering Description:  Data virtualization via patent-pending technology

We rarely mention Genotrope on these pages, but we just released significant new features and thought it was worth the blatant plug.

The good news is the market is picking up a bit and most companies are now hiring for a few positions. New start-ups are being funded and building out their core teams. The timing is right for the new release of Genotrope with even more focus on helping People and Companies Connect.

You might know that our approach is to “find the company first and then the job”.  However the entire market, both companies and candidates are focused on job postings, so rather than continue to attempt to swim upstream, we have released job posting functionality.

Now companies can register with Genotrope and manage their company record, build a Talent Target graph, release news as well as create and edit job postings.

Users can now view job postings. The difference is that now when Candidates are viewing the list of job posting the Genotrope Icon will be present in the job listing to indicate companies where the registered user also has an affinity match through their professional graph. These jobs will be the better fit matches when compared to matches done strictly by position or industry.

Along with the new job postings, we have added major new search functionality.  Both Browsing and MyGraph mode on the FindJobs page can be searched by zipcode proximity, Industry and Company Status. This means you can slice and dice the company database to find very specific matches, such as all B2B companies with a series A investment that are 25 miles from my home town.

Also, now it is not a requirement to be a registered user to view job postings or Apply for a position. Registered users gain the benefit of saving their profile information, which provides the affinity matching from the professional graph, as well as the ability to contribute data and edit the company database.

now for completely anonymous Job Search using your professional graph. It takes less than a minute and only an email address and a few companies entered into work history are needed.