Covering Start-ups and Emerging Technology in theHUB Boston and Cambridge area.
Genotrope Record: MyRoar
Funding Status: Bootstrapped
Investors:
Founders or Execs past companies: Feedster, Lehman Brothers
Industry: Web Search, Financial Services
Offering Description: MyRoar provides a unique offering for data vendors and data consumers. Unparalleled insights are provided to users who can now do research quickly and easily, resulting in increased satisfaction and productivity.
The MITX Start-Up Clinic kicked off Thursday with a session titled Business Models and Cost Efficiencies. It was hosted by Doug Levin, past CEO of Black Duck Software, and Stanley Doleberg previously at Forrester, who both recently co-founded Precipice Consulting.
The startup founders in attendence ran the gamut both in age brackets and product offerings. There were MIT hackers developing their ideas, to seasoned executives embarking on a new digital adventure. The products ranged from online ticket sales to a digital scale with attendant web app for managing weight and training programs.
The presenters commented that the VC’s were looking for capital efficient companies and are speaking about building initial product concepts for $50K. This would be somewhat of a change towards web company funding, which seems like a promising sign.
Another interesting topic of discussion was, how the local VC’s have discouraged the angel community in the past by washing them out of investments, thereby creating a vacuum of active angels in the Boston area.
It seems the lack of significant active angels in the Boston area is probably the main reason we are playing catch up in the Web Start-up market currently. This makes us respect our active Web angels even more.
As with any first cut at a project there was room for improvements. The comments from the audience made it clear that some of the material covered was a mis-match for the attendees. In particular, a section on cost cutting given to mostly bootstrapped/self funded companies did not resonate.
Another direction recommended by the audience was more practical information such as use cases and real world examples. If they can get speakers from local consumer start-ups to come and share their past experience in dealing with the variety of issues Consumer startups face, I believe the attendees would receive that very enthusiastically.
It was clear from the feedback that this group of entrepreneurs was hungry for real world examples and practical, actionable processes and not as interested in theory and high level overviews.
Doug and Stanley have contributed a much needed, more practical meetup to compliment the larger more schmoozefest, demo oriented group meetings. We look forward to attending future clinics as the series unfolds.
Follow the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange MITX site for future Start-Up Clinic events.
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Next Thursday evening there is a Startup Clinic in Cambridge, for founders of consumer web companies, that should be interesting.
It is the first event in a new series sponsored by MITX. Hopefully, we will see more involvement of this type from successful local entrepreneurs who are willing to engage with the community and pollinate the web ecosystem here in Boston. This kind of startup to startup interaction is one of the ingredients missing from our local scene.
This free event is for entrepreneurs only; seating is limited and you must be engaged in creating a consumer start-up to attend!
Register for: MITX Start-Up Clinic: Business Models & Cost Efficiencies
Presenter: Doug Levin, Serial CEO and Entrepreneur, Founder of Black Duck Software
Discussion points will include:
Check it out and let us know how you liked it.
We received an email today from Scott Annan the CEO of Mercury Grove, an Ottowa web software firm telling us about their stop in Boston on the current Co-working / Dex Roadtrip tour of the east coast startup scene. He and Scott Lake (founder of shopify.com, and social media consultant) are traveling to various US cities trying to connect with local bloggers, startups, and technology enthusiasts for a discussion about social CRM and the new app DEX (http://dexapp.com) As a power user of contact management apps, Dex seems pretty interesting, we just signed up for the beta.
The two Scotts are also co-authors of the startupottawa.com blog. It should be a good time with some interesting conversation. Try to get out and meet them and let us know how it went.
More information here: http://dexifyboston.eventbrite.com
GreenCloud Systems
Funding Status: series A stealth
Investors: DoMatrix, Chrysylis Energy
Founders or Execs past companies: Amazon, Treevolt, Energena
Industry: BioEnergy Cloud Computing
Offering Description: GreenCloud has developed an inexpensive electricity generation system that harvests metabolic energy from bamboo. Using this bioenergy converter we deliver on the promise of cloud computing for next generation data centers, and do so holistically, addressing: cooling, application performance, and reduction of power consumption.
The more computation the more oxygen is produced. In the future, every Google search you perform will help rebuild the earth’s atmosphere.
We have been watching a couple of local Internet Job sites that are ramping up nicely in the recent months.
MyPerfectGig , the more pedigreed of the two, is a startup funded by North Bridge and Commonwealth Capital. The founding team are seasoned entrepreneurs, having founded BrassRing and run DirectoryM.
MPG describes their offering as “sourcing intelligence”. The application provides hiring companies with an incredible amount of information regarding competitors hiring and available workforce.
Vitruva was founded in 2006 by an executive from Iconics. They don’t make public their funding sources but they must have some money, having existed for several years.
They characterize themselves as a “job matching engine” and the tag line is Jobs without Searching.
Both of the sites are showing strong recent growth as you can see. Monster Board, the billion dollar revenue career site was started here in the Boston area and is currently one of the most used sites on the web. The recruiting market is huge and it will be interesting to watch the upstarts as they pick away at a continually fragmenting market. It would be great to see another huge success from the Boston area, rise up and compete with the Monster.
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