Highlights
Indian Start-Ups Become More Attractive to Venture Firms
India has been the hot new place for United States venture
investors for a couple of years now, attracting billions of
dollars in venture capital. Are there enough promising
companies to use all that cash?
For the most part, the companies seeking venture financing in
India have been middle- to late-stage companies, not true
start-ups like those that get financed in the United States.
There are simply not enough start-ups to absorb the capital, so
investors have focused on older companies. That is slowly
changing, Mr. Saxena said, as “a little trickle of start-up
money is coming in.
from
New York Times
A Brief History of Business Incubation in the U.S.
Business Incubation: A Brief History
While there have always been shared spaces, services and
management in the real estate market, business incubators as we
now know them in the United States came into being in the late
1970's.
The industry began in the industrial northeast, where the
"rust-belt" economic conditions of the late 1970s and early
1980s prompted not only a renewed entrepreneurial spirit, but
an emphasis on economic development and job creation.
This emphasis resulted in three simultaneous movements.
The first was the attempt to use old, abandoned factory
buildings in distressed areas of the Midwest and Northeast by
subdividing them for small firms; the second was begun as an
experiment funded by the National Science Foundation to foster
entrepreneurship and innovation at major universities.
The third movement arose from the initiatives of several
successful entrepreneurs or groups of investors who sought to
transfer their own new venture experiences to new companies in
an environment conductive to successful technological
innovation and commercialization.
-- Thomas Ressler, Business Incubators Economic Development in
Local Government
Startup Blog
Dharmesh Shah, Chief Software Architect and Founder of
HubSpot in Boston blogs
for entrepreneurs On
Startups.
30 Start-up Ideas
Paul Graham at Y Combinator has thirty ideas of things they would consider funding, including a "Start-up for Start-ups."
On software developers starting a business
Havoc Pennington, former Desktop lead engineer for Red
Hat, says creating a small, sustainable business is an an
alternative to working as an employee or starting a venture
backed start-up in his post, Choices For Software
Developers.
Business plan howlers
Aggressive confidentiality clauses and an obsession with
non-disclosure agreements.
Overly technical documents.
read full article
The Open Source and Venture Capital Show
The level of VC investment flowing into Open Source is impressive and growing. Last year $481MM was raised by 48 startups. Since 2000 Open Source startups have raised over $1.9B in financing. Here are the last three years:
| 2004 | $298MM | 36 deals |
| 2005 | $306MM | 41 deals |
| 2006 | $481MM | 48 deals |
In his blog, Larry Augustin, VA Linux founder turned venture
capitalist,
predicts the number of venture capital investments in Open
Source will remain level or decline in 2007 and 2008.
Start-ups more common in Europe
AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France: Jacques Souquet had gone through
several start-ups in Seattle, but he still was not entirely
prepared for starting up a high-tech company in his native
France.
Full
article from International Herald Tribune
Two Open Source Companies receive Venture Capital
Open source is here to stay. Linux is here to stay.
- MontaVista CEO Thomas Kelly in Linuxdevices.com.
Siemens Venture Capital joins with NEC, Alloy Ventures,
US Venture Partners and Aplix in the "Round G" funding of
MontaVista. MonteVista
announced it secured $21 million in funding which closed on
November 24th. The company intends to use the funds primarily
to build its cash reserves.
Amazon has invested an undisclosed amount in Wikia joining existing
investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and angel
investors Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Joichi Ito and Mitch Kapor
according to
Techcrunch.