During an interview with Bloomberg West this week, YCombinator’s Paul Graham weighed in on the start-up carnage lying around from the last two weeks. First from Apple’s WWDC keynote, which made a land-grab for territory previously held by some of its third-party iOS developers and then with the news that Facebook Read More
Zach Inglis, a 25-year old web developer based in London and passionate Tumblr user (well, it’s complicated) hit Digg.com and Hacker News in 2010 with an inflammatory blog post titled “Why Tumblr Sucks” after frustrations with downtime, features, customer service, and ultimately, a bumpy attempt at hosting a Tumblr meetup in London, for which he did not receive the promised stickers. “I do think that their complete lack of care for their product should be known, so others do not make the same mistake I have,” he wrote at the time; he also created snarksite http://istumblrdown.com. Those efforts might be written-off by Tumblr as trollish frustrations.
But Mr. Inglis is taking his Tumblr beef to the next level: He plans to create the “Facebook to Tumblr’s Myspace.” He’s spoken to CHINACCELERATOR, a TechStars-affiliated incubator in Dalian, northeast China, which he says extended an invitation for him and a developer to join in July in order to work on a Tumblr competitor, Betabeat learned. Read More
A side project we counseled to turn start-up is headed to San Francisco to join the elite incubator Angelpad, founded by ex-Googlers in 2010. IDoneThis, the productivity hack from Walter Chen and Rodrigo Guzman, told us a month ago they had applied to a few incubators–including New York’s brand-new Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator–but it seems they’ll be shipping off to Cali even though “New York has been good to us.” We look forward to hearing dispatches from the relatively new incubator, which mostly selects start-ups run by more experienced entrepreneurs, and to enjoying the sandwiches at their celebratory open sandwich bar party next week. Read More
Betabeat will be getting some new neighbors June 6th, when ten start-ups move into Times Square offices for a three month accelerator program run by Entrepreneurs Roundtable.
“We are very excited to have received interest from such a wide group of top-flight entrepreneurs for our inaugural ERA program,” said Murat Aktihanoglu, managing director. “We are thrilled with the group of companies which will be participating, and we look forward to working with them and our extensive mentor network to help these companies succeed.” Read More
“Quality over quantity,” Dave Tisch was explaining to an entrepreneur as Betabeat chanced upon him outside Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt, just after Paul Graham had hosted Y Combinator-style office hours on stage.
TechStars has gotten more than 800 applications for the summer session, Mr. Tisch told Betabeat, and the quality of applicants is “exponentially higher.” “We’ve got applications from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple,” he said. “We didn’t have that before.” He thinks they’ll have more than 1,000 applications come in; last time there were about half that. The deadline to apply for the summer session is May 26.
Orientation! Today was the first day of the DreamIt Ventures accelerator’s brand new New York program, and entrepreneurs from 12 start-ups gathered around director Mark Wachen this afternoon in the accelerator’s three-quarters-of-the-way finished open office on the eleventh floor of a Chelsea elevator building on W. 27th and Broadway. The space is sunny and bright and equipped with wifi, coffee, water, a ping-pong table, clusters of desks, some computers and iPads and not much else. “That’s going to be another conference room there,” Mr. Wachen indicated a corner with some panes of glass leaning against the wall. “You can also use the stairwell conference room.” “Or the Starbucks conference room,” the office manager piped up. Read More
The sunny Polaris Ventures-sponsored Dogpatch Labs space is a mystery! Start-ups hand-picked by Polaris Ventures and entrepreneur-in-residence Matt Meeker get to jam on their product for six months and often longer rent-free, giving up no equity stake, agreeing to no “first-look” caveats, no strings attached, in a super space just south of Union Square. And despite some rumorous rumblings to the contrary, start-ups seem to have no trouble moving up after they leave. Today the five-person analytics start-up Spinback was acquired by Buddy Media for an undisclosed sum which was “very compelling”–compelling enough that the company scrapped the term sheets it had signed with east and west coast VCs for an (also undisclosed–but “very normal”) Series A. And after giving the company free rent along with the free coffee, free lunches and visits from tech luminaries that come with the space, Polaris Ventures made zero monetary return on their success. Read More
Philadelphia-based DreamIt Ventures, the second established accelerator to open a New York branch, is gearing up to open its doors on Monday. The first hurdle–getting enough quality applications–proved to be no trouble, as managing director Mark Wachen and team had more than 500 applications to sort through in order to pick 15 companies. That’s an acceptance rate of three percent–higher than Y Combinator and the 1.7 percent accepted for TechStarsNY, but still extremely selective. Read More
Dogpatch Labs has interest from 250 to 275 companies for about eight to 10 desks, liaison Matt Meeker told Betabeat, after a steady increase gave way to a rush. “It’s been building over the past couple months, but the past couple weeks have really accelerated a lot (sorry for the pun),” he said. “I wish I had twice as many desks.” Read More
Hm, odd that this item isn’t #1 on Y Combinator’s Hacker News! A survey of VCs, angels and accelerator graduates shows the original TechStars incubator is more effective than Paul Graham’s venerable Y Combinator. TechStars-Boulder was ranked first, beating Y Combo by a “narrow edge,” Tech Cocktail writes. Read More
