OregonStartups.com News

Vesticon Names New CEO

Vesticon announced this week that they have added Richard Lazar as CEO. Founder Cathy Epley led the search and remains with the company and on the Board of Directors.

Don't Quit Your Day Job

A recent Forbes article, Don't Quit Your Day Job - Forbes.com described the benefits of keeping your day job while working on a new venture.

You can't count on bankers or angels to get your venture off the ground. So maybe you should shoehorn it around a 9-to-5 career Samuel Tharp spends 50 hours a week as a vice president at ZoomInfo, an Internet search service that helps companies find information about prospective employees. After work Tharp, 39, returns to his Acton, Mass. home and spends two hours on another job: He is the founder of year-old Otrib.com, a service that helps people plan funerals, send death notices and write tributes to those who have passed away. In April Otrib had 25,000 unique visitors who spent 15 minutes, on average, on the site.

...

Not so long ago an Internet venturelet like Otrib might have seen a swarm of venture capital firms, or at least some commercial banks offering high-priced loans. Nowadays such financiers want to see businesses with revenue, customers and a logo solidly in place before they commit capital. "It's a betting game," says Jeffrey Carr, executive director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at New York University. "The things that used to be differentiators are now requirements. It's harder to stand out."

Good point - you need traction these days to get funding. The problem is that it's hard to make headway on a startup when you're spending 40+ hours per week on a day job! If there were just more hours in the day...

How to Evaluate a Product Idea

Tony Wright recently mentioned a post from last December that Evan Williams made on How to Evaluate a new product idea. If you're trying to narrow down that long list of ideas you have into the one the you just have to pursue, Evan's post provides good food for thought. His top-level items:

• Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
• Obviousness: Is it clear why people should us it?
• Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
• Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
• Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
• Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
• Personally Compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

What Business Owners Worry Most About Now

From the Wall Street Journal: Independent Street : What Business Owners Worry Most About Now summarizes the findings of a report from the National Federation of Independent Business. The list:

1. Cost of health insurance
2. Cost of natural gas, propane, gasoline, diesel, fuel oil
3. Federal taxes on business income
4. Property taxes (real, inventory, or personal property)
5. Tax complexity
6. Unreasonable government regulations
7. State taxes on business income
8. Cost of supplies/inventories
9. Electricity costs (rates)
10. Workers’ compensation costs

How does that compare to your top worries?

Post Mortem of a Failed Startup

From Information Arbitrage: Monitor110: A Post Mortem, Roger Ehrenberg walks through the 7 deadly sins committed by failed startup Monitor110. The 7 sins, in summary:

• The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game
• No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
• Too much PR, too early
• Too much money
• Not close enough to the customer
• Slow to adapt to market reality
• Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board

It's worth reading the full post on how things like "too much money" decreased the odds of success.

SplashCast opens LA office

The Portland Business Journal reported that Portland startup SplashCast has opened an office in LA. According to the Business Journal, SplashCast has raised $4 million and employs 11 people.

Oregon Business Magazine features Startups

In the article Start Me Up this week, Oregon Business Magazine featured 14 Portland area startups, including:

Toonlet Values of n
JanRain
NuScale Power
WeoGeo
Lumeno.us
Interasi
Lunarr.com
OsoEco
goneraw.com
networthiq.com
grabb.it
walkertracker.com
urbandrinks.com

TechCrunch's Elevator Pitch Site

Earlier this month TechCrunch launched Elevator Pitches, a site for startup CEOs and founders to upload a 60-second video explaining what their companies do and how they make money. Since the launch, they've simplified the upload process. In the blog post Elevator Pitches, Now Ready For Your Uploads, Erick Schonfeld pointed to the following 3 pitches as good examples:

SmugMug, mEGo, and WrapMail

Intel Creates Solar Company

From the Portland Business Journal today, Intel Capital is leading a $50 million round to set up SpectrWatt Inc., a solar cell startup that will build a manufacturing plant in Hillsboro.

What is a Sales Cycle?

From Sales 2.0: What is a Sales Cycle?: " By Nigel Edelshain, Sales 2.0

How long is your sales cycle? How do we shorten our sales cycle? Interesting questions but how do you answer these if you don't know what your sales cycle is?

Check out the full post for the answer!