Sep 14, 2010

“Three weeks before graduation when everyone went off and partied in the Caribbean, I came back out to San Francisco and my co-founder and I sat down and did a lot of work.  I went back to MIT for graduation, graduated on a Saturday and two days later on a Monday morning we started fulltime in our new office together.  We hit the ground running,”...

Aug 5, 2010

Last June Iker Marcaide graduated from MIT with an MBA degree from the Sloan School of Management.  His graduation present?  Traveling to Barcelona to collect €20,000 for winning the HIT Global Entrepreneurship Competition as part of the HIT Barcelona World Innovation Summit and having his young company peerTransfer named the most promising early-stage...

Jul 28, 2010

JetPens.com is the leading online retailer of Japanese pens, pencils, and stationery.  Started in 2004 with an initial investment of $9,000 from its three founders, the company managed to achieve profitability after two years, without any additional financing.  Because they never had to sell any equity to outside investors, the three founding partners have...

Jul 23, 2010

I talked to Jamie Taylor, Minister of Information at Metaweb, the company behind Freebase. Freebase is a community-writable semantic database, spanning millions of topics in thousands of categories. Jamie, tell us what sparked your interest in semantic technologies: you got a PhD in Behavioral Economics, at some point you started San Francisco’s first ISP. How...

Jul 22, 2010

I recently talked to Will Hunsinger, CEO of Evri, a discovery engine, delivering intelligent, real-time streams of information around popular topics enabling users to share and engage. The company has just under 40 employees and is based in Seattle with offices in San Francisco. How does the recent acquisition of Twine/Radar Networks impact your strategy? So we...