I crashed my first demo day today at 500 Startups. \u00a0As with all good things, it came about via a stupid coincidence. \u00a0I’m an investor in 500 Startups, but hadn’t yet managed to get myself on the official LP mailing list so I had no idea an investor day was coming up. \u00a0I plopped down in seat 10A on the Alaska bus to San Jose, and of all the damn coincidences, my good friend and cofounder from Ontela, Brian Schultz, had the seat next to me. \u00a0I asked him what he was up to and he told me he was headed down for 500 Startups demo day. \u00a0I zipped off an email before the flight attended shut me down and had an invite by the time we hit 10k feet.<\/p>\n
500 Startups is an interesting beast. \u00a0The fund has $29MM under management with over 250 investments, only half of which are in the valley. \u00a0Companies came from as far as Japan (cloud data processing) to Brazil (educational test coaching). \u00a0Here’s some of the companies that stood out to me:<\/p>\n
TinyReview<\/strong> was super cool – like instagram + twitter + yelp. \u00a0You go somewhere, take a picture, and put 3 extremely short lines of text on it – two or three words per line, tops. \u00a0Looks like fun, good traction, and the service just feels like something people will enjoy playing with. \u00a0But I’m skeptical of the positioning as a review site. \u00a0My top use for a review site is to recommend stuff – not actually clear to me how you use microhaikus to find a great restaurant, unless you’re just reading a lot. It looks like a great creative palette but not like a great reviews site.<\/p>\n The concept behind Spinnakr<\/strong> is great. \u00a0They do lots of crazy analysis on a per-user basis and help you customize your content for the actual human being doing the visiting. \u00a0Bit creepy. \u00a0But the pitch is golden – a job site can highlight jobs that are relevant to you. \u00a0A news site can bubble up information that’s relevant to you. \u00a0They make a strong claim that the big sites are doing this already, so they can bring the same tools to the little guys. \u00a0The founders have a cool background too – fundraisers from politics who are experienced with targeting and what it does.<\/p>\n Switchcam<\/strong> is, in their own words, “blowing people’s faces off”. \u00a0These guys scoop up a bunch of online videos of events and stitch them together. \u00a0Imagine watching a video of a concert, as filmed through a dozen camera phones – complete with pans, cuts, and even the ability to grab the director’s chair and pick your “camera angle”. \u00a0Love the technology. \u00a0 Not so in love with knowingly hosting large quantities of pirated content, and automatically categorizing it for easy takedown notices.<\/p>\n MeMeTales<\/strong> has a special place in my heart because they’re an ex-Seattle company that I mentored in the first Seattle Founders’ Institute class. \u00a0Maya is awesome, and she moved the company down to the valley (boo, hiss) to take 500s funding and really grow the business. \u00a0They’re doing online and mobile storybooks for kids – great growth, and spectacular stickiness with an average session length of 29 minutes. \u00a0The books look great; I was particularly partial to “Richard was a Picker”, about boogers.<\/p>\n Postrocket<\/strong> says they’re like SEOmoz for Facebook. \u00a0In English, they optimize facebook posts to make it more likely that a given post on Facebook gets seen and “like”‘d. \u00a0I didn’t catch quite how they do this, but they have a great story that includes dropping out of college to go on a 46 hour Boston-to-Palo Alto\u00a0pilgrimage\u00a0to the valley to start the company.<\/p>\n Fitocracy<\/strong> gets marketing: they’re about fitness, so they showed photos of the founders, before\/after, chubby\/sleek, XXL-t-shirted and… yes, shirtless. \u00a0The only thing they left off their pitch (and I can’t believe they did) was their own XKCD comic (http:\/\/xkcd.com\/940\/<\/a>). \u00a0Nice way to game-ify fitness.<\/p>\n GoVoluntr<\/strong> has the distinction of being the only startup pitched by an actual Got Milk ad model. \u00a0But they had a great pitch: former Starbucks guy has hard numbers that community involvement drives growth and revenues. \u00a0So they get businesses to donate products and services to people who are volunteering, and provide tools to help volunteers track their engagement and pick up perks from participating companies.<\/p>\n All in all, a solid showing – 32 companies, plenty of which show loads of promise. \u00a0Great work to Dave and team!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I crashed my first demo day today at 500 Startups. \u00a0As with all good things, it came about via a stupid coincidence. \u00a0I’m an investor in 500 Startups, but hadn’t yet managed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}