Pepsi, the food and beverage giant, is ramping up the ways it connects technologically with its customers. Toward that end, the company just launched a new contest aimed at involving 10 startups in yearlong pilot programs with one of Pepsi’s dozens of brands, including Frito-Lay, Mountain Dew, and Tropicana. Organized in conjunction with Highland Capital Partners and Mashable, Pepsi is also offering winners access to its public relations and branding partners, including Weber Shandwick and OMD. “The idea is to identify young entrepreneurs with promising technologies but who don’t have a clear business plan to work with marketers,” says Seth Kaufman, PepsiCo’s director of media strategy and investment. Pepsi is hoping such relationships will help itself better connect with consumers -- “which is very important for us to figure out,” says Kaufman -- while serving as a marquee client off which the startups can capitalize down the road.
2 min read · 05 June 2010
The night before last, Bill Gates and his father, Bill Gates Sr., sat before a sold-out audience in New York, where it was revealed, not for the first time, that Gates, who’d been nicknamed “Trey,” was more than a typical handful as a teenager. He was such a discipline problem, in fact, that the Gateses wound up in family therapy for a full two years. The disclosure’s timing wasn’t accidental. Gates Sr. just released an updated, paperback version of his memoir, Showing Up For Life, in time for Father’s Day. But according to Gates Sr., it wasn’t him who most wrestled with their independent-minded, boundary-pushing teenage son but his now-deceased wife Mary.
1 min read · 04 June 2010
Let’s face it: VCs speak their own language, and it’s sometimes more frat boy than Thoreau. We all know the VC who says to “trust the process” or who goes on “pity dates” with entrepreneurs. Others might joke about “putting lipstick on a pig” of an investment, or point to a newly acquired startup and say of its founder that he or she “pulled a Patzer” (i.e., left money on the table by selling too quickly). I hate to say that Sigma managing director Greg Gretsch has inadvertently taken things to a new level with the title of his new blog post, “Don’t Let a Venture Capitalist De-flower Your Startup Without Making a Commitment.” Still, the post has a thought-provoking premise: If an entrepreneur is going to be dazzled by a top-tier VC firm that wants to help seed his or her company, that funding had better come with a board commitment from the VC. Without one, the entrepreneur is facing a “double-edged sword."
3 min read · 03 June 2010
Back in January, online textbook rental service Chegg sent a lawyerly letter to rival Bookrenter, insisting that it stop referring to itself as “#1 in Textbook Rentals” -- a title to which Chegg had laid claim. At the time, Chegg had already raised a stunning $144 million in cash and debt, including from Kleiner Perkins, Foundation Capital and Insight Venture Partners. BookRenter only had collected $6 million, from Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management. Given their respective sizes, the decision to bear down on Bookrenter seemed ill-conceived, to say the least. (When I interviewed Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig back in March, he made a point of explaining that he “hadn’t even started at the company” when that letter was sent.) Today, BookRenter is fighting back, both with a fresh, $10 million round and a new direction that’s picking up traction. Unlike Chegg, which is placing an expensive bet on developing its own brand and competing with college bookstores, BookRenter thinks it can capture more market share by working with the universities. Whether it works longer-term remains to be seen, but since launching the platform in April, 75 schools around the country, including the University of Texas at Austin and the University of San Diego, have
5 min read · 03 June 2010
2 min read · 01 June 2010
1 min read · 01 June 2010
In the Web world, David Ulevitch is a bit like the ubiquitous Waldo of the childrens’ book series. First came the job at a regional ISP at age 12. By his junior year of high school outside San Diego, he was working at the free music-sharing company MP3.com. He was still there when it went public in 1999, and when it imploded under the weight of a lawsuit by Universal Music Group less than a year later. Ulevitch was also a participant in the VA Linux IPO. (He was awarded stock for writing software used by the company; it paid for his college education at Washington University in St. Louis.) And Ulevitch was one of the first employees hired at the ad network AdBrite after entrepreneur Philip Kaplan spun the business out of his popular site, FuckedCompany.com. Ulevitch, now 28, will be on the scene a lot longer, judging by the trajectory of his own four-and-a-half-year-old, San Francisco-based company, OpenDNS. Boring as it may sound, by providing a way for consumers to improve their page loading times, as well as protecting them from phishing scams and empowering them to block sites, OpenDNS has become one of the most promising startups around. Indeed, despite competitors like UltraDNS and, more recently, Google, which launched its own DNS service last December, OpenDNS is uniformly acknowledged as the leader in its field -- and its business is ballooning.
4 min read · 29 May 2010
Interesting post just published by Paul Buchheit, best known for creating Gmail as Google employee no. 23, and cofounding the social network aggregator FriendFeed, acquired by Facebook last summer under undisclosed terms. Titled "What To Do With Your Millions," it's Buchheit's response to the post of someone newly rich on Hacker News who is, in Buchheit's view, receiving crummy advice (this comment notwithstanding). Buchheit's first bit of advice, do not hire a financial advisor, no matter how many times friends recommend you to exactly that. "What those people don't understand is that the only skill a financial advisor needs in order to be successful is the ability to sell you things," writes Buchheit. "Their actual financial skills are almost irrelevant."
2 min read · 28 May 2010
Earlier this week, I wrote about an entrepreneur with a fairly serious black mark on his record who has nevertheless received seed funding from some top-tier investors, including AOL president Tim Armstrong and Ron Conway. In an email, Conway told me that the entrepreneur, who was indicted for mail fraud in 2002, “has always been aboveboard about his full background” and that he'd “learned from his early mistakes.” The case raises the question -- one that I’m sure that all investors occasionally face -- of when to back someone with a somewhat dubious past, and when to run in the opposite direction.
3 min read · 28 May 2010
2 min read · 28 May 2010
