Welcome to the Draper University of Heroes, a new school in San Mateo, California, where aspiring entrepreneurs get a taste of the madness involved in running a startup. We featured the program in this week’s issue of Bloomberg Businessweek and...
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Draper University Gets Aspiring Entrepreneurs Out of the Classroom
Photograph by Erik Dreyer
Among crowdsourced Q&A sites, the winner may be whoever can answer the business question first.
Can a Q&A Site Be a Real Business? $14M Will Help ChaCha Find Out
ChaCha, a website where you can ask about anything and get answers from volunteers or the site’s database of 2 billion queries, doesn’t have a response yet to one big question: Is crowdsourced Q&A a standalone business? Enter that into...
Read more »Lynda.com Lands $103 Million in Biggest Education Financing
Over the past two years, as money poured into online education startups, Lynda Weinman sat back and operated her profitable bootstrapped company to little fanfare. With 2 million members signed up for Lynda.com’s tutorials on web design, photography and business...
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Courtesy Lumo
The LUMO BodyTech wearable sensor to track posture.
Eric Schmidt, Jerry Yang Back Posture Gadget in $5M Round
Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt may not agree on much, but they do see eye to eye on back pain. Yang and Schmidt, through his investment fund Innovation Endeavors, are joining with Seattle venture capital firm...
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Photograph by Fragments from Olympus
One of the most successful campaigns on Indiegogo aimed to raise money to buy back Nikola Tesla's old laboratory.
Crowd-Funding Site Indiegogo Is Going International
In many parts of the Eurozone, now is not the best time for an entrepreneur to go to the bank and expect to skip away with a loan. But a growing alternative for some Europeans could be crowd-funding websites, which...
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Courtesy Zoho Corp.
Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu doesn't want to bring in venture capitalists who could ruin the fun of running the business, he said.
No VC: Zoho CEO ‘Couldn’t Care Less for Wall Street’
This is the fourth in a five-part series called “No VC,” which highlights startups that have succeeded without venture capital, the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. At first, Sridhar Vembu couldn’t raise money for his enterprise software startup because he didn’t know how to...
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Photograph by John Lamb
TranscribeMe has raised a total of $1.5 million to develop its text-to-speech service.
TranscribeMe Takes On Apple’s Siri With Man and Machine
Note to self: Good speech-to-text services aren’t cheap. TranscribeMe, a startup that charges customers between $1 and $3 per minute for audio transcription powered by people and machines, closed a round of about $900,000 last week, co-founder Alexei Dunayev said in...
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Photograph courtesy of Quizlet
Quizlet founder Andrew Sutherland (left) hasn't found the need for venture capital.
No VC: Education Startup Quizlet Makes the Grade Going It Alone
This is the third in a five-part series called “No VC,” which highlights startups that have succeeded without venture capital, the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. (This post was updated to correct the site’s pricing to $15 a year.) One night this past...
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Photograph by Petrified Collection
FreshBooks says it has paying users of its Web-based accounting software in 120 countries.
No VC: FreshBooks CEO Sees Risk Capital as Too Risky
This is the first in a five-part series called “No VC,” which highlights startups that have succeeded without venture capital, the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. Mike McDerment was shacked up in his parents’ basement in Toronto when the first venture...
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Photograph by Push Pictures/Corbis
Startups that choose to go without venture funding can control their own destiny and gain a real appreciation of money.
No VC: How 5 Startups Skirted Tech’s Financiers
Since the 1960s, venture capitalists have bankrolled Silicon Valley, financing startups that would go on to become the world’s most successful technology companies, including Apple, Cisco and Google. The money hasn’t stopped flowing. Over the past decade, venture firms poured...
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