A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to be successful and influential.
Venture capital is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the firms they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. The start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Stephen T. Jurvetson is an American businessman and venture capitalist. Formerly a partner of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), he was an early investor in Hotmail, Memphis Meats, Mythic and Nervana Systems. He is currently a board member of SpaceX and served on Tesla's board from 2006–2020, among others. He later co-founded the firm Future Ventures with Maryanna Saenko, who worked with him at DFJ.
Fred Wilson is an American businessman, venture capitalist and blogger. Wilson is the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a New York City-based venture capital firm with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, Kickstarter, Etsy and MongoDB.
An angel investor is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. Angel investors usually give support to start-ups at the earliest stage, once or in a consecutive manner, and when most investors are not prepared to back them. In a survey of 150 founders conducted by Wilbur Labs, about 70% of entrepreneurs will face potential business failure, and nearly 66% will face this potential failure within 25 months of launching their company. A small but increasing number of angel investors invest online through equity crowdfunding or organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share investment capital, as well as to provide advice to their portfolio companies. The number of angel investors has greatly increased since the mid-20th century.
Semyon Dukach is a Russian-American entrepreneur and former professional blackjack player. He is the founding partner of One Way Ventures, a venture capital fund that backs immigrant entrepreneurs.
Techstars is a global investment business that provides access to capital, one-on-one mentorship, a worldwide network and customized programming for early-stage entrepreneurs. It was founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado. As of May 2022, the company had accepted over 2,900 companies into its accelerator programs with a combined market capitalization of $71bn USD.
Charles River Ventures (CRV) is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology. The firm was founded in 1970 to commercialize research that came out of MIT. Its name comes from the Charles River.
A Startup Weekend is a 54-hour entrepreneurship educational competitive event, in which groups of participants form teams around ideas the Friday evening, and work during the weekend to develop a working prototype, demo, and VC presentation by Sunday evening. Startup Weekend is a hackathon like event with a global presence. As of December 2016, it has reached 135 countries, involving over 210,000 entrepreneurs. Upon its 2015 acquisition, Startup Weekend, alongside Startup Week and StartupDigest, became one of the Techstars family of startup programs.
David Semel Rose is an American serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He is an investor in startup technology companies and founder of New York Angels, an early-stage technology investment group. He is Managing Partner of Rose Tech Ventures, a venture fund focused on Internet-based business, and CEO of Gust, which operates a collaboration platform for early stage angel investing.
Xconomy is a Boston, Massachusetts–based media company providing news on business, life sciences, and technology focusing on the regions of Boston, Boulder/Denver, Detroit, Indiana, New York City, Raleigh-Durham, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Texas, Wisconsin, and beyond. The website was launched in June 2007 by founders Robert Buderi and Rebecca Zacks. Xconomy content covers "local personalities, companies, and technological trends to business and technology leaders" with a target audience of "entrepreneurs, business and technology executives and innovators, venture capitalists, angel investors, lawyers, and university researchers and officials." Bill Mitchell of the Poynter Institute described Xconomy in 2010 as reflecting "the insiderish feel of, say, Politico, but with some of the familiarity that you might expect from a small town paper."
David Cohen is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Pinpoint Technologies, iContact.com, and Earfeeder. He is also an angel investor with a portfolio of more than 100 companies. Cohen is best known as the co-founder of Techstars, a mentorship-based startup accelerator.
Bill Maris is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist focused on technology and the life sciences. Bill Maris's investments have to date resulted in over 150 exits and more than 50 companies that have grown to over $1B in value, including: Aurora Innovation, Nest, Uber, Crowdstrike, Coinbase, 23andme, Flatiron Health, Foundation Medicine, The Climate Corporation, Vir and Auris. He is the founder and first CEO of Google Ventures (GV) and also served as VP of Special Projects at Google/Alphabet. He is the creator of Google's Calico project, a company focused on the genetic basis of aging. He is the founder of early web hosting pioneer Burlee.com, now part of Web.com, and the founder of Section 32, a California-based venture fund focused on frontier technology.
Bill Aulet is the Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship at MIT and Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management and MIT Sloan Executive Education. He is also the author of Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup.
Bloomberg Beta is an early stage venture capital firm with $375M under management, capitalized solely by Bloomberg. The fund exists to expand Bloomberg’s horizons by investing in companies built by extraordinary founders that are creating profound change in the way business operates, with a focus on machine intelligence and the future of work. Bloomberg Beta was recognized by VC review site CB Insights as the #2 investor in AI.
Kerala Startup Mission is the central agency of the Government of Kerala for entrepreneurship development and incubation activities in Kerala, India. KSUM was primarily founded to undertake the planning, establishment, and management of the technology business incubator (TBI), a startup accelerator in Kerala, to promote technology-based entrepreneurship activities, and to create the infrastructure and environment required to support high-technology-based businesses.
David Tisch is a businessman and angel investor based in New York City. He is managing partner of BoxGroup, a seed-stage capital firm, and a co-founder of TechStars New York City. He is the grandson of American businessman Laurence Tisch, co-owner of Loews Corporation. His great-uncle, Preston Robert Tisch purchased the New York Giants, now co-owned by Steve Tisch, who produced the films Forrest Gump and Risky Business.
Hugo Van Vuuren is a South African entrepreneur and investor. An expert-in-residence at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, he is the co-founder of Work-Bench, an early stage enterprise technology venture fund.
Cheryl Sew Hoy is an entrepreneur, speaker and angel investor, best known for being the founding CEO of the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC), a government-funded agency to support entrepreneurship in Malaysia and ASEAN.
CIIE.CO is an Indian startup accelerator and incubator that supports early-stage startups located at IIM Ahmedabad in Ahmedabad, India. It was founded in 2002 to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in India. It is a Center of excellence set up at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad with support from the Government of India's Department of Science and Technology and the Government of Gujarat.
