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 do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo-founder. During the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential, such as unicorns.
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc. 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 start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and often come from high technology industries such as information technology (IT) or biotechnology.
Small businesses are types of corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships which have a small number of employees and/or less annual revenue than a regular-sized business or corporation. Businesses are defined as "small" in terms of being able to apply for government support and qualify for preferential tax policy. The qualifications vary depending on the country and industry. Small businesses range from fifteen employees under the Australian Fair Work Act 2009, fifty employees according to the definition used by the European Union, and fewer than five hundred employees to qualify for many U.S. Small Business Administration programs. While small businesses can be classified according to other methods, such as annual revenues, shipments, sales, assets, annual gross, net revenue, net profits, the number of employees is one of the most widely used measures.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is a podcaster, American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, and author.
Bikky Khosla is an entrepreneur and founder of tradeindia.com. He is the younger brother of Vinod Khosla, an Indian venture capitalist. Presently, he is chairman of the e-commerce committee of ASSOCHAM and had served in the same capacity for ASSOCHAM SME's Expert Committee in the past. He is also editor of SME Times, a business news website and is associated with Indian Angel Network, a network of investors that invests in early stage businesses.
Timothy Ferriss is an American entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru. He is known for his 4-Hour self-help book series—including The 4-Hour Work Week, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef—that focused on lifestyle optimizations, but he has since reconsidered this approach. He also supports scientific research into psychedelic treatments.
An angel investor is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. Angel investors often provide support to startups at a very early 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 and provide advice to their portfolio companies. The number of angel investors has greatly increased since the mid-20th century.
Sashi Parvatha Reddi is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and a philanthropist. Sashi Reddi was the CEO and founder of AppLabs. Sashi Reddi was born in Madras, India and later migrated to the US. He grew up in Guntur but attended boarding school at Lawrence School, Lovedale. He is a recipient of the Louis Braille Award from the Pennsylvania Council for the Blind, for the year 2017. He currently sits on the advisory board of the Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs and the advisory board of IIT Hyderabad.
William Klippgen is a Singapore-based Norwegian entrepreneur and technology venture capitalist who co-founded the price comparison portal Zoomit.com. He served as one of the judges on the television series Angel's Gate, which was broadcast on Channel NewsAsia in 2012. Klippgen is a co-founder and serves as the Managing Partner at Cocoon Capital. He holds an MBA from INSEAD where he is an Entrepreneur in Residence.
Randy Haykin is an entrepreneur, angel investor, venture capitalist and philanthropist who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Haykin founded and runs The Gratitude Network, a 501c3 not-for-profit that provides coaching services to social entrepreneurs around the world.
Xconomy was a media company providing news on business, life sciences, and technology focusing on the regions of Boston, Boulder/Denver, Detroit, New York City, Raleigh-Durham, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle. The website was launched in June 2007 by founders Robert Buderi and Rebecca Zacks. Xconomy content covered "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."
Michael Dever is an American businessman, futures trader, and author. Dever is the founder and CEO of Brandywine Asset Management, Inc., an investment management firm founded in 1982, and he is the author of the investment book "Jackass Investing: Don't do it. Profit from it."
Darren T. Kimura is an American businessman, inventor, and investor. He is best known as the inventor of micro concentrated solar power (CSP) technology known as MicroCSP.
Scott Fox is an American financial and self-help author, specializing in entrepreneurship and startup company advice. He is a serial Internet entrepreneur, startup advisor, media personality, and angel investor. Founder of the OC Startup Council, the Click Millionaire's MasterMinds Forum at ClickMillionaires.com, and RadioGuestList.com among many other niche website businesses, Fox is best known for his books which have been translated into many languages worldwide. These include Internet Riches: The Simple Money-making Secrets of Online Millionaires, E-Riches 2.0, and Click Millionaires: Work Less, Live More with an Internet Business You Love.
Comcast Ventures is a corporate venture capital firm headquartered in New York, NY.
Daniel Conrad Engel is an American CEO and entrepreneur who has worked in the e-commerce and software industries since 1997. Engel led customer acquisition at Picasa, Google, FastSpring, GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC. In 2020, Engel founded Santa Barbara Venture Partners, a venture capital investment fund. He graduated from Tulane University in 1998 with a major in finance and is a past member of Young Presidents' Organization. Engel sits on multiple boards of directors and advisers to tech companies. Since 2018, he has served as board member on a range of local nonprofits that address the critical issue of homelessness. Engel lives in Santa Barbara, California with his two children and his wife, Emily, an environmental activist, art historian, and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Matthew Allan Watson also known as Matt Watson, is an American entrepreneur and the current CEO of Stackify LLC, a technology company based in Leawood, Kansas. In 2003, Watson co-founded and served as CTO of VinSolutions, a developer of online CRM and lead management software for auto dealerships. In 2011, VinSolutions was sold for $135 million to AutoTrader.com. Then Watson founded Stackify in January 2012 to assist software developers in troubleshooting and support with a suite of tools including Prefix and Retrace. Watson has credited his experience at VinSolutions for the skills necessary to build Stackify. During the same period, he also launched the Watson Technology Group to support other entrepreneurs via angel investing. Watson received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer information systems at DeVry University in 2009.
Jack Abraham is an American businessperson, serial entrepreneur, investor, and the founding and managing partner of startup studio and investment fund Atomic.
Vingroup JSC is a Vietnamese conglomerate headquartered in Long Bien district, Hanoi. Vingroup is one of the largest conglomerates of Vietnam, focusing on technology, industry, real estate development, retail and services from healthcare to hospitality. As of 2022, the revenue of Vingroup and its subsidiaries was almost 1.1% of the GDP of Vietnam.
Rich Kleiman is an American entrepreneur. A native New Yorker, he is Kevin Durant’s longtime agent and later business partner with Durant in 35V. Founded in 2016, 35V incorporates Kleiman and Durant's business entities, including Durant’s personal brand marketing portfolio and on-court contracts, an investment portfolio and the sports business media network Boardroom. Forbes has called Kleiman a visionary with an "established track records in starting companies, investing in emerging brands and in disrupting existing markets."
