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 refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups refer to 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 (VC) 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.
Kanwal Singh Rekhi is an Indian-American businessperson. He is credited as the first Indian-American Founder and CEO to take a venture-backed company public on the NASDAQ.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
Dennis Bennie is an entrepreneur and early-stage investor based in Toronto, Canada. He co-founded Mission Electronics in 1979; co-founded Aviva Software in 1982; co-founded Delrina in 1988; raised two venture funds under XDL Group and is currently a mentor, advisor and angel investor to early-stage technology companies.
Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. Formed in 2005, Founders Fund had more than $11 billion in aggregate capital under management as of 2022. The firm invests across all stages and sectors, including aerospace, artificial intelligence, advanced computing, energy, health, and consumer Internet, with a portfolio that includes Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Stripe, and Oscar Health. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and one of the earliest investors in Facebook. The firm’s partners, including Peter Thiel, Ken Howery and Brian Singerman, have been founders, early employees and investors at companies including PayPal, Google, Palantir Technologies, and SpaceX.
Gideon Isaiah Gartner was the founder of Gartner, Inc. a Stamford, Connecticut information technology (IT) research and advisory company.
A series A round is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchange for their investment. It is usually the first series of stock after the common stock and common stock options issued to company founders, employees, friends and family and angel investors.
An angel investor is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. Angel investors usually give support to start-ups at the initial moments 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. Over the last 50 years, the number of angel investors has greatly increased.
Revolution LLC is an American investment firm based in Washington, D.C., founded in 2005 by AOL co-founder Steve Case, after leaving the AOL Time Warner board. The firm seeks to fund entrepreneurs who are transforming legacy industries with innovative products and services, with an overarching focus on companies that are based outside of the coastal tech hubs of NYC, SF and Boston. Through the firm’s Rise of the Rest platform, it has developed a network of business and civic relationships that helps Revolution source investments and support existing companies as they seek to expand across the country. Notable investments include LivingSocial, Zipcar, DraftKings and sweetgreen.
Qumranet, Inc. was an enterprise software company offering a desktop virtualization platform based on hosted desktops in Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) on servers, linked with their SPICE protocol. The company was also the creator, maintainer and global sponsor of the KVM open source hypervisor.
Christopher M. Schroeder is an American entrepreneur, advisor and investor in interactive technologies and social communications. He has written the first look at startups in the Arab World, “Startup Rising -- The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East” released in August 2013 with a new edition in 2015 and one in Arabic in 2016. It was published by MacMillan/Palgrave, with a foreword by Marc Andreessen.
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.
Dmitry Alimov is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and investor in Internet and media businesses, founder and managing partner of the investment fund Frontier Ventures, co-founder of the online video service ivi.ru. He worked as a senior manager in major Russian and international companies, such as Access Industries, Gazprom-Media, TNT, Amedia, ru-Net Ltd, Sputnik Group. In 2012, Russian business magazine, Secret Firmy, named Alimov one of the Top-50 Russian Internet Millionaires. In 2016 the European CEO magazine named Dmitry Alimov Entrepreneur of the Year.
John C. "Bud" Colligan is a community activist, social entrepreneur, investor and company builder. He was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom as his senior advisor for international affairs and trade in March, 2019. He is co-founder of the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership (MBEP), co-founder of the non-profit community-development organization Pacific Community Ventures, former partner at Accel Partners, a global venture capital firm, and former chairman and CEO of Macromedia, a multimedia software company.
Village Capital is a venture capital firm that finds, trains, and invests in early-stage ventures solving major global problems in agriculture, education, energy, financial inclusion, and health. VilCap Investments, LLC is its affiliated, managed investment fund. The programs use a model referred to as peer-selection, in which the entrepreneurs themselves choose the companies in the program that receive pre-committed investments of around $50,000. As of October 2018, Village Capital reported that they had made over 100 investments, and that over 900 entrepreneurs had gone through a total of more than 50 programs.
Naval Ravikant is an Indian entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList. He has invested early-stage in over 200 companies including Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Wish.com, Poshmark, Postmates, Thumbtack, Notion, SnapLogic, Opendoor, Clubhouse, Stack Overflow, Bolt, OpenDNS, Yammer, and Clearview AI, with over 70 total exits and more than 10 Unicorn companies.
Jaleh Daie is an American scientist, educator and entrepreneur. She is currently a managing partner at Aurora Equity and seed investor for Band of Angels. Daie was the first woman to serve on the U.S. Space Foundation board of directors and was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1996.
Shervin Kordary Pishevar is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, super angel investor, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and former executive chairman of Hyperloop One and a co-founder and managing director of Sherpa Capital, a venture capital fund which has invested in companies including Airbnb, Uber, GoPuff, Cue Health, Slack, Robinhood, Munchery and Postmates.
Saurabh Srivastava is an Indian entrepreneur, investment professional, institution builder and a former chairman of NASSCOM, a non-profit trade organization for the promotion of Indian IT industry. A master's degree holder from Harvard University, he founded Infinity Venture, reportedly the first venture capital fund in India and is a recipient of Dataquest Lifetime Achievement Award, the IT Industry Award from the Prime Minister of India and Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri, in 2016, for his contributions to trade and industry.
