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. 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.
Matthew Charles Mullenweg is an American entrepreneur and web developer living in Houston. He is known for developing and founding the free and open-source web software WordPress, and its parent company Automattic.
Evan "Ev" Clark Williams is an American billionaire technology entrepreneur and executive. He is a co-founder of Twitter, and served as CEO of Twitter, Inc. from 2008 to 2010 and as a member of its board from 2007 to 2019. He founded Blogger and Medium, two of the largest blogging internet platforms. In 2014, he co-founded the venture capital firm Obvious Ventures. As of February 2022, his net worth is estimated at US$2.1 billion.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
Rafe Furst is an entrepreneur, impact investor, writer, producer and poker player. He is co-founder of Crowdfunder and advises many projects that involve technology and social entrepreneurship. Furst has spoken about transformation of early-stage finance at TED, and in 2006, he won a World Series of Poker Championship Bracelet. A 2011 book titled, Shake the World featuring Furst along with other business and non-profit leaders, described him as a "twenty-first century polymath."
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, alias brokep, is a Swedish entrepreneur and politician. Sunde is of Norwegian and Finnish ancestry. He is best known for being a co-founder and ex-spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search engine. He is an equality advocate and has expressed concerns over issues of centralization of power to the European Union in his blog. Sunde also participates in the Pirate Party of Finland and describes himself as a socialist. As of April 2017, Sunde has been working on a new venture called Njalla, a privacy oriented domain name registrar.
YouNoodle, Inc. is a San Francisco-based company, with offices in Barcelona and Santiago, founded in 2010, building a platform for entrepreneurship competitions all over the world. YouNoodle matches entrepreneurs with competitions, accelerators, and startup programs, and provides a judging and voting SaaS platform to university, non-profit, government and enterprise clients organizing innovation challenges and competitions. Stanford's BASES, UC Berkeley LAUNCH, Start-Up Chile, Amazon Startup Challenge, and NASA are all running one or more competitions on YouNoodle's platform.
Howard Lindzon is a Canadian Author, financial analyst, technical analyst and super angel investor. Lindzon manages a hedge fund, serves as managing partner of the holding company Social Leverage, limited partner at Knight's Bridge Capital Partners, and is the co-founder of StockTwits. Lindzon was named one of The Best Tweets for Your Money in 2013 by Barron's.
Posterous was a simple blogging platform started in May 2008. It supported integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes. It was based in San Francisco and funded by Y Combinator.
Behance is a social media platform owned by Adobe whose main focus is to showcase and discover creative work.
David Karp is an American webmaster, entrepreneur, and blogger, best known as the founder and former CEO of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr.
Disqus is an American blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that use a networked platform. The company's platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. It was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan as a Y Combinator startup.
Graphicly was a platform for publishers which offered work flow integration, self-publishing, digital distribution, conversion, and promotion for digital content. Launched by Kevin Mann and Micah Baldwin, the website was initially a platform for digital comic books, but later added support for children's books, art books, and magazines. Graphicly accumulated more than 3,500 publishers and more than 10,000 independent creators. The website hosted an active social community, allowing creators and fans to interact directly. Graphicly shut down in May 2014, and some of its key staff moved on to fellow digital publisher Blurb.
RocketHub was an online crowdfunding platform launched in 2010, its first use was September 1, 2009. Based in New York City, its users included musicians, entrepreneurs, scientists, game developers, philanthropists, filmmakers, photographers, theatre producers/directors, writers, and fashion designers.Users posted fundraising campaigns to it to raise funds and awareness for projects and endeavors. Operating in over 190 countries, RocketHub was once considered one of America's largest crowdfunding platforms.
BackType was a SaaS social media analytics service launched in August 2008.
Bluefin Labs is a defunct Cambridge, MA-based social TV analytics company that uses publicly available social media commentary from Twitter, Facebook and blogs to measure viewer engagement with television shows and ads at scale – historically a costly and complex problem for TV and marketing industries to solve.
Ejovi Nuwere (born c. 1980 is an American security engineer and entrepreneur. He was the co-founder of Google funded wireless company Fon and Microsoft funded analytics company Ivy Softworks.
Squarespace, Inc. is an American website building and hosting company which is based in New York City, US. It provides software as a service for website building and hosting, and allows users to use pre-built website templates and drag-and-drop elements to create and modify webpages.
Onevest, a New York–based investment crowdfunding site for startups that was acquired by Business Rockstars in April 2018, allowed entrepreneurs to raise capital from accredited investors. In July 2014, startups launching on Onevest had collectively raised over $66 million.
Justin Waldron is an American internet entrepreneur known as the co-founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company, and Zynga.org, a non-profit organization to promote and facilitate the use of social games for philanthropic initiatives. In 2020 Waldron co-founded Playco, a mobile instant game company backed by Sequoia Capital, where he currently serves as president.
