
Highest funded US Startups from 2006 to 2008 - prakash
http://revotra.com/2008/10/highest-funded-startups-from-2006-to.html
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hugh
A well-timed reminder of something that a lot of people here seem to forget:
not all startups are frivolous webapps.

Some of the interesting ones:

Nanosolar: High-efficiency solar cells

Gridpoint: Something to do with power grid management

Plastic logic: Flexible displays

eSolar: Solar thermal power

HelioVolt: More solar cells!

SulfurCell: More solar cells!

GodTube: Christian Videos. Seriously, this one sounds like a joke, but it
exists and somebody gave it $30 million.

Fisker: Electric cars.

Admittedly a rather high percentage are still web-based software of some kind.
And an awfully large percentage of those remaining are related to energy.

Another interesting (if worrying) trend: I couldn't find any biotech on the
list at all (there might be a few, I didn't look at everything but I checked
the names for bio-sounding things).

~~~
vaksel
godtube is funny, its kinda like conservapedia. Its a good business decision
for the guys who did it, because they cash in on rightwing ignorance, who
think youtube/wiki produces all its content and spin it with liberal bias.

Its the same people who think blogspot needs to be sued because someone made
an offensive post on one of their accounts

~~~
Prrometheus
If you believe that viewing certain things is wrong, then pre-filtered content
is of value to you. Does Godtube particularly cater to "ignorance"?

Now, Conservapedia is ridiculous, but the only people I've seen take it
seriously are liberals in search of a caricature to attack.

~~~
vaksel
the hannity/limbaugh crowd takes conservapedia VERY seriously

~~~
run4yourlives
Yeah, but nobody takes them seriously.

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martythemaniak
OANDA is American? I could have sworn my office is downtown Toronto ;)

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vaksel
Out of those 161, I've only heard of 32. Out of those 32, I only use 3 more
than once

~~~
Sam_Odio
You'd be surprised. You probably use several of these startups without even
realizing it. For example, CDNetworks is a large content delivery network. And
if you've ever stumbled across those annoying parked domains you've probably
availed yourself to OverSee's services.

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dawie
I would like to see a list of the LOWEST funded US Startups from 2006 to 2008.

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cellis
<http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>

~~~
nostrademons
I'm guessing there are lots more self-funded startups that are started for
effectively nothing.

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dmix
The average initial startup investment in every industry is $25,000. Usually
using the founders savings.

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nostrademons
Right, but the question posed above was "I'd like to see the _lowest_ funded
startups". I'm sure there are some folks living in dorms or with the parents
and using university computers for their servers. Starting up is essentially
"free" in that case, modulo time.

Come to think of it, doesn't this describe Google for the first 2 years of its
existence?

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dmix
I went through most of them and I found Plastic Logic the most interesting.
They have a very thin "epaper" coming out next year that looks like it has
potential to be a great disruptive product.

CNN seems to like it too, <http://www.plasticlogic.com/>

~~~
noor420
Also interesting and related :

a) Sony's "Flexible Full Color Paper Screen"

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6bkmPjVF-k&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6bkmPjVF-k&feature=related)

b) Readius's "Polymervision 3GSM e-paper"

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_m36Gr4jzM&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_m36Gr4jzM&feature=related)

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teej
How is Slide so low on the list? Their public $50M was a SECOND round of
funding.

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Eliezer
I bet that the companies on this list that actually make good-old-fashioned
material things, like Nanosolar, pay off triple the average return of the Net
startups.

~~~
nostrademons
I'm really tempted to take that bet...

The virtue of web startups is that marginal costs are effectively zero. So
once you've paid off your fixed costs (i.e. have basically _any_ revenue model
that actually works), you're profitable. If something like FaceBook, with
$150M in revenues, is not profitable, it's usually because they're empire
builders and hire many more people than they actually need to keep the site
going. That's easily fixed by laying off people.

Solar companies, in addition to having large R&D costs, also have large
variable costs. And they're competing against fairly low-cost alternatives,
like oil and natural gas. To be profitable, their variable costs need to
undercut oil prices, _and_ they need to have enough left over to pay for R&D,
overhead, and cost of capital.

"Make something people want" is only a golden rule of startup success in
software. For everything else, it's "Make something people want, cheaply".

~~~
potatolicious
Web startups have costs that are far from zero - as your example mentions,
Facebook is not profitable because they retain too many people - but it is
precisely their large work force that maintains their competitive lead in the
social networking sphere. If they pared down their headcount to merely
"sustain the server farms and fix bugs" size the company would disappear very
quickly, having been out-done by someone else.

They're not empire building, they're doing what they need to survive.

The lack of costs on the web is precisely why web startups have some of the
highest costs of all. Hosting is cheap, bandwidth is almost free. The only way
Facebook avoids being out-done by two college kids in a garage is _because_
they have big money backing them, and are building out like mad.

On the flip side, traditional startups sell something that is of intrinsic
worth. Most web apps have very little intrinsic worth, and is easy substituted
- they have no patent-protected edge over the competition, and the COST of
cloning an innovative feature is FAR less than the cost to reverse-engineer an
ingenious new solar panel.

~~~
nostrademons
Right, but they have _variable_ costs that are close to zero, i.e. the
marginal cost of servicing one extra customer is zero. (In practice, it's a
bit more than that - you're looking at fractions of a cent for bandwidth,
servers, ops people to maintain those servers, etc.) I worked it out for my
startup, based on previous websites that have gotten traffic, and it came to
something like $1/month/200 registered users, or $0.05 CPM.

Their fixed costs are high, but usually VCs invest to pay those fixed costs,
_after_ the startup has already started getting traction.

~~~
potatolicious
That may be true - and I would agree with you if the startup in question was
_selling a service to paying customers_ \- e.g. eBay or Amazon. The cost of
supporting an extra customer is quite small in their cases, and being online
certainly gives them an advantage over brick and mortars.

The problem is that most web startups don't _sell_ anything. They give their
most valuable work away for free in the vain hope that showing ads or selling
premium accounts will magically rescue them from inevitable collapse.

If you're not making any significant amount of money off a single user, it
doesn't really matter HOW low your marginal cost is, you're still screwed. I
have very little faith in companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, and the such -
their per-user costs are ridiculously low, but so is their per-user revenue.

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brandnewlow
So this guy just stole a list that Techcrunch republished? Why are we linking
to him and not the original?

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fallentimes
Seatwave - 33 MM. Really?

I love Yodlee, but 35 MM seems slightly ridiculous.

