Y Combinator provides seed stage capital and a 10 week startup boot camp for budding entrepreneurs. At the end of the 10 week session Y Combinator invites VCs and angels to an investor day / demo day. Today YC unveiled 20 new startups to about 80 Boston area VCs and investors. Scott Kirsner (Boston Globe) and Roger Krakoff (Sigma Partners) are pictured here in the first row.
The companies covered areas like; a startup job site, video conferencing, cloud database software, a site for students, a news aggregation service, photo-sharing, social browsing, POS customer satisfaction surveys, white labeled social news, audience response software, music distribution, green certification, site creation for small business, a mobile-focused Evite competitor, a secondary ticket market, an event site, and a comment crawler.
These companies are only 10 weeks old, so some haven't launched yet and are still in stealth mode. Here is a summary of some of the companies that have launched.
Frogmetrics - puts touch screen devices into the hands of customers to get accurate, real-time feedback at the Point Of Sale. Frogmetrics measures customer satisfaction, employee performance, and advertising effectiveness to tell businesses what their customers think about products, services, and employees. Survey response rates typically exceed 85%.
The software aggregates data from unlimited locations, highlights significant trends, and helps companies gain insight into business performance—instantly, from any web browser.
Posterous is dead simple blogging by email. Just send text and attachments to post@posterous.com—no signup and no setup. You can photos, audio, video, documents, and rich text. Posterous automatically sets up a blog for you, then sends you an email reply with the URL address of your new blog.
TicketStumbler - a site to find and buy tickets to sporting events. Similar to StubHub, except TicketStumbler aggregates tickets from all the various ticket resellers. You can search by date, price, location, etc.
Best line of the day came from the TicketStumbler presenters "People go to Facebook to "poke" friends or some useless thing. People come to TicketStumbler to buy tickets. We make money on every sale."
Anyvite - Similar to Evite, a way to create events and invite guests. Ideal for the small to medium events. Simple to use. Guests can use email, SMS or IM to be notified of new events, and to respond without even visiting the site. Anyvite’s fully integrated mobile interface gives users the freedom to create and manage their events at any time and from any place.
Job Alchemist - a site for online recruiting, launched Startuply, a startup-specific job site, in July 2008. New sites targeted to specific industries and communities can be launched and populated in as little as 30 days.
Their next product will be JobSyndicate, a distributed affiliate job network. Companies put recruiting bounties on jobs, and anyone can use the widget technology to advertise these jobs on their site. When a publisher sources an applicant who gets hired, they get half the bounty: a payout of $2-10K or more.
There were several other interesting companies that I can't talk about yet because they are still in stealth mode. The 20 companies this year were very polished and business focused. The Boston area VCs are paying attention to Ycombinator now.
Some of the VCs I talked to included; David Hornik (August Capital), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), David Beisel (Venrock), David Baum (Stage 1 Ventures), Rich Lavendov (Avalon), Roger Krakoff (Sigma Partners), Neil Sequiera, David Orfao, and Joel Cutler (General Catalyst), Eric Hjerpe (Atlas), Jeff Glass (Bain Capital), Bijan Sabet and Rob Go (Spark Capital), Saar Gur (Charles River Ventures), Jonathan Seelig (Globespan Capital), and Jo Tango (Kepha).
Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot), Bob Buderi (Xconomy) and Scott Kirsner (Boston Globe) attended the YC Demo Day and wrote reports on their blogs.
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