Snapette was supposed to be an unusual way for Sarah Paiji to spend the summer between her two years at Harvard Business School. It was a mobile app idea she started working on last winter with Harvard alum Jinhee Ahn Kim, aimed at enabling women to better share and find fashion products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Then, two days before school was set to wrap up that first year, a Twitter interaction with the colorful Silicon Valley investor Dave McClure more or less changed all that, Paiji says. She tweeted an infographic about local shopping, which McClure then retweeted. He also directed his Twitter followers to sign up for the Snapette fashion app. The resulting traffic clued Paiji in to the fact that McClure was someone important in the startup world.

At the suggestion of friends, Paiji reached out to McClure, who runs the 500 Startups seed fund and accelerator in Mountain View, CA, to share some more information on her company. “He liked the idea but said he doesn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. So McClure passed Snapette along to his 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai and Jess Lee, founder of fashion tech startup Polyvore, to take a look at the company. Snapette got the OK, the 500 Startups fund invested an initial $50,000, and Snapette left its digs at Boston’s MassChallenge program to join McClure’s accelerator—three weeks after it had already started.

Now, Paiji is working full-time on Snapette and has no foreseeable plans to return to business school. The 500 Startups demo day in August put Snapette in front of 700 investors.”If they’re interested, it’s hard to say you’re going to back to school and will do this on the side,” says Paiji.

“It was very thematic of the whole journey: unexpected,” she says.

(And this isn’t the first startup I’ve written about whose Twitter interactions with McClure ultimately led to inking an investment from him. The other one would be Cambridge, MA-founded and now San Francisco-based Baydin.)

Snapette officially launched its app in late August in conjunction with demo day, and Kim and Paiji finished up the year at Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The company also continued to be a part of the MassChallenge program remotely, Paiji says.

Just last month, it made the move to New York City (to Dogpatch Labs, again) to be near the “high shopping density of boutiques and users,” says Paiji, who I caught up with in Boston this week.

There’s plenty of buzz around social, local, mobile, and even fashion tech startups. So what makes Snapette different? Most of the plug-ins and apps and platforms aimed at better tailoring shopping to consumer preferences exist in the online world. Not so much for the physical world. “Our idea was, we would love to help women find great products in stores using crowdsourcing,” Paiji says.

Snapette’s iPhone and iPad interface provides a stream of product pictures that have been uploaded by the user community, with information on the brand, price, and store that carries it. Users can search streams near them, and get directions to the store selling the products nearby. They can also interact with and follow others in the Snapette community, share products to other social media outlets, and view a stream of what products are hot and trending based on likes and comments on Snapette.

“It feels like Pinterest for the real world,” says Paiji. (The comparison had to be drawn.)

Snapette has since expanded beyond this crowdsourced content, and is explicitly partnering with brands and boutiques looking … Next Page »

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[Updated 1:45 p.m. ET] Executive compensation held relatively steady in 2011 among privately-held life sciences companies, while their peers in the technology sector continued to see salary increases, according to the annual CompStudy survey produced by executive search firm J. Robert Scott and law firm WilmerHale in collaboration with Noam Wasserman, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.

The survey analyzes year-to-year compensation changes across ten different executive positions in life sciences and technology. It includes compensation data from 575 technology firms and 225 life sciences companies from across the United States. While the technology sector continued to report moderate salary increases in 2011, momentum eased for the life sciences sector. “In life sciences, there was not a real slowdown through the economic downturn,” says Aaron Lapat, managing director with J. Robert Scott in Boston.

That may be changing. Lapat says executive compensation in the life sciences sector only increased by 1.45 percent over 2010. “There is something hitting the life sciences market that hit tech a few years ago,” Lapat says. Prior years saw annual changes in executive compensation for the life sciences sector of between 3 percent and 7 percent, he says. In 2011, non-founder CEOs in life sciences earned average base salaries of $304,000 according to the survey, up from $295,000 in 2010.

The technology sector, by contrast, seems to be finding its stride. The 2011 results … Next Page »

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High school and youth sports teams may lack the deep pockets of the pros, but they can still take advantage of technology for tracking game stats thanks to a New York startup. Angel investor-backed GameChanger Media offers coaches of young athletes a mobile platform that evolves record keeping from pen and paper to smartphones and tablets. “Coaches and scorekeepers of youth and high school teams have incredibly archaic tools for managing what is the most painful and time-consuming part of their job,” says GameChanger Media CEO Ted Sullivan.

His company offers youth teams a free app that lets them log game information, which they can then share in real-time with local news outlets and the public. Rather than jotting down notes on a clipboard, the teams punch in the numbers with their mobile devices. Initially designed for use by baseball and softball teams, the app is available for Android phones, iPhones and the iPad. Sullivan says another version of GameChanger Media’s platform is under development for basketball teams and is due out in beta by midyear 2012 with the full release expected by next winter.

Thanks in part to $1 million raised in November from angel investors, Sullivan says he expects to grow his staff of sixteen by 30 percent by the end of 2012. GameChanger Media has raised $3.5 million to date in total from private investors.

Founded in 2009, GameChanger Media released its app to the public in January 2010. Sullivan says in 2011, some 30,000 youth and high school teams across country and around the world adopted his company’s tools to record game stats. Amateur baseball governing body USA Baseball, youth sports program Little League International, and high school baseball team tournament host Perfect Game USA all use the platform, Sullivan says. The app is also catching on internationally, Sullivan says. “Our product is only in English, but we have teams from Korea to Germany using it,” he says.

While GameChanger Media’s platform is free for teams to use, the company also … Next Page »

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[Editor's note: Cross-posted from The Economist, 11/2/11]

New York Mayor-entrepreneur Michael Bloomberg, not known for shyness, recently proclaimed New York City as America’s new entrepreneurship capital, roaring past Boston in venture capital and soon to leave Silicon Valley in the dust as the “go to” destination for entrepreneurs. Indeed, the world media are awash with proposals to kick start entrepreneurship as a strategy for economic revival, with support for venture finance at the heart of many programs. Yet the title of Harvard’s Josh Lerner’s recent book, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” is no coincidence, because proclamations are one thing, actual success is quite another.

Fortunately, there is a lot of experience around the world about what works and what doesn’t. Here are some practical principles that the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project have been identifying and developing for public leaders who have, correctly in my opinion, identified entrepreneurship as an essential plank in economic policy.

1. Be clear that the objective is to foster an entrepreneurial finance ecosystem, not to directly provide capital to entrepreneurs. Over time, a healthy entrepreneurship ecosystem makes available capital to ventures that deserve it, while denying it to ventures that do not. This does not mean that governments need to revert to selecting the deserving. This idea has regained currency recently, but we learn time and again (Solyndra anyone?) that it does not work. It does mean that the availability of capital, and other resources, needs to be part of a natural process in which the ecosystem elements—in this case, deal flow and capital—continually evolve and adjust to each other, a concept that is consistent with Smith’s “invisible hand.” But the concept goes further by suggesting that enlightened and skillful leadership can play a critical role in encouraging the evolution of a self-sustaining ecosystem, but leaders have to understand how and when to get in, and how and when to get out.

2. Stimulate financing, but stay off of ventures’ balance sheets. Presence of government and government-owned entities as direct debt or equity holders of ventures should be a red flag. The only reason government should be on a venture’s balance sheet is in the rare case when it is absolutely necessary to entice private, profit-oriented entities to get involved as the natural selector of investment targets, and in those cases, government should have a clear plan to get out. Governments can, as have Israel, Finland and some other countries, provide smart, off-balance sheet funding in the form of repayable grants, matching grants and so forth. But presence on ventures’ balance sheets ultimately leads to a conflict of interest between governments’ social priorities and obligations, and the need to provide a positive return to invested capital. Overall, there is evidence that a moderate amount of this kind of financing can be beneficial, but as it gets to be too great, the benefits rapidly turn into liabilities.

3. Make sunset clauses for financial support programs the rule, not the exception. Permanent, or evergreen programs of government-supported venture capital, loan guarantees, startup grants, angel tax credits and so on, risk becoming white elephants and/or political assets, not economic ones, and in the process risk squandering public funds. Sunset clauses, or “sell-by dates,” help focus policy-implementation programs on (a) achieving results, and (b) creating self-sustainability by building capacity and mutually reinforcing systems (for example, by showing private sector players that they can actually make profits.)

4. “Pulse” incentives to foster discovery. An implication of sunset clauses, in general, is that if providers and consumers of risky capital can “discover” that it is profitable to engage, then they will accelerate self-interested behavior when the “visible hand” is removed. Seeing if providers and consumers of entrepreneurial capital “discover” the correct pricing mechanisms to allow them to engage in a profit-seeking transaction is one test as to whether the problem is really a market failure or not, and is not just … Next Page »

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Armed with gusto and a microphone, Bay Area Internet guru Dave McClure and his gang from 500 Startups brought their latest batch of hatchlings to New York at last night’s demo day at General Assembly. A handful of locally bred startups stood among the twenty-one exuberant presenters—all graduates of McClure’s Mountain View, CA-based accelerator program—who pitched their ideas to potential investors and fellow entrepreneurs.

New York’s ToutApp, one of this summer’s graduates, led off the night with CEO Tawheed Kader talking about how he can make sending repetitive e-mails easier. 500 Startups invests in the companies that emerge from its three-month program and helps introduce them to other potential backers. Many of the startups at demo day were in the midst of additional funding rounds, though one said it already had enough cash. “We’re not taking money,” said Michael Horn, founder of Brooklyn’s CraftCoffee.com. “We closed a round today and we’re oversubscribed.” CraftCoffee.com ships specialty coffees from around the world to its subscribers.

The full-capacity event, which may even have stretched a few room occupancy fire codes, was not all about trumpeting entrepreneurs who walked on air. Mixed in with the enthusiasm were notes of self-deprecation. Horn said he originally built CraftCoffee as an e-commerce site that stalled. “It was a total disaster; no one bought anything at all,” he said. Discussions with local coffee shop owners, he said, helped him refocus on specialty coffees for java lovers with discerning tastes.

Jameson Detweiler shared his own confession from … Next Page »

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Every entrepreneur or executive would like to “do well by doing good.” That is the dream of being socially responsible and financially successful at the same time.

After working in venture capital and selling Internet advertising for eight years, I decided to focus on cleantech for my next career adventure. Though I live in Seattle, I was approached by a venture capital firm called XSeed Capital from San Francisco to be CEO of a next-generation biofuels and renewable chemicals called Bio Architecture Lab, founded by a professor from the University of Washington named David Baker, a post-doc from his lab and an MBA from UC-Berkeley.

Though our market timing in 2008 was challenging, given the financial and energy market crashes, we had a great run. We raised $35 million in financing, received the largest ARPA-E grant in the country for advanced energy research from the Department of Energy, and established partnerships with DuPont, Statoil in Norway, and the Chilean oil company ENAP. As of 2011, Bio Architecture Lab is a 40-person company located in Berkeley, CA and Chile, making great progress commercializing seaweed (or macroalgae) as a next generation sugar source for biofuel and chemical production. In 2010, we hired a fantastic, “been there, done that” energy CEO from Shell named Dan Trunfio to take the company to the next level. Dan has the much-needed experience in complex energy infrastructure, operations, and supply chain that I do not. As everyone knows, start-ups are all about people. Dan is the right guy at the right time for the next phase of growth for the company.

After a year of commuting to the Bay Area, I returned to Seattle to seek the next adventure. With young kids and a love for Seattle, I was focused on doing something local. I was equally open to another cleantech or Internet adventure.

We are almost five years into the “cleantech” revolution and, unfortunately, a cleantech cluster has yet to evolve in Seattle. There has been a lot of discussion of the importance of clusters in the evolution of industry and technology in general. For those interested, here are two good articles on technology clusters from Hosein Fallah at the Stevens Institute of Technology and another on industry clusters by Mercedes Delgado of Temple University and Michael Porter of Harvard Business School. San Francisco and Boston have established technology and biotech clusters. San Francisco is probably the dominant cleantech cluster, which is why our board decided to move Bio Architecture Lab to San Francisco in late 2009, even though it was founded in Seattle.

Why has Seattle not achieved critical mass in cleantech? Though Seattle has a lot going for it, I point to a number of factors:

• Finance: Raising money for cleantech in Seattle is hard. The venture capital community in Seattle is small, in general, AND cleantech is a very different industry from biotech and tech, requiring knowledge of energy and basic materials. Most Seattle venture capital firms and angel investors are focused on software and Internet investments, based on our Microsoft and Amazon roots. The only local funding source in Seattle that has been consistent to cleantech is the Northwest Energy Angels. Pivotal from Portland has also been making some small investments throughout the Northwest. OVP has made a number of cleantech investments but only EnerG2 in Seattle. Off the top of my head, most other VCs in Seattle have taken a similar approach of opportunistically looking at cleantech, but not making it a priority in Seattle. Arch, Vulcan, Polaris, Cascade, Second Avenue, and Voyager all have at least one cleantech investment, but most are not located in the greater Seattle area.

• People: Seattle is a GREAT software and Internet town, but it does not have … Next Page »

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Divya Gugnani grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and told herself she’d never do that.

Now, she’s CEO of two startups. One of which, she says, is out to transform the way women shop. That would be Send The Trend, a website that sells personalized accessories like jewelry and scarves. It’s one of the many New York fashion-focused sites that has started up in the last couple of years.

Gugnani, who early on developed a passion for cooking, pursued a traditional career in finance after graduating from Cornell, taking positions at Goldman Sachs, and private equity and VC firms Investcorp International and iFormation. Those exposed her to the creative side of startups.

“I really got to see how people started a business: how they grow it, how they start it, the problems they have,” she says. “I really got to get a feel for business, but the end of the day you haven’t done it. As much as I loved being a venture capitalist, there was just this bug in my body that wants to be on the other side.”

It took her a few years, though. She went to Harvard Business School, mainly because “working in finance for four years is enough to kill someone,” she says. She ended up cooking a lot and making new friends, but when she was done, jumped right back into venture capital.

While working at FirstMark Capital, Gugnani had the idea to turn her passion for cooking into a social website for tips on recipes, nutrition and mixology. A colleague encouraged her to pursue it as a fun side project in 2008, and months later Gugnani quit her career in VC to run the site, Behind the Burner, full time.

Living the scrappy startup life exposed Gugnani to the challenges most women face while shopping, she says. “From that experience my life as a woman changed dramatically. It used to be that a great sales rep would say, ‘this is what you need to wear.’ Shopping was an activity where you got so much service and customization. Once you don’t take a salary, shopping sucks.”

“Women have a hard time shopping, whether it’s online or not online, they can’t discover the things they want to buy,” Gugnani says. “Discovery is the biggest problem.

So last year Gugnani launched Send the Trend with friend Mariah Chase, who had worked with Project Runway winner Christian Siriano. The trio developed a website that surveys women on their style preferences and brings them … Next Page »

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In the spring of 2009, when former Microsoft engineer Oliver Roup was finishing his second year at Harvard Business School, he entered the idea for his future company, VigLink, in the school’s annual business plan competition. During his live presentation to the judging panel, he showed off some code he’d written to help Web publishers make more money from affiliate commissions—essentially, mini-kickbacks from e-retailers for the outgoing links they place on their pages. On his last slide, he included his cell phone number.

As it turned out, Roup’s idea didn’t advance to the finals of the competition. But the “link” he’d included on his slide, in the form of his cell number, actually did bring him some money. One of the people in the audience that day was Rich Miner, a partner at Google Ventures and the co-creator of the Android mobile operating system. “Before I even got to the door, Rich had read my cell number off the slide and texted me,” says Roup. “He said, ‘This is very interesting.’”

By that summer, fast-moving Google Ventures had put some seed money into Roup’s idea, and VigLink’s software went live in February 2010. Now the company is based in San Francisco—though how long it will stay in the state is up in the air, thanks to a political showdown brewing in Sacramento over Internet sales taxes; more on that in a moment. And it’s growing fast, counting 17 employees and a “four-digit number” of customers, according to Roup. Already, pages outfitted with VigLink’s affiliate commissions code are viewed roughly 2.5 billion times per month.

It’s all part of an ongoing technological revolution in what’s called “performance marketing.” If you were under the impression that bloggers, copywriters, and other content creators pepper Web pages with outgoing links like this one purely for your edification, I have some disappointing news: trillions of those links are actually designed to send you off to a page where you’ll buy something. Whenever you do, some money changes hands between the site that profited and the site that sent you. Those are called affiliate commissions, and performance marketing is the science of maximizing both the commissions and the sales they’re designed to incentivize.

Roup says he became convinced that there was room for improvement in the performance marketing business—and for a startup like VigLink—after he wrote an experimental Web crawler to count the number of links pointing to product pages on Amazon. Fewer than half of the links that he found included the extra code needed to activate an affiliate commission from Amazon. For whatever reason—lack of awareness, or perhaps lack of technical skills—Web publishers were leaving tens of millions of dollars in Amazon commissions on the table.

VigLink’s service offers a simple fix: it gives its clients a bit of Javascript code that they can add to their sites’ HTML templates. Once it’s installed, VigLink tracks all of the clicks on links pointing to merchants with affiliate commission programs, and it makes sure that publishers get paid what they’re due. The company profits by keeping a 25 percent slice of each commission.

Here’s a quick VigLink video in which Roup explains the concept; article continues after video.

… Next Page »

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The summer after her first year at Harvard Business School, Halle Tecco got an internship at Apple in Cupertino, CA, helping to evaluate mobile apps for the health and medical category of the iTunes App Store. “I was on the phone all day with big hospitals and healthcare organizations who didn’t put the love into their apps,” she says. “They were building things with a check-box strategy, and in my opinion they didn’t have much creativity or innovation.”

Sitting in the next cubicle over, by contrast, was a woman who worked on game apps. “She had a really colorful cube with people in and out all day long. It was like a party,” says Tecco.

Tecco felt that health-related mobile apps could benefit from some of the same fun and imagination going into games—and the idea stuck with her. She went on to found Rock Health, a new non-profit incubator in San Francisco that’s exclusively tailored for startups working on Web- and mobile-based healthcare technologies. And today Rock Health named its first class of companies, from a team using camera phones to diagnose ear infections to a startup dedicated to using social networking to prevent Type 2 diabetes. (For the full list, read on.)

I visited Tecco and Rock Health creative director Leslie Ziegler a couple of weeks ago at San Francisco’s Aberdare Ventures, one of the incubator’s founding partners, and got the whole story behind the incubator. With prestigious supporters such as the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School, Microsoft, and Qualcomm and advisors like 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey and former MIT Media Lab director Frank Moss, Rock Health is on a mission to reverse the problem that Tecco’s Apple internship experience hinted at: the huge innovation deficit in the healthcare sector.

The barriers to innovation in healthcare are legion, Tecco acknowledges: the FDA’s fickle history of medical-device regulation, the red tape that makes it difficult to sell new technologies to hospitals, and the baroque complexity of insurance reimbursement systems, just to name a few. But “we view that as a huge opportunity,” says Tecco, who is now Rock Health’s managing director. “If we give an entrepreneur the resources and confidence to overcome those barriers, there is a huge arbitrage opportunity, because they are building something in a space that was uprecedented before.”

Tecco unveiled Rock Health to the world at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin in March, at a launch event that featured both Todd Park, chief technology officer of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Aneesh Chopra, chief technology officer of the United States. More than 350 teams sent in their applications before the April 1 deadline, vying for berths that include a $20,000 grant for each team, five months of startup mentorship from advisors, office space at Rock Health’s newly renovated startup digs in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and prototyping and testing support from the Mayo Clinic, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School.

You can think of Rock Health as an aspiring Y Combinator for health and medicine. (Though Y Combinator itself, it should be said, has incubated health and fitness-related companies in the past; this winter’s batch included at least two, DrChrono and FitFu.) But Rock Health is also designed to help entrepreneurs with a history of success in more traditional technology companies make the switch into a risky and unfamiliar new field. As a comparison, a program I covered back in Boston—an executive retraining program designed by the New England Clean Energy Council to help turn IT executives into energy entrepreneurs—comes to mind. Says Ziegler, “We really want to attract the kind of people Y Combinator is attracting: bright people who are maybe a little scared of … Next Page »

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Here in Boston, we fret about losing tech talent and leadership to the West Coast. So today, let’s celebrate the return of one of our own.

Michael Schreck has joined Boston-based digital publishing firm Zmags as its new CEO, as of earlier this month. Schreck, a prominent investor and entrepreneur, has spent the past eight years in the cultural wasteland of Orange County, CA, as CEO and managing director of Equity Pacific Group, a private equity shop. Before that, he made his name in Boston as a co-founder of a number of startups including m-Qube and Upromise, and a co-founder and general partner at venture firm General Catalyst Partners. He originally came to town in the early 1990s to work at Monitor Group and then attended Harvard Business School; now he’s moving back.

These things come full circle. Ten years ago, Schreck was helping recruit big-name CEOs to run companies. Now he is the big-name CEO.

But why Zmags? My colleague Wade wrote about the company back in 2009, when it was best known for its platform for publishing digital magazines (hence its name). Over the years, Zmags also has been focused on digital marketing—helping brands design and develop interactive catalogs for the Web and mobile devices. The firm started in Denmark in 2006 and moved its headquarters to Boston in 2008. This month, Schreck succeeds former CEO Jens Karstoft, a co-founder who is staying on as vice president of strategic innovation.

Zmags is also rolling out a new digital merchandising and e-commerce service today, called CommercePro. The basic idea is to help brands optimize their catalogs, marketing materials, and shopping analytics across iPad, iPhone, Android devices, Web browsers, and other channels. A key feature: the new software lets consumers make purchases directly from within a Zmags catalog or magazine (on a Facebook fan page, say), and also helps brands keep track of what’s working and what’s not.

“You can imagine it, architect it, test it, and get the data back,” Schreck says.

It sounds like an intriguing opportunity for Schreck (see left), who has some deep perspective on digital and mobile marketing. In the early 2000s, he helped start m-Qube, which grew out of a previous startup called Proteus Mobile. Back then, Schreck says, the question was, “Is texting going to be big in the U.S.?” Major wireless carriers thought no—that consumers would leap-frog to an enhanced messaging system—but m-Qube stuck with its plan, keeping mobile-marketing content simple and short via SMS. But marketing via text messages severely limited what brands and marketers could do on mobile devices.

What’s changed in the interim? In a word, the iPad/iPhone. Schreck calls it “the great leveler—nobody could imagine that device [iPhone] until it appeared in our palm.” Schreck’s epiphany for his new job came to him during a boardroom meeting with a bunch of public-company CEOs. Apparently it’s a faux pas to have your laptop open during such meetings. But “we all had our iPads out,” he says. “It was weird, I’ve never seen anything like it.” There were different age groups represented in the room, from junior to senior execs, he says. “It was everybody. You could have an iPad there, it was this sort of information appliance. You couldn’t have a laptop. I thought, ‘This is amazing.’”

Indeed, according to Jeff Glass of Bain Capital Ventures, who worked with Schreck … Next Page »

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He says he is “part entrepreneur, part educator…part ambassador, part politician.” Who is this masked man?

He’s Gordon Jones, the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, and until last week many people in the startup community might not have known who he was. I’m just starting to get to know him, having talked with him on the phone from the West Coast (where he was earlier this week). So this isn’t going to be a rigorous analysis of his new job or anything, but let’s just say the man has his work cut out for him. Given all the twists and turns in what he calls his “custom-created career,” I’m betting he just might be up to the task.

The Harvard Innovation Lab is a new, $20 million center for entrepreneurship that is slated to open this fall. The 30,000-square-foot space, still under construction, is located where WGBH-TV’s studios used to be in Allston. The “i-lab” will house classrooms and meeting space for students, faculty, investors, and local businesses, as well as provide business development resources and develop new classes and programs focused on innovation. It will also operate as a nonprofit incubator of new companies. The broader goal, Jones says, is to encourage entrepreneurship and commercialization across all of Harvard’s various schools—arts and sciences, engineering and applied science, business, law, and government.

“The promise is to be a home for entrepreneurs at Harvard,” he says.

And the unstated goal? To keep the next Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Tony Hsieh—all Harvard undergrads at some point—from moving his or her company (Microsoft, Facebook, Zappos) out of Boston. Harvard thinks it’s found the man to lead the effort.

Jones, 42, is a former marketing and sales exec and an expert in consumer goods. He talks like every well-polished MBA you’ve ever known. But he brings real experience selling real stuff you can get your hands around—everything from Oral-B toothbrushes and newfangled dental floss, to window and glass scraper tools, to a “mosquito magnet” that uses propane and a catalytic converter to keep pests away. He has done time at Gillette, American Biophysics, and Universal Pest Solutions, and he has experience selling to international markets like Asia and Latin America. All of that will be useful in advising student teams on product-market fit and building partnerships with businesses across a wide range of industries.

“Fundamentally, I have such respect for R&D groups, whether they’re people working on toothbrushes or coders working on technology,” he says.

Jones also brings some more recent educational experience. He has taught marketing and entrepreneurship at Bentley University since 2007, and also works with Harvard Business School’s admissions office. He says he hopes to cultivate an environment where student entrepreneurs think big and “celebrate the journey.” And that applies across different levels of interest—from students who are curious about entrepreneurship to those in the idea stage seeking mentorship, to … Next Page »

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Harvard University announced today that Gordon Jones will be the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, a $20 million community center for entrepreneurship that’s slated to open this fall at WGBH-TV’s former offices in Allston. The goal of the lab is to foster startups and interactions among students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and the local community. Jones was previously a marketing and sales executive with Universal Pest Solutions, American Biophysics, and Gillette, and has worked with Harvard Business School’s admissions office. He also serves as a business advisor to a number of startups. He officially starts on May 9.

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The founders of fashion e-tailer Gilt Groupe, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Alexis Maybank, are quite aware that they have competitors popping up on the Web all the time. (Last week, Xconomy New York identified seven other fashion-related Web startups in New York City alone.) But the inventors of the fast-growing Gilt believe they can stay a step ahead of all those rivals. “What we’re good at is constant innovation,” says Wilkis Wilson. “We’re never happy with the status quo.”

Towards that end, Gilt is feverishly working towards a late-summer launch of a yet-to-be named extension of Gilt Man, its division that offers discounted clothing and gear, as well as online content, for men. The new site will sell full-priced men’s clothing— a huge departure for the New York-based company, which since its launch in 2007, has focused primarily on “flash sales,” limited-time events during which discounted fashions and home décor are offered to members only.

That niche has been plenty to make Gilt one of the hottest startups in NYC. Maybank says the company’s 2010 revenues came in at $240 million and are projected to roughly double this year. The company has raised $80 million in several financing rounds from an A-list group of investors that includes Matrix Partners and General Atlantic. Business Insider, which was also started by Gilt’s founder, Kevin Ryan, reported in February citing unnamed sources that Gilt would be raising another $80 to $100 million at a valuation of about $1 billion.

And the financial community in New York is salivating over the prospect of Gilt going public. No one over at Gilt’s smart-looking Park Avenue offices seems to be in much of a hurry to join the Wall Street crowd, though. Gilt board member Nick Beim, who is a partner with Matrix, says he thinks an initial public offering would be do-able, but that the company’s investors “are not in a rush to seek an exit. We see Gilt as a rare opportunity to build a great Internet company with a global reach.”

Maybank and Wilkis Wilson also declined to talk about the company’s funding. During a recent meeting at Gilt, they preferred to steer the conversation towards all the new initiatives the company is launching to build on its cachet. Topping that list is the upcoming full-priced men’s site.

Maybank says the company’s growing presence in the men’s market came from demand. She and Wilkis Wilson, who are both graduates of Harvard Business School, were originally inspired to start Gilt because of their own obsession with the sample sales they frequented in NYC. But they were surprised by how many men were attracted to Gilt. “Men were constantly writing us and asking ‘when are you going to sell something for us?’” Maybank says. So the company started holding flash sales for men in 2008. Today, nearly 25% of Gilt’s members are male.

The men’s sales were so popular that Gilt’s management team decided to branch into a full-priced offering. Everything on the new site will be hand selected, Maybank says. The focus will be on offering fashion, but not extremely overpriced “high fashion,” she explains. “Because we have an addicted male customer, we think he will cross over, and not be averse to paying full price,” she says.

Heading up the effort is John Auerbach, a longtime Gilt employee who helped launch Gilt Man after working in investment banking as a retail specialist. As a full-priced site, Gilt’s new offering will be competing against the online sites of Jos A. Bank, Barneys, and just about every big department store. But Auerbach isn’t worried. “In reality, most online outlets … Next Page »

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Our big VC65 event in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium was a tremendous success. The intent of course, was to celebrate the 65th anniversary of venture capital in America—but in a way that drew out lessons and insights about building great companies and great partnerships between VCs and entrepreneurs.

We drew an amazing crowd of nearly 1,000 people, including 500 from the National Venture Capital Association’s annual meeting. The speakers included leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from around the country. There was lively repartee on the “speed-dating” panels, capped by incredible stores of entrepreneurial and venture success—all followed by a reception in the MIT Museum’s MIT 150 Exhibit celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Institute.

You will soon be able to read our recap of the afternoon, and see photos of the speakers and crowd, elsewhere on Xconomy.com. But I wanted to take a moment to thank all the great partners and participants who made it happen.

First, our speakers, some of whom flew across the country to join us, in order of appearance,: Jack Lasersohn, Bob Metcalfe, Henry McCance, Mick Mountz, Ajay Agarwal, Ed Roberts, Bryan Roberts, Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, Noubar Afeyan, Jason Mendelson, Howard Hartenbaum, Scott Kupor, Bob Langer, Terry McGuire, Phil Sharp, John Durant, Bill Sahlman, Peter Brooke, Linda Rottenberg, and Tim Draper.

Thanks to our event sponsors, starting with Platinum Sponsor Microsoft, Gold Sponsors Silicon Valley Bank and WilmerHale, and Silver sponsors Advent International and SNR Denton. We really appreciate your support!

I’d also like to thank our event partners, the NVCA and the MIT Museum. The great teams at both of these organizations made the day smooth and successful.

Thanks as well to our Event Supporters: MFA–Moody, Famiglietti & Andronico; Mintz Levin; Charles River Ventures; TA Associates; and Wolf & Company.

Our excellent Design Partners were Mixture and Upstatement, and our great and comfortable stage furniture was provided by Turnstone.

We’d also like to thank the underwriters and venture members who support us throughout the year. Without you, none of this would be possible. First, our charter underwriters, who have supported us since our launch in mid-2007: Alexandria Real Estate Equities; Biogen Idec; Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security; and WilmerHale.

Our other great underwrites are: BNY Mellon Wealth Management ; Goodwin Procter; Invest Northern Ireland; J. Robert Scott Executive Search; Kauffman Foundation; Latham & Watkins; Schwartz Communications; SRI International
; Turnstone; and UK Trade & Investment.

Our venture capital members include: Advanced Technology Ventures; Arch Venture Partners; Atlas Venture; Avalon Ventures; Boston Millennia Partners; Flagship Ventures; LaunchCapital; North Bridge Venture Partners; and Polaris Venture Partners.

Thanks to one and all again. And, finally, thanks to you, our great audience. We look forward to seeing you at our next big event here in Boston, XSITE 2011 (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship), which will take place at Babson College on June 16. A formal announcement will be coming soon, but save the date, and we will hope to see you there.

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Can you ever fire people too quickly, as chief executive? How do you foster a company’s culture as it grows? And what are the pros and cons of going public?

Answers to these pointed management questions could be found in yesterday’s technology track at the National Venture Capital Association’s annual meeting in Boston. Harvard Business school professor Bill Sahlman (a busy man this week) led a CEO panel consisting of some heavy hitters: Jim Baum from Netezza, now part of IBM (NYSE: IBM), Tim Healy from EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC), and Andy Ory from Acme Packet (NASDAQ: APKT).

Here are 10 things I heard that stood out to me. Please excuse the rapid-fire mode; been tweeting too much lately:

1. “When you’re CEO of a public company, you’re at the top of the aggravation pyramid but the bottom of the liquidation pyramid.” That was Sahlman, referencing investor Tom Volpe.

2. “Going public is the beginning of a long process. It’s about locking everyone in. It’s an exit, but not for me [as CEO].” That was Ory talking about Acme Packet. “You have 180 days to understand who you are” in the transition from private to public company, he said. “Realize you can’t satisfy everybody.”

3. “In spite of [various investor issues], becoming a public company really did give us credibility, it really did help us with large customers. The benefits outweighed the negatives,” Baum said of Netezza.

4. “We’d rather have a hole in the organization than pick the wrong person and have to live with that,” said Healy of EnerNOC. (He spent 22 months interviewing 150 candidates for chief operating officer before going public in 2007.)

5. “Are they a happy soul? I won’t hire unhappy people,” Ory said. Baum added that he looks for intelligence, enthusiasm, passion, integrity, and cultural fit in his hires—experience is less important.

6. “You have to have the right people. If you don’t make the changes that need to happen, everyone sees it [and you harm the culture],” Baum said. That’s a lesson from his PTC (Parametric) days. Baum had fired an employee for poor performance, and his manager, Dick Harrison, said, “Do you think you fired that guy too quickly? Have you ever said, ‘Well, I moved too fast on that one’?”

7. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, and everyone’s against us. We’re the little guys,” Healy said of EnerNOC’s culture and mindset.

8. “We had a common enemy: Oracle,” Baum said of Netezza’s mindset. As for Acme Packet’s culture, Ory described it as “a positive, results-oriented humanistic environment where people are changing the way the world communicates.”

9. “Get in there, talk to a lot of customers, figure out what their real pain is,” Healy said of his company’s business growth strategy. “You cannot innovate in a vacuum. There is enlightenment when you engage [with customers],” Ory added.

10. “I try to get off the board [of a company] if we start having Groundhog Day meetings.” That’s Sahlman talking about companies that keep having the same board meeting over and over again.

In sum, these were some telling tips from four business leaders who have seen it all.

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New York is famous in the business world for its large companies in a variety of industries. For the partners at the seed-stage venture fund Founder Collective, however, the focus is on the small tech startups in the city and beyond that have the potential to rapidly grow in value.

In fact, managing partners David Frankel and Eric Paley, among other partners of the fund, formed Founder Collective in 2009 as a continuation of their success in backing each others’ startups and other young companies for several years. And while the firm’s $50 million fund might seem small to the bigwigs on Wall Street, we’re living in a world where tech upstarts are launching products and gaining real customers on budgets of less than $1 million.

Founder Collective, with offices in Cambridge, MA, and New York City, has made more than 50 investments in tech startups around the country, and its partners have made bets on 20 or so firms in New York, according to Paley and Frankel. Though Frankel and Paley have been involved in firms outside of tech, their fund focuses on software and Web startups that make efficient use of capital and for which relatively small investments can carry the companies to major jumps in value. (So, obviously, this excludes capital-intensive businesses like drug developers.)

While Frankel and Paley both keep homes in the Boston area, they have partners in New York, like Hunch co-founder and CEO Chris Dixon, who spend most of their time in operational roles at startups. (Hunch, a New York City-based startup, says that it personalizes the Internet by helping people find recommendations on all sorts of topics.) Frankel and Paley, who are the only partners who are full-time dedicated to Founder Collective, each serve on multiple boards of directors in New York, giving them a close view of what is happening on the ground in the city’s startup scene.

“There’s been, and I think Chris (Dixon) has been very involved in this, a renaissance in … Next Page »

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We are down to the wire, and up to some 900 guests and counting. That’s the expected attendance at tomorrow’s VC65 event celebrating the 65th anniversary of the birth of venture capital in America—and 65 years of innovation in how to help support great entrepreneurs.

Get your tickets and see the full agenda here.

This is your last chance to attend this incredible event, which features some of the leading VCs and entrepreneurs from around the country. The event takes place tomorrow afternoon (April 6) in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. Xconomy has partnered with the National Venture Capital Association and the MIT Museum to hold the event in concert with the NVCA’s annual meeting this week in Boston. Some 400-500 venture capitalists will be bused to Kresge to join a similar number from Xconomy’s audience. Afterwards, we will all walk to the MIT Museum for a reception in the fabulous MIT 150 Exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Institute.

The core of the afternoon will feature stories and insights that entrepreneurs and investors alike will want to hear. Kicking things off will be entrepreneur and investor Bob Metcalfe, now professor of innovation at the University of Texas. He will be followed by Henry McCance of Greylock Partners, who will share his firm’s Four Principles of Building Great Companies, and how he is applying those principles to non-profits. The rest of our lineup includes:

—The Skype Story: Told by Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital, the founding investor in Skype.

—Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Partners and Mick Mountz, founder and CEO of Kiva Systems, describing Fulfillment 2.0—how a new era of robotics is fueling e-commerce growth.

—Legendary MIT inventor and serial entrepreneur Bob Langer and Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris Venture Partners, will share the secrets of their longtime collaboration that has spawned some 14 companies.

—Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz will talk about his firm’s new model for doing venture—what has worked, and what hasn’t.

Other speakers at VC65 include Tim Draper, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Theresia Ranzetta of Accel Venture Partners; Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group, Bryan Roberts from Venrock; Peter Brooke, founder of Advent International; Noubar Afeyan of Flagship Ventures; Linda Rottenberg of Endeavour Global, and William Sahlman, a professor at Harvard Business School.

And that’s not all. We will also show a special 7-minute clip from More than Money, a documentary about venture capital featuring legends like Tom Perkins, Arthur Rock, and Don Valentine.

Then the networking begins. It should be a great afternoon. Get your tickets now. We hope to see you there!

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Besides snow and rain (and other April Fool’s jokes), ‘tis the season for business plan competitions around Boston. You might know all about MIT’s $100K contest and Harvard Business School’s equivalent, but there’s a lot more going on out there—and a lot of talented young people vying for a taste of entrepreneurial success.

Here’s a quick sampling of five university-based contests going on around town, and their finalists (certainly not a comprehensive list):

—Tufts University is running its seventh annual $100K business plan competition. The final pitches are happening next week, April 6. Here are the five finalists in the social entrepreneurship bracket: Educate Lanka (student scholarships, Manjula Dissanayake), Give 2App (smartphone apps for nonprofits, Artem Efremkin and Shabazz Stuart), Kabuk (earthquake kits, Mustafa Tuzcu), Saathi (sanitary pads, Nithyaa Venkataramani), and Sanergy (green toilets, Gaurav Tiwari).

And the six finalists in the classic competition: InstaCard (cash in gift cards, Warren Davis), Rentcycle (local business rentals, Kevin Halter and Sean Zinsmeister), Roof For Two (motorcycle accessories, Andrew Altman), RxCap (smart pill containers, Nathan Scott), Salary View (college career services, Kenny Berlin), and Saves on a Plane (airfare deals, Ade Baptista).

—Babson College, which says it founded the first college business plan competition in 1984, is in the midst of its $100K+ undergraduate and graduate business plan competitions. The final round takes place on April 14. Here’s a rundown of the three graduate finalists: Atiken Renewables (agricultural waste to energy), Golden Health Guide (online reviews of home medical products), and SkyCrepers (fast-serve crepe franchise).

And the three undergrad finalists: Down to Earth Waste Solutions (small-business waste collection and composting), Nodes (online collaboration and group social networking), and Redeemr (business intelligence and customer retention for small to businesses).

—Boston University’s $50K “new venture competition” is down to its final four, just like March Madness. The BU finals are next week, April 6. Here are the four finalists: ACCEasy (accounting software for Russian businesses, Katsiaryna Akhlopkava), Handlebikes (better bicycles, Fredrik Fjellsaa), Nyumba (pneumonia diagnostics by cellphone, Andrea Fernandes), and RayVio (efficient ultraviolet LEDs, Yitao Liao).

—The MIT Entrepreneurship Competition’s $100K business plan contest is well underway. The semi-finalist teams (five teams in five tracks, plus wild cards) are currently in their mentorship program hurtling towards the finish line on May 11. You can see a full list of the semi-finalists, which were announced in early March, here. A few that caught my eye, mostly because they have interesting names: SaferTaxi (mobile track; cab rating and registration system), iHelmet (products and services; no idea what they do), Boss (life sciences; bone graft tool), Waste to Watts (emerging markets; sounds self-explanatory for power generation), and All Cows Eat Grass (music lessons) and VisualizeMe (social graph), both in the Web/IT track.

—Lastly, Harvard Business School’s business plan contest is just getting started. Business plan entries are due next week, April 7; there’s a “business venture” track and a “social venture” track. The whole competition is done by the evening of April 26.

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Great venture capitalists and entrepreneurs aren’t in it for the money or fame—they are out to build outstanding companies that make the world safer, healthier, more productive, more accessible, or just more fun. And, usually, it takes a great partnership between investors and entrepreneurs to pull that off.

Celebrating such successful partnerships is the main focus of a tremendous event Xconomy is proud to have taken a leading role in organizing. It’s called VC65, and it marks the 65th anniversary of the birth of venture capital in America, as embodied by the formation of American Research and Development, the pioneering venture capital firm formed by Harvard Business school professor General Georges Doriot in 1946. This gathering, which will feature leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from around the country, will take place the afternoon of April 6, in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium.

The power-packed lineup for VC65 features keynotes from legendary entrepreneur and investor (now professor, read on) Bob Metcalfe and pioneering venture capitalist Henry McCance of Greylock Partners; a series of VC-entrepreneur stories designed to bring out key lessons or insights about building great companies; and lightning panels about the future of venture capital and entrepreneurship. There’s more on the program below, and you can find the full agenda here.

To put on VC65, Xconomy has partnered with the National Venture Capital Association and the MIT Museum. On the afternoon of April 6, some 600 venture capitalists will make their way to Kresge following the first session of the NVCA’s annual meeting, which opens that morning in Boston. They will be joined at the VC65 conference, which is open to the public, by New England entrepreneurs, technologists, student, and other members of the innovation community—in short, by you, Xconomy’s readers. Then, after a great session with some special surprises soon to be announced, everyone will walk down to the MIT Museum for a reception in the recently opened MIT 150 Exhibition, which celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Institute.

It promises to be a fantastic day of sharing big ideas and networking. The early bird rate ends Thursday, so get your tickets now at VC65.eventbrite.com.

The afternoon’s festivities will include:

—An opening keynote talk by Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet and co-founder of 3Com. In 2001 Metcalfe became a partner at Polaris Venture Partners, and has now joined the University of Texas at Austin as Professor of Innovation. He knows both sides of the VC-entrepreneur partnership personally.

—Henry McCance of Greylock will talk about his firm’s four principles of building great companies, and how he is hoping to apply those principles to cure disease.

—Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital, who was the founding investor in Skype when he was with Draper Richards, will share details from the Skype story.

—Mick Mountz, founder and CEO of robotics company Kiva Systems, will be taking the stage with lead investor Ajay Agarwal, managing director of Bain Capital Ventures. Their story is called Fulfillment 2.0, and it is about a new era of robotics enabling e-commerce growth.

—Scott Kupor, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will talk about his firm’s new model for doing venture investing. The upstart venture firm was co-founded by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and inventor of the first widely used Web browser.

—Bob Langer, the most prolific inventor in America today, will be joining Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris Venture Partners, to talk about their great collaborations, which have resulted in some 14 biotech companies at last count.

And that’s hardly all. Other speakers at VC65 include Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Theresia Ranzetta of Accel Venture Partners; Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group; Bryan Roberts from Venrock; Peter Brooke, founder of Advent International; Noubar Afeyan of Flagship Ventures; Linda Rottenberg of Endeavour Global; and William Sahlman, a professor at Harvard Business School.

And as I mentioned, we have a few more treats in store, to be announced in the days ahead. But get your tickets now to take advantage of the early bird rate.

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I generally hate cocktail parties, but the one at Cambridge, MA-based Performable on Tuesday night was pretty good (you can see some photos here). Not that many VCs were there, which was just as well, because I got to meet tons of entrepreneurs from Boston and beyond, all working on interesting startups.

Plus, who knew that Performable had hired Andrew Bialecki, the son of Greg Bialecki, Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, as a developer? (I met them both at the party and I’d say it’s a smart move, Performable.)

At such gatherings, and elsewhere, I’ve been hearing about lots of interesting Boston-area tech startups—some still in stealth, others not. Let’s call these “quiet startups.” In any case, they’re early-stage but won’t stay quiet for long. Some of them might not want the attention yet, but hey, that’s my job: Dig up the news and write about it here.

So here are five startups I’ve been hearing about:

—Take the Interview, led by founder and CEO Danielle Weinblatt, a former private equity associate and investment banking analyst (and current MBA student at Harvard Business School). This company has scored angel financing and is already gaining some traction. The idea is a Web-based video interviewing system for employers and job seekers—basically trying to make the recruiting process more efficient by screening more candidates before doing in-person interviews. My colleague Wade wrote about a similar-sounding Y Combinator startup last summer called HireHive; that company is now defunct, though I’m not quite sure what happened.

—Open Mile, led by Evan Schumacher, the former CEO of Going.com (and a few other tech startups). This company got money about a year ago from Charles River Ventures, and is using Web and mobile technologies to help shipping companies like UPS and FedEx match up supply and demand in an effective and economical way.

— Loom Décor (co-led by Jessa McIntosh) and CustomMade (led by Mike Salguero). These two are in honor of the recent activity around town in “mass customization,” which may start to redefine some segments of e-commerce. Loom Décor hasn’t quite launched yet, but it seems to focus on fabrics and home furnishings. More importantly, it is a Boston company masquerading as a New York company, but we know better (the founders come from BU and MIT Sloan). Meanwhile, CustomMade is based in Kendall Square, has quietly grown to 27 employees, and focuses on selling a wide variety of furniture, displays, jewelry, and other items.

—Locately, led by Thaddeus Fulford-Jones, Eric Weiss, and Drew Volpe. This location-based mobile tech startup is roughly following Compete.com’s business model—sell competitive insights to businesses through subscriptions. I recently spoke with Volpe, who said, “We think location analytics will become like Web analytics. We think there’s a huge company here. Our goal is to get there first, build really great technology, and build a great company.” (Volpe will be speaking in the “location smackdown” portion of Xconomy’s Mobile Madness event on March 9.)

Locately’s goal applies to all of the above startups, I suppose. We’ll be watching closely to see what happens.

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