On Tuesday, September 8th, TheFunded Founder Institute graduated 54 companies from the inaugural semester. Throughout the next few weeks, the businesses developed within the Institute will be launching to the public. Skimble (http://skimble.com), a web portal to track your active lifestyle, was the first Institute company to launch with several thousand thousand outdoor enthusiasts as early users, as well as a nice article in TechCrunch (http://bit.ly/siNpz).
The vision of the Institute is to help founders build world-class technology companies by providing peer support, structured training, mentorship by experienced founders, access to investors, and best of breed services. Each of the 66 founders in the program attended 17 training sessions over four months, and each session was lead by a team of world-class CEOs. After each session, the founders were assigned company-building projects that they completed with their peers in working groups. All of the stakeholders, from mentors to founders, participate in any equity upside generated from the 54 companies.
The Institute is now planning future semesters in the Bay Area and in various cities throughout the world. First, the Institute would like to thank the sponsors: Microsoft BizSpark, the Founders Fund, and Charles River Ventures. These firms are clear supporters of entrepreneurship. Second, the Institute would like to thank the 27 mentors that took precious time to help founders build the next wave of world-class companies: Aaron Patzer, Alain Raynaud, Bryan Thatcher, Bubba Murarka, David Higley, David Kidder, Eugene Lee , J. Barry Thompson, James Hong, Jason Calacanis, Jason Nazar, Jay Jamison, Jeff Stewart, Jen Shelby, Joe Zawadzki, Joe Betts-LaCroix, Ken Ross, Mark Pincus, Michael Arrington, Michael Diamant, Munjal Shah, Peter Pham, Philip Kaplan, Russ Fradin, Scott Heiferman, Scott Painter, and Trip Adler. Congratulations to Mentor Aaron Patzer of Mint.com for the $170 MM sale to Intuit today (http://bit.ly/XOUcL).
Finally, we partnered with leading service providers to develop special offerings to help Institute founders build their business across seven phases. Below is a list of the service partners, each of whom have also shown strong support for startups:
Ideation
- 99Designs (http://99designs.com/) - 99designs connects clients needing design work such as logo designs, business cards, or web sites to a thriving community of over 40,000 talented designers.
- Patent Express (http://www.patentexpress.com/) - Patent Express is the best place online to access affordable patent, trademark, copyright, international, and IP consultation services.
Product Planning
- Elance (http://www.elance.com/?rid=1JAGR) - Elance delivers an immediate, cost-effective and flexible way to hire, manage and pay independent professionals and contractors online.
- MediaTemple (http://mediatemple.net/) - (mt) Media Temple is an industry-leading, privately held, profitable web hosting and software application services company based in California.
- Wrike (http://www.wrike.com/) - Wrike is the leading provider of on-demand project management software for small and midsize companies.
- Weebly (http://www.weebly.com/) – Weebly enables over 2 million people to easily create personal sites and blogs or establish web presences for businesses, weddings, classrooms, churches, artistic portfolios, and more.
- nResult (http://www.nresult.com/) - nResult is a innovative software testing company, where their engineers act as a seamless extension of your own teams for a wide range of compatibility, functionality, usability, accessibility, and load testing.
- SugarCRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com/) - SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software.
- The Outsourcing Company (http://www.theoutsourcingcompany.com) - Offering Web Development, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay per Click (PPC), and Social Media Marketing (SMM) to help your company attract more clients - all at very affordable prices.
- PlanHQ (http://www.planhq.com) - PlanHQ is a web based business plan tool that turns your static document and spreadsheet into a dynamic and up-to-date overview of where you’re going and how you’re tracking.
- Mixpanel (http://www.mixpanel.com) - Mixpanel is a real-time analytics platform that tracks how users engage with web applications. Mixpanel goes way beyond Google Analytics and provides extremely detailed analysis that companies generally have to do all in-house.
- PBworks (http://www.pbworks.com) - PBworks is the world's largest provider of hosted business and educational workspaces. Over 50,000 businesses have chosen PBworks to implement knowledge management, extranets, project management, and more.
- ProjectLocker (http://www.projectlocker.com) - ProjectLocker is a leading provider of on-demand development tools for software developers, with products such as ProjectLocker Analytics and BuildLocker.
- New Relic (http://rpm.newrelic.com/affiliates/FF...) - New Relic is the leading provider of on-demand application performance management solutions. Their premier product, New Relic RPM, is an SaaS application performance management solution for web applications.
- BrowserMob (http://browsermob.com) - Ensure your website can handle heavy user loads with BrowserMob's low-cost on-demand load testing service.
- Balsamiq (http://balsamiq.com) - Balsamiq Mockups is the fastest and easiest wireframing tool on the market.
- CVSDude (http://cvsdude.com) - CVSDude is the leading provider of Subversion and CVS hosting. Use CVSDude to quickly set up, share, and back up your online version control and issue tracking repositories.
- Kontagent (http://bit.ly/8Gy6f) - Kontagent is a Facebook-funded viral analytics platform for social network applications. The Kontagent platform provides deep social data visualization and analysis that delivers actionable insights delivered via a hosted, on-demand service.
Modeling and Finance
- The Brenner Group (http://www.thebrennergroup.com/) - The Brenner Group is one of the technology community's leading specialized finance and accounting services firms.
- Liquid Scenarios (http://www.bpcentral.com/) - Liquid Scenarios software allows for advanced real time capitalization table and investment scenario modeling.
- Intuit (http://www.qboe.com) – Intuit’s Quickbooks is the #1 small business financial software.
- FusionCharts (http://www.fusioncharts.com/?BS=TheFunded09) - FusionCharts v3 helps you create animated and interactive Flash charts for web and desktop applications, and works with all databases.
Team Development
- NeoHire (http://www.neohire.com/) - NeoHire is a premier recruiting agency specializing in online media and technology properties, most widely known for their superb client relationships and deep knowledge of the online space.
- The Resumator (http://www.theresumator.com/home/s:fo...) - TheResumator lets you handle job recruitment in one online interface – including the ability to add a job board to your site, post jobs to other sites, and collect, organize, and track positions and resumes.
- SalesConX (http://www.salesconx.com/) - Salesconx provides virtual independent, pay-for-performance sales teams to drive your business by leveraging their network of over 10,000 selling and business experts.
- Pacific Business Centers (http://www.pbcoffices.com) - Pacific Business Centers (PBC) is a leading provider of on-demand offices offering part-time and full-time office space, including virtual offices, private offices, and team-space in a shared infrastructure.
Company Formation
- Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (http://www.wsgr.com) – The premier provider of legal services to technology, life sciences, and growth enterprises worldwide.
Publicity and Awareness
- SeisMK (http://morris-king.com) - A division of The Morris + King Company (MKC), SeisMK expands MKC’s already renowned digital PR and social media services to benefit brands seeking to engage in resonant conversations with media, users and other influencers.
- Conference Guru (http://www.conferenceguru.com/) - Conference Guru is the most comprehensive place to discover technology conferences, and purchase discount tickets.
- MyPRGenie (http://www.myprgenie.com/) - MyPRGenie is a social media-based, PR delivery platform that allows you to build traffic, access over 500,000 journalist/blog contacts, and track your results.
- PRNewswire (http://www.prnewswire.com/) - PR Newswire is the global leader in news and information distribution services for professional communicators.
- Constant Contact (http://thefunded.constantcontact.com) - Constant Contact's leading email marketing and online survey tools help more than 275,000 small businesses create a dialogue and connect with their audience.
- SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org) - SEOmoz is the web’s premier destination for SEO education, tools and information. SEOmoz also provides consulting, Internet marketing and search engine optimization services to elite businesses around the globe.
Fundraising
- Lightserve (http://www.lightserve.com/) – Lightserve offers 409a valuation reports for a special Institute price, and offers software that stops VCs from sending around your confidential documents when you go out to raise money.
