Visit to the land of high-tech start up - Part 1

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After recuperating from my 3 week trip to China, I headed up to Silicon Valley for 1 week to meet with various venture capital firms, private equity firms, start-ups, and entrepreneurs to kick-off my networking efforts. I had a successful trip, introducing myself to a number of well connected people that should begin to open doors to some interesting consumer internet companies over the coming weeks. My meeting with Mark Shulze from Quantcast was of particular interest. Mark and I had worked together during his days at AOL while I was with Shopzilla. Mark his since joined the company Quantcast, whose mission it is to deliver a far more granular level of site traffic and demographic information to the long tail of publishers. Quancast’s analytics are unlike any that I have seen and their current free license model for accessing data seems to be attracting thousands of small publishers. Mark is a well connected guy and provided some great leads for me including a very interesting company called Mochiads, an ad network for video games. I have sent off my CV to Mark and expect to begin hearing back from interested companies over the coming weeks.

One constant theme during my visit to SF was that of Seattle as a significant Internet start-up hub. It seems that with so many successful companies, including Real Networks, Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, etc there is now a large base of incredibly wealthy and talented managers just itching to start their own companies. Most of the venture partners I spoke with were either leaving for or coming back from Seattle last week, a direct sign of some pretty significant VC investment in the region. Check out the Alexa list Seattle’s hottest internet startups, brought to you by one of Settles very own entrepreneurs, Marcelo Calbucci, founder of Sampa. Hot Seattle Web 2.0 Start-Ups. The list is sprinkled with companies getting significant traction including and whose services I have used during my job search already including Zillow, Wetpaint, Payscale, Jobster, Redfin, Farecast, and even Triphub, whose service I highly recommend for planning a bachelor party! ;-).

June 3rd, 2007