First Eight Companies for LAUNCH Education & Kids

We are just five weeks out from the LAUNCH Education & Kids event at Microsoft's campus in Mountain View June 12 & 13.

So far the LAUNCH team has spoken with over 130 startups in the education and kids space  -- we're blown away by the passion, sophistication and insights these founders (a number of them educators-turned-entrepreneurs) have shared with us.

Eight startups impressed us so much we couldn't wait to let their founders know they received one of the 25 spots on stage. Here they are:

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The Age of Excellence

Listen to Lon Harris reading this editorial on "This Week in Startups" episode #252 and the follow-up discussion with Jason and Tyler Crowley. Download it here.

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The business world is changing very fast right now.

Transparency and global marketplaces are the catalysts.

There's no room left in 2012 for average, or even good, products.

Just three or four years ago, making a good product was good enough. In fact, a lot of the business thinking at the time focused on knowing when to stop investing in a product and get it out the door.

"Perfection is the enemy of progress," I would tell folks. The MVP (minimum viable product) and lean startup movements are great for learning -- but there is nothing MVP about an iPad or Ridley Scott film.

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Is There a YCombinator Valuation Bubble or Not?

At the end of Friday's piece, I asked you guys to vote on SurveyMonkey what I should write about this weekend. Over 50% of you said you wanted me to discuss the buzz around the bubble in valuations for Y Combinator companies. ( Full results: http://jc.is/HE3AV5 )

I speak with six to 12 investors a week, both angels and VCs, as well as a half-dozen founders. Almost every discussion for the past couple of weeks has shifted to the valuations of the latest YC crop.

[ Note: In this piece I will not reference any specific knowledge I have as an angel investor. Everything here is based on public discussion of these issues. ]

For background, the valuation of a startup is the number investors and founders come up with as the full monetary value of a business during a financing event.

Valuations are always a hot topic, but they are delicate for two specific reasons:

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The One Product That Makes Apple a Trillion-Dollar Company Overnight

Apple will become a trillion-dollar company based not on iPads and Apple TV, but payments.

Imagine taking out your iPhone and instead of buying Angry Birds you bought the latest Groupon.

Or one-click bought the latest object d'art at OneKingsLane or Fab on your iPad seconds after downloading and launching their app.

Or you took out the awesome Hotel Tonight and without ever having signed up for the service you booked a room -- and paid for it without typing in your credit card number.

That's coming.
 

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Mint.com-for-the-cloud Cloudability to Graduate from TechStars Cloud with 2k+ Customers

[ Cloudability founders Jon Frisby, Mat Ellis and J.R. Storment at the TechStars Cloud office in San Antonio. Photo courtesy of Cloudability. ]

From startups to Fortune 500 behemoths, everybody is using cloud-based services like Google Apps and Dropbox, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

But does any organization actually know how much it spends on the cloud across the board (since employees often sign up for services and expense them) and how to keep costs under control?

Manually entering data into a spreadsheet is one less-than-attractive option for avoiding a "who forgot to turn off the extra servers before the weekend" situation. Or you could sign up with -- what else -- a freemium SaaS company like Portland, Oregon-based Cloudability, which bills itself

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Disrupting Education

It's been exactly a month since the LAUNCH Festival and I've finally recovered.

These events literally take the life out of you, and I mean that in the best of ways. It reminds me of the feeling after I used to run the New York City Marathon: a combination of depression that the magic was over and never-ending flashbacks of the exhilaration of the mission being completed. I'm guessing some moms out there can relate. :)

It turns out that not only did we close well over $1M in investing on stage, but I've found out since that over $500k in additional commitments were made. So, when the final tally is done, the event will have resulted in about $2M for the startups that were present.

Five years of LAUNCHing great startups from Dropbox to Mint to Yammer and now Space Monkey and Alltuition (among many others). You can watch the LAUNCH 2012 awards ceremony here.

In between our yearly event we plan to host some smaller one- and two-day vertical events. I've been pushing my own startup Mahalo.com hard into education after being inspired by folks like Khan Academy and, of course, Steve Jobs and Apple.

Education is one of three verticals we believe is going to be radically disrupted over the next five years.

So, on June 12th and 13th we're hosting LAUNCH Education & Kids.

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LAUNCH Education & Kids, June 12th & 13th

[ Image via creative commons license from flickingerbrad .]

Here at LAUNCH we follow innovation like hawks, and we've seen a lot of activity from founders working on education and 'edutainment,' both for kids and adults. So, we're going to have an intimate 250-person event for folks trying to disrupt the space on June 12th and 13th in Silicon Valley (Mountain View to be exact). More details at our official site: http://www.launchedu.co

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LAUNCH Festival Wrap-up: Winners, Investments and More

The 5th annual LAUNCH Festival March 7 & 8 in San Francisco exceeded our expectations:  42 amazing startups launched or launched new products and competed for investment money that topped $1.4M by the time we announced the winners.

We had 195 companies in the Demo Pit -- 11 of which got to present on stage -- and 1,700+ people (including top entrepreneurs and investors)  attended the show over the two days. Our Office Hours stage attracted standing-room-only crowds as folks like Tony Hsieh of Zappos, David Cohen of TechStars and Dave McClure of 500 Startups answered entrepreneurs' questions.

The Grand Jury gave out 12 awards in all, naming Dropbox rival Space Monkey Best Overall in the 1.0 competition, TurboTax for financial aid Alltuition Best Overall in the 2.0 competition and Scoot Networks Best Demo Pit. Space Monkey and Alltuition snapped up $376k in investments, while Best Design 1.0 winner Minbox secured the TechStars slot plus $200k in investments.

Check out the list of winners, who got which investments, the awards ceremony, all LAUNCH Festival '12 demos (on our YouTube channel) and all official LAUNCH Festival '12 photos.

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Where Over $1M in LAUNCH Festival Prize Money Is Going

[ LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis (right) stands with Minbox founders Michael Lawlor (left) and Alexander Mimran (middle), who received a slot at TechStars after launching at the 2012 LAUNCH Festival. ]

When the LAUNCH Festival kicked off on March 7, we had over $1M in investment money pledged. Thanks to members of the Grand Jury who had not previously committed money -- and existing investors upping their amounts -- that number climbed past $1.4M when we held the closing ceremony on March 8.

Here we list who has pledged how much to which startup(s) -- a total of $1,069,000 so far.

Best Design 1.0 winner Minbox is at $318k in pledges, Best Overall 1.0 winner Space Monkey at $276k, Best Technology 1.0 winner Captricity at $125k, Best Overall 2.0 winner Alltuition at $75k and Best Business Model 1.0 winner Appstack at $75k.

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LAUNCH Festival 2012 Winners

[ Space Monkey won Best Overall in the 1.0 competition. LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis (far left) and Brad Gerstner, founder of LAUNCH '11 winner Room 77 (far right) presented the award. More photos of the LAUNCH Festival here. ]

The LAUNCH Festival Grand Jury chose 12 winners in all on March 8 -- six in the 1.0 competition, five in the 2.0 competition, and one overall winner from the DEMO Pit. Here they are by category.

For a complete list of official competitors, check out our spreadsheet.


1.0  WINNERS
These are brand-new companies that received no press or blog coverage prior to launching at the LAUNCH Festival. 

Best Overall   
Space Monkey

Best Design   
Minbox

Best Technology   
Captricity

Best Business Model   
Appstack

Best Presentation   
That's Suspicious Behavior

Diamond in the Rough   
Copper
   

2.0 WINNERS
These are existing companies that launched a new product, a new version of their product or pivoted.
  
Best Overall
Alltuition

Best Design   
Wanderfly

Best Technology   
YouEye

Best Business Model   
Docstoc

Best Presentation   
Vocre
    
    
DEMO PIT
The DEMO Pit -- which had 200 companies this year, including the 42 official competitors -- was open to all startups that were less than 18 months old. Some startups launched in the DEMO Pit while others promoted their existing product.

Best Overall
Scoot Networks

Who Launched at the 2012 LAUNCH Festival

[ Yossi Vardi (left) and Jason Calacanis (right) chat with President Shimon Peres of Israel on day one. ]

So much excitement and awesome startups -- here's your complete list of every company that has launched so far, and here are the LAUNCH Festival photos we've uploaded. Both are getting updated, so please check back often.

UPDATE: We have opened the DEMO Pit to the public for the rest of the day! Just come to 635 8th st. And you can stay for the closing party, too.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

[ Image via creative commons license from 401k. ]

Our good friend, visionary entrepreneur and angel investor Bill Lee has stepped up again and saved the day! His $100k commitment to invest this year puts the LAUNCH Festival at a whopping $1,039,000 in prize money/investments. Bill will join the Grand Jury for part of the event, and this is the second year he'll be investing in startups at LAUNCH.

$1,039,000 in prize money.

Wow.

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LAUNCH Prizes Top $1M!

UPDATE [ 3/6/2012 ]: Angel investor Bill Lee is in for $100k, total is now $1,039,000!

By Jason Calacanis

I'm thrilled to announce that we've added $250k $400k to our total prize money at the LAUNCH Festival.

First, we added $100k to the AngelPad investment by way of a miscommunication. We originally thought AngelPad, a leading accelerator here in San Francisco, was offering $20k to the company they accepted.

It turns out they are offering $120k.

Oops!

Additionally, three five angel investors have agreed to commit $50k each in investment to the 50 startups on stage.

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LAUNCH to Welcome Shimon Peres, President of Israel, on March 7

[ President Shimon Peres appeared before the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on Feb. 23. Photo courtesy of the President's official website. ]

We are extremely honored and excited that Shimon Peres, President of Israel, will come to the LAUNCH Festival on Wednesday, March 7 as part of a trip focused on innovation in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis and legendary Israeli entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi will do a fireside chat with the President, who also plans to visit the DEMO Pit.

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Tesla Motors Model X Will Be on Display at the LAUNCH Festival

[ Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk shows off the Model X in Los Angeles Feb. 9. ]

Visionary Telsa Motors CEO Elon Musk is out of town and couldn't make it to the LAUNCH Festival, but he did the next best thing: he gave us a Tesla Motors Model X to show off!

This is the first time anyone in the Bay Area is going to get to see the car up close and personal from what we understand. We saw it a couple of weeks back at the Los Angeles opening and it is stunning -- especially the falcon doors.

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LAUNCH Festival Hits $639k in Prize Money

By Jason Calacanis

We've now done three of four mandatory rehearsals for the startups launching on stage at next week's LAUNCH Festival (March 7 & 8), and I'm 100% certain they are as good as our amazing alumni: Dropbox, Mint, Fitbit, Yammer, Red Beacon, Powerset and Room77 (among many other awesome startups).

In fact, having had the privilege of personally coaching every alumni for the past five years, I can tell you that one of this year's startups reminds me of a next-generation Dropbox, two feel like features Yammer will add in a year or two, and one is as awesome as Mint -- but for the second most important finance category.

All of them are worthy of angel investment.

Today I received amazing news: last year's winner, Brad Gerstner of Room77, has agreed to put up a $100k prize for one of the winners in this year's competition.

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LAUNCH Hits $589K: A Slot at AngelPad and $100K Investment (If You Move to Vegas)

[ Image created by Marc Burckhardt for the Inc. magazine article "Tony Hsieh's Excellent Las Vegas Adventure" by Max Chafkin. ]

If you thought the prize money available at this year's LAUNCH Festival was already too good to be true, well, we've raised the bar even higher.

San Francisco-based accelerator AngelPad is guaranteeing a slot to a LAUNCH company* -- worth $20k. Plus VegasTechFund will invest at least $100k in one company that agrees to relocate to Las Vegas. 

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The Two Most Important Startups in the World

By Jason Calacanis

The two most important startups in the world: AngelList and Kickstarter.

They're more important than Facebook, Twitter and Apple. Heck, they're more important than Pinterest! ( ← zing! pow! )

These two projects have been hated, dissed and dismissed for much of their existence, but soon folks will see just how disruptively awesome they are.

In the early years, having your vision hated by most people, but absolutely loved by a few is -- of course -- the surest sign you're going to change the world. Conversely, projects that are loved by everyone early are sure to have absolutely modest outcomes. Even Google had doubters. "Why do we need a new search engine?" they said. Others saw the actual, better results behind the goofy name.

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10 International Startup Scholarships

[ The Tonchidot team demos its Domo app at LAUNCH '11. ]

The LAUNCH Festival is doing so well we want to get more folks involved from outside the USA.

Great ideas and startups can come from anywhere today, and we're particularly interested in bringing more startups from Israel, Korea, Japan, China and South America (and of course beyond!) to the LAUNCH Festival DEMO Pit in San Francisco March 7 & 8.

LAUNCH will pick up the entire cost (except your travel) to ensure we have a truly international event. Yes, we'll even pay for your booth (table, chairs, electricity, wifi and space).

You just have to get your team there.

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DOUBLE Boom! LAUNCH Hits $369k in Prizes Thanks to MailChimp's $100k!

2011/12 Creative Mornings with Ben Chestnut from CreativeMornings/Atlanta on Vimeo.

Ben Chestnut, the founder of the wildly successful MailChimp, has agreed to invest $100k in one of the 10 winning companies at the LAUNCH Festival on March 7th and 8th.

Total prize money is now, gulp, $369k.

This prize will work similarly to the Charles River Ventures $100k prize we announced yesterday: Ben will pick one of the 10 award winners at the LAUNCH Festival and either give them a convertible note without a discount or cap (similar to the notes provided to Y Combinator companies), or simply invest in their next round.

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