What makes you different from other entrepreneurs trying to build start-ups? You are competing with thousands of entrepreneurs for the same resources, talent, and capital, are you really sure you’re cut out for this? What can you do as a founder to attract the best people and funding? What are you doing to build the network you need to be successful? What are you willing to sacrifice to get the company built? When was the last time you went down to Silicon Valley/Alley? Join us to talk about the difference between Entrepreneurs or Wantrepreneurs.

Meet Some of the Panelists:

Daniel Debow, CEO, Rypple
David Crow, founder, StartupNorth.ca
Michael Litt, CEO, Vidyard
Debbie Landa, Founder, Dealmaker Media (Grow Conference & Co-Founder, GrowLab)
Jason Bailey, Co-Founder, GrowLab

GROW2012 Tour Dates:

February 13  - Toronto, Canada   - Register

February 14  - Waterloo, Canada - Register

February 15 – Montreal, Canada - Register

Dear awesome entrepreneur,

PIE (Portland Incubator Experiment) — a Portland based startup accelerator that gives you cash, office space, and three months of intensive mentorship — has opened applications for its next class and they’d love to have you apply to be part of it.

The PIE application form features many of the standard incubator/accelerator questions about the awesome product you’re building and the dream team you’ve assembled to bring it to fruition. It even asks a few questions about why you think you’re the perfect fit within PIE, itself.

If you’re currently sitting there, working on your dream, you owe it to yourself to throw your hat into the ring for the next class of PIE. It could be that push you need to make your startup fantasy into a reality.

Deadline is February 24, 2012. So don’t delay! We’re looking forward to seeing your application.

Contact:

http://piepdx.com

@piepdx

Follow us on Twitter @dealmakermedia

Facebook’s $5 billion IPO filing will make it the largest web company IPO in history.  The engineers that stuck it out for the long haul are doing victory dances.  However what does that mean for the rest of us?  What other ripple effects will the IPO have on our economy?

1. Real estate prices: According to a talk on NPR this morning, real estate agents are getting ready to see a spike in Silicon Valley new home purchases from the newly rich Facebook employees. This may create a buying frenzy in the whole area, carrying over to other bay area residential and business areas.

2. Mobile advertising: According to the S-1 filing, Facebook plans to massively expand its mobile reach.  In the past four months, mobile users have increased 21%. Currently Facebook mobile is ad free, although a high percentage of Facebook’s revenue has come from its site advertising.  As we use our mobile device more and more, we can only expect advertisers to follow us.

3. Social Gaming: With the IPO filing, Facebook has to spend about $10B of the money they raise.  Given that third party games still generate a lot of revenue for Facebook, many wonder if they won’t try to invest in the space themselves and act as a first party publisher.  Internal development would allow Facebook to be leader in the space and create a fuller mobile offering.

4. Privacy: Everyone wants to know how Facebook will handle privacy post IPO. An IPO means Wall Street expectations to monetize, monetize, monetize.  Unfortunately for consumers this could be our personal data.  It will be interesting to see how the company will still build a community that caters to us while making money off of us.

We may see massive Facebook changes now that it’s married to Wall Street.  However, remember that Mark Zuckerberg still own nearly 28 % of the company. Hopefully with his leadership, we’ll still be old school messaging and sharing. Who knows, maybe we’ll start throwing sheep at each other again.

The word ”scale” to startups typically means rapid growth after launching their product.  “Scale” progress is measured by subscribers per month or transactions per second. However, Yobie Benjamin, Global Chief Technology Officer of Citigroup ICG/GTS says “scale” has a much wider definition when applied to larger enterprises like financial service companies.

What can we learn from industry leaders in massive scaling? What technologies do you need to provide in order to partner with the global leaders like Citigroup?  Read our interview with Yobie to blow your mind on a whole new type of scaling.

Q: What is scale in your world?

A: In most large financial institutions, number of users, concurrency, and response time are just the beginning — table stakes.  Now add on:

1. Response to compliance matters in near real-time

2. Pronounced security for the entity, its regulators and customers

3. Reality that the world is not America and that each and every country no matter how small can affect global operations.

Think of a single multi-national client that operates in over a hundred countries that includes unstable governments. Now pretend that the financial company takes in and makes payments in massive retail volume. Now multiply that multi-national client by thousands and then by an extension of their customers in the hundreds of millions of individuals.

Q: What key things do companies need to address to scale globally?

A: Regulatory issues are at the top of the list but can be broken down into other matters that are no less important.   For example, in the EU privacy is a serious matter and is very different from the American point-of-view.

Another example are the discreet laws of individual countries — The crime of insulting a monarch, a throwback to a bygone era of absolute
sovereign power is still very much in force in Thailand. In a leading large important Asian country, promoting or “seen as facilitating” an “outlaw group” can lead to charter revocation.

Q: You mentioned latency challenges when companies try to scale in countries that have intense regulatory issues and government filtering.  How does a company best plan to expand in those types of countries?

A: Almost all countries monitor most communications that cross through their digital borders.  Some look at everything, every word, bit and
byte.  Some look for key words.  Financial transactions are generally tracked, particularly those that cross a threshold that triggers AML
(anti-money laundering), monitoring of terrorist financing, etc. Some filtering technologies used by countries are better than others
and inevitably affect response time performance. There is no way around it in some countries. In others, one can use adjacent networks
but it’s not easy and it can be construed as a violation of regulations.

Q: Many startups in the infrastructure and cloud services space are targeting financial institutions as partners and customers.  What do they need to address to meet your particular scaling needs?

A: Automated KYC (know your customer) and AML solutions would be an area of extreme interest.  It has to be in real time.

Everyone scoffs at “me too” products.  However, the scoffed at should be feared.  When done correctly a ‘me too’ can surpass what it was copying.

“Look at Ali Baba. It started in China as an imitation of Yahoo,” said Oded Shenkar, in a recent GigaOm article.  Oded is the Ford motor Chair and professor at Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. “Now it’s in a position to buy the company it was imitating.”

How to Prevent Copycats: Four lessons from GigaOm

- Differiate: Realize your main idea is not unique, but how you differentiate is: Many others thinking through similar solutions as your company is; the key to success is to understand all the players and ensure you solve the problem better/differently.

- Think global: Many copycats just take your product to a different international location

- Partner or acquire clones that are competitive.  Just as Groupon bought competitors across the world, gobble up up would be threats if the cost of competing is high.

- Execute well and execute fast!  Ideas are a dime a dozen—the winners will outperform in how they operate and stay relevant to the market.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve noticed a lot of moving and shaking going on in the HR software industry. While mergers and acquisitions are always interesting for industry analysts, the most recent bout of activity – including the acquisitions of Rypple and SuccessFactors by Salesforce and SAP (respectively), as well as the announcement of VC funds flowing into the market (with large investments in SmartRecruiters and iCIMS) – are particularly exciting. Why? Because this activity is driving change in areas of talent management technology that we primarily paid lip service to in 2011.

With two major players taking action, the market in 2012 is poised for the continued expansion of HR solutions into the Cloud, as well as further integration of social media functionality across the full spectrum of HR applications. To that end, 2012 will see more large software companies making strategic moves in the talent management niche as they fight for the biggest piece of the pie.

Guest blogger, Kyle Lagunas, HR Analyst at Software Advice – an online resource for reviews of HR software – has taken an in-depth look at what SAP and Salesforce stand to gain from their HR acquisitions, how it will impact this dynamic software market, and where other contenders in this space might make moves of their own in 2012. Take a look at his analysis and forecast on his HR blog at: http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/hr/the-hr-software-round-up-setting-the-stage-for-2012-1011912/. Have your own thoughts? Join the discussion, and leave a comment.

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Photo Credit HERE

Last year companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook and Salesforce gobbled up a multitude of startups to strengthen their talent and technology strategies.  However, just because they’ve got money to burn doesn’t mean you should consider selling.  75% of acquisitions fail due to timing, out clauses, and cultural fit.  Google’s failed acquisition of Groupon is a classic example. However, some startups hit timing perfectly such as Bebo’s sale to AOL for $850M.

Entrepreneurs must ask themselves if exiting is the right strategy versus building up their company for a potential (yet sometimes reachable) IPO.

To know if selling is the right thing to do successful entrepreneurs must ask themselves these questions:

-  What type of company are you?  A full-fledged offering or a feature looking for a product?

- What type of acquisition are you? Talent, Business, or Technology?  Each will have different valuation.

-  Will your market grow and what are your chances of thriving amid competition if you go it alone?  Who else could your buyer acquire?

-  Is it the right time given your traction?  Will you have a significantly higher valuation in the near term?

-  What is your long term vision for the company?  Is it aligned with the buyer’s goals?

- Is the buyer the right cultural fit for your company?  Could you hang out with them?

- What service level agreements and out clauses do you have with your customers?

- Are your internal finances in order?  What things do you need to clean out from under the rug?

We will be tackling some of these questions with established corporate acquirers and acquired entrepreneurs in Los Angeles in March.  Come join us for an Acquisition Strategy Session in Los Angeles on March 6, 2012.

Congratulations to Isaac and the entire Recurly team on raising $6 Million in Series A funding from BV Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, Harrison Metal Capital and FreeStyle Capital.  Subscription billing has never looked so good!

See Recurly’s 2011 Under the Radar Presentation HERE.

Company Description:
Recurly provides subscription billing management as an easily outsourced service. Recurly can be set up in just days, and fully automates recurring billing; error-handling, dunning management, customer upgrades and downgrades and all related communications to ensure that merchants can focus on their core business rather than managing a complex billing system.

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Cloud computing provider and our Under the Radar alum, Joyent just secured $85 million in their Series D round!  According to a TechCrunch article, Joyent plans to roll out a collection of “seamlessly connected high performance clouds” serving global corporations on every continent.

With more and more money being poured into cloud software and services, investors are betting that corporations will abandon their back room servers and trust more of their data in the cloud.

All Chips In?

However, not every company is transitioning their data over as fast as Joyent’s customers.  According to Michael Driscoll, CEO of predictive data analysis start-up MetaMarkets, “There is still a cultural obstacle with cloud.  Although companies trust their private data with large banks or physical boxes in their back room, some are still hesitant to move it into the cloud.”

What makes enterprises finally place a bet on the cloud?  How will they resolve data privacy concerns? What other emerging cloud startups will provide such valuable benefits that keeping data in the “back room boxes” is no longer an option?

Congratulations to Jeremy and the entire Retailigence team on receiving $2.6 Million in funding from Motorola Solutions Venture Capital!  Retailigence won our Under the Radar 2010 Judge’s Choice award and they are obviously continuing to impress people all around!  Nice work!

See their 2010 Under the Radar Presentation HERE.

Company Description:
Retailigence is a hyperlocal focused solution that bridges the gap between intent-driven shoppers and local retailers. Using our open API, any web or mobile app can consume local retail product availability and pricing information to deliver compelling solutions. We are not a consumer app but rather we are a data aggregation and analytics company with an open platform. Our experienced management team has a successful track record in local, retail and inventory solutions.

Follow us on Twitter @dealmakermedia