1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator (Part 1)

Geoff Ralston is President of Y Combinator. We had a terrific discussion on what we each are seeing in the startup ecosystem. Sramana Mitra: Geoff has been involved with Y Combinator right from the beginning. Why don’t we take a look back on the evolution of Silicon Valley and Y Combinator.

539th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Geoff Ralston, Y Combinator

Geoff Ralston is President of Y Combinator. We had a terrific discussion on what we each are seeing in the startup ecosystem.

From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did they find out about you? Eric Frenkiel: We were introduced to investor networks. There were investors who knew the startup needed a really strong database product. They put us in touch. We gave them a demo and they knew that was going to help them develop fast. That was our first

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From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the rationale behind relational database at this point? Eric Frenkiel: That’s a great question. In fact, it’s one of the first questions our investors asked us, “Why are you building a relational database? The entire world is going to NoSQL.” We had a very contrarian view at that time, which was that

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From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Facebook? Eric Frenkiel: Not very long, it was for 10 months in total. It was an amazing opportunity. We ultimately left Facebook because we had a bigger opportunity that we wanted to build. That was MemSQL. We joined in 2010 and left in early 2011. That was a

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An Underused Tool For Job Recovery

As the U.S. economy continues to hiccup, large-scale entrepreneurship is a badly needed remedy. In transitioning hundreds of thousands of people to self-employment and job creation through entrepreneurship, incubators look like an extremely helpful tool. But we need to produce more of the most effective incubators.

Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Paul Bragiel, Managing Partner, i/o Ventures, San Francisco, California (Part 1)

By guest author Irina Patterson and Mridula Velagapudi I am talking to Paul Bragiel, managing partner of i/o Ventures, which is a three-month accelerator program for technology entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The partners of i/o Ventures come from companies like MySpace and BitTorrent, and their mentors are from Yelp, Digg, Mint, Mochi Media, and OpenDNS.

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Business Incubator Series: An Interview With David Cohen, Founder And CEO, Startup Accelerator TechStars – Boulder, Colorado (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What are your mentors’ relationships with the companies? Is there compensation involved? David: No. No compensation. Many of them will go on to be investors or advisors long term. That’s the natural outcome. At the start of the program, the mentors work for free. The reason

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