(Founder of watches) Napkin Labs: Should startups pitch close to venture capital?

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Riley Gibson — CEO and co-founder of the Boulder-based napkin Labs, a startup that helps companies manage and involve their Facebook fans and twitter followers. Napkin Labs launched an updated version of the service today (read, napkin Labs allows brands to better understand their customers (and turn them into colleagues) to launch Gibson flew to New York to get advice on building your business during working hours with a hunch co-founder Chris founder Dixon and first round capital managing partner Josh Kopelman.

Based in Colorado, Gibson alleged that his company may be at a disadvantage, because it is not near large sources of venture capital. He wondered if the move will help. Kopelman don't think and react, saying, "I'm not sure it makes sense to go to be near VC ... I think you tend to move if you find that you're starved for talent, if you can't hire to fill positions at the right level. We financed companies throughout the country. "

Dixon chime in with a tongue-in-cheek response that is often better to abandon sources of venture capital.

After an exchange of Gibson asked Dixon and Kopelman on raising money. The question is the napkin Labs to try to reach the defined indicators to make money, or he doesn't worry about benchmarks and just go for it? Dixon and Kopelman take a similar position, with Kopelman, stating "probably makes sense to have just a handful of conversations, testing the appetite and the reaction of investors." he pointed out that you don't turn, fund-raising and shuts down, but rather is an ongoing process to attract sponsors.

Make sure to watch all the videos for additional ideas, along with previous episodes, the founder of the clock with a picture of Dispatch.io, Schedit and profitably.

Napkin Labs allows you to easily locate information from your fans, followers and customers. Our online platform provides tools for market research, brainstorming and rapid, simple, product evaluation ...

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Josh Kopelman is a venture capitalist and managing partner of first round capital. Previously, Kopelman founded Half.com which was acquired by eBay in 2000 year. He remained with eBay for ... Read More

Chris Dickson currently works as Director and co-founder of hunch. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch. He was previously CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which ...

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August capital, Google Ventures to the $ 18. 5 m in online legal service rocket lawyer

Leena Rao is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school of the Medill School of journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007 she helped lead efforts for advocacy and community relationships Congressman Carloyn Maloney in New York. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003 where it was ... ? Read More

More big money online legal services. After LegalZoom raised $ 66 million from Kleiner Perkins and IVP, competitor rocket lawyer also announced a new round of funding. Start generated 18.5 million in funding led by August capital, Google Ventures and Investor Growth Capital (IGC) participated in the round. This brings total funding to rocket lawyer $ 30 million.

Founded by Charles Moore, the rocket lawyer not only provides legal documents for consumers and small businesses, but also helps users create customized legal documents that can be electronically signed and shares instantly online or downloaded for printing. Moore says that every month, more than 20000 the last wills and 40000 business contracts created. Rocket lawyer offers these documents free of charge.

While users can use rocket lawyer on a one-time basis, many of the users of the site pay for actual legal advice along with access to documents. Users can pay just $ 20 per consultation up to $ 200 to $ 300 per year for the legal service of the call, which is a fraction of the cost that some lawyers (the company currently has thousands of people who pay for annual maintenance).

Moore said that 20 million people will use rocket lawyer by the end of this year. Rocket lawyer and the visitors increased by more than 100%, year over year. The company grows revenue by 10 million dollars annually, but refused to say if the lawyer launch profitable yet.

Taking into account the traction that other players like LegalZoom is seen, it looks like the industry online legal services to the fast-growing market that still has great potential. LegalZoom and looks to IPO next year.

The new funds will be used to continue building the rocket lawyer brand and patent online legal solutions.

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Deck raises $ 19 million to connect main street businesses with capital

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

On deck capital, a platform that connects to the small business capital was raised 19 million dollars of its own in a series c funding round. Run raised $ 15 million in January from SAP Ventures and the recently added another four million dollars from SF Capital Group, a firm of private investment on new emerging issues. Within the framework of the new funding Capital Group President SF Neil Wolfson will be joining on the deck of the Board of Directors. Wolfson joined David Hartwig, Managing Director of SAP that is subscribed to the Council after the investment firm. On deck was raised a total of $ 38 million from investors including the venture partners, first round capital path, better business, RCF enterprises and rural enterprises.

On deck was on a good run recently, as it added two senior leaders for its sales and business development teams, made an appearance at the Forum of the Clinton global initiative in Chicago, has doubled its growth month to acquire customers (up to 4000 customers) and credit applications in 2011 and is now a small business with more than 125 million dollars in capital (average loan size of $ 30 K). You can read our original coverage on deck here.

Created in 2006, the deck uses a combination of aggregation and electronic payment technology to bring an alternative form of assessing the health of small businesses in an attempt to attract capital for small and medium-sized enterprises. While TechCrunch and other technology publications regularly cover the startups raise large rounds of venture capital firms and Angel investors (ahem, like this one), the truth is that there are a huge number of small businesses in the United States, who could not raise money from powerful venture firms.

Avenue to capital for many family shops on main street traditionally apply for a bank loan. Thus not only enterprises that do not have access to venture capital, but he is also a market that has been covered by these traditional bank loans.

On deck considers that individual enterprise the main street of the fundamental problem is not a loan and capital one (as it so often diagnosed) but instead is a matter of time and technology. What does it mean? Small and medium-sized businesses often cannot afford (or lack of experience) to complete a lengthy loan packages, and, on the other hand, banks do not want to allow (the truth inordinately) cost of underwriting of sub $ 250 K, financing of space — not to mention those who, for $ 100 K for which the process is even more tedious.

As a result, banks are forced to rely largely on personal credit score business owner in the assessment of the application for the loan, which is often highly inaccurate reflection of the business. Thus, on deck solves this problem by using the software, which investigates the number of data points, including how many clients business, cash flow, sales and recorded complaints — all in an attempt to find out whether the business is strong enough to repay the loan.

So instead of going to a personal credit score business owner, the company offers what it calls "on the deck of the rating", which is not a business loan is intended to provide creditors with effective measure the creditworthiness of small businesses. Score on deck was developed in partnership with Equifax.

Because the launch platform allows enterprises to create trade profiles, which associates a sources of electronic data, including online banking, accounting and trade processing (and aggregates social, tax and industry data), banks and lenders can facilitate access to the complete financial profile (SMB). Is the rescues of creditors from the hassle of data collection, or relying on personal credit scores for credit assessment.

In view of the fact that currently 5 million enterprises, which have 25 employees or less — a segment of the United States economy is based on 40 per cent of its work — on deck provides an extremely valuable service to facilitate underwriting of these enterprises, and the new infusion of capital to ensure that the launch continues to bring disruptive technologies is not enough (and tangible) market segment.

For more check on the deck of the House here.

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Minus raises $ 1 million from IDG capital to simplify sharing files

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

New York-based file-sharing startup, announced today that it raised $ 1 million in seed funding from IDG Capital Partners, which launch plans to use the expand command, and invest in technology and infrastructure to create a simple and universal experience for their users.

There are many tools out there, you can use file sharing, e-mail, Skype, Dropbox, Box.net, and Ge. tt to WeTransfer. The list is long. We've Sendoid a few months ago, Y Combinator hail, offering solution cool peer-to-peer, browser based. In the light of the crowded space minus the value proposition that it works on almost any device connected to the web and supports almost every type of file you can think of.

With the minus, users can quickly and easily share photos, documents, music, videos, etc., simply by visiting Minus.com and drag the file that they want to move on the home page. After downloading the files, the user receives a shortlink, which they then can participate on Facebook, Twitter, Google, email, chat conversations, and more. Minus is also free to use and does not require users to register to upload and share files.

That being said, while users can take advantage of an unlimited number of uploads and downloads without registration, there is 25 MB per file limit. If you register and sign in, which is free, limit raises of up to 100 MB per file. Minus co-founder and chief operating officer John COE tells me that the launch of scales and gets her feet on the backend, and co-founder and CEO Carl Hu plans to increase the limit even more. (A site launched in private beta in October).

But what is great about the negatives, beyond simple shortlink, Exchange (min. uses) that you can drag the 100 files in the Web interface and let them at the same time to load. Although you may not send huge files to and from the 100 MB limit, you may not Download any lengthy video, the user can allegedly download and share hundreds of images and then give a few hundred people, preview and download links. (Minus also has a feature "download as zip" compression your links for you on the fly. example here.)

XIE told me that, in addition to prioritization of scaling, the team wants to keep less easy, as in the UX and UI, and continue to focus on the sharing aspect of the platform. Because negative cloud-based, registered users, you can create a profile, after they download their images, documents, etc., they've been featured on the minus sign in the same way, Flickr, Dropbox, Scribd, and many others to do so. You can check out an example in the hosted files page here.

And, since the launch, minus some good traction. The platform is currently serving 50 million downloads each month, according to CE and is North of 500 000 monthly active users. What is more, while the minus sign can initiate a crowded space with many ahead of competition, clearly the determination of the command is: originally posted on Min .us domain, the group recently acquired the domain Minus.com for about $ 115.000. So for those who hoped for Google, you'll have to look elsewhere, minus not budging.

And for those curious, that with the launch of cloudy backend: platform built on HTML5 and fully deployed on a stack of Django on Amazon EC2/S3, and now the group is building its own custom CDN solutions for bandwidth. Developers are welcome.

Minus is currently available for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu desktop app, chrome and Firefox extensions, as well as the application chrome and available on mobile for Android. IOS, and Windows Mobile applications currently in beta, with updates coming soon. More about applications here.

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