I Am Adam Smith

ChipIn: A successful Hawiian Online Startup

ChipIn is a paypal based service to help people share costs for things. They're based in Manoa valley on Oahu. Inspires me that you can do a successful startup in Hawaii! I'm proud to be starting TripInvite here, and want to help build the startup community here (as well as a world-class group travel site).

Hawaii Business Magazine had a good article about them and their startup experience.

Part 1 of the story

Part 2

Real costs for one startup

Guy Kawasaki posts some numbers on what it costs his buddies' at Redfin to run their startup. It shows their predictions, and then the realities. I love data points like these....

SharePoint Hosting SaaS

Phase2 International launched its SaaS site featuring Hosted SharePoint. While still in beta, all the SaaS applications including SharePoint, CRM, MS Project, Exchange, and a homegrown DWG manager called ShareCAD for AutoCAD are available.

The site is being redesigned by a top-tier London based firm, and will officially launch in Mid-November.

I'll be tracking developments at the official Phase2 blog (when its up), and SharePoint related info at my SharePoint blogspot account.

The Silk Road Newsletter by Piper Jaffray

Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray writes a weekly newsletter, The Silk Road, on ecommerce companies. There's good coverage of the online travel industry here.

I've also started reading The Alarm Clock. Bunch of guys who used to work for Red Herring. They profile a startup company each week. They've cover a lot of ecommerce and social networking firms.

Kayak.com Secures $7 million Series B round

Buisnesswire reports that

NORWALK, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 21, 2004--Kayak.com, a website that helps consumers get comprehensive and objective travel information, today announced the completion of a $7 million Series B financing round led by Sequoia Capital, a California-based venture capital firm. Kayak.com is only the third East Coast company Sequoia Capital has funded in the last two years.

New Rule Requires Expensing of Stock Options

from the Mercury News

Accounting rule makers handed down long-awaited final guidelines Thursday that will force companies to deduct the value of billions of dollars of employee stock options from reported profits starting in mid-2005.

The change, which is intended to give investors a more accurate picture of companies' compensation costs, is expected to reshape how workers are paid in Silicon Valley and the technology industry.

From a public policy perspective, I certainly agree with this decision. Options are a liability, albeit a hard one to value, that a company has. This should be integrated into formal accounting and should be deducted from profits.

I understand that it will be difficult to value the options - as many tech companies are hit or miss propositions and its hard to predict their value when the options actually vest. But there are lots of cases in accounting where people have to value imprecise and illiquid asset.

We haven't dealt with options yet at my firm TripInvite yet, so I don't have an informed opinion yet from the perpective of a tech startup.

Free Conference Call Service

FreeConferenceCall.com offers.... you guessed it. Why not use this? They give you an access number and passcode to have people dial into. Up to 90 some participants.

Good tool for the broke startup company.

Andy Sack

Got tipped off to the blog of Andy Sack today. Former Sloany, founded and sold Firefox and abuzz, among other hightech startups. Now runs Instinct Patners

About Instinct (They invested in Judy's Book):

Instinct Partners is a private partnership that creates and operates companies that tap the ubiquity and everyday utility of the Internet.

We use our own capital and expertise to prototype business concepts that are likely to generate significant positive cash flows within 12 to 24 months.

By risking our time and capital in the earliest phases of company formation, we expect to create a portfolio of companies that generates excess returns both for the partnership and for our later-stage corporate and venture capital partners.