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Recently, Business 2.0 reported that "a typical VC-funded startup in the late 1990s needed roughly $10 million to carry a company from business plan to product launch. Today that cost has been reduced to just $4 million - and in many cases way, way less. The barriers to entry have never been lower."
So now is a great time to get serious about your brainchild and join us for the Churchill Club's annual look at what it takes to build a successful startup. Moderated by one of the Club's favorite moderators - the provocative and entertaining Guy Kawasaki - this panel of technology's leading innovators will discuss and debate the challenges and critical success factors to landing funding, proving long-term viability to customers, building a team, and leading a startup to the promised land. What lessons have been learned from the past? What advice do they have for future entrepreneurs?
PNN, the Personal News Network, was started and recently launched by Lauren Elliott, software author well known for his 'Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego' software series. PNN matches a familiar, simple, desktop interface to all the strengths of the latest web technology to bring personal web publishing to the mainstream home and family market. PNN is a success story of the low financial barriers to launch.
Before co-founding JotSpot (the first application-wiki company and included on Business 2.0's Next Net 25 list), Joe Kraus' entrepreneurial life began in 1993 when he convinced five friends to pass up blue chip job offers to start a business of their own, Excite, Inc. Joe was also the co-founder of Digitalconsumer.org and has spent many years as an angel investor.
Reid Hoffman is much sought after for his Web 2.0 startup insights and advice. In addition to co-founding and leading LinkedIn, he has made angel investments in Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Technorati, and Wink. He serves on the Board of Directors of SixApart and Mozilla Corp. Prior to founding LinkedIn, he served as Executive Vice President of PayPal.
Jajah was co-founded in 2005 by Daniel Mattes. Jajah, named as one of Red Herring's Top 100 Companies in North America, is the Internet phone service that enables you to use any phone to call any phone without installing any software or being connected to the computer once the call is initiated.
Photobucket, the web's most popular photo-sharing site, started as co-founded and CEO Alex Welsh's hobby. In 2003 as a software engineer at Level 3 Communications, he wrote a program to create a centralized "hub" to store and publish images making it easier to swap photos. Today the site has more than 19 million users with a 44% market share.
Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Forbes.com. Previously he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer where he was one of the individuals responsible for the success of the Macintosh computer. He is the author of eight books including "The Art of the Start", a must read for anyone who wants to start a business.
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