Silicon Alley Insider Archive

Tonight at the NY Tech meeting, Kevin Ryan presented the set of companies he manages under the AlleyCorp brand. The companies aren’t investors, instead they come up with the ideas themselves and build the companies from scratched. Kevin received a bonus two minutes — pretty interesting if you ask me. I wonder how many startups would have loved an extra two minutes during their demo?

They have raised $40 million for the six companies but he didn’t provide a breakdown.

Here are the comments that Kevin noted for each of the six companies:

• Silicon Alley Insider – already beating PaidContent in pageviews (here’s their Meetup demo)
• ClusterStock – new site launching soon – looks like this is a stock site that Blodget is editing.
• Gilt Groupe – private auction sales – they sell out daily (here’s their Meetup demo)
• ShopWiki – they have 500k stores where shopping.com has only a few thousand stores
• Panther Express – CDN (content delivery network) which Ryan says powers most of the other presenters of the evening
• Music Nation – talent competitions online in the U.S., U.K and France – they are also signing artists now to the Music Nation label
• 10gen – cloud computing company – Silicon Alley Insider is on the 10gen network

Here’s Kevin Ryan’s presentation of the Alley Corp companies:

Before I rip, I’d like to say that the growth that Silicon Alley Inisder (SAI) has seen since their launch is amazing and eye-popping. In less than a year they have already pushed into the Technorati top 50 blogs online and their traffic growth has been spectacular. In a chat with Federated Media VP Neil Chase, he called the blog an, "amazing story." Hats off to them!

Now let’s get down to this discussion about their latest list. They are out today with their, "SAI 25: The World’s Most Valuable Digital Startups." Clearly this is a linkbait list and it’s worked. Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch takes a look at the valuations and calls the list a "guessing game." Erick suggests that the list is based on the top 25 private Web companies. Perhaps that would have been a better name for the list but clearly wouldn’t be as sexy as to rip off the "startup" moniker.

I asked the CN readers back in January how they define the term "startup" and most seemed to suggest it was based on time, funding, ipo, etc. But c’mon Blodget, Kafka, Frommer, is Facebook really still a startup? Funding in the $300 million range, hundreds of employees, worldwide offices and they are a startup?

I’ve read all the pages on the site (your welcome Sun) and I don’t see any definition of startup. It’d be great to learn how you decided who to list and who got left off. Even at the most basic definition, once you raise a considerable amount of funding, startup no longer applies.

Here are just a few of the hundreds of real startups here in NYC alone: BricaBox, BeenVerified, UpNext, Hakia, Aviary, KickApps, Magnify.net, Snooth, Blip and Mogulus.

Other notes:

• I like how Powerset made it into the Top 50 — sans the TC pimpings, no one would even know about this un-launched startup.
• Mahalo at $150 mil? Where’s the calculation for this?
• Isn’t TheLadders a SAI company? Live 4 years, hundreds of employees, etc.?
• No eBuddy, Meebo, Zoho, Prosper, PlentyofFish, CafeMom? I could go on for hours…

It is good to see some non-U.S. companies on the list and I applaud your efforts to try to determine valuations on companies where English isn’t the first language. Overall though, I am disappointed and was looking forward to this list to see what the SAI team came up with. Perhaps CN will need to put together a call for the top 25 "real" startups.

The new "Julie" of ConceptShare, Will Pate sent over some info about their new contest today. The contest is to design a tshirt for ConceptShare to use as a promotional giveaway (I am guessing at events, meetups, etc.). Why is this a brilliant move? Simple, it gets people using ConceptShare. And not just anybody, but part of their target audience — designers.

While this tactic won’t work for every Web app, it is something for you to consider as you promote your own Web app – "How can we leverage our platform to market our platform?"

Check out their contest blog post and entry details for more information. Also check out our audio interview with the ConceptShare founders earlier in the year.

Check out the video below (rss come inside) of the presentation by Kevin Ryan and Henry Blodget about Silicon Alley Insider. Silicon Alley Insider is a blog that initially covered NYC topics but they have removed the NYC branding and now cover large companies instead.

The service is now known as Business Insider.