Startups Unplugged

Category: startup programs

A collection of posts about startup programs and what we can learn from them.

  • You’re So Vain

    While we talk about lean startup and vanity metrics we also often send conflicting signals. Here are some examples that startup ecosystems create or enable. From what I’ve seen, vanity is the major culprit.

    The Events Problem

    Speaker Events. You don’t get any closer to your goal by going to hear a speaker, famous or not. Is this a good use of your time? Will there be other benefits to going that make it worth not working for a couple hours? Or do you feel good about being in the crowd and getting a beer afterward. (Yes, I’ve spoken at lots of events.)

    Demo Days. I’ve heard from a few startups that are pressured to demo something they’ve already determined has no future, but which looks good in front of an audience. This is the vanity demo day. Why? It’s there to make the program look good by making the audience feel that things have gone according to plan instead of owning up to the fact that many (most?) startups change direction. Presenting something that you know you’re not going to continue building is a waste of everyone’s time. I’ve worked with startups who have changed course right before their demo days and I’m fine with that… (I’ve run a bunch of demo days and have stayed away from the above problems but have heard it elsewhere.)

    Pitch Events. This is where a group of selected startups pitch to a panel of judges, after which one is declared the “winner.” There may or may not be a prize. That’s the format that I’ve seen time and again. The problem is, the judges are not given any opportunity to really evaluate the companies and perhaps are not the best ways of evaluating startups at all. (Would you want to be evaluated based solely on five minutes talking onstage?) The image that I like to show potential startups applying to these events: the performing seal. Does a startup really “win” an event or is the real winner the organizer of the pitch event? (I’ve judged at a bunch of pitch events.)

    The Celebrity Mentor Problem

    A very small number of famous mentors get a lot of attention, but realistically do not have the time or interest to advise every startup out there. Instead of looking to famous startup mentors for everything (a vanity metric in itself), what about those unheard of mentors who have deep industry knowledge in your field? Those who have worked with the same customers and markets that you are building for today? They might speak a different language than the startup people, but they also might know more about the problems you’re facing. Seek them out instead of going down the popular path.

    The Too Much Uneeded Information Problem

    Take the number of articles startup people read about their target market and customers and divide that by the number of “startup” themed posts they read in tech publications. Cry when the ratio is lower than three.

    The Sexiness Problem

    Yes, there is a problem with sexiness in startups. This happens when people feel better about repeating the phrase “I’m in a startup,” than they do about building something people want. This is a hard one to call out because sometimes the good feeling that comes from being in a startup is all people have to hold on to.

    Startups can be sexy — geek sexy. By geek sexy I mean that there is no actual sex, but we still feel really good about ourselves.

    Since you’re going to be serving your target customers and market for years, make sure that you love it. Following trends that show up in the popular press or investment community will leave you looking bored geek sexy.

    Worrying About Your City’s Place On A “Top Startup Location” List

    I spent a year in Hong Kong running AcceleratorHK and Startups Unplugged and saw the city get listed as the number one tech hub to watch. People celebrated. I also saw the city not get mentioned on a bunch of other top startup locations. People complained. Neither of these things matter much. Build helpful, supportive communities and you’ll get the recognition you deserve.

    Tech Ecosystem, Heal Thyself

    Different parts of the tech ecosystem can unwittingly be like doctors who advise low sugar intake and then are seen ripping open a bag of Cadbury Creme Eggs on the walk to the car. We preach lean startup but then make sure that startups are fed a high sugar diet of tech news, demo days, events and lists of celebrity mentors…

    Should this matter? Candy producers don’t set aside part of their profits to treat diabetes. So why should startup communities care about the misinformation of early-stage startups?

    I think it’s because these same communities’ reasons for being is to help. They exist because at heart, startup culture in most parts of the world is collaborative. People want successes. They want examples that go on to become bigger supporters of the rest of the community.

    So focus on the important. Are you learning? Are you growing? When you determine you need to change your business model, do you do it or stay attached to the original idea you dreamed up in the shower? How much time do you spend working on your startup and how much attending / reading / worrying about these other things?

    If you liked this post, you’ll love my book Startup Sacrilege.

  • When Does a Startup Accelerator Succeed?

    There’s a lot written about startup accelerators. At least, there’s a lot written by outside casual observers; very little is written about them from the inside. There are reasons for that. In my experience running an accelerator, I wouldn’t share much about the startups until after demo day (more about why in a later post).

    Before we go any further, let’s define “startup accelerator” as a program designed to speed up the development of a new business (usually tech), accepting applicants usually of early-stage companies for a defined length of time and granting a seed investment in exchange for equity. Accelerators usually also include mentorship from an internal team and external subject matter experts and concludes with a demo day where the companies show what they have built and discuss their future plans. If the startups want, additional funding is often planned to be raised at or after demo day.

    Major themes for the last couple years are that there are too many accelerators and that they don’t produce results.

    This begs the question “What makes a successful accelerator?”

    Success factors usually mentioned for accelerators.

    There are many different types of accelerator programs. They are usually measured the same way, but in reality many of them have different goals and have different factors of success. But the two most common ways accelerators are measured are:

    1. Funding raised by, or shortly after, demo day. This is a problematic measurement, especially for programs that operate where there are small local investment communities or where they focus on very early stage startups. I’ve also seen startups who are not even looking for funding post demo day. When did amount of money raised become a measurement of success for a startup?
    2. Survival rate after demo day. The question is who reports these numbers and where do they get the data. It is very easy for a startup to appear live when the founders have given up even if it hasn’t closed down. Plus, almost no one does the work to check on the numbers. For example, my old review of TechStars’ original published success rates (which seemed amazingly high when they first published them in late 2011) led me to lots of “zombie startups”. And those were just the ones I found. The great thing is that TechStars periodically updates their data. Now that I revisited that old post and compared it to TechStar’s results page, most of the startups that I listed as possible zombies on my old blog post are now marked as failed. At a minimum, the results from the most recent one year of their startups should be removed from the statistics. Those startups haven’t yet had time to fail or succeed. From the 25 startups I had in my first year running an accelerator and bootcamp, only one shut down, so that means my “success” rate is 96% if I measure myself the same way. That’s not a helpful way to think about a success metric.

    These factors have something in common — they are seemingly easy to measure so they become the standard of measurement. But they don’t really tell us what’s most meaningful.

    Instead, the focus should be some other qualities that are harder to measure

    Time and money saved not building something no one wants, but which would have kept the would-be entrepreneurs busy for months or years. I’ve seen a lot of startups that are really just a couple of guys with a hobby and a devotion to writing code to serve that hobby. How much do the companies at start point develop and where are they by end point? How far did people get over the program?

    Strength and involvement of the mentors. Are the mentors celebrity mentors, too busy to take time with the startups or are they perhaps not famous but dedicated to the success of the startups?

    Involvement of the accelerator with the startups after the program ends. Are there follow-ups? What’s the activity of the alumni network? What do the entrepreneurs go on to do five or ten years later?

    The accelerator’s success exiting from portfolio companies years later. Again, hard to measure because of the time lag and since the exit numbers are typically private.

    So, leave all that aside and decide what accelerator, if any, works best for you.

    Update to the above post…

    Rereading this post after years, I notice the following:
    – I have given up on using “accelerator” and “incubator” as distinct descriptors. The reasons are there has been extensive change in the way these programs work, at least at the edges (the mainstream is often still similar) and in general few people ever knew the difference between the two terms.

  • Four simple things that make a better accelerator experience

    With a growing number of startup accelerators, bootcamps and incubators out there, here are some tips for having a good experience once you’re in a program. This comes from running two startup accelerators (three-month full-time programs) and three bootcamps (three-month part-time programs).

    Be Coachable. Disagreeing with feedback is fine and necessary at times but be open to new ideas and ways of operating. There’s no point to participate in a program if you’re not willing to try something new.

    Be Social. There are a few types of being social. One is getting to know the other startups in the program, helping each other out,  going out for drinks or dinner. Too much of that and you wake up to find you didn’t get enough work done. Not enough and you leave without getting to know new people who you might work with in the future and without getting their assistance during the program. Find the balance that works for you.

    Don’t Disappear. I’ve seen startups withhold news that is obviously bad but necessary to share, such as the loss of a co-founder or issues with money. Disappearing means that we can’t help — because we don’t know.

    Don’t Lose Momentum. After the program, no matter how disciplined you are you will probably lose momentum. We try to keep things going by continuing to talk to the startups afterwards, but it doesn’t compare to being in the thick of things during the program. Create habits that will help you continue after the program ends, such as keeping a regular group meeting and using mentors’ and advisors’ expectations to keep the pressure on.

  • How I Tried To Be a Better Startup Weekend Judge

    [I originally wrote this piece in early 2013. I just revisited it again in March 2018. I hope you enjoy it.]

    Working with many startups, I get to see how lots of people test ideas and build their startups. I also get to see how lots of people want to rush off and build in the beginning, before they know whether their ideas are any good. I’ve also seen a condensed version of this in Startup Weekend. But the truth is, even though I’ve mentored at three Startup Weekends (New York, Hong Kong and Shenzhen) and given pre-Startup Weekend talks, I’ve never been a participant in the event. And now I was to judge at the next Startup Weekend…

    So I did the only logical thing in this situation.

    I decided to hold my own one-person Startup Weekend to see what it was like. I’ll sum up the experience for you.

    It sucked. But I understand even more about why people have such difficulty doing well in these situations.

    I had a few rules for how I would participate in this self-made Startup Weekend.

    First, I would keep track of how I felt during the two days and would do more of what was enjoyable and less of what was not (sometimes bad choices that I thought participants would be likely to make). I wouldn’t ask for help with the explanation that I’m doing a test, since I think most Startup Weekend participants can’t (or shouldn’t) just ask their friends when they need customer interview subjects and instead should go out and try to find the right people to interview. I’d also have to be developer, designer and business guy without extra help (this one was more about not wanting to drag people in on a holiday weekend). Also, I couldn’t work myself like a real Startup Weekend, since, well, I had other things to do on the weekend. So, overall, this was going to be Startup Weekend-lite, but crazy also.

    In terms of being a “good” participant, I was terrible. That was clear from the start. What happens when you let yourself choose “fun” during a competitive learning process is poor results. I felt like building and wanted to postpone talking to people. This was made even more difficult for a few reasons.

    1. I had no team. That made a big difference. So much of the overall impact of the event comes from other people in attendance. Now, as a one-person experimental startup, I had to act all alone. And, I had no one there to encourage me to put the hours in.
    2. I had no other guidance along the way. This actually makes quite a bit of difference. Just being able to talk with someone else about your ideas keeps you from wasting time.
    3. It poured that weekend. As I looked at the rain streaming down outside, I have to admit I was a little relieved that the weather gave me an excuse not to go out and interview people.

    The service I was building was to help people practice their pitches — something I could have found lots of customers for at a Startup Weekend, but not during a normal weekend, especially a holiday weekend. Eleven people I contacted to interview were either unreachable or pushed me off until the following week. According to my rules, I didn’t try to explain that I was working on a self-imposed artificial deadline. Instead, I fell on the unspoken evil of Startup Weekend attendees — the online survey. How else was I to get data so quickly? I received five responses to the survey in the time that I could officially use them (other responses came in afterward).

    Further, I was trying to do all of that while also registering a domain (pitchreviewer.com), setting up hosting, email (incorrect MX records led to a couple hours delay), designing a new site and building the two services I was testing. Since I thought that early-stage startups are usually terrible at pitching themselves, I built a service to solve that. The free service I tested was a phone number to call to hear a list of questions you might get when presenting your pitch. The paid service was a grade of you pitching on video and recommendations for how to improve. I built a basic Twilio app for the first (call a phone number and hear questions like “What problem are you solving?” and “How have you tested this idea?”) and relied on PayPal and email for the second.

    None of this mattered since I felt uncomfortable about blasting out this fake startup to my contacts. I used a coupon for online ads instead. In the one and a half days I had, I managed to attract one person, I think by accident, to the site. This one person tried neither service.

    As Reid Hoffman said, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” I was embarrassed but also waited too long for things that didn’t matter. While I spent time designing buttons for the new site (perhaps the most fun of the process) I scrapped all but one of them when I simplified the design.

    I also couldn’t truly fulfill the requirement to do much customer development and test the business model (which I could explain, but had no data for since no one chose between the services).

    So, suggestions for you include:

    • Form a balanced team,
    • Get out of the building and interview potential customers either in-person or online as soon as possible (or set up a schedule starting Friday night of Startup Weekend, at the latest), Start testing as soon as possible — which is probably sooner than you think,
    • Remind yourself of the business model, customer development and execution criteria every few hours so you do what has value. Have one person ask “what are we trying to learn and how could we test it faster” every time there’s a new feature suggested,
    • Talk to mentors and other teams and get to know people you might work with after the weekend,
    • Check out other resources before you begin, such as this Startup Weekend Toolkit.

    Do all of that and I won’t be too hard on you as a judge.

    List of tools and services I used: PHP, CSS, Adobe Illustrator, WordPress, HostGator, GoDaddy, RetailMeNot (for coupons), Bing Ads, Google Analytics, PayPal, Twilio. Also, three glasses of a bottle of Scotch from Steve Messina and a remaining 1/2 bottle of wine from Jeffrey Broer.

  • The Two Sides of Demo Day You Might Never See

    I’ve run three different startup accelerator programs. Two of them ran demo days, but the one I currently run does not. For an explanation of why, see this post on side effects.

    Demo days can be good or bad depending on your goals and the people involved.

    I thought that this would be a good time to talk about the action takes place before and after demo day. As with many things in life, the real story is not where the attention is. There are two sides to any demo day that you might never see if you don’t know what to look for.

    The Side Before Demo Day

    Before a demo day there are at minimum months of work that most people never see. Some of this work might take place years earlier when the entrepreneurs gained skills and an outlook that led them to the problem they chose. Months or years spent putting together a team, talking to customers and understanding the market… If the startups participated in an accelerator program, typically being three months in length, they were probably also guided with workshops, interviewing customers, meeting other entrepreneurs and investors and lots of presentation practice.

    Then it all comes down to a few minutes at the front of a room.

    Before running the Hong Kong Lean Startup Bootcamp and AcceleratorHK years ago, I visited programs around the world. I visited as a mentor, spoke to participants, alumni and people who ran the programs. Most of the time I saw a lot of value generated.  I also saw a few cases of when there were misaligned incentives between the participants and the programs. The worst of these being when startups who were “behind” in their three-month growth sprint were encouraged to put on a good show at the expense of their true direction. I’ll never be involved in a program that does that. Even more recently, in the Laudato Si Challenge in Rome and the Incubator at USC, I keep learning new ways programs run and changing the model based on who is involved. This constant change is crucial.

    The Side After Demo Day

    It’s so easy to look at demo day as the end goal. For any startup presenting at a demo day, their work is just beginning. However, after the presentations and party, it’s easy to walk away thinking that the goal of demo day… is demo day. But really, if your company didn’t raise money as a result, was there another strong purpose for spending so much time on this one short presentation? (Note: I don’t believe that there is an inherent good to this type of stylized presentation prep.)

    Post-demo day memories can be short. I remember some of the first demos I saw in New York years ago, before I built my first startup. I saw some great presentations, with speakers and visuals I still remember. Checking my notes a year later I looked up these same startups and what did I find? Some successes but also lots of complete changes of direction, “domain for sale,” and blogs not updated for a year. Change, exhaustion and disappearance are expected parts of a creative process.

    Demo day is just the beginning of a long process.

    Why do demo days exist?

    With the typical startup program lasting only three months, holding a demo day at the end can take away valuable work time.

    Sometimes programs need demo days as a way to stay focused. We need them as a way to learn how to present to an audience. The startups have worked hard and have something to show for it. Demo days are a forum to meet their communities and to talk publicly, often for the first time, about their work.

    And we need demo days as a way to celebrate.

    But evaluating startups only by their demo day is like evaluating people by what they did on their first birthday.

    Keep working, guys! We’re proud of you.

  • Startup Weekend Toolkit

    Here’s a Startup Weekend Toolkit I put together after mentoring and judging. It’s a lot of info, so it’s best to read this before you go since you will be busy enough (and sleep deprived) during the weekend, but these resources will save you lots of pain.

    Startup Weekend isn’t a hackathon or a business plan competition… So work on these activities instead:

    1. Customer Development. “Get out of the building” and talk to people. Learn from them. What hypotheses do you want to test? Do your potential customers support and reinforce your assumptions? What qualifies success or failure?

    2. Business Model. Express what you learned in customer discovery: Who is your customer? What is your core value proposition? What are your key activities? What are your revenue streams? What is your cost structure? Who/what are your key partners/resources? What are your distribution channels? What is your roll-out strategy?

    3. Execution. What did your team build during the weekend?

    4. Your presentation. Not being able to express what you did is the unspoken failure point of many teams. Start to practice on Saturday, not Sunday.

    Are you really building an MVP?

    Working with lots of startups, the most common error I see people who think they are working on an MVP is that they do not understand what an MVP is. An MVP is focused on getting validated learning. Write down your hypothesis and what will qualify as success or failure for you. See more about that below. Otherwise, how do you know if you’re learning anything?

    A sample hypothesis format:
    I believe that [customer segment] has [problem / need] and [a specific number / percentage of them] will do [action / use this solution].

    Hypothesis Formation to guide you as you build an MVP and then collect data. Read this brief article for guidelines.
    Questions to consider: What are your riskiest assumptions? What MVP will enable you to test your riskiest assumptions? What will you accept as validation that you are solving your customers’ problem?

    MVP case studies:
    Think about how Dropbox, Aardvark, The Ladders etc tested their services before building them out.

    Some techniques to build an MVP:
    – Landing Page — put up a landing page that leads the visitor to believe that the product has been built out. Then test user actions — do they try to sign up, do they try to buy, etc;
    – Mockups / Wireframing — these can be on paper, using tools as simple as powerpoint (where I like to hyperlink fields on the page and connect them to other pages to make it feel like a website), or more sophisticated tools like InvisionApp or Balsamiq. Give the user the feeling of using your product before you write any code;
    – Video — make a video to demonstrate what your service does before you build it. This could be as simple as text or basic images or screenshots with a voice-over;
    – “Concierge” — use humans to emulate what the software would do later on, if you were to build it;
    – Prototype — actually build a working version.
    – “Parasite” — this is the name I use for riding on top of another network (Twitter, FB, Skype) and using the users there as test subjects rather than trying to drive new users to your new service.

    Doing Customer Discovery Interviews:

    1) Ask about situations in which potential customers might be aware of the problem you’re trying to solve and then ask questions around that. This means that if you’re trying to solve the problem of finding cheap vacation travel packages, I’d ask “Do you like traveling?” and ask them to talk about that, instead of directly asking “Do you want to find cheap flights for your vacations?” (which is a question that forces them to say “yes, of course” — not that helpful to you).
    2) How do you solve this problem currently? or What do you do to make it less painful? In the above example, they might have signed up for notifications for cheap flights from online discount travel agencies. This will tell you about the competitors who are already involved in solving this problem. Not just the existing business competitors, but also ways that people deal with this problem by themselves.
    3) Can you describe this problem to me in your own words? They may have already told you about this without you having to ask them. Directly asking this also only works if you didn’t already force the issue by asking them if they have the problem. Otherwise they’ll just repeat what you asked them already. This may also give you keywords to put on your landing page and in ads.
    4) Are there other solutions out there that you’ve tried in the past? This will make you aware of competitors or other services addressing similar problems.
    5) What do you wish you could do to solve this problem (even if it isn’t practical)? This can be really powerful, especially if you find out that something they think is not practical is now practical for you.

    Cool things you could show:

    • Number of people you spoke to;
    • What you learned that was unexpected;
    • Actual purchase orders;
    • How you hacked the system to get it all done.


    Watch out for these things. I made this list by surveying past participants:

    • Mentor whiplash (getting pulled in different directions by different mentors);
    • Replacing customer interviews with online surveys (because you run out of time or are too hesitant to find interview subjects);
    • Hesitating to “get out of the building;”
    • Underestimating the time it takes to talk to people;
    • Building too much, testing the problem too little;
    • Not taking risks, not being creative;
    • Not practicing the pitch enough;
    • Thinking too much about the judging;
    • Team fighting, worrying about IP protection, getting distracted, no team balance, team too large.


    Practice your pitch. Pitch structure ideas:

    • Introduce yourself and team;
    • Introduce the problem, Show your solution;
    • Talk about how you got there: Customer Discovery work you did, your Business Model.

    And for what happened when I tried to run my own one-person Startup Weekend before I was a judge for the first time, read this.

  • Launching AcceleratorHK

    Today is the first day of AcceleratorHK, Hong Kong’s first startup accelerator. I’m happy to be the Director of the program.

    The process of getting this off the ground was straightforward but took a while:
    – Lots of discussions with people in HK’s tech community, starting December 2011
    – Lots of discussions with other accelerator programs, throughout the US, Asia/Pacific and Europe. We’ve managed to take some best practices while also building something that works in Hong Kong
    – Running Startup Bootcamp, which allowed me to test the format and content. I will continue to run Startup Bootcamp. There are seven startups in the current cohort
    – Meeting many people with similar goals for Hong Kong’s growth, including our mentors, and of course, Steve Forte, CSO at Telerik. That’s where things really moved forward

    Thanks to all who have supported these programs. I’ll blog regularly here.

  • Simplicity

    I saw two useful and simple new services yesterday: Delight.io (by Thomas Pun, who I know) and PopTip.com (from a new TechStars grad). Delight.io allows developers to add a line of code to their iOS app in order to see how users interact with the apps. PopTip allows any Twitter user to run a poll within their Twitter account.

    What struck me about both of these services is how they have simplicity built in for the user. Delight.io users only need to add one line of code to their app. PopTip users can run their polls right within Twitter, which gets respondents to promote the poll itself. I’d like to know how much went into building the services themselves.

    Looking forward to using them both in the future.

  • Famous teacher or good teacher

    Years ago, when I was at Columbia, I heard about an interesting-sounding course taught by a Nobel Laureate. Competition to get in the course was tough so I decided to sit in on a class first (always a good idea).

    What I found astonished me.

    The class was half full with most of the attending students distracted by email and IMing. The Laureate could barely string two sentences together. Discussion was almost non-existent.

    Don’t bid for classes like that.

    Sure, there are times to go hear a famous speaker. But when it comes to wanting to learn something and change the way you operate — go to a good teacher. I’ve been lucky to have a few.

    I work at being a good teacher myself. Here are a few things I do:

    • Before each Startups Unplugged course begins I have participants send me detail on themselves and what they’re working on. Then I spend time reading this info and learning about their markets.
    • I ask for feedback regularly, either verbally or in written form. I do use the feedback to make changes to the course but I don’t change everything I hear about, since I still do have a pretty strong vision for what I need to include in Startups Unplugged. But it’s good to know what people think.
    • I change my teaching style and content based on needs of people in the course. (One of the toughest comments I received early on led to what has become my standard opening day intro lecture.)
    • I’m always talking to people about what I’m doing and why.

    It’s starting to pay off. Skillshare made me a “Skillshare Master Teacher” recently after positive comments from people who took my course. Several of the startups who’ve taken Startups Unplugged have stayed in touch and a few have even taken the course twice.

    I’ve got a ways to go, but I’m always trying to improve.

  • Are the TechStars Results accurate?

    I have total respect for TechStars and what I know about it tells me it’s a great program.

    So when I recently saw TechStars’ results page with a 80% success rate I had to learn more. I’m always very interested in “success/failure” at startups so I looked through their list of previous classes, going back to when they started in 2007. First thing I noticed was that the list might be out of date (ToVieFor from the most recent class is still shown as active).

    First a word on how I gathered the data.
    TechStars lists company status as either Active, Failed, or Acquired. But after I started to look, I saw a lot of companies that were listed as Active, but didn’t seem to be so. So I started a 4th category called “Inactive” and began to look at the list.

    Since I didn’t have any inside info and company founders don’t take kindly to strangers emailing and asking “hey, you still doing this startup or what?” I used publicly available information. I marked a company as inactive if they shared a couple of these traits: blog hasn’t been updated for over 1 year (many were more than 2 years old), has a Twitter account but no activity, has a Facebook account but no activity, the site doesn’t exist anymore (that was the easy one), the site is still a landing page just collecting emails even after more than a year.

    I also only looked at the first five TechStars classes, since any newer company hasn’t had a real opportunity to succeed or fail yet.

    I’m probably not totally accurate in the list, so take it as a list of who “appears” to be Inactive based on information online.

    This is TechStars data for the first five classes.

    And when I add the 9 companies (listed at bottom) that appear to not be Active, I get the results below.

    This takes the TechStars from an Active + Acquired average of 84% for those classes down to 66%. If you look only at Active companies, then it goes from 67% down to 49%.

    If anyone has better data, contact me and I’ll be happy to update this. To make it easier for you to make corrections, these are the 9 extra companies that seemed to be inactive: J Squared Media, BuyPlayWin, Peoples Software Company, LangoLab, TempMine, Mailana, Rezora, Monkey Analytics, TutorialTab, Sparkcloud. (Sorry for any mistakes.)

    I wrote this to learn about startup longevity rates, not to upset anyone. And I know that sometimes startups look inactive but there are other things going on.

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