Reuters recently announced its Silicon Valley Six, who are considered the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. The selection is described as follows:
Here are the 4 hot startups, along with their hot startup jobs, on VentureLoop:
We made an interesting observation late Wednesday night. As our monthly metrics reports began streaming to our venture capital clients, we noticed that for the first time in several months more than half of our VC firm’s portfolio companies added more jobs than they removed for the month. As venture-backed startups have cut back in these tough economic times, they have been pulling job openings from their career sites. While new jobs are still added each month, the number of jobs eliminated has been significantly higher. So while a newly funded startup might list 5 new job openings, 3 other venture-backed firms might eliminate 10 previously posted jobs. But not in July. Is this s sign of hope in the job market?
Historically startups and early stage companies tend to begin hiring sooner than the bigger public companies as economic times improve. They have more flexibility and can commit to headcount without the market pressures that publicly traded companies feel. Could this be a sign of better things to come? We don’t know, but it was at least a refreshing observation. We’ll keep you posted on any other positive signs and check in next month to determine if this was an anomoly or the beginning of a trend.
TheFunded, a website that rates VC firms and their partners, has published a new list of top rated venture capital partners. Four of the top ten VC partners work for VentureLoop clients.
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MuleSource
Founded: 2006
Location: San Francisco, CA
Current Employees: 50 (30 in SF)
Funding: $16.5M
VCs: Hummer Winblad, Morgenthaler, Lightspeed
Overview
MuleSource is the leading provider of open source service oriented architecture
(SOA)
infrastructure software. Founded by the creators of the Mule project, the
world’s most
reliable and widely used open source enterprise service bus (ESB) and
integration
platform, MuleSource delivers enterprise-class software, support, and services
to the
thousands of organizations that have downloaded the open source project
worldwide.
Competition
They are the leading opensource player. Main competition is from
proprietary incumbent players and large software companies.
Users
Developers and architects in the IT group of a company. Variety of
industries. Don’t just focus on Fortune 500’s of the world.
Effectively serve the smaller and mid-market companies.
Sales
Business model comes from subscriptions that include enterprise class version
of the software and additional tooling and support. Consulting services
on top of that. Sales team with inside/outside model. Got a start
in financial services, but very diverse. Over 80% of deployments are
considered mission critical.
Working environment
Startup culture. Passionate group of employees. Believe in the
opensource model. Not internally competitive. International feel with
people contributing from all over the world. Offices in 9 countries.
Hot Job
All sales positions. Get
over 1,000 leads each month. Infrastructure software experience
helpful. Believe they will be the winner in the SOA space.
Weatherbill
Founded: 2007
Location: San Francisco, CA and Georgetown, MA
Current Employees: ?
Funding: $12.5M, $16.8M including angel funding
VCs: Index Ventures, NEA
Overview
WeatherBill, Inc. (www.weatherbill.com)
provides the only online service that allows businesses to protect revenue and
control costs from bad weather. Founded by CEO David Friedberg and CTO Siraj
Khaliq, former Googlers, WeatherBill is funded by New Enterprise Associates and
Index Ventures and backed by Nephila Capital. Essentially, Weatherbill
allows users to insure against bad weather for business or events.
"WeatherBill is the first to offer safe and effective weather coverage
online. There is no unnecessary paperwork, no claims process, no proof-of-loss
and no waiting for payment. WeatherBill enables customers to customize, price
and buy weather coverage online in minutes, and pays automatically when bad
weather occurs."
Users
Wide variety of industries. Energy companies, agriculture, and even car
wash owners and hair salons.
Sales
Keep premium if the weather outcome doesn’t happen. Already making money
with a real product and real customers.
Working environment
Outgoing, fun, ambitious crowd of people. Well-rounded engineers.
Hot Job
Javascript Engineer
Widgetbox
Founded: 2006
Location: San Francisco, CA
Current Employees: 22
Funding: $1.5M Seed, $4.7M Series A, $8.3M Series B
VCs: Hummer Winblad, Sequoia Capital, and NCD Investors
Widgetbox (www.widgetbox.com) is a fast
growing, Internet startup based in San Francisco helping people express, connect,
create, and inform using web widgets. Widgetbox is the world’s leading
distributed marketplace for web widgets with close to 41 million monthly
viewers and 40,000+ web widgets such as games, cyber pets, countdowns, and
art. What’s a web widget? Check out the one we made in less
than 2 minutes:
Our widget
Users
Widgetbox widgets are popular on social media platforms, blogs, and
other personal and professional websites. Anyone with a webpage can
use them. Widgets can help drive traffic to your website. With three
quick clicks, you can turn your website into a widget.
Sales
The Widgetbox revenue model is in its early stages. The company launched DevShare, a revenue sharing program between
Widgetbox and the widget developer on Facebook a few months ago and is
expanding it beyond Facebook soon.
Culture
"We are creative, fun, and innovative – just like you! We come from small and
large companies alike including eBay, Apple, Yahoo, PayPal, Epicentric, and Wired. Our founders, Ed Anuff, Giles
Goodwin, and Dean Moses serve as inspiration for us and we are funded by
Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad, NCD Investors, and private investor Michael
Dearing."
Hot Job
Front-end Software Engineer
Strong javascript, AJAX and Java
