VentureLoop News

San
Francisco, California, February 26, 2008 – VentureLoop, the leader in job postings
exclusively for venture-backed startups, announced the launch of its 2008
summer internship program targeted at top MBA students who want to work with
startup companies. After a successful
pilot program in 2007 with Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan, VentureLoop
has added student groups from Columbia Business School, University of Texas
McCombs, Kellogg at Northwestern, Wharton at Pennsylvania, University of
Chicago Graduate School of Business, Stanford University Graduate School of
Business and University of California Berkeley Haas MBA program.

The program allows venture-backed companies to post
internships and search the student resume database, while students can apply
directly to company internships or post their resume to be searched. Unlike typical interns, the students from
these programs can step into a job needing no more assistance than any other
senior level employee.

“Finding quality
startup internship opportunities can be a difficult process, and VentureLoop
will be a valuable resource to make the search much easier,” said Josh Miller, an MIT Sloan
student and member of the Entrepreneurship
& Innovation program. “The site is phenomenal and caters perfectly
to the interests of students in the new Entrepreneurship & Innovation
program,” added Bennett Fisher, another student in the program.

PitchMe!
A unique feature launched by VentureLoop allows startups to
post a generic internship opening and have students “pitch” them on what they
could offer for the summer. This gives
startups the flexibility to see what help students can offer their venture
while allowing students to think creatively about how to “pitch” their skills.

“I really like the PitchMe! feature,” said Sunil Nagaraj, a student at
Harvard Business School. “It will allow
me to craft a role for myself that demonstrates the unique strengths I can
bring to the table that go far beyond what a resume communicates.”

“The internship program has been a great compliment to our
regular startup job postings,” said Jeremy McCarthy,
CEO of VentureLoop. “We have
relationships with several hundred venture-backed startups, and this is a
perfect opportunity to connect them with entrepreneurial-minded students at top
graduate programs.”

The internship program is open to any company backed by an institutional
venture capital firm. Companies can
email internship@ventureloop.com
to request access to the program at no cost.

About VentureLoop
VentureLoop is the leading website dedicated to job postings
for venture-backed startup companies. Founded in 1999, VentureLoop creates direct relationships with the
world’s top venture capital firms to connect their portfolio companies with quality
candidates. Candidates can search the
VentureLoop website for thousands of jobs at startups backed by top tier
venture capital firms. VentureLoop’s
VentureCareers product is a hosted career page for venture capital firms,
allowing portfolio companies to advertise job openings directly onto their
venture capital firm’s public website. VentureLoop
also publishes the weekly VentureLoop Insider Newsletter, which communicates
valuable information about startup news, funding, and career advice. Find out more at www.ventureloop.com.

CONTACT:
Melissa Ta
Senior Public Relations Consultant
Melissa@ventureloop.com
www.ventureloop.com

I attended the PwC MoneyTree presentation yesterday for Q4 2007 industry numbers and full year 2007 numbers.  The results are still very positive despite cloudy economic news in the mainstream press.  There is more money to invest than quality investments to fund.  Fund raising is strong for VC firms and appears to be continuing.  And despite large amounts of money waiting to be invested, firms appear to continue prudence with their investment decisions as evidenced by a steady number of deals funded.

Until the M&A and IPO market liquidity hits a big wall, the market for jobs at startups backed by venture capital firms should continue to be strong.  One caution mentioned about liquidity referred to the potential buyout of Yahoo! by Microsoft.  A combined company could limit the number of M&A deals in the software/Internet market with one less major player involved.

See the PwC press release here

See the full report here

Jeremy McCarthy
CEO, VentureLoop

An interview with Ramit Sethi, Co-founder and VP Community Marketing

Overview
Founded: 2005
Location: San Mateo, CA (branch office Nashua, NH)
Current Employees: 11
VC: Mohr, Davidow Ventures, a VentureLoop client
Money Raised: $2.1 million

Give us a basic background on PBWiki.
PBWiki’s
goal is to lead the world’s collaboration market. The name "PBwiki"
comes from the idea that making a PBwiki is as easy as making a peanut
butter sandwich.  The product was initially programmed by David Weekly,
the PBwiki CEO, at a SuperHappyDevHouse event in less than 24 hours.
Within 48 hours of launching PBwiki, we had over 1,000 wikis. Now we’re
currently hosting over 400,000 business and education communities,
which is more than any other wiki site.

Why would someone use your website, and what is the cost?
Project
management for business and classrooms for educators are our biggest
applications right now.  A company can quickly set up a wiki that
allows them to post updates, share documents, create calendars, and
control user access.  The basic application is free, and we have
affordable subscriptions for more robust and customizable features.
The reason so many companies utilize our wiki is the easy and rapid
deployment of a simple, secure collaboration website.  You don’t have
to wait for your overworked IT department. And we build the software to
be used, not to be shoved down the throat of poor end users. We use our
own product for all of our internal collaboration.

Is this product mainly for startups, or does it have the horsepower to meet the needs of larger companies too?
That’s
a good question.  We never intended to serve only Silicon Valley. In
fact, when we look at our usage data, we have more customers from the
Midwest and East coast than the West coast. And one-third of Fortune
500 companies use PBwiki for internal collaboration. Many of these
larger companies find products like Microsoft Sharepoint too
complicated and inflexible.  They just want something that works. Some
of those typical use cases include intranets, extranets, and document
repositories. 

You mentioned a subscription version of the product.  Is that your main or only revenue model?
We’re
currently doing very well utilizing a subscription model to compliment
the free version of our product.  We actually set new revenue records
most months.  We’re of course open to other revenue models in the
future. But subscriptions are working well.

What is it like to work for PBWiki?
The
culture is very informal. You can tell that from our name and logo down
to the emails we send. (Try it! Send us an email if you’re interested
in working here.) Everyone here is hungry and wants to make big changes
right now.  It’s pretty amazing to realize how many people PBwiki
touches. We get hundreds of emails from users around the world telling
us how they use PBwiki and how they wish we’d just help them do this
ooooone other thing.

In terms of our work life, we have the
typical free lunches and
massages.  But the real fun is that you can make big, ambitious changes
and get them in front of millions
of users the very same week.  We’re a SAAS company so we deploy often,
and changes affect lots of users. To put things in perspective, last
week our blog (http://blog.pbwiki.com) has photos of a recent
spicy-food-eating contest we had in the office.

What is your hottest job opening right now?
We’re hiring in engineering, sales and support, but a web engineer would probably be our most critical need at the moment.

Web engineer

What makes us tick? We love building useful tools
for the web. We develop new features on Monday, and deploy it to hundreds of
thousands of real users by Friday. What makes you tick? We want you to be energetic,
full of ideas, know what a wiki is, and enjoy working with a small team of
brilliant people. You should thoroughly understand web technologies. You know
how to prototype things and quickly make them real with XHTML, Javascript/AJAX,
CSS, and/or PHP.

Click here to view job and apply

Click here to view all PBwiki jobs

   Click on the image to purchase shirts, mugs, caps, and more!  These items are sold at our cost to make them as affordable for you as possible.

Intent
on finding a job with a great startup, Rachel checked out VentureLoop
for her search.  "VentureLoop was a great find for me," said Rachel.
"I was looking for a website that aggregated startup jobs all in one
place.  The fact that all of the companies are backed by top-notch
venture capital firms gave me comfort that jobs on the website were
legitimate opportunities."

Rachel found a few opportunities she liked, applied through VentureLoop, and landed a great job with a promising startup backed by Index Ventures.  She is now enjoying her new marketing job!

Simply do a search for "ventureloop" on Facebook, click on the VentureLoop page, and become a fan!  Keep up with all of the great news going on at VentureLoop and let us know what you think.