Monday, March 30, 2009

$250MM in Venture Capital

An incredible sum was raised by online home renter HomeAway. The money is to be spent buying companies - so its not your traditional venture capital.

Prison Entrepreneurship Program

Catherine Rohr, a private equity professional quit her job to start an incredible initiative to train prisoners to run their own small businesses. She's graduated 440 men, and 47 have launched companies. Five have companies that pay more than $100K per year. That's better than business school stats ! 105 have returned to prison. Maybe they can benefit from more classes. 


Story from Inc Jan/Feb 2009.

$10MM a year for working 1 hour a day

I just read an incredible story. Markus Frind is Founder and CEO of Plenty of Fish, a Canadian dating site that serves up 1.6 billion pages a year, far more than Match.com. Till recently the company had 1 employee. His site is so simplistic, he needs less than an hour a day to maintain it. He recently hired 3 employees. The website was set up to be maintenance free. "It runs itself" he told Inc. The site is intelligent, so one sees only a narrow group of potential mates and not the 10 million people that are there. The CEO believes he makes 800K connections a year.
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Thursday, March 19, 2009

Stem Cell Research

NIH has 120 days to come up with the guidelines for "responsible, scientifically worth human stem cell research, inclusing human embryonic stem cell research...". Geron is the only company with FDA approval for human testing.