Y Combinator starts
Graham, Livingston, Morris, and Viaweb employee Trevor Blackwell offer $6,000 seed capital for a company with one founder, $12,000 if the company has two founders, and $18,000 if the company has three. In exchange, Y Combinator gets around 6% in common stock. Graham publicizes the program on the web:
We give you enough money to live on for a summer, as with a regular summer job. But instead of working for an existing company, you’ll be working for your own; instead of showing up at some office building at 9 a.m., you can work when and where you like; and instead of salary, the money you get will be seed funding.
Starts TechCrunch
0 0 reuben reuben2014-10-23 21:14:282015-02-12 10:06:57Starts TechCrunch
Audio Eagle Records
Carney founds Audio Eagle Records, an independent record label dedicated mainly to local Ohio artists. The label’s first release is Gil Mantera’s Party Dream’s Bloodsongs.
Audio Eagle, a new label imprint from Patrick Carney of the Black Keys, is proud to announce Bloodsongs. Known for their live shows, Gil Mantera’s Party Dream demands an audience’s attention. Formed in Youngstown, OH, they show their talent for creating dance-worthy synth melodies on their debut Bloodsongs.
Starts responsible fashion brand
Together with his wife, Ali Hewson, Bono founds EDUN, a socially responsible clothing and accessories line. The company’s mission is to promote and provide sustainable growth opportunities to African people.
EDUN is building long-term, sustainable growth opportunities by supporting manufacturers, infrastructure and community building initiatives in Africa. We are actively working toward increasing trade throughout the continent with our apparel and accessories businesses. For Spring 2014, 85% of the EDUN collection will be produced in sub Saharan Africa.
Founded
YouTube is created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who met as employees at Paypal:
When we registered the YouTube domain on February 14, 2005, we set out to create a place where anyone with a video camera and an Internet connection could share a story with the world.
Sanctuary deal falls apart
Sanctuary Urban Group terminates Carter’s five-year contract, as well as those of his Erving Wonder partners, J. Erving, and Tony Davis, before they expired. An eventual settlement closes the chapter on Sanctuary’s alliance with the urban music genre. Carter says the cultures of the two firms were just too different:
Instead of me being able to be creative with the artists, I was sitting in finance meetings a couple of times a week. It killed my spirit as an entrepreneur.
He loses his payday from the sale.
As an entrepreneur you take big swings of the bat. I struck out.
Erving Wonder acquired by Sanctuary
Erving Wonder is acquired by Sanctuary Group Inc., which manages some of the world’s biggest artists. Carter and Erving are appointed as Executive Vice Presidents of Sanctuary Urban. Sanctuary CEO Mercuriadis:
Erving Wonder has made a tremendous impact in both the music and the film world having developed an impressive roster of multi-talented, commercially viable and important artists. Troy and J’s strategic business sense, relationships with the smartest executives in the industry and their ability to brand artists and entertainers made them our number one choice for the development of Sanctuary Urban.
Carter:
Our goal is to take artists to an unheard of level in the U.S. and internationally. The Erving Wonder/Sanctuary collaboration will create more opportunities to help artists transcend music genres, TV/Film, and establish unique branding options.
Elected Exxon CEO
Tillerson is elected president of ExxonMobil and member of the board of directors.exxon
Zuckerberg, Winklevoss’ meet
The brothers and Narendra meet Zuckerberg in the dining hall of Harvard’s Kirkland House, where they explain the HarvardConnection website, the plan to expand to other schools after launch, the confidential nature of the project, and the importance of getting there first. During the meeting, Zuckerberg allegedly enters into an oral contract with Narendra and the Winklevosses to become a partner in HarvardConnection.
Although his attorneys have denied that any formal discussion about compensation or ownership of Harvard Connection took place, Gao would later tell the court:
I told him that [Narendra and the Winklevosses] would either pay him on a rolling basis or take him on as a partner with the possibility of taking an equal stake. He became visibly excited. He told me that he wanted the latter option … because he thought the Harvard Connection website had the potential to reach out to a very large user base.
He is given the private server location and password for the unfinished HarvardConnection website and code, with the understanding that he will finish the programming necessary for launch. Zuckerberg allegedly chooses to be compensated in the form of sweat equity.
Funding approved
After a hard political battle, President Bush signs an omnibus bill which includes $110 million in initial funding for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt System. The funding allows the team to proceed with the final design of the probe.
It’s like the old days. We are going to the frontier. We’re going back to the roots of the space program.
Start work on HarvardConnection
The brothers, along with their friend, Divya Narendra start work on a social network for Harvard students named HarvardConnection, which was to expand to other schools around the country. They hire Sanjay Mavinkurve, who works on the system until Spring 2003 and then Victor Gao, who is paid $400 for his work on the website code during the second half of 2003.
Initial public offering
Netflix initiates an initial public offering, selling 5.5 million shares of its common stock at $15 per share. It is traded under the symbol “NFLX”.
Runescape launch
Brothers Paul and Andrew Gower release the beta Runescape while in college, and out of their parent’s home in Nottingham. The game is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). The game is browser based, or cloud-based, meaning that any computer accessing the game can do so with no downloads required, a feature that makes the game unique. Andrew:
When I went to university, I discovered text-based MUDs, or multi-user dungeons. I loved the fact that these sorts of games had all these players playing at once – even when you were not playing, the world carried on without you. Because of this, I began creating my own text-based MUD, but I quickly realized that with so many of them out there, there was no way that mine would ever get noticed. So I began to search for a way to make mine stand out, and the obvious way, of course, was to add graphics. With my game, I was trying to emulate text MUDs at the time, purely as a hobby. I worked on it on and off over a number of years…and I believe I started from scratch 3 or 4 times. I finally launched a version of the game after a left university in 2001. The basic plan was to run it for free, but to pay for my hobby through advertising. However, when the dot com bubble began to collapse, advertising dried up, and there was no way to pay for the game’s server.
This was really unfortunate because just the week before I had got 3 big servers for the game, and now was left with no way to pay for them. I began asking players for donations, but quickly decided that this was not the best way to go about it – to rely on people’s sympathy. Basically what we did was calculate how many people we’d need to keep going, and came up with 5000. Thankfully, we managed to get like 2000 subscribers in the first hour, and had our 5000 in the first week. Once we had people paying, we were able to reinvest back into the game. The more we invested, the faster it grew.
Joins Zone Labs
McAfee invests in San Francisco-based cybersecurity firm Zone Labs, creator of the then-popular ZoneAlarm firewall product. McAfee also joins the company’s board of directors.
Co-founds Achex
Arrington co-founds the payments provider and serves as its VP for business development, and general counsel.
Loudcloud launch
Andreessen announces the formation of Loudcloud, a company based in Menlo Park, California, that provides high-performance computing and software services to Internet and e-commerce companies. Loudcloud is later recognized as the first company to conceive of the “cloud” paradigm. Andreessen teams up with several ex-Netscape employees, including Loudcloud’s co-founder and CEO, Ben Horowitz. Andreessen is listed as the company’s co-founder and chairman. According to reports, Loudcloud is privately funded by Andreessen and other employees.
Teammates for Kids Foundation
Brooks founds Teammates for Kids Foundation, a foundation that provides financial aid to charities for children. The foundation accomplishes goals by partnering professional athletes, corporations, and celebrities by getting them to pledge or donate money. All the money raised goes to help kids in areas of their lives, such as health, education, and inner-city outreach programs.
Having the cowboys of the Professional Bull Riders as our teammates could not make me happier. They’re premiere athletes and I am grateful for their decision to use their gifts to benefit the kids
Named HP CEO
Fiorina is first outsider named CEO and President of HP. Board Member:
She is quite simply the ideal candidate to leverage HP’s core strengths in the rapidly changing information-systems industry and to lead this great company well into the new millennium.
Founds Erving Wonder
Carter and Erving found talent management company Erving Wonder by merging Boy Wonder Management and J. Erving Group. As well as Eve, they manage other major hip-hop and R&B stars, Beanie Siegel, Jadakiss, Sleepy Brown, Angie Stone, Floetry, and Nelly.
Sells Tribal Voices
McAfee sells Tribal Voices for about $17 million. He purchases properties in Arizona, Hawaii, Texas, and New Mexico and takes up Aerotrekking.