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Businesses Linux Business The Almighty Buck

Open Source Venture Fund Unveiled 66

Posted by timothy from the party-like-it's-1999 dept.
prostoalex writes "Over the next three years Simula Labs will finance 6-8 open source startups with $10-15 million it got from venture capitalists, News.com says. The venture financing enterprise is mostly interested in hiring the founders of the project and selling the services based around product infrastructure. LogicBlaze and Mergere are among the first startups who got financing from Simula Labs, and it looks like a logo that incorporates orange and brown is required before you apply."
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Open Source Venture Fund Unveiled More

Open Source Venture Fund Unveiled

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  • interesting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cyberfunk2 ( 656339 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @07:08PM (#12601615)
    An interesting way to fund Open source based buisness ideas... but the captial seems a little small spread out over that many ideas... will it run out before the ideas pan out ?

    • Re:interesting (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Byrneseyeview ( 850510 )
      Ah, but one of the joys of the software business in general is how little capital you need. It's possible to waste money, but that only happens when you're suffering a slight concussion from VCs hurling obscene amounts of cash at you and demanding that you waste it [blogs.com].

      • Re:interesting (Score:5, Funny)

        by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <barbara.hudson@b ... m ['son' in gap]> on Saturday May 21, 2005 @08:51PM (#12602246) Journal
        Nobody's done the math yet.
        $10-$15 million
        6 to 8 startups
        That's over a million bucks per startup. Quick, where's the link to that bogus research paper generator!

        • That's over a million bucks per startup.

          If salaries for programmers fall substantially, then this would buy a great deal of programming time.

          A million bucks would get pretty far in Bangalore.

          Unfortunately, I wanted to be an overpriced American software engineer. I figure a good salary would be around $50k a year with benefits. The cost to my employer would be $100k per year. A million bucks could theoretically buy a programming team of ten people for one year (assuming that there is no support sta

          • No, you would take a low salary with lots of stock options or have a hugh performance bonus... so you would be very motivated to work you arse off and deliver the code, etc.

            p.s. I'm always amazed at the amount of money that VC firms pour into startups... and even more amazed at how high the burn-rate it... gee, I wish somebody would pour millions into my company so I can move into a new office, buy lots of cool equipment, and pay myself a high salary, give myself lots of bonuses... basically burn the VS m

    • It depends. Of course, the investment pattern tends to be that smaller investments yield less exciting returns, but obviously this isn't always true. It's better to have lots of fingers in lots of pots rather than dumping all your cash onto one hope.

      I currently have a service which is blowing up in popularity (several thousand users, 300,000+ requests a day in only a few months) and getting lots of donations.. but users are saying they're ready for a commercial solution and so I'm working my ass off to get

    • Re:interesting (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      in general you are correct, but for companies that will be providing software services I don't think so

      with a lot of stuff you need to outlay a lot at the start to set up manufacturing and distribution and marketing

      here you can scale pretty well and just take on as many customers as you can handle and then add more people as you grow and bring in more money

  • Site Design & Structure (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xombo ( 628858 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @07:10PM (#12601631)
    Both sites seem to be structured in the same manner with similar page titles and similar wording for content.
    • I noticed that. Definitely the same web designer... lol
      • Doesn't that simply mean that the VCs are doing their job and providing needed services instead of letting each company go out and re-invent the wheel?

        This is the sort of service that a ~good~ VC brings to the table... in addition to cash, they hook you up with their existing business connections. You get the benefit of the VCs experience and business contacts.

        • I was going to mention that in my post but hoped people would fill in the blanks as opposed to construct a conspiracy theory (ala vapor-ware).
          It's nice to see some Venture Capital firms making things easy for their clients and having a serious understanding of how this technology works before setting out to do something huge.

    • Re:Site Design & Structure (Score:5, Informative)

      by updog ( 608318 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @07:46PM (#12601876) Homepage
      Yes, looks like the sites are just placeholders created by Simula Labs - look at the contact info: Simula Labs 2321 Rosecrans Avenue, Suite 1265 El Segundo, CA 90245 Phone: +1 310 356 6888 FAX: +1 800 822 0471 LogicBlaze 2321 Rosecrans Avenue, Suite 1265 El Segundo, CA 90245 Phone: +1 310 356 6888 FAX: +1 800 822 0471 Mergere, Inc. 2321 Rosecrans Avenue, Suite 1265 El Segundo, CA 90245 Phone: +1 888 796 6737 Fax: +1 310 545 9786
  • ...a logo that resembles a mouldy tangerine?

  • Paramount Business Solution (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Today yada yada yada more than ever yada yada yada your needs yada yada yada our solution yada yada yada. Open Source adopts market speek

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @07:16PM (#12601678)
    Microsoft has applied for funding to start an open source project called "POSIE", an acronym for the term "Proof that Open Source Is Evil." Microsoft requires funding due to a lack of volunteers. When asked why he doesn't simply throw a mountain of cash at the project, Bill Gates replied, "I'm not going to contribute any money to something that is Clearly Evil and Wrong".
    • Hm. Bill's business acumen must be slipping. Either that, or he just hoped we wouldn't notice that there is no point in throwing a mountain of cash at this project, when he could possibly convince somebody else to throw a mountain of cash at him for it. (;
    • I have no idea why it happened, but I must confess that the first thing that sprung to my mind upon reading POSIE was "Piece Of Shit Internet Explorer".
  • "it looks like a logo that incorporates orange and brown is required before you apply"

    Is it just me or do the logos look rusty and gray?

  • The transition from project to services (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @07:27PM (#12601761)
    I wonder how these ventures will work out. The transition from being an independent OSS project to being a captive part of a services organization can't be easy. Holding customers' hands as they deploy last-year's release is very different from writing the next bit of cool code.

    The solution will be to find a management staff that can balance software development tasks versus providing services -- keeping both the project personnel and the customers happy. I'm guessing that they will do this by putting project people into "guru" positions and doing the bulk of the sales and service work with an army of hired underlings.

    • Re:The transition from project to services (Score:4, Informative)

      by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @07:38PM (#12601827)
      I will be interesting to see alright. LogicBlaze was formerly ActiveMQ a JMS implementation which while not bad has no compelling features in what is quite a competive arena. Mergere (what a stupid name) was formerly Maven, a tool which as far as I could see had a small vocal support group but engendered pathological hatred in most people who used it (disclaimer I tried it a while ago and despised it).

      Anyway good look to them.
      • Both products strike me as solutions looking for problems ... this small amount of VC is probably not going to go far in building the bridge required to achieve a sustainable model.

        With LogicBlaze -- there are a lot of much bigger companies pitching the same story (including IBM and Microsoft) and LogicBlaze's product is too much of a pure infrastructure play to be compelling here.

        Mergere has a different problem -- they had open-source appeal to niche groups ready to change their mental model of CI dev

  • Selections of hilarious dot-com e-business terms (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mancat ( 831487 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @08:22PM (#12602090) Homepage
    Collected these little gems from the two sites mentioned...

    "Evolve your web services into real-time business processes"
    "Enterprise Transaction Platform"
    "JAVA-based developers are not asking if they should adopt automated build processes; they're asking how much standardization is best suited to their IT structures."
    "Infrastructure Development Management (IDM)"
    "Software Lifecycle Management (SLM)"
    "With our message queue, enterprise service bus and clustered cache manager products, we significantly reduce the complexity and cost of integrating, managing, and maintaining distributed enterprise applications to enable organizational adaptability and flexibility in responding to constantly-evolving priorities and competitive drivers"

  • Wow (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @08:31PM (#12602137)

    Both sites contain nothing but marketing double-speak and absolutely no useful ionformation about what they produce.

    VC money meet toilet.


    • VC money meet marketing. I've always thought that marketing and "double-speak with absolutely no useful information" were synonymous. But hey- if those full-color brochures don't prove that the product is good, then I don't know what will.

  • This could lead to some intriguing possibilities.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Billy the Mountain ( 225541 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @09:50PM (#12602533) Journal
    Think about it. A new category of startup: The Open Source Startup Model. As any self-respecting Slashdot denizen, I naturally haven't read the article. Others mentioned that 10 million spread among 6-8 startups would not be enough to fully fund a startup. I agree, but if I was running such a fund, I don't think I'd want all of the startup funding coming from one primary source anyway. The OSS teams I'd want to finance would be those that already had something going, i.e. some software already in place. Then I'd want to at least see a plan for filling in the "Step 2: ?????". Why finance something that already exists? Because you don't want to start with a just a concept that may or may not work. Also, you already have a potential customer base (just have to figure out a way to not piss them off).

    What would be the advantage of an OSS startup? It's a great way to leverage goodwill--people like OSS software and its developers. Also, OSS usually contribues to the greater good of society.

    What existing projects would be good candidates for this? I'd like to hear from others on this. My votes would be for 1. Mambo--PHP Web Content Management. 2. Nagios--enterprise system monitoring and alerting software.

    I don't think I'd be willing to fund, say, PHP or MySQL because they are too mature to benefit from $1-2 M, plus MySQL already is an established enterprise.

    BTM
    • Others mentioned that 10 million spread among 6-8 startups would not be enough to fully fund a startup

      Yeah, well others don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's absolutely possible to bootstrap a new company on far less than 1 million dollar. You can't say anything meaningful about it unless you know "the plan".

      I'm just replying to your post because I think it's silly the way people talk about startups these days (not you; the others). There certainly are products/markets that require more ca
  • I note that the web pages for both start-ups don't know the English language -- in particular their use (actually mis-use) of commas. And the style is distressingly similar. It looks like a fraud to me.

  • Another Simula (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This venture could have picked a better name. There is already a Simula Research Laboratory [simula.no] in Norway, a government funded research facility specializing in communication technology, scientific computing and software engineering.
  • Thier sites and logos were done at the same time by the same person, and reading them sites I have no idea what these companies do.

    So I guess this is the start of another bubble. Hurrah.

  • Duplicate name for that venture capital company (Score:3, Informative)

    by arcade ( 16638 ) on Sunday May 22, 2005 @04:52AM (#12603830) Homepage
    Simula Labs is located in Norway, the country where the Simula programming language originated. The _real_ Simula Labs homepages are at http://www.simula.no/ [simula.no] :-)

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