Open Source Venture Fund Unveiled 66
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."
interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Re:interesting (Score:2)
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
Re:interesting (Score:1)
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
Re:interesting (Score:3, Informative)
yintercept is half right. Doubling the salary is a good rule of thumb of the total cost of the employee. But that cost should include equipment, office space, management overhead, etc.
Lots of fingers in lots of pies = good (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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)
Re:Site Design & Structure (Score:1)
Re:Site Design & Structure (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Site Design & Structure (Score:2)
Another AC... coward.
I work for SAS, the world's largest privately owned software company. I did however do my time at two different startups.
Re:Site Design & Structure (Score:2)
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)
Re:Site Design & Structure (Score:2)
So they want... (Score:1)
Paramount Business Solution (Score:2, Interesting)
I have SW Fever (Score:1)
Re:I have SW Fever (Score:1)
Urrr, Good Open Source is. Be tempted by the Bill side do not!
</yoda>
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:1)
Re:In other news... (Score:1)
Re:Un-hackable my ass!!! (Score:2)
Re:My Linux box is un-hackable (Score:1, Funny)
orange and brown? (Score:1, Funny)
Is it just me or do the logos look rusty and gray?
The transition from project to services (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Anyway good look to them.
Re:The transition from project to services (Score:1)
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)
"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"
Re:Selections of hilarious dot-com e-business term (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Selections of hilarious dot-com e-business term (Score:1)
Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Both sites contain nothing but marketing double-speak and absolutely no useful ionformation about what they produce.
VC money meet toilet.
Re:Correction (Score:2)
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)
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
Re:This could lead to some intriguing possibilitie (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Is there a writter in the house? (Score:2, Interesting)
Another Simula (Score:1)
Identical sites (and logos) (Score:2, Insightful)
So I guess this is the start of another bubble. Hurrah.
Duplicate name for that venture capital company (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Duplicate name for that venture capital company (Score:1)