What we do: Or Be Square -- http://orbesquare.com -- (as in 'be there or be square') is a mobile and web application that helps people discover events and activities they love and plan them with their friends.
Who: we're a small, passionate, fun group of guys that write code everyday, have worked at Bessemer Venture Partners/Microsoft/Amazon, and went to school at Berkeley/Princeton/MIT.
Why now: The beauty of our situation is that you get all the excitement and responsibility of being at an early stage company with huge potential, but you get to avoid much of the associated downside because we've already raised a bunch of money and get to spend lots of time with amazing advisors and investors who have helped make companies like Dropbox, Ticketmaster, Amazon Recommendations, Disney, ShoeDazzle, Playdom, etc., the amazing businesses they are today.
You'll get to be an instrumental part of the company that delivers what we and our supporters believe could, really, be one of the most important products in a person's life in the future.
What we've built:
(1) Sophisticated and scalable service-oriented architecture
(2) A sanitized, curated database of most of the events in the U.S.
(3) A recommendation engine that learns about user interests by crunching data from Spotify, Facebook, etc.
(4) Clever social functionality that neatly folds together Facebook, Twilio and more.
(5) Ticketing feature (with our API partner SeatGeek) that will immediately deliver material revenue when we launch
(6) An alpha front-end that gets slicker everyday
*What we can offer: competitive compensation, meaningful early stage equity stakes, deep technical problems, shiny aluminum toys to hack on, and a lot of fun.
This is an interesting graph. It looks like the mid-point of 2011 to the mid-point of 2012 was ~80mm visitors (2011) to ~90mm (2012) which constitutes 12.5% YoY growth. The largest delta between some 30-day interval in the last year and this latest 30-day interval seems to be ~30mm visitors (~90mm - ~60mm) which is still only 50% annualized growth.
I find Scribd to be a very valuable service but this chart makes me wonder if monetization rate is growing more quickly than visitation. If not, perhaps the monetization potential of content publishing is lower than with other kinds of user-generated content.
Great that it's profitable, though, gives the team indefinite time to figure it out, or identify an acquirer who values it strategically.
Thanks for writing this article. I really enjoyed it. When I was growing up, I was terrible with cash management. My parents continuously subsidized my various entrepreneurial endeavors (building and selling skateboard ramps, selling people's stuff on eBay, manual labor...). So, I grew up really excited about the upside potential of entrepreneurship, but learned little about what it takes to manage the extraordinarily limited resources that you have when you are building businesses in the real world.
Now I help invest in and build companies and work on projects of my own. Learning the trade offs between pricing/volume, technology/cost, etc., is so valuable and I'm only starting to understand them deeply now. I think I'll do something like this when I have kids, whenever that may be....