Web 2.0: Establish businesses without big capital

When Seth J. Sternberg and two associates launched chat services integrated into the Meebo web, they didn't think about finding investors. With a small capital of 2,000 USD, they still have the ability to pay the most expensive expense of 120 USD / month to maintain the server's operation.

After only 1 month (September 2005), Meebo attracted 50,000 visits per day and needed to be equipped with a server. Sternberg decided to receive only a total of $ 100,000 from three different veture capitalists because he did not want these people to intervene deeply in the management process.

' We were approached by dozens of venture capitalists, but they only received shaking their heads. The appearance of the VCs always gives rise to many problems and the progress of our work is slowed , 'explained Sternberg.

Eventually, Meebo accepted $ 3.5 million from Sequoia Capital but that was when the company went into orbit and confirmed its market position with 200,000 entries per day.

In the past 2 years, hundreds of businesses operating on the Internet in Silicon Valley and many other places in the world have followed the same path, different from the first Internet boom when the majority Companies are formed with huge budgets.

Many businesses do not care about investors, others sell products to millions of people before agreeing to allow VCs to intervene. This situation makes the VC feel frustrated because they need to invest to generate profit.

However, even as alcoholic and possessing an app that attracts consumers, mergers with major firms do not bring too much funding for the following small mushrooming Web 2.0 companies. this rain. For example, Google acquired Writely and recently JotSpot, as well as Flickr, joined Yahoo with unpublished money, probably because they were not as shocking as the YouTube exception when it received $ 1.6 billion. from Google.

' At this stage, anyone can become an entrepreneur, ' Joe Kraus posted on his blog. He also needs only $ 100,000 to set up and maintain JotSpot - the company that builds a spreadsheet program as a wiki application.