incubators

The best-known right now has to be Bill Gross's IdeaLab http://www.idealab.com/. Gross sold his company, Knowledge Adventure, to Broderbund a few years ago and, among other things, plowed some of the proceeds into a sort of incubator (along with some othe very high profile investors). He behaves like a VC in some respects except that he expects a larger equity stake in exchange for a more complete package of support. IdeaLab maintains a central resource of business support services, from photocopying to accounting to board level advice and so far they have seen through a number of tech ventures (all net companies so far, I think). None have reached maturity yet but two that are getting lots of attention are Keith Teare's Centraal http://www.centraal.com/ and Gross' own GoTo http://www.goto.com/. Launching a venture, or launching an incubator? If the former, I'd strongly suggest checking out Mario Morino's "Netpreneur" efforts: http://netpreneur.org, and reading through all of the old archived discussion materials, which cover loads of IT start-up venture issues. techbusiness conference Main Menu