BusinessWeek publishes their list of most intriguing new businesses: The Most Intriguing Startups
"Green technology" is the dominant category, along with medical technology this year. Hunch gets $ 2million, while Aardvark is just getting warmed up. Go figure.
Overall, this list is a great example of the systems archetype known as Success to the Successful wherein the allocation of resources (i.e., venture capital) is overwhelmingly biased toward those who have "succeeded" in the past - and ignoring those who might be successful if provided with resources.
One of the key lessons I learned from my own experiences on Sand Hill Road in 1998-2000 is that the risk of a false negative is very low. That is, if an investor passes on an opportunity and the fledgling venture succeeds anyway without further investment then a false negative has occurred - and the investor made the wrong choice.
More often, the venture will fail due to lack of investment, whether or not it would have succeeded otherwise. So - investors often back "proven" entrepreneurs, even when the only thing they've proven is the ability to burn through $ millions in pursuit of another "imitator" strategy. After all, how many online pet stores were funded in the first internet bubble?
Rock on!
