The Rise of ThePortlander.Com

Most websites when they first start barely have enough momentum to survive especially ones that have almost no funding . Apparently the exception to this rule has been www.theportlander.com . Within one month of launching there Web 2.0 news website they have garnered over 70,000 ad impressions and served over 1,000 unique views , to top this those 1,000 visitors have viewed over 20,000 pages. The founder of the site is now being mentioned on websites like www.technorati.com , www.Oregonlive.com ,www.northwestnoise.com, smallworldpodcast.com and countless others. It appears Portland that we have our first full fledged Star here in Portland. This blogger recommends that you check out there site as you will undoubtedly here more about it as time goes on.

Eyeballing the Value of Web 2.0 Startups

So how much is a Web 2.0 startup really worth? Everyone is wondering that these days, especially since there are so few acquisitions or IPOs by which to measure them. That's why I like the slide below created by eSnips CEO Yael Elish. It gives an approximate value for many high-profile Web 2.0 sites by correlating publicly available Alexa Web traffic numbers with the value of known deals like YouTube's. This slide is hardly accurate for many reasons (see below), but it does help you visualize how one company may be doing against another.

By her count, Wikipedia, YouTube*, and MySpace are in that rarefied realm of Web 2.0 sites worth more than $1 billion. Just below that are Flickr*, Facebook, and Hi5. In the $100 million to $500 million range are LinkedIn, Bebo*, Digg*, Feedburner, Last.fm*, and Technorati*. And just below the $100 million mark is StumbleUpon*, Slide*, and Netvibes*. She values eSnips on the chart at about $30 million. (The asterisked names made the Next Net 25 either in 2006 or 2007 ).

You need three things to create a successful startup

(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

And that's kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.

If there is one message I'd like to get across about startups, that's it. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.