Since part of my job at Redstar Ventures is to meet as many entrepreneurs as possible who might want to co-found a startup with us, I’ve swilled plenty of coffee at Voltage and Peet’s swapping ideas with many a bright, passionate, and inventive entrepreneur. Somewhere into my second gallon of cappuccino, I began to notice a simple pattern emerging in the fundamental approach entrepreneurs have to their ideas. Grossly speaking, the ideas and entrepreneurs that go with them tend to fall into one of four quadrants of the following matrix (with deference and apologies to the BCG Cash Cow)
Let’s look at the left half of the chart below first. A great example of the Technology driven / Me market quadrant (lower left) would have to be the entrepreneurs behind Rockmelt, who are building an integrated web and social media browser for, well, twenty-something hipster tech guys. In their homepage “what is it” video, the narrator and prototypical user is “a recent college grad who moved out to California to join the Rockmelt development team.” Can’t be any clearer than that—their initial target market is their own employees! I have no first-hand knowledge of Rockmelt’s early ideation, but it feels like a pretty classic tech-driven concept in the sense that it takes something people are doing already (web browsing, Facebook, Twitter) and tries to make it easier and more efficient through a unified, integrated user interface.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Four Kinds of Startups | Xconomy
Author: Joe Chung
