WhiteyBoard
— maker of stick-on-the-wall whiteboards — has obtained approximately
$500,000 in seed funding, the company’s founders announced today. Bill
Liao, who is best known as a founder of Xing.com, the dominant
social network for business professionals in Europe, led the investment.
He has taken eight companies public and is the author of “Stone Soup:
The Secret Recipe for Making Something From Nothing.”
While Mr. Liao usually starts and invests in technology businesses, he said he decided to take an active role in WhiteyBoard, a physical goods company, because, “I love a product you don’t have to explain. And I always want to get new things out there.” It didn’t hurt that Jason Wilk, 25, a founder and a chief executive of WhiteyBoard in Los Angeles, was a Y Combinator-winning entrepreneur before approaching him.
Y Combinator is the early stage investment fund that uses a biannual, weekend-long pitch and demonstration competition to find investment-worthy companies. It has inspired the formation of several other incubator and accelerator funds that borrow its pitch competition and boot camp approach to helping technology companies get started. Other Y Combinator winners — like Reddit, the social bookmarking site, and Posterous, the content publishing platform — have created popular consumer Web technologies.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Rethinking the Whiteboard - You're the Boss Blog - NYTimes.com
Author: LORA KOLODNY
