I recently spoke with Richard Adams, founder of Referral Networks, which was later sold to Peopleclick. He has started a new venture, RipDigital, which does the dirty work of converting CD collections into MP3 libraries. Basically all you have to do is place an order on the website and the company ships a box to you, you pack your CDs into the box, RipDigital does the conversion, and then ships your new library on either a DVD or portable hard drive along with your CDs. It is truly frictionless commerce. While interesting, this is not the only project that Richard is working on these days.
I have also been staying in touch with Owen Davis who co-founded Sonata (Thinking Media) with Vid Jain. Owen and Vid are back at it again with a new company, Petal Computing. Petal, according to its website, provides software that allows a dedicated group of PCs to operate like an enterprise server or mainframe. Its solutions are further optimized for the high performance needs of the financial world, including modeling, cash management, risk analysis and pricing. In other words, Owen and Vid have created cluster computing software which is highly specific and focused on the financial sector. While the cluster computing space is a competitive market with some established players, I like their approach to building the business. They have actually been working on the software for the last 2 years.
In fact, many NYC 2.0 entrepreneurs (those NYC veterans on their second venture-I hesitate to use the word Silicon Alley since that leaves a bad taste in many people’s mouths) are starting companies with a new philosophy to build businesses that uniquely solve a real customer problem. Embedded in the new way of starting companies is strong financial and product discipline. In other words, NYC 2.0 entrepreneurs have learned to keep the burnrate low until they have a great product they can sell repeatedly with feedback from living, breathing beta customers. With this philosophy, these entrepreneurs just may have a better opportunity to create some real businesses that will generate meaningful cash flow.
BTW, I placed my order with RipDigital today for 250 CDs today and will report on the finished product at a later date.
