“There’s sort of an infinite number of good ways to start a company,” says Xconomist Joe Chung. “One of the fundamental rules in startups is that there really aren’t any rules.”
But the serial entrepreneur has some pretty specific plans for how his new creation will pop out startups. That would be Cambridge, MA-based Redstar Ventures, which has been described by its other co-founder, Jeet Singh, as a “company that builds companies.” The pair would know a bit about putting together companies. Both were co-founders of the Cambridge, MA-based e-commerce software company Art Technology Group, which went public in 1999 and sold to Oracle last year for $1 billion. Chung went on to to start another shopping tech startup, Allurent, which didn’t see the success that ATG did, while Singh worked on his rock music career.
But back to Redstar, which was founded last year. There’s no shortage of entities that are specifically in the business of supporting other tech startups (read here for my colleague Wade’s thoughts about the incubator bubble), but Redstar doesn’t align itself with the heavily consumer Web-focused, three-month-long accelerator programs such as Y Combinator and TechStars, and their mentorship models. Instead, it’s using its team to research market opportunities for new companies, and then match them with the right entrepreneurs, using all its own internal funding.
Read below for some takeaways from my conversation with Chung on how they’re going about things at Redstar. (And check out Chung’s Xconomist posts on how to and how not to start companies.)
—Chung and his team take pride in their “maturity.”
“One good thing to do when you start any kind of venture is to start things that are biased in your favor, that play to your strengths,” Chung says. “Because we’re old, we’ve built a really strong network. Hopefully we’ll bring commercial relationships and partnerships to the table right from the beginning, and revenue and customers from the initial business proposition. We’re looking for companies in spaces where we already know or identify consumer needs or business needs.”
—We won’t be seeing any “solomo” companies being created at Redstar. No, that’s not a typo, but techie jargon for companies working in the social, local, and mobile sector, Chung says.
“We’re doing stuff that is targeted at the TechCrunch crowd’s mothers,” he says. “They have all the money and are deeply underserved by the Internet.”
Considering this and the Redstar team’s past experience, it might not come as a surprise that the first company it has put together is focusing on
