Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

One nice thing to see in Southern California is the number of second-generation companies — those started by the founders of previously successful startups– who are building their businesses.  Although that’s long been a Silicon Valley dynamic, it was quite rare until recently to find companies whose founders previously started up companies, sold them, or left after some success to found their new companies.

Olivier Chaine, who was at LowerMyBills, just raised $2.5M for his startup, Magnify360; increasingly, I’m seeing second- and third- time around folks heading up the companies here. Some that come to mind lately are Minard Hamilton and Ben Jones of Six Degree Games (both from Jamdat);  Frank Addante at Rubicon Project (L90/Strongmail); Jason Feffer of Sodahead.com (formerly COO at MySpace); and  Russell Fine of Opposing Views (formerly at Youbet.com); just to mention a few.

Of course, prior performance isn’t any guarantee of future success, but the fact that we have a stable of entrepreneurs trying to make their second or third success bodes fairly well, and you can expect they’ve learned a few lessons and what does and doesn’t work that the odds are in their favor.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Southern California, Startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.