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Thursday, July 16, 2009
Ultra Light Startups helps entrepreneurs network, build business
Breaking down the MIT $100K
MHT's Doug Banks: 10 Women to Watch in tech
Flash Slideshow: Mass High Tech All-Stars Thought Leadership Roundtable
A new networking group for bootstrapping technology startup founders meets for the second time in Cambridge tonight.
Ultra Light Startups launched in New York in 2007 with the idea of helping entrepreneurs find ideas, best practices, co-founders and kindred spirits — anything but venture capital funding, says founder Graham Lawlor.
“I think there’s a lot of groups out there that are specifically trying to put entrepreneurs in touch with investors and I’m avoiding that route,” Lawlor said. “Ultra Light is really about trying to build a business rather than trying to get investment.”
After 10 years as a financial services IT employee on Wall Street, Lawlor quit his position at Deutsche Bank in 2007 to become a tech entrepreneur. To vet an idea file 50 or 60 items long, he started a group of like-minded entrepreneurs.
“That meta-idea turned out to be very popular, and more and more people started showing up,” he said. “Over the course of about a year, I started thinking about Ultra Light Startups as the business itself.”
Ultra Light now has 3,000 individual members and is adding members at a rate of about 500 a month.
Chapters opened in London last fall and in Boston this spring. Later, chapters opened in Philadelphia and Boulder, Colo.
Alex Lindahl, a sales rep at Andover-based Drupal development house Acquia Inc., and Aaron Gerry, a biotech student at Northeastern University, are putting together a calendar of bi-monthly meetings.
Tonight’s meeting, at the fourth-floor conference room in Northeastern University’s Dodge Hall, will focus on cleantech economics. Cleantech companies often require major venture-capital and private-equity investment — but not always, Lindahl said.
“There are technologies and startups that are able to get off the ground with very little money,” he said. “The focus is more on how do we find those startups and technologies that are more incremental innovation that don’t require that much money that can easily be adapted into existing infrastructure.”
In 2007, Lindahl co-founded Textworks with high school chum Miles Lennon. The company raised over $100,000 from private investors to develop a university mobile text alert system in the wake of the Virginia Tech campus massacre — but shut its doors in 2008 after running into software development problems.
Lindahl and Lennon also co-founded College Mogul, a group-edited blog for young entrepreneurs and university startups, and said they are looking at starting other networking groups in the Boston area.
“I always try and do things I can leverage against other things I’m doing,” he said. “It makes life easier, and you can build it faster.”
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