Entries filed under “Startups”

Over at Oregon Business, Linda Baker writes that Thomas Thurston from Growth Science has created a model that accurately predicts whether or not a Startup will succeed.

How does Thurston’s model work? It’s rooted in the mountains of data he has collected on market and corporate dynamics, including the anticipation of future changes in the marketplace. Patterns of success or failure then emerge depending on these different market and business behavior factors. “The key is identifying variables that are predictive of success and failure,” says Thurston, who is very hush-hush about revealing those variables. It’s a process that involves “lots of hard, hard work,” he says. “You go through a whole haystack to find one needle.”

Read the Full Story.

When you think of Missoula, Montana, what comes to mind? Perhaps a rugged western landscape under enormous cloud-capped skies? Or the University of Montana, or maybe the Montana Grizzlies college football franchise, or as the site of state’s largest and oldest active breweries? If you’re thinking timber, forget it – that industry died back in the 1990s. Now the university and two hospitals are the city’s biggest employers.

But if local entrepreneurs and investors have their way, all this will change. They see Missoula becoming the technology hub of the Northern Rockies with Big Data leading the way.

A recent article in the Missoulian written by Martin Kidston cites the growth of two local companies involved in Big Data – TerraEchos that uses propritetary software to predict cyber-attacks, and GCS Research, a developer of next-generation Geographnic Information Systems and remote-sensing applications.

They represent the vanguard of what local leaders, the university and investors hope will morph into Missoula’s tech hub. As part of its efforts to support the talent pool needed to realize this initiative, the University of Montana has included a course on IBM’s InfoSphere Streams software, and three departments are looking to launch a new Big Data Program at the university.

In the article, Clyde Neu, chief financial officer at TerraEchos, talks about the growing interest by venture capitalists and other investors in potential Big Data startups in the Rocky Mountain Region, including Missoula.

These are the kind of business that scale very quickly,” Neu said. “If they take root, they’ll be hiring people. Their growth is somewhat global – there’s no limitations. They leverage the Internet as they expand. That’s what excites me about the Missoula area. We also have an awful lot of small, high-tech information firms bubbling underneath the surface here, and some are rising to the top and attracting substantial funding.”

Read the Full Story.

Will Big Data analytics change the world of venture capital? Over at Xconomy, Benjamin Romano writes that we have entered the era of the Moneyball VC.

Over the last seven years, Thomas Thurston has been developing algorithms—first at Intel Capital, and later in collaboration with Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, and under his own shingle at Growth Science in Portland, OR—to model markets and business behavior, and thereby predict the success or failure of a given innovation. Now he is joining Hambrecht-led venture fund Ironstone Group as a partner to try this method in a venture capital industry increasingly open to data-driven approaches.

Read the Full Story and be sure to check out our RichReport podcast interview with Thurston.