4 things BusinessWeek won't tell you about its under-30 entrepreneurs
The problem with lists like BusinessWeek's collection of 13 under-30 entrepreneurs: Inevitably, in an effort to fill a demographic quota, editors scrape the bottom of the barrel. And presenting a balanced picture of these business novices cuts against the goal of serving up fresh faces. (Whether they're supposed to make BusinessWeek's 50something readers feel either young again or even older, I'm not quite sure.) Here are some things that BusinessWeek would just as soon you not know about members of its boy band:
- Joe Green (top left) has raised $7.3 million for his Facebook application, Causes. Which would be more impressive had the funding not come from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Thiel is an investor in Facebook, and has a vested interest in creating the impression that Facebook appmakers are worth something.
- Drew Houston (not pictured) runs a company, Dropbox, which offers online file storage, a service users can't get from anyone else. Except AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, and a good dozen other startups.
- VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez (top, second from left) tried to compete with YouTube and failed. Or "evolved," as BusinessWeek put it, into an ad network for Flash games, a crowded field that so far has garnered VideoEgg gross revenues of $300,000 a month. The magazine lauded Sanchez for raising $27 million in venture funding; it should have asked instead how much is left.
- RockYou cofounder Jia Shen (bottom left) launched his widget startup while working for another company, Iconix, according to IM chats produced in court. He and cofounder Lance Tokuda settled a lawsuit with iconix last year. They're now trying — so far unsuccessfully — to raise another round of venture funding, or sell the company.