Startupalooza

**Originally published 8/11/2013

The annual Lollapalooza festival was just held here in Chicago with a record 300,000 attending the three-day event. I remember attending Lollapalooza in St. Louis back in 1992 w/ Pearl Jam playing a summer afternoon set supporting their still new “Ten” album. Me and by buddy Jeff in the 3rd row watching one of the most explosive live sets I’ve ever seen…

Startupalooza is now on a multi-year run, and record crowds are to be expected well into the future. The most popular major at Stanford today is computer science, and huge numbers of future entrepreneurs are teaching themselves to code online. The ramifications of all these new startups in places all over the world are massive for future global GDP growth. No such thing as too many startups.

At Promus Ventures, we are investing in a myriad of companies that sell products and services directly to developers and startups. For example, we have backed companies that:

• enable remote developer teams to communicate and share code more effectively through an always-on video platform
• manage a dual-sided open-source software marketplace that let developers sell their code to other startups and developers so MVPs can be built cheaper and quicker
• oversee the entire HR, finance and accounting functions of a startup with remote CFOs so teams can better focus on building product rather than spending time on backoffice duties
• have built a next-gen distributed communications platform that enables startups to more efficiently and intelligently build and manage their product

We want our community of software businesses to be able to run faster, leaner, smarter and stronger. We’d like to think that by partnering with some of the aforementioned terrific companies, we’re helping our startup community and all those playing in Startupalooza to do just this.

Rock on.