Entrepreneurs say starting a company without a co-founder can be an isolating experience.

There's no one to share ups and downs with, brainstorm with, or banter with.

But for a few solo entrepreneurs, the difficult and lonely experience pays off. David Karp was technically the only founder of Tumblr, although he had early help from employees like Marco Arment. Wiley Cerilli, founder of SinglePlatform, sold his local business listing company to Constant Contact last summer for $100 million in cash, stock and employee incentives. He was also a solo founder.

Here's Cerilli's advice to other entrepreneurs who are founding startups alone.

• Find your purpose. In the early days of SinglePlatform I really focused my work on validating the market by meeting with local businesses. What I found was an incredible opportunity for small businesses, especially given the proliferation of online sites where consumers could search for a business. This market need was a major driver for me and motivated me to become the sole founder of SinglePlatform. So while the early days of validating the market was a solo exploration period for me, the reward of learning about the market need for SinglePlatform definitely helped push me forward and outweighed the negatives of tackling those challenges by myself.

• Find a support group. I found that with all of the ups and downs that comes with being a sole founder, it’s very important to find a peer support group. What helped me a lot was connecting with other CEO’s in CEO forum groups like VenWise, as well as having regular one-on-one dinners with various CEO’s. By doing this, you realize that other people are going through something very similar. You don’t feel so alone and you can get great feedback from people who have just gone through what you are going through to help be more successful.

• Celebrate your wins before moving on to the next milestone. In the early days, especially when wins were off in the distance, times were tough. With all the pressure on your shoulders, all you can think about is getting to that next milestone. Then once you hit that benchmark, your focus immediately goes to hitting the next one without even appreciating what you just did. I saw Jed York, CEO of the 49ers, speak and he said that you have to remember to celebrate your wins, and celebrate them with your team. Especially in an environment where you are always working to hit that next milestone, celebrating your wins is critical.

• Focus on company culture. Another piece of advice I would give a sole founder is to really focus on your company culture. Creating a great culture starts with a sole founder and is influenced by the types of individuals that you surround yourself with. At SinglePlatform, we have a work hard/play hard culture and I think that's important for any startup trying to both build the business, but also attract top talent, especially here in NYC as the technology community continues to grow with young talent eager to be a part of the next big thing. This aspect of culture is one of the main reasons why we have integrated so well with Constant Contact. We all share a common drive to help small businesses succeed.

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Entrepreneurs should know who they're taking money from. Otherwise, an investor could pull a fast one on them. 

Chris DeVore, a startup investor and advisor, warns about one shady move angel investors sometimes make on his blog, Crash Dev.

He details investors who act supportive of startups early on, providing introductions and assistance as needed. But when it comes time for startups to raise the next round, the "bad angels" show their true colors.

Entrepreneurs are most vulnerable during the fundraising process because they're often low on cash and under stress.  That's when "bad angels" take advantage of them. 

"This early investor makes a private demand to the CEO for a substantial equity grant (one or more full points pre-financing) for their 'invaluable assistance,'" DeVore writes. If they don't get their wish, they'll deny the entrepreneur future help.

"Using this moment as a leverage point to extract value from highly stressed founders who are giving their all is an egregious violation of investor trust and ethics," DeVore says. He urges startups to reference check before accepting money to prevent this from happening.

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Delian Asparouhov, a 19-year-old Thiel Fellow and recent dropout from MIT, just launched a new health startup called Nightingale.

Driven by his grandmother's battle with breast cancer and feeling frustrated by her quality of care, Asparouhov set out to improve the quality of patient care through technology.

Today, Asparouhov and his co-founder Eric Bakan are launching Nightingale for iOS and Android.

Nightingale wants to help ensure patients never forget their medication again. The mobile app learns your lifestyle so that it can provide each patient with accurate, custom medication reminders.

If a daughter is taking care of her father, she could also benefit from Nightingale to track her dad's compliance and get alerts if he's taking less than 10% of his medications. 

Nightingale also wants to help improve the communication between patients and their doctors. Down the road, it will provide on-demand data and a suite of analytics so that caregivers and health care providers can gain better insight into a patient's health.

A service provider with only one or two patients likely won't have to pay, but someone with multiple patients may have to pay yearly fee on a per-patient basis.

Following the sentiments of Square founder and college dropout Jack Dorsey and high school dropout David Karp of Tumblr, Asparouhov says that dropping out isn't for everyone. 

"I think my philosophy on this and what frustrates me with people trying go to deal with this issue is, they try to give really general, overarching advice,"Asparouhov says. "They'll say, 'Oh everyone should drop out of school' or 'Oh, no one should drop out of school. It's one of those individual decisions that just needs to be made on a case-by-case experience."

In Asparouhov's case, he had overloaded himself with classes and finished up a lot of his computer science degree requirements pretty quickly. He was only in his second year at MIT., but was technically considered to be a junior.

The only classes left were introductory courses to computer science — classes that he had previously skipped. But Asparouhov says MIT would not allow him to graduate without taking them.  

Asparouhov ultimately decided to just drop out and use his time more productively, especially given his experience interning at Square the summer before. 

He officially dropped out June 7, shortly after news of him becoming one of the newest Thiel Fellows came out. 

The Thiel Fellowship gives 20 teenagers $100,000 to drop out of college and start a company. The two-year program has been pretty hands-off so far, Asparouhov says, but he likes it that way. 

The program officially started about a month ago and Asparouhov has since relocated to Mountain View, Calif. where he lives in a hacker house with fellow entrepreneurs. 

SEE ALSO: Google Begged This Woman To Stay, But She Left To Start Her Own Company

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If you're seeking discreet paid-for companionship, you need to know about Slixa.

The site offers you an incredibly easy way to hire local escorts over the Internet.

If you want to learn more, we have all the details for you here. If you'd rather take a work-safe tour of the site ...

Here's the homepage at Slixa.com. We're in New York, so let's select it from the "Browse" pulldown menu.

Featured escorts are highlighted at the top...

...and as we scroll down we can see pictures of plenty more.

You're never more than a few clicks away from all kinds of adult entertainment online – pictures, erotic movies, whatever your heart desires.

Now a site called Slixa is trying to harness the power of social media for the world's oldest profession.

The site functions as a localized directory of escorts, erotic masseuses, dominatrixes, fetish workers, and the like. Each one maintains her own personalized profile page of autobiographical information, pictures, and rules on how customers should behave.

It's got a clean, modern design. It's incredibly intuitive to use. And it doesn't look anything like the cheap-looking text-only ads of Backpage.com, where many escorts migrated after CraigsList banned hookers.

Click here for a (work-safe) tour of the site >

It works like this: You browse the site by city, reading the profiles of local escorts. When someone catches your eye, all you have to do is reach out to her. Entertainers' email addresses and phone numbers are publicly visible to anyone browsing the site, so this is a pretty straightforward proposition.

In a roundabout way, this is the Internet's picture menu of sex.

User registration is free, but not required. The only impetus to have an account would be to follow your favorite escorts' status updates, like a sexy Facebook newsfeed.

If you're a prospective customer looking to hire an escort, you pay nothing to use the site. You have unlimited access to entertainer profiles and their contact information. Escorts obviously make money from their clients while Slixa gets its share by charging the escorts for their presences on the site. All standard pages are free right now, but entertainers can buy ad upgrades for a small fee to get increased publicity throughout the site.

Escorts use "credits" to buy a page (also called an ad) on Slixa, with each credit costing $1. To get your ad some exposure on a given city's page, Slixa charges 30 credits per month. To get it listed on the main homepage for some serious site-wide exposure, it's 375 credits for a 14-day period.

Spokesperson Lee Ann Jennings told us that "Slixa has signed up more than 3,000 entertainers in seven months with no signs of slowing down. Escorts and other adult entertainers continue to join at a rapid rate, which of course we're very happy about. The really significant thing is that we're more interested in quality over quantity."

The site is completely bootstrapped, run without any venture funding – "Just the way we like it," said Jennings.

And how much use does the site get? Jennings revealed that the company has "a strict privacy standard we adhere to, so we don't share any of our traffic stats with third parties. As for what percentage are hiring from the site, we don't track that information, as those discussions take place off-site, between the consumers and the entertainers for privacy reasons."

If you're into the idea of Slixa as long as your privacy is protected, this appears to be a non-issue.

In interviews, the only feedback we got from escorts using the site that even came close to constituting a "complaint" is that Slixa is still slightly under the radar and hasn't hit critical mass yet. One entertainer in New York City who requested to remain anonymous said that she would like to do much more business over the site in the future, but acknowledges that "it takes time to build a new brand. So, I believe in the site very deeply. I know it has a great future ahead of it, as it's specifically addressed issues that are a problem for other sites."

And what problems do these other sites have?

They "are either so poorly designed or have such low-functioning capacity that entertainers get lost in the shuffle (and if they don't want to be, they have to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars just to get any attention to their ads). Slixa does a fantastic job of creating a space where entertainers who invest in their business with high quality photos and ad copy have a chance at getting attention, without having to compete with cam sites or pornographic advertising," this escort said.

We had all kinds of legality questions. What's the difference between an escort and a prostitute, and how is Slixa able to operate in the clear?

We reached out to Adrianna Carter, an escort using the site to publicize her wares, who told us that "escorts are high-end companions. Prostitutes sell sex for money." This appears to come down to the subtle difference between selling your time and selling your body.

We also spoke to Lisa Love, an escort operating out of Dallas, Texas, who explained it the same way: "Well, an escort has companionship for sale. A prostitute has sex for sale. I personally like to be described as a 'provider' because I provide the combined services of a therapist, girlfriend, best friend, and ego-booster, you could say. But as a provider, I sell my time. Now, how we choose to spend our time – that's all up to the client."

However, if you're going to use the site, be smart. Atlanta lawyer David Schnipper told us that ads for adult companionship will dance around the specific details of what to expect, instead using keywords like "massage,""time," or "companionship" to stay in the clear. But law enforcement obviously knows what's happening. They're just far less likely to care until someone complains or gets injured.

We were obviously curious about the financials here, and Slixa pages readily tell you the rates you can expect to pay. As the site caters to a clientele that is often of some means, encounters can get expensive quickly. Each escort sets her own price, but as an example, here's how much one New York City escort charges:

• Two hours "get to know you"– $1,800
• Five-hour dinner engagement – $6,000
• Overnight bliss – $10,000

We interviewed one such high-end escort (her name is being withheld at her request), who said that really enterprising and hardworking women can make as much as $400,000 a year, and six figures a year is common income for escorts in general.

Click here to take a (work-safe) tour of Slixa >

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Steve Hogan has a special job in Silicon Valley. His firm, Tech-Rx, is hired to save startups that are circling the drain.

PandoDaily's Erin Griffith interviewed Hogan and asked him for the most common reasons startups fail.

Surprisingly, running out of money wasn't cited as reason number one. It's third.

Instead, only having one founder is the most common reason Hogan says startups die. Running a company alone is much harder and more stressful than it seems, and it's especially unusual for a startup to succeed with just one person behind it.

Reason number two: forgetting to ask, "Who's going to buy this?" before launching. Freemium models are often the fall-back business model, but if a founder doesn't have a truly amazing product, no one is going to buy an upgrade for it. "Unless you can get paying customers, you are probably going to die," Hogan tells Griffith.

Finally, running out of capital is a sure way to kick the bucket. Hogan says he sees a lot of startups get 90% of the way there then run out of cash, and it's often because they didn't raise enough during their last round and plan for enough runway.

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Between down rounds and the inability for startups to raise millions of dollars (the "Series A Crunch"), it seems like the party is over in New York tech.

Instead of stories about Wall Street executives leaving their cushy jobs for startups and consumer apps raising eye-popping amounts, dying startups are making headlines. The once thriving scene has taken a down turn, and a lot of founders are crawling back to the workforce.

Patrick Keane has been part of the New York tech scene for almost two decades. He was the CEO of Associated Content when it sold to Yahoo for $100 million and now he's president of native advertising company, Sharethrough.

Despite the Series A crunch, he thinks New York is still a thriving tech scene. Here are the investment and startup trends he's seeing, and his prediction on the next big tech acquisition. 

Edited by Justin Gmoser

SEE ALSO: How Tory Burch Built Her Fashion Empire And Became A Billionaire In Less Than A Decade

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In 2011, Chris Altchek left his job at Goldman Sachs. He created PolicyMic, a site that used Bleacher Report's model of hiring mostly-free contributors to produce content and applied it to politics. 

Since then, Altchek and his co-founder Jake Horowitz have raised a small family-and-friends round followed by $1.5 million from angel investors and VCs.

The team recently grew to 16 people but Altchek says his team reached 6 million monthly uniques with just 12 people prior to the mini hiring spree. Part of the traffic growth came from obvious tweaks, like adding more apparent share tools to the site and expanding into other verticals, such as news and entertainment. There's also an obvious traffic spike in March 2013, when PolicyMic closed its financing round. Other less obvious factors contributed to the company's growth as well.

We asked Altchek which moves he's made over the past few years that helped his site grow the most.

"PolicyMic focused on a very specific demographic – millennials – and a specific type of content – high-quality analysis," Altchek says. "We've been able to grow traffic to over 6 million monthly uniques, which is now 1/3 social, 1/3 search, and 1/3 direct, by doing three things really well."

Here are those three things, according to Altchek:

1. Smart social – we've narrowed in on smart content that people still want to share. We hired a behavioral scientist from London School of Economics, Liz Plank, who's job is to study viral trends on smart topics. We track social sharing on all the top publishers on the web and draw trends that allow us to produce viral stories on important topics. A few examples include this story on the protests in Turkey which has 97,341 shares, or this storyon Calvin & Hobbes with 50,011 shares, this story on Brazil which 71,570 shares, or this story on the American economy with 47,176 shares.
2. Mobilizing millennials – we have built our editorial team around our millennial contributors – who are the leading 20-something in their fields. Instead of writing multiple stories per day, our 12-person editorial team is focused on training writers, editing, fact-checking, and recruiting millennials with deep topic expertise. By sourcing these high quality millennial contributors, we have built out a network that produces, consumes, and distributes to have an impact on PolicyMic and across various social networks. Our contributor model has allowed to us to scale to publishing over 90 high-quality articles per day.
3. Viral Engagement – while building a high-quality publishing system, we've built a community of millennials that want to have intellectual discussions on big ideas. Because of the authentic discussion happening on our platform, thought leaders have begun holding Q&A by publishing on the site and responding to comments. Here are a few recent thought leaders we've hosted:

Future improvements Altchek is planning to make include a site redesign, and the expansion into even more verticals this fall. 

To see how he got started, here's a Q&A with Altcheck shortly after he left Goldman Sachs.

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Marissa Mayer is on an insane acquisition spree as she tries to breathe life into Yahoo.

In this month alone, she's hoovered up four companies. Since she took over a year ago, she's bought 18 different companies, according to Wikipedia. (We checked Wikipedia against Yahoo's official Twitter feed which announced all the deals.)

Her old company, Google, was a prolific acquirer, which must have been an influence over her style.

We've assembled the companies here to try to make some sense of her scattershot approach to rebuilding Yahoo.

If you look closely, you can see a pattern. 

Stamped was the first company Mayer bought.

Stamped raised ~$3 million. CEO Robby Stein was previously at Google, and worked with Mayer before she brought him to Yahoo. Yahoo reportedly paid around $10 million for Stamped.

Stamped was a social mobile review app. Yahoo killed the product and put its team of 10 engineers to work on other stuff. We're not sure what the team is up to right now at Yahoo. Stein is a director of product in NYC for Yahoo building out a team, it seems. 

Next, she acquired Ontheair, which did video chat hang outs.

OnTheAir raised $880,000 in seed funding. It was only around for a few months before it decided to sell to Yahoo. There were only five people on the team. They were building a video chat hang out for mobile phones.

Snip.it was a social sharing startup that collects links.

Snip.it was killed. It looks like Mayer wanted to hire its CEO Ramy Adeeb, who had a background in investing. He has an eye for startup talent, so he can help Yahoo make other acquihires.

Emerson Walker is 14 years old and — if he gets his way — he's about to change the way schools all over America handle their schedules.

He has developed a calendar app, called mPlanner, that solves school's trickiest problem: Coordinating the differing schedules of classes, parents, sports teams, doctors and so on. As his almost fully funded Kickstarter page describes it:

School assignments are posted online, their school events calendar is on the school webpage, their sports calendar is on the fridge, their doctor appointments are on their parents’ phone, and their social events are on social media sites.

The mPlanner app syncs them altogether:

The mPlanner syncs with assignments from school portals (such as Schoology and Blackboard), and presents each assignment to them to "triage" into a study plan.

The app also benefits parents by providing them with a parent interface, allowing instant access to their child's schedule so they can be on the same page.

The idea is genius, because if you know anything about school calendaring web sites like Blackboard and Classes, you'll know they are balky, complicated and annoying to use — in addition to being stored on separate sites. (I can attest to this personally from my experience using three different class scheduling systems at Columbia and NYU.) If mPlanner "solves" this problem, it could easily become the Facebook of calendars. Remember, Facebook started off as a literal "face book" for college campuses.

Emerson, of Turpin High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, and his collaborator, Will Muller, a senior at Indian Hills High School, already won a Cincinnati Startup Weekend contest, getting themselves some free office space and advice. They've already got mockups of the app on their web site. And there's an adorable/impressive pitch video on YouTube (below).

Emerson only needs $5,000 from Kickstarter to get his project done this summer, he says.

Lastly, don't worry (too much) about him spending it all at the mall: "My dad, Ry Walker, Partner at Cincinnati venture studio Differential (http://differential.io), is formally running the project, and will manage the money," he writes.

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Qin Zhi was working as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. when he first read Steve Jobs' famous Stanford University commencement speech.

In his famous "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish" commencement address, Jobs instructed recent graduates to act on their passions, stating that, "the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle."

Bloomberg reports that the words prompted Qin Zhi to leave his job at McKinsey & Co. and join a Chinese startup, Autohome Inc., in 2007.

"After reading those words I thought to myself what I was doing then was absolutely not my passion," Zhi told Bloomberg. "What I did had no risks and I felt like I was wasting my life. So I decided to seek a change."

Six years later, Zhi is now Autohome's CEO, a company with over 1,000 employees and home to China's most popular website for comparing vehicles.

With a possible Autohome IPO on the horizon, Zhi has seen large success after acting on the late Apple co-founder's advice.

This past year, Autohome took in over $163 million in revenue, with its website seeing over 6 million unique visits a day.

In Zhi's case, it looks like it pays to "stay foolish."

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Dan Shipper, 22, is going into his final semester at University of Pennsylvania.

Unlike most seniors, Shipper doesn't spend his nights fretting about finding a job or endlessly partying. He is already self-employed.

Much of his spare time is spent running a tech business that's more or less bootstrapped: Firefly. He and his partner, Justin Meltzer, raised $20,000 from First Round Capital's Dorm Room Fund.

This isn't their first startup either. The pair met at a coffee shop during Shipper's sophomore year (Meltzer is one year older), where a group of students interested in tech entrepreneurship gathered on Fridays. Their first joint venture was Airtime, a company they've since discontinued. Both are technical; Shipper has been coding since he was in fifth grade. Meltzer taught himself five years ago.

Firefly is a 2-person startup (three if you count the intern) that has only been around for 10 months. It enables customer service reps to share their screens with customers and co-browse without requiring them to download any software. Its 6,000 customers either pay $25-99 per customer service rep or a fixed monthly rate if it's a large organization. Today Firefly announced a partnership with chat company Olark that accounts for 5,000 of its 6,000 clients.

Despite Shipper splitting time between class and "real" work, Firefly is profitable. It's "well into the 6-figures in annual revenue," says Shipper.

Most college kids in that position would be throwing keggers and buying friends rounds at the bar. We asked Shipper what he does with all the money he earns, how he manages his time, and what his plans are when he graduates in December.

The following is a lightly edited Q&A.

BUSINESS INSIDER: Firefly generates 6-figures per year. What does a college kid – sorry, "young adult"– do with all that extra cash?

DAN SHIPPER: Yes, well into the 6-figures. But I can't tell you exactly where in the six figures. We just plow the money right back into the business. We pay ourselves a little bit of a salary but most of it goes toward expenses. Lawyer bills when you run a company like ours can get high. It's not like all of this is profit. We are pretty frugal with our money.

BI: So Firefly is profitable?

DS: Definitely profitable. It's just the two of us and an intern.

BI: What do your friends and classmates think of all this?

DS: They think it's cool, especially when we tell them the number of customers we have. Before we were successful they stopped listening when we said "customer support software."

BI: What is your typical day like?

DS: I go to classes during the day, which start between 10 and 1. After that I'm in the office [First Round Capital's in Philadelphia] until midnight. I have a full course load and I'm graduating early; I took more classes than I had to so I could graduate in December.

BI: Do you have a social life?

DS: Yah, I go out some.

BI: Do your friends see the fruits of your labor? AKA do you buy them rounds of drinks? 

DS: [Laughs] Maybe when we get to 7 figures in revenue we'll do that.

BI: But you're a college kid making tons of money. Even if you paid yourself $30,000 a year that'd be a fortune for a college student. You never share the financial love with any friends?

DS: We're not paying ourselves even close to $30,000. 

BI: Justin, what was your schedule like?

JUSTIN MELTZER: I had the same schedule as Dan. I graduated early but after class we'd meet and work on the business.

DS: We'd meet in my lounge in the dorm. People were running around; chairs were uncomfortable. Now at First Round we have things like free snacks and a skeeball machine. Our office is closer to my house than any of my classes.

BI: With such hectic schedules, how did you manage to close a big partnership like Olark? You said that deal alone increased your customer base from 1,000 to 6,000.

JM: Dan got an intro to them. We've been working really hard on it over the last year to get it done. We thought Olark would be a natural fit.

DS: I realized Olark was a Y Combinator [a Silicon Valley startup accelerator] company. I asked another Y Combinator grad, Jason Freedman of 42Floors, for an intro. He set it up.

BI: What's the plan when you graduate? To join Justin full time? Will you relocate Firefly to New York?

DS: The plan is to keep working on Firefly full time. We're not sure where we'll be located. We both really, really like Philly.

SEE ALSO: 21-YEAR-OLD TELLS ALL: Here's How I Sold My Startup For $100 Million

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Zynga is suing the makers of Bang with Friends, an app that makes it easy to turn Facebook friends into flings. That's news to Bang With Friends' founders, who say they never received a service letter notifying them of the lawsuit. They read about it in the news this morning, just like everyone else.

The service letter, which is mandatory in any lawsuit, shows up here, so Bang With Friends will likely receive it today. The lawsuit was filed late last evening.

Given that Zynga owns the "with friends" trademark for all computer games, it doesn't sound like Bang With Friends has much of a case. Zynga first filed for the "with friends" trademark in 2011 before Bang With Friends was founded. It was officially granted the mark in June 2013. The mark encompasses a wide spectrum of intellectual property, such as "entertainment services in which users can interact through social games for recreational, leisure or entertainment purposes," and "computer software to enable posting, showing, or displaying information in the field of electronic gaming."

Zynga claims Bang With Friends only chose its name because of Zynga's popular brands, such as "Words with Friends,"Scramble with Friends" and "Running with Friends." Not only that, but Bang With Friends is a sex-finding app, so it could damage Zynga's wholesome reputation. Zynga is seeking payment for damages in the lawsuit.

"Zynga filed a lawsuit to stop blatant infringement of its valuable “With Friends” brand," Zynga's Deputy General Counsel Renée Lawson said in a statement. "A company calling itself “Bang with Friends” – whose own founders played Zynga’s “With Friends” games – decided to gain attention for its sex-related app by leveraging Zynga’s well-known mark. Zynga is compelled to file suit to prevent further consumer confusion and protect its intellectual property rights against infringement."

A source close to the Zynga team says Zynga is only seeking a name change, not requesting that the app get shut down entirely. This person also says Zynga tried to resolve this "amicably" for several months, and there have been communications between both parties prior to the lawsuit.

Bang With Friends could make the case that it isn't technically a game. But its name is similar enough that it could cause brand confusion with Zynga, especially since its app once retailed in the App Store alongside Zynga's brands. It doesn't seem like Bang With Friends would pass the "Likelihood of Confusion test," which is used in many trademark infringement cases. According to MarkLaw.com, "If the relevant consuming public will likely be confused or mistaken about the source of a product or service sold using the mark in question, then likelihood of confusion exists, and the mark has been infringed." 

The founders of Bang With Friends say they take intellectual property seriously and they'll act accordingly once they receive a copy of the lawsuit (as of 6:00 AM Eastern, they still hadn't received official notification).

"We heard through media reports that Zynga has filed a trademark infringement claim with respect to the 'with friends' part of our name," Bang With Friends told Business Insider this morning via email. "As a technology company, we take intellectual property seriously and will evaluate the case in detail once we receive a copy.  Regardless, we continue to be focused on making our users happy, so that they can help each other be happy."

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If you want to make a lot of money, you get a job on Wall Street.

If you want to make even more money, you might dump that Wall Street job for a startup.

It isn't a career path that works out for everyone. But for the founders of Wikipedia and Amazon, for example, ditching finance for tech was a smart choice.

Joshua Kushner worked for Goldman Sachs before he started Thrive Capital, which invested in Instagram and Kickstarter

Joshua Kushner graduated from Harvard and worked for Goldman Sachs. After a short stint there he left to pursue a career in venture capital.

His firm, Thrive Capital, has invested in startups such as NastyGal, Kickstarter, Instagram, and Makerbot. He also recently gathered $40 million to start a new health insurance company, Oscar.

Alexa Von Tobel was a trader at Morgan Stanley before she founded LearnVest, a startup that's raised more than $40 million to give affordable financial planning to the 99%.

Alexa Von Tobel began her career at Morgan Stanley where she rose up the ranks to become a trader. She quit to attend Harvard Business School, then dropped out to found LearnVest.

LearnVest has raised more than $40 million to tackle an important issue: there should be financial planners and advisors available for the middle class, especially with such a high percentage of the population in debt.

Whether LearnVest will succeed or not remains to be seen, but Von Tobel looks well positioned to clean up as a tech founder.

Scott Belsky quit a job at Goldman Sachs to start Behance. After bootstrapping it for five years then raising a few million dollars, he sold it to Adobe for $150 million.

Scott Belsky is now an angel investor in companies like Pinterest with his own, very big startup success. Last year he sold a portfolio site for designers, Behance, to Adobe for $150 million.

Prior to founding Behance, Belsky worked for Goldman Sachs. He told Business Insider about his decision to leave Wall Street for a startup.

"I figured I might just become a middle manager living a great life, but not doing something extraordinary. I came to believe that doing something extraordinary is never achieved through ordinary means. I remember that moment at Goldman where I was thinking I should leave and start something. I shared that with colleagues and they thought I was crazy. I gained confidence from being doubted."

After nearly a decade at VMware, prominent exec Jerry Chen left last month to join VC firm Greylock Partners.

Chen's decision caused a collective gasp in the enterprise world.

He was an early employee at VMware, joining when the company was about 400 employees strong. (It has about 15,000 employees today.)

He was also the Vice President of Cloud and Application Services, a critical team for VMware.

His departure was seen as part of a bigger brain drain at VMware now that former CEO Paul Maritz has moved on, replaced by Pat Gelsinger.

We recently caught up with Chen. He left VMware as part of his mission to build what he calls the "post server world," he told us, and he's inviting other current and past VMware employees to join him.

In many ways, this is what VMware is already doing, from its flagship "server virtualization" product (which allows one physical server to run multiple operating systems) to its leadership with a new tech that threatens Cisco called software-defined networking.

Here's a lightly edited transcript.

Business Insider: There's been a lot of talk about the number of execs leaving VMware. What's going on and why did you leave?

Jerry Chen: At 15,000 employees there will be some employees coming and going. VMware is in transition and the industry itself is in transition.

For me, every five or ten years you have to ask yourself, am I in the right career?  As the VP running a big team, I wasn't getting my hands as dirty as I wanted to. I love working with new tech and creating category-defining technologies and products.

BI: What's the next big technology that you're working on?

JC: The "post server world." People understand that [the term] post-PC era means we're no longer using PCs as our primary computing devices, we're using tablets and mobile phones.

The analogy is that enterprises used to buy servers, networks, storage. In the "post-server world" you're no longer buying racks of servers and storage. You are buying an Amazon extra-large instance and 2 terabytes of storage per month. Enterprises are quickly moving from building their own data centers to renting capacity in the cloud.

BI: So "post PC" refers to the changes in consumer tech. "Post server" refers to the same trend on the enterprise side?

JC: Yes.

BI: Former VMware employees have launched quite a few startups. Do VMware employees have a friend in you?

JC: VMware is interesting. There's a growing alumni network. We've been calling it the V-mafia, like the PayPal mafia. For sure the VMware alumni connection will be a great source of entrepreneurs and executives to join companies. I hope that they look at me as a friend or a mentor.

BI: The V-mafia boss?

JC: [Laughs]. Like Don Chen.

SEE ALSO: The 15 Most Valuable Cloud Computing Companies In The World Are Worth Way More Than You'd Think

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The pop culture view of startups is that they’re all about coming up with a great product idea. After the eureka moment, the outcome is preordained. This neglects the years of toil that entrepreneurs endure, and also the fact that the vast majority of startups change over time, often dramatically.

In response to this pop culture misconception, it has become popular in the startup community to say things like “execution is everything” and “ideas don’t matter”.

But the reality is that ideas do matter, just not in the narrow sense in which startup ideas are popularly defined. Good startup ideas are well developed, multi-year plans that contemplate many possible paths according to how the world changes. Balaji Srinivasan calls this the idea maze:

A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions.

Imagine, for example, that you were thinking of starting Netflix back when it was founded in 1997. How would content providers, distribution channels, and competitors respond? How soon would technology develop to open a hidden door and let you distribute online instead of by mail? Or consider Dropbox in 2007. Dozens of cloud storage companies had been started before. What mistakes had they made? How would incumbents like Amazon and Google respond? How would new platforms like mobile affect you?

When you’re starting out, it’s impossible to completely map out the idea maze. But there are some places you can look for help:

1) History. If your idea has been tried before (and almost all good ideas have), you should figure out what the previous attempts did right and wrong. A lot of this knowledge exists only in the brains of practitioners, which is one of many reasons why “stealth mode” is a bad idea. The benefits of learning about the maze generally far outweigh the risks of having your idea stolen.

2) Analogy. You can also build the maze by analogy to similar businesses. If you are building a “peer economy” company it can be useful to look at what Airbnb did right. If you are building a marketplace you should understand eBay’s beginnings. Etc.

3) Theories. There are now decades of historical data on tech startups, and smart observers have sifted through to develop theories that generalize that data. Some of these theories come from academia (e.g. Clay Christensen) but increasingly they come from investors and entrepreneurs on blogs.

4) Direct experience. A lot of good startup founders figure out the maze through direct experience, often at work. The key here is to put yourself in interesting mazes and give yourself time to figure it out.

The metaphor of a maze also helps you think about competition. Competition from other startups is usually just a distraction. In all likelihood, they won’t take the same path, and the presence of others in your maze means you might be onto something. Your real competition – and what you should worry about – is the years you could waste going down the wrong path.

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Collaborative consumption startups are becoming more commonplace with the likes of Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft.

But bikesharing is relatively new to the space.

Startup Social Bicycles recently deployed 25 bikes for a bike share test run in Hoboken, N.J.

The company also recently closed a $1.3 million round in funding from a slew of investors including David S. Rose, SOS Ventures, Esther Dyson and Karl Ulrich, SoBi founder Ryan Rzepecki tells Business Insider. SoBi hopes to raise a Series A round toward the end of this year.

Rzepecki previously worked at the New York City Department of Transportation, and even played a part in the city's efforts to bring a bikesharing program to New York. 

But Rzepecki ultimately decided that he wanted to create his own company, after toying around with designing how a bike sharing program could work. Since he was still at the DOT, it would have been a conflict of interest so he left. 

Rzepecki started developing Social Bicycles in the spring of 2010. Since then, SoBi has deployed its custom bikes in Buffalo, N.Y., Sun Valley, Idaho and Hoboken, N.J., Tampa, Fla., and at the San Francisco International Airport. Across the entire system, SoBi has deployed 150 bikes.

But not in New York. 

Unfortunately for SoBi, a group called Bicycle Share beat them out for New York's bid to run the city's bike share program.

But when CitiBike first launched, it elicited a lot of criticism from residents. Some complained about the stations taking up precious space for parking spots and driving lanes. 

"The biggest pushback didn’t come against the bikes, it came against system," Rzepecki says.

Social Bicycles doesn't need to build these huge, custom racks. In a more residential area, Social Bicycles could simply set up bike racks on the sidewalk.

"That’s the flexibility that comes with having a lock on each bike," Rzepecki says.

SoBi's bikes come with built-in locks and GPS units. So when you want a bike, all you do is pop open your smartphone app to locate one. You unlock the bike with a pin and then once you're done, simply reenter the pin to lock it up.

While Social Bicycles could theoretically launch in New York without the official support of the city, Rzepecki says he's not really trying to "go rogue."

"That's just the way this particular industry works," Rzepecki says. "You have to focus on communities that don't yet have bike share programs."

But as great as a bike share program sounds, there are still some issues to keep in mind, Rzepecki says. Especially as we're getting to the point where it's going to be expected for a city to have a bike share program, he says.

1. Launching at too small of a scale. A program is only as useful as the number of bikes and locations where you can take them.
2. Helmet laws. Some cities have strict laws for riders to wear helmets, which could be problematic for a lot of bike share programs. 
3. "A bike-share is not a cure-all." Cities still need to make sure they have done some groundwork in terms of bike lanes and educating motorists about building a bike-friendly culture. 
4. Another tricky thing is that most cities were not built with locking and biking in mind. Hence the big, bulky locking racks that CitiBike uses in New York. 

SEE ALSO: Google Begged This Woman To Stay, But She Left To Start Her Own Company

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You may be a media planner, fending off ad sales meeting requests.  You may be a CEO , trying to escape journalists with questions. Or you may be a journalist, batting away PR pitches.

Either way, there's nothing worse than opening your already-brimming inbox to find a bunch of emails from strangers you've never met, asking you for things.

How did these resourceful, needy people find you?

One trick they may be using is an email plug-in, Rapportive.

Rapportive is a contact list startup that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. It raised about $1 million from a few VC firms and notable angel investors like Dave McClure and Uber investor Shervin Pishevar. It was snatched up for somewhere between $10 and $20 million, according to AllThingsD.

Rapportive pulls in email contacts' social media profiles so you can follow them on Twitter or Facebook easily. It also enables you to swap notes with the person or scan recent tweets, all from a box that appears next to an open email exchange in Gmail. 

Here's what an email from my colleague Jim Edwards looks like.

Where it can be a useful stalker tool is this:

Say you don't know a person's email address, but you know the typical format their company uses. For example, at Business Insider, our format is First Initial, Last Name @ Businessinsider.com. You can guess what an individual's email is from there.

Create a new email and type in the guess-of-an-email-address. Wait a few moments, and Rapportive will either show you the person's results on the side, or it will show you nothing. In other words, try again.

I discovered Rapportive this afternoon, while asking a colleague for Jack Dorsey's email address. Dorsey is the CEO of payments startup Square and he co-founded Twitter. She whipped up Rapportive and voila, Dorsey's email was confirmed. Mind=blown. 

Here's what the successful result looked like:

Here's what the inaccurate attempt looked like.

So sorry Jack, but thanks to Rapportive, you can expect an email from me soon. 

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500px, a platform where photographers upload their own photos in hopes they'll go viral or sell a few copies, has raised an $8.8 million Series A round of investment, the company's founders told Business Insider.

Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Harrison Metal, Creative Artists Agency, Rugged Ventures, Dustin Plett, and ff Venture Capital.

500px was started as a hobby in the mid-2000s for its Toronto-based founders, Oleg Gutsol and Evgeny Tchebotarev. The name stems from one of the early photo upload requirements: all images had to be at least 500 pixels wide. Gutsol and Tchebotarev launched 500px as an actual business in 2009 and from there it has grown to 10 million active monthly users, according to Gutsol. It has 2.5 million registered users. Across its platform, which includes other companies that use the 500px API, it generates 1 billion monthly pageviews.

Unlike Pinterest (which Andreessen Horowitz also invested in), The Fancy, and other photo-sharing sites, the majority of photos uploaded on 500px abide by current copyright laws. Everyone who uploads an image on 500px and wants to sell it retains the copyright to it. In other words, it's an image they should have taken or designed themselves. If it isn't and 500px receives a complaint about it, they'll work on a case-by-case basis to remove the image from the system.

The photographers can then sell their images on 500px, or they can simply post it and hope it gets noticed. If enough users in the 500px community like the image, it will rise to the front page of the site and spread across the Internet. Gutsol says 500px sees a lot of traffic from social sites, with the top referrers being Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest in that order.

For its first few years, 500px was bootstrapped. It later raised a seed round; John Frankel of ff Venture Partners was its first investor. Shortly after raising that round, 500px reached profitability. Gutsol decided to put the revenue toward scaling the company though, so the profitability was short lived.

In 2012, Gutsol says his 25-person team generated $1.3 million by offering a premium subscription service. This year he says revenue will double or triple that amount and they're considering offering commercial licenses.

500px plans to use a portion of its Series A to open an office in San Francisco and triple the size of its staff.

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This morning at DreamIt Ventures demo day, 15 new startups presented to a packed room full of investors, industry insiders, and press.

DreamIt Ventures is one of the more prestigious accelerators in New York. Over the years, it has produced successful companies like SCVNGR/LevelUp, Notehall, SeatGeek, Adaptly, and Mindsnacks.

Here are some of our favorite companies from the day:

Miner creates virtual stores on your phone depending on your location using geofencing technology. Miner delivers mobile content to people when they arrive. At the event today, we entered a contest to win a Nike FuelBand, just to test the service. At the end, they announced the winner. Miner also has a cool treasure hunt feature where you can find hidden gems all over your city.

GamePress makes it dead-simple to create iPad games on the iPad without any programming knowledge. Users can sell their games to their friends and to the GamePress community through its marketplace. They can also create and sell special visual and sound effects. 

Stylr may literally change the face of offline shopping. Three Stanford graduates created Stylr to help people find clothing products in stores around you. You can filter it down by color and size. Over time, the system learns about your preferences and can provide you personalized suggestions. Already, Stylr is pulling in inventory from more than 60 major retailers and more than 5,000 brands. 

Let's say you want to buy a dress today. Pop open the app, search for some dresses, pick one you like, and then you'll see if the store has it in stock. If they do, you can put in on hold within the app itself and then pop on over to the store to pick it up. 

Touchbase is determined to change how people interact with physical objects. It's essentially a better solution for NFC-like communication, but has developed a technology that uses conductive ink technology. For example, New York's MTA could create a tag so that when you place a tagged card against your smartphone, you can pay for and reload your pass. 

instruMagic makes it super easy to learn how to play guitar on your iPad. In the future, instruMagic will add additional instruments, like the piano and drums, so that you can even have jam sessions with your friends. 

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