You've just decided to rent out party boat for your 25th birthday party. Now comes the hard part: finding enough cash to cover at least part of the cost.

That's where Crowdtilt, a small-scale crowd-funding app, can help. It's kind of like Kickstarter, except instead of trying to start a company, you're just trying to get a group of friends pony up $5,000 for a party boat.

And it turns out the idea has some serious traction: in its first six weeks of being open to the public, Crowdtilt — whose projects range in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, not millions — serviced more than $1 million in funding projects.

We caught up with co-founder James Beshara to find out more about Crowdtilt. Here's what we learned:

• After turning the service on, Crowdtilt served more than $1 million in campaigns in a little more than six weeks. Given that they are all small-scale projects, you can imagine how many funders and campaigns there were (though Beshara wouldn't give us specific details).

• The funding projects range from a party on Alcatraz to changing your middle name to "Awesome Dangerous." They aren't exactly intended to be large-scale projects like starting a company through Kickstarter.

• Still, some charities are using Crowdtilt. They saw some traction with charities and non-profits, which was originally the target audience, but saw a much bigger audience among the small-scale project funding. 

Here's a lightly-edited transcript of the interview:

BUSINESS INSIDER: Tell me a little bit about yourself — what's your background?

JAMES BESHARA: My background is actually in development economics, that's what I studied. I worked in South Africa for two years in microfinance and microinsurance. While I was down there I built a crowd-funding platform focused on developing communities. That was my first kind of tech startup. We launched that in South Africa and when I came back to the U.S. I wasn't working on that full-time and thought the same software we'd built could similarly be used for grouping funds for any charitable cost or any kind of social effort. Crowdtilt was originally focused as a Kickstarter for charities and after launching, within a few weeks, friends started requesting to use it for much more trivial use cases like fantasy football and a party bus. Those two campaigns started spreading amongst our group of friends and they started requesting to use it more and more. Within a few weeks it was getting traction with some nonprofits but with groups of friends it was spreading like wildfire. After about five weeks, it was just so clear that we needed to build the site out for how it was already being used, for groups of friends to pool money online. 

BI: So you guys don't consider yourself a crowdfunding site exactly right? It's a little different?

JB: The biggest differences are that these campaigns are private amongst your group of friends. Your group of friends is kind of ambiguous, it's private amongst your network. The second biggest difference is that it can be used for anything. It's used mostly for shared experiences and shared purchases. Instead of a documentary or a creative project or your startup, like all the crowd funding sites, it'll be for a trip to Alcatraz for Halloween or a party bus for Suzy's birthday on Friday night.

I think for the most part, we just have "crowd" in our name. It's pretty deliberate, we've taken those elements of crowd funding models out there. Part of it is on purpose. You put up an objective you gather support for it and no one is actually charged if the objective isn't reached. It's different from a year or two ago when you were collecting money, telling everyone to pay you by PayPal or check. That was such a frustrating experience, daunting for the organizer. It's very much like Kickstarter now — do you guys want to do this Friday, are we going to raise enough? No one wants to be on the hook for it. We'll either get enough money or no one will be charged a cent.

BI: Why would I use Crowdtilt instead of something like PayPal?

JB: We think there's this gap between PayPal and selling tickets on Eventbrite. PayPal is great for being able to collect money from anyone anywhere. Eventbrite is great for selling tickets from 50 to 80 to 100 people. But there are a lot of experiences of 15 people that want to do something. You have 15 friends, 20 colleagues, 25 fraternity brothers or bachelors. They want to have a barbecue. There's this massively under-served middle-market. You don't want to sell Eventbrite tickets to your friends, but you do need to aggregate funds. The reason PayPal doesn't fit that is because the same group of friends are usually the idea and the interest bubbles up from a very social place on the web. The same group of friends, when given the choice to go to a transactional, impersonal service or to use a social and collaborative tool, once they use the social tool it's hard to go back to a transactional tool like PayPal.

The natural evolution of the connected web is for you to do things with your friends, to feel like the experience, even online, is inclusive and collaborative. I'm sure you're collected money from a group on PayPal before, it's a pain in the ass and there's no transparency to see who has and who hasn't paid. I's just not as simple when you can put up one little landing page and everyone can not only see who's paid and who hasn't, but everyone can pay without having to sign up to PayPal or enter bank account information. You can get paid from anywhere around the web. Within 2 to 3 seconds, it's actually even easier. In (Y Combinator Partner) Paul Graham's words, each service has to be orders of magnitude better than the previous service you're competing with.

"In (Y Combinator Partner) Paul Graham's words, each service has to be orders of magnitude better than the previous service you're competing with."

With Crowdtilt, it wasn't just about making it social and nice to see friends' pictures, it was making it even simpler than PayPal.

BI: What are some of the weirdest campaigns that have been funded on Crowdtilt?

JB: Renting out Alcatraz for Halloween. It was about $37,000 to rent it out and get ferry boats and the organizer wanted to do it with friends and not front the money. It got funded really quickly. On the totally other end of the spectrum, a guy in Arizona two or three weeks ago wanted to fund the changing of his middle name to Awesome Dangerous. The application fee was $350 and his friends funded that. I remember because within 15 minutes it was halfway there and I was laughing that friends would really come together on something like that. If he had tried to send out an email asking people, and this characterizes the difference, to send cash or checks I doubt it would have worked. But because it was online on something like Crowdtilt people felt like they could be a part of something.

We see that ranging from Alcatraz to party buses and epic house parties, you feel like you're a part of something when you get to see the names and pictures of your friends much more than contributing to it in the dark.  

BI: Are you guys opening this up to developers? Can anyone plug it into their site?

JB: This fall you'll be able to plug it into other sites. The example would be Spring Break friends being able to pay for something on a vacation rental site, or three friends being able to buy a bigger bouquet of flowers on 1-800-Flowers.

BI: What kind of traction are you guys seeing so far?

JB: We launched in February and opened it up out of our beta in April. In our first six and a half weeks, we funded over $1 million in campaigns. It was extremely fast, out of the gate, because we really tested this out with a private beta to see what the real need was. We were able to hit $1 million, that totally floored us, it blew away even the Y Combinator partners. They were really stoked bout it, five of them re-invested in us because of this traction and the real need for a social payments model online. 

BI: What's up next for you guys? 

JB: It was our biggest day ever yesterday, and we have a really cool partnership in the pipeline.

The biggest thing is focusing on the product and growth even more. That's kind of the biggest internal thing. We have a partnership with Reddit that launches later this month, to be their official fundraising partner, which is pretty huge. We're stoked about that. We've already started the testing for that and it's been pretty cool to see. Our biggest objective right now, the most important priority is just making the product as easy and effective as possible. You use it once and you'll never go back to PayPal or checks or cash again.

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The very first "office space" where Pinterest was born is now at risk of being shut down.

Hacker Dojo, one of Silicon Valley's most prized collaborative workspaces, is in the process of raising money to retrofit its office and avoid being shut down, The New York Times reports.

Hacker spaces like Hacker Dojo (nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley) and Noisebridge (in the edgy Mission District in San Francisco, an up and coming startup-heavy neighborhood) are beloved among entrepeneurs because they bring a bunch of smart developers under a single roof. Whenever you have that many smart people in the same room, great ideas tend to emerge.

Hacker Dojo charges rogue developers $100 a month to have access to the space, which includes office supplies, bike racks and other perks. Often they'll hold makeshift classes, such as a beginner's session on the Python programming language — resources you would never have access to otherwise.

As a result, founders and curious would-be entrepreneurs can lean on these "dojos" instead of having to go through the arduous process of finding funding for an office space or getting accepted into Y Combinator or other incubators, and won't have to give up equity.

The other option is to work from home, which in addition to being lonely and devoid of other entrepeneurs, can be disheartening and have an annoying lack of resources. You hear stories about entrepeneurs scraping together a prototype while eating dried ramen — with places like the Dojo, the reality is much softer and much more welcoming.

In short, hacker havens like the Hacker Dojo actually lead to more entrepeneurs being willing to venture out on their own and try to build companies.

But given that it's just a retrofitted warehouse, it doesn't have the requirements of an office building — like fire escapes and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. That's led city officials to come down on the hacker space, which also served as the west coast office of the designers of the Pebble watch, the Times reports.

“If they can’t comply, they can’t use the building as they want to,” said Mountain View's chief building officer Anthony Ghiossi told the Times.

The Dojo has so far raised more than $170,000 for retrofits amounting to about $250,000 — from Google included, the Times reports. It also has a Kickstarter campaign running, which has raised more than $40,000.

Granted, it's for safety precautions, and it sounds like Mountain View is trying to work things out with the Dojo. But having visited a number of these spaces, getting snagged by a technicality is a horrible way to go down.

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We're not quite sure what to make of Branch, a new discussion board backed by some of the biggest names of Silicon Valley.

Is it supposed to be like Twitter, but without the 140-character limit? Is it like Facebook, where you are only talking amongst your friends? Is it a Quora killer? Or a message board?

Whatever it is, the result is pretty nice: the site is filled with very intelligent discussions — if not skewing a bit on the side of armchair philosophy.

The basic function of Branch to create exclusive discussions that only a few people can publicly engage in, yet anyone can tune in and watch.

Membership is invite-only for now, so sign up here if you want to give Branch a go.

With the co-founders of Twitter serving as advisors, New York-based startup Branch has raised about $2 million in funding, so they have to be doing something right.

Branch, at least for now, is pretty exclusive. You have to request an invitation if you want to get in.

You can't even view the main website if you haven't picked up an invite yet.

However, you can view specific branches and subscribe to updates from them via email until you get an invitation.

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In the wake of the Facebook IPO, something funny has happened to the world of startups. 

Suddenly, startups feel very boring.

VCs and entrepreneurs say they feel it too.

"I do feel a bit like that, but then again that could also just be the startups I'm happening to see," one investor said.

"The noisiest space (social consumer) looks a bit less interesting," said another.

What's changed? Why are startups for the first time in a long time...boring?

We've just come out of a very exciting time in tech

Four of the biggest, most-hyped tech companies—LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga, and Facebook—have gone public.

Instagram got acquired for $1 billion. Yammer did even better.

Everything we were looking forward to is over and there's not much that's exciting on the horizon.

If feels like the day after Christmas.

Suddenly, startups aren't the exciting companies to watch

Yammer CEO David Sacks was on to something when he wrote about the coming end of Silicon Valley.  

"Human creativity has not changed," he wrote. "But the question is, how many of those opportunities will be captured by startups versus incumbents? Silicon Valley may not be running out of ideas, but we might be running out of big new companies."

For the first time in a long time, the exciting stuff is coming from the biggest companies in the industry instead of the smallest ones. Google's self-driving cars. Apple's iPad. Amazon exploring same-day delivery. 

These are big, world-changing ideas. 

A few startups are worth their hype. Square is doing something amazing in making a transaction feel personal again. Pinterest's user growth is astounding. And Twitter, if you can still call it a startup, is becoming more and more important. But those are exceptions.

Startups that were supposed to be big, exciting tech companies are letdowns

A few startups had us nearly convinced they'd be the next big things, but they've been letdowns. After a splashy launch Airtime lost all its users. Brewster, an app that promised to change mobile contacts, did too. When was the last time anyone used Viddy or Draw Something?

Add to the pall how Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, are struggling in the public markets.

What happens to those big companies affects the entire tech ecosystem. Paul Graham cautioned startups about a Facebook fallout.

"The bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups," he said.

He was right; startups are stuck in limbo. No one wants to invest or believe in "the next Facebook" while the current Facebook struggles.

The space is too crowded

Starting a company used to be more difficult. Only people with boatloads of money could afford to launch one. Only engineering geniuses could make one. And only marketing gurus knew how to scale one.

Thanks to improved technology, social media, and new sources of financing, anyone can start a company, even if it isn't novel or necessary. Founders can scale consumer products relatively quickly too. Angel investor Chris Dixon called 10 million users the new one million.

"Thousands of early-stage consumer web/mobile companies were started and funded in last 24 months," he wrote. "If you are thinking of starting a non-transactional consumer startup, be aware that you are entering what is perhaps the most competitive sector in tech in the last decade."

A startup era is ending

Consumer startups, products we all use and can easily understand, have led the tech world for the past few years.

"The interesting innovation now is happening in [business-to-business] and infrastructure, which doesn't seem as intellectually interesting but can have a large impact," an investor told us. "[Business-to-consumer] might just be tapped out for the moment after a good 5+ year run."

Suddenly the most interesting startups are in less-sexy sectors: hardware, enterprise software, infrastructure—even biotech.

Those startups may be better, more predictable bets for investors. But they require a different mindset from entrepreneurs and the rest of us.

Oh, and remember how mobile was going to be the next big thing in consumer? One word for that: Instagram.

The consumer startup era is ending.

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Good morning! Here's the news:

• Facebook has made a long-overdue update to its iPad and iPhone apps. It ditched HTML5 and the apps now run twice as fast as before.

• Facebook is also eyeing its weak Android app. Facebook is basically forcing employees to use Android phones because it wants them to experience the app's pains first hand and fix them.

• Jon Miller, News Corp's Chief Digital Officer, is leaving the company.

• Salesforce.com beat earnings estimates, but the forecast for its third quarter may spook some investors.

• Underneath all the big perks like free food and iPhones for Yahoo employees, Marissa Mayer is bringing one really big change to the company: Get stuff done fast and well.

• Business Insider's Alyson Shontell argues that startups have gotten very boring, particularly in the consumer space.

• It turns out most people don't want one of the iPhone 5's big new features.

• Meet the man tasked with turning Foursquare into a real business: Chief Revenue Officer, Steven Rosenblatt.

• The Apple Samsung lawsuit rages on, and the jury has its work cut out for it. The Verge's Nilay Patay discusses the jury's nightmare.

• Lance Armstrong has decided not to fight doping charges brought against him by the US Anti-Doping Agency. He's likely be stripped of his 7 Tour de France titles, and he may be banned from competitive cycling for life.

• In case you missed it: Here's what it's like working at Foursquare's NYC headquarters (it's the coolest startup office we've ever seen)

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Yesterday we wrote that startups have become very boring, particularly in the consumer space. There are a number of reasons why we feel that way.

For starters, we just came out of a very exciting time in tech, where four of the most talked about companies, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga and Facebook, went public.

A few startups recently got acquired for $1 billion or more.

And while there are still some amazing startups out there, like Square, Kickstarter and Pinterest, in a way it feels like the day after Christmas.

Most of what we were looking forward to has passed, and there isn't much on the horizon in consumer tech.

But it wasn't supposed to be that way.

Right about now, if it was still a stand-alone company, there's one startup we'd all be going crazy for:

Instagram.

You'd be reading more headlines like the following:

• Instagram Soars To 80 Million Plus Users.
• Instagram Is Quickly Becoming The Biggest Mobile App Company In The World.
• The One Startup That Terrifies Facebook Is Instagram.
• The Brilliant Way Instagram Made A Simple Feature Better Than Apple, Google Or Facebook.
• An Interview With Kevin Systrom, The Man Who Made 80 Million People Better Photographers.

But Instagram got (wisely) acquired, and it's not as fun to watch a company when you already know its outcome.

We'll never know what Kevin Systrom planned to do with that $50 million he raised before the big buy, or what kind of company Instagram would have become.

Instagram is the most exciting startup of 2013 that never will be.

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You know what’s cooler than a million dollars?

A billion dollars… said these five tech CEOs right before they no longer had a billion dollars.

Launching a hot internet startup, taking it public and making billions of dollars for yourself and your investors is one of the most exciting ways of the last 20 years to make a bloody fortune.

Unfortunately, being the CEO of a hot dotcom company can have a few more ups and downs than, for example, being the CEO of Coca-Cola.

Actually, it can be more like a roller coaster ride, and with each peak and valley your net worth increases or decreases exponentially. The last year has been rough for many companies and the economy in general, but the tech industry has been battered especially hard. Along the way, these five tech CEOs in particular have lost a fortune…

These 5 Tech CEOs Who Have Lost A Fortune In The Last Year >

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Kevin Systrom – Instagram

Back in April my dad asked me to explain what Instagram was and why Facebook was buying them for $1 billion. It’s not as easy to explain as you’d think. It’s a free app that distorts your photos to make them look older and lower quality…kind of like a Polaroid… Regardless of what you thought of Instagram, you had to give props to 28 year old CEO Kevin Systrom after he scored a billion dollars for a company that had no revenue or monetization plans whatsoever as far as we know. Systrom’s 40% stake was worth $400 million, another $100 million went to co-founder Mike Krieger and the remaining half billion was divvied up by various venture capitalists. The terms of the deal would pay Instagram $300 million cash and 23 million shares of Facebook stock which at the time (prior to their IPO) were valued at $23 a share or $690 million. Good deal right? Ehhh… Turns out not so much. It would have been a great deal if Facebook’s stock exploded after their IPO like everyone hoped/expected but, as we laid out in example #4 above, Facebook went on to lose half its value, Instagram lost $300 million and Kevin Systrom’s take was reduced by $120 million to $280 million.

Instagram teaches a very good lesson in negotiation. Usually when a company accepts stock in a buyout, the sellers lower their risk by requiring a floating share price. A floating share price allows the number of shares involved in the buyout to increase or decrease depending on the buyer’s stock price at the time the deal officially closes. This also means that if the stock goes way up, the acquired company does not benefit from the increase in value but, their original deal is locked in stone. In hindsight, Instagram probably should have opted for more protection, but in the long wrong, maybe they’ll be vindicated.

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook

Facebook’s bad luck didn’t end with their disastrous IPO back in May. The IPO was a complete debacle, leaving investors reeling with unfilled orders and bad information. Facebook’s share price peaked briefly at $45 on it’s actual IPO day, giving the company a near $85 billion market cap and CEO Mark Zuckerberg a net worth of $20 billion. June, July and August have been brutal for the young social network. The stock has lost half its value and Zuckerberg’s net worth has dropped to $10 billion. Shockingly, several analysts and reporters have actually called for the mighty Zuck to step down from his own company!

Reed Hastings – Netflix

As we reported back in October, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has experienced one of the most incredible falls from grace in CEO history. Almost exactly one year ago, Netflix was a Wall Street darling, with the stock hitting an all time high of $300. The company had a market cap of $16.5 billion and Reed Hasting’s net worth was $900 million. Fast forward 12 months and Netflix’s stock has lost 78% of its value thanks to their very public, very disastrous Qwikster debacle which raised fees and sent subscribers fleeing by the tens of thousands. It also didn’t help that the company lost several key licensing deals which left their streaming library very thin. Reed Hasting has been selling his own stock like there’s no tomorrow and his net worth is currently $280 million.

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Why has the billion dollar valuation become trivialized in startup investing?

What started Facebook down a path where it would it reach a $150 billion valuation on secondary markets before going public at a $100 billion valuation, and then sinking to a $50 billion valuation within months?

We were talking about these questions with the CEO of a startup that has itself raised more than $100 million in this environment.

This CEO believes the answer to these questions are in the chart below, which shows how the yield on corporate debt has declined for the past 22 years:

What makes debt attractive is that it is a low-risk, guaranteed return.  

But two trends in the past few years have combined to make venture capital funds a more attractive place to put money than corporate debt.

• The first is that, as the chart above shows, the yield on corporate debt has declined greatly – especially relative to the 1980s, when pro investors cut their teeth.
• The second is that the venture capitalists are now investing in startups in a way that reduces their risk while only slightly reducing upside.

After targeting these startups, these VCs approach them about investing. But the VCs don't want normal "common stock;" they want stock with special rights. These "preferred shares" guarantee their owner that, in the event of any sale, the owner will, at the very least, get the price paid for the stock back. If the VC invested $10 million in Startup X at a $100 million or $200 million valuation, that VC will get at least $10 million back, even if Startup X only sells for $10 million.

To convince the startups to sell them this preferred stock, the VCs agree to pay more for it. The way they pay "more" is not by investing more, but by acquiring a smaller percentage of the startup with the same amount of money – by giving the startups much higher valuations.

These higher valuations mean that VCs have lower potential reward. But the special rights also make VC a less risky investment.

Combined with a decline in yield for corporate debt, that makes venture capita a more attractive sector for large pension funds and other institutional investors to put their money.

So the money has come flooding into VC. 

This, in turn, makes the competition for the few high-profile, hyped startups that much more frothy. In competition with each other, VCs become more willing to "pay more" for their preferred shares, and startup valuations get higher and higher. 

In 2007, Microsoft bought $250 million worth of preferred Facebook stock at a $15 billion valuation.

The huge valuations haven't stopped since:

• THE BILLION-DOLLAR CLUB: 12 Startups With Skyrocketing Valuations 
• Evernote Has Completed A $100 Million Round At A $1 Billion Valuation Led By Meritech  
• The (Near) Billion-Dollar Club: The 11 Most Valuable Startups In New York

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As a member of the local Angel group selection committee, I’ve seen a lot of startup presentations to investors, and I’ve never seen one that was too short - maybe short on content, but not short on pages! A perfect round number is ten slides, with the right content, that can be covered in ten minutes. Even if you have an hour booked, the advice is the same.

I’ve published these points before, but based on interest, it’s time for an update. Remember the goal is an overview presentation that will pique investor interest enough to ask for the business plan and a follow-on meeting, not close the deal on the spot. If you can’t get the message across in ten minutes, more time and more charts won’t help.

Every startup needs both a business plan and an investor presentation, completed before you formally approach any investors. The approach I recommend is to build the investor presentation first, by iterating on the bullets with your team, and then fleshing out the points into a full-blown text-based business plan document. Here are the ten slides you need:

1. Problem and market need. Give the “elevator pitch” for your startup. Explain in analogies your mother could understand, and quantify the “cost-of-pain” in dollars or time. Fuzzy terms like “not user-oriented” or “too expensive” are not helpful.

2. Solution product & technology. Here is how and why it works, including a customer-centric quantification of the benefits. Make sure to communicate the relevance of your product / services to market needs. Describe your technology patents and “secret sauce”.

3. Opportunity sizing. Define the characteristics of the overall industry, market forces, market dynamics, and customer landscape. Investors like $1B markets with double-digit growth rates. You need data from industry experts like Forrester or Gartner for credibility.

4. Business model. Explain how you will make money and who pays you (real customer). In this section, you need to be passionate about recurring revenue, profit margin, and volume growth. Implicit in this is the go-to-market strategy.

5. Competition and sustainable advantage. List and position your competition, or alternatives available to the customer. Highlight your sustainable competitive advantages, and barriers to entry.

6. Marketing, sales, and partners. Describe marketing strategy, sales plan, licensing, and partnership plans. Here is also a good place for a rollout timeline with key milestones. Make sure your marketing budget matches the scope of your plan.

7. Executive team. Qualifications and roles of the top three executives and top three on your Board of Advisors. They need domain knowledge and startup experience. Highlight their level of involvement, and quantify their skin in the game.

8. Financial projections. Project both revenues and expense totals for next five years, and past three years. What is the current valuation of the company? Show breakeven point, burn rate, and growth assumptions.

9. Funding requirements and use of funds. What is the level of capital funding sought during this stage? What equity is the company willing to give in return for the investment? Show a breakdown of the intended uses of these funds.

10. Exit strategy. What is the timeframe of return on investment? What is the planned exit strategy (IPO, merger, sale, including likely candidates)? What is the timeframe for the exit? What is the rate of return expected for the investor?

Hand out copies of the slides before the presentation for note taking, with proper cover sheet, with brochures, product samples, or other marketing material you may have. Offer to do a demo later, but don’t try to squeeze it in the presentation.

My last recommendation is practice, practice, practice. The CEO should give the pitch, and prepare by playing “presidential debates” - asking your team to be the opponents, and check you on timing. Investors hate long rambling presentations. Show some energy and enthusiasm, and remember if you lose their attention, you have lost the deal. Have fun!

Marty Zwilling

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Social-coding startup GitHub's San Francisco headquarters looks less like an office and more like your favorite hangout bar.

That may be because the company got its start at Zeke's, a San Francisco sports bar, according to cofounder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner, who gave us a tour.

GitHub just raised $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz—the largest investment by the legendary VC firm to date, and one that valued the four-year-old startup at $750 million.

GitHub offers its customers, largely programmers, a place to jointly work on and store their code. Open-source projects can use GitHub for free. It makes money by selling private code-repository services and software to enterprises (and also by selling 3,000 GitHub T-shirts, mugs, and other goodies a month).

For years, GitHub made do without an office, meeting in bars or coffee shops. So they wanted the same atmosphere for their first office—fun, not "soul-deadening." When San Francisco's legendary Eddie Rickenbacker's bar shut down, Preston-Werner snapped up a vintage red Indian motorcycle from the watering hole's collection.

The front third of the office is an employee lounge, bar, and party area filled with funky furniture.

The company logo, the Octocat, is everywhere. The Octocat takes all kinds of forms, like this oil painting.

Dogs, video games, and a motorcycle are part of the decor.

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Everyone dreams of retiring by age 25.

But what does it feel like to make more money in your mid-20s than most people make in a lifetime?

Someone recently asked this question on Quora. An early employee at a successful tech company responded. This person made more than $10 million at age 26.

Here's what this person had to say.

For another personal story of a self-made millionaire, check out:

What It Feels Like To Wake Up At 32 With Everything You've Ever Wanted >

Read Quote of Anon User's answer to Wealthy People and Families: What does it feel like to be a self-made millionaire under the age of 25? on Quora

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You don't win in business by wasting money.

Even the most successful entrepreneurs pinched pennies in the early days—and many still do.

Here, several multimillionaires share their best cost-cutting tips when you're trying to get your startup off the ground.

1. Cash in credit card rewards. Before the success of the George Forman grill super-charged sales at his direct-response television marketing firm, Rick Cesari became resourceful in using his credit card points to buy event tickets or thank high-performing employees by sending them on weekend getaways. Today, the founder of Seattle, Wash.-based Cesari Direct, charges between $125,000 to $200,000 on an Alaska Airlines Visa Signature card, and still uses the rewards to save several thousand dollars each year on employee perks at his $5 million company.

2. Skip the fancy furniture. "I didn't buy new furniture for the first six years I was in business," says Brett D. Reizen, CEO of Entertainment Benefits Group, LLC, Aventura, Florida, a $100 million provider of travel and entertainment services. Of course, you can start by checking out local used furniture shops or search on Craigslist. There are also furniture rental services like CORT, which can reduce the upfront cash you need to outfit your office. It also sells that rental furniture at deep discounts when clients are done with it. Find more online at CubeClerk, an office furniture marketplace.

3. Recycle and reuse shipping supplies. Even though his online garden supply retail business, Growers House, skyrocketed to $2 million in revenue in its first nine months, founder Nate Lipton only spent $300 on shipping supplies. Whenever the Tucson, Ariz.-based business receives its shipments it turns around and reuses all the boxes. If you're shipping via Priority Mail, the U.S. Postal Service also offers free boxes and envelopes. Of course, there are discount cardboard box sellers, such as UsedCardboardBoxes.com, you can turn to as well.

4. Be creative about space. Instead of springing for a posh office to sell RetroFitness health club franchises, founder Eric Casaburi used an extra room in one of his health clubs. It wasn't pretty, he says, but it saved him more than $10,000 in office rent and also fit with the company's bare-bones brand image. Co-working spaces are another option to cut costs. Cambridge, Mass.-based HubSpot was headquartered in a Boston co-working space until it hit 100 employees, sharing conference rooms, coffee machines, and even a receptionist and phone system. LooseCubes and CityFeet are good directories of shared and co-working office spaces.

5. Check out deal sites. Liz Gaspari, co-founder of Gaspari Nutrition, an $8 million nutritional supplements company based in Lakewood, N.J., uses daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial to offer employee perks. Whether it's through discounted meals and shows or gym memberships, the coupons have saved the company hundreds of dollars, she says. When it comes to business purchases, sites like RapidBuyr and Bizydeal can help you save on computers, office furniture and supplies, and even training courses.

6. Cross-train employees. Startups are no place for a "that's not my job" attitude. After Jeff Platt began to train employees to fill multiple roles at his Sky Zone Indoor Trampoline Parks, he saved more than 5 percent on payroll for the $15.7 million Los Angeles-based recreation company. Casaburi did the same thing at RetroFitness, attending his first International Franchise Association trade show with the manager of one of his gyms acting as a franchise sales representative. "Having employees move from hat to hat to hat saves you money and keeps your operations lean," he says.

7. Do your own research. In his boot-strapping startup days, Casaburi also used to conduct his own market reach by sitting in parking lots of prospective locations and counting the car and foot traffic to see if there was enough activity to support a new gym. He analyzed every metric, such as population, vehicle and foot traffic, and other aspects of his most successful locations and tried to find locations that had similar activity and characteristics. Now that he's staffed up, he no longer does this himself, but he estimates he's saved more than $100,000 per year in salary or consulting fees before he hired help. Instead of hanging out in parking lots, you can take advantage of technology like ZoomProspector, a free service that lets you find communities by parameters like community size, education levels, and recent job growth.

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Bryce Roberts, the cofounder of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, says startup pitches have never been worse than they are right now.

"In all of my 11 years as a VC, I'd argue we're at the low watermark for startup pitches," he writes in a post titled "The Sad State of the Startup Pitch."

Roberts says that most founders are coming without any sort of presentation in hand—no slides, no executive summary, no planned product demo. Demos usually consist of pulling up the website and poking around with no plan or direction.

When asked what they need from investors, founders have told Roberts they need "speed" -- speedy decisions that will let the founders get back to work on the products.

"Here’s an idea, if raising money is such a bother than build products that don’t require you to do it," Roberts writes.

"If you’re going to take the time to track down investors, create a slot on your busy calendar to meet and drive all the way across town to do so: bring it. Bring it every single time."

What's worse than bad pitches? Bad pitches from boring startups. And there are a lot of boring startups right now.

Read the full post so you know the right way to pitch a startup >

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Light Table, a new startup that came out of a crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign, is an application that can already shorten the process of developing an app by more than 20 percent.

But that's just the start. After raising hundreds of thousands with Kickstarter, Light Table is soon going to be the future of developing.

Here's how it works: normally, when you develop an app, you have to compile everything altogether, and hope for the best when you run it that everything works.

But with Light Table, you can see the app working in real time, and determine if things are working right away or not. That means you can more rapidly debug your apps, making the whole process of building an app much, much faster.

And it's also a good way to find your mistakes quickly — making it a powerful learning tool, too.

We caught up with co-founder Chris Granger to see what it's like trying to reinvent programming. Here's what we learned:

• Just after closing a $316,720 Kickstarter campaign, Light Table joined Y Combinator. It was "just two guys" at first, but now they're looking to hire a lot of new people.

• Light Table speeds up your development time by 20 percent — and that's just right now. The team hopes to speed up development time by "orders of magnitude."

• Light Table might end up being the perfect way to learn how to program, too. Because everything happens in real time, you can immediately see where your mistakes are and parse your results. Light Table's co-founder wasn't a programmer to begin with, and learned how to do so by building Light Table.

Here's a lightly-edited transcript of the conversation: 

BUSINESS INSIDER: Can you tell me a little bit more about your background?

CHRIS GRANGER: Right now we're just two guys, we met back in high school. We've known each other for a little over a decade. He went and did biology at Johns Hopkins. I went to Chapel Hill, actually for German, and took courses all over the place. I graduated with a German degree and I'd been programming forever. I worked my way through college on contract gigs, programmed for a while in Charlotte and then joined Microsoft as a program manager for Visual Basic and C-Sharp (C#) for a few years. It's a precursor to what we ended up doing for Microsoft's own development tools. We just started talking and said, ah, we should do a company together, and here we are now.

BI: How was your experience with Y Combinator?

CG: I had applied with another guy a few times ago with a completely different idea. It's always been on our radar. This time, it was really great, we certainly learned a lot. Y Combinator opens up opportunities, not even to just investors, but to meet people you might not otherwise meet and learn from them. It's not even them giving you anything necessarily or opening doors, it's learning from people you would never have the opportunity to see. That's the most valuable thing we got out of it, beyond the fact it also let us focus. We didn't have to worry about, how in the world do you set up a company. They have a streamlined process, now it's all done, so go do your stuff.

BI: So what is Light Table?

CG: Light Table is a new environment for creating software. The main problem, is building software is way harder than it should be and it's really inefficient. A good analogy is like, being a developer today is being a painter with a blindfold. You make a stroke on the canvas, you don't see the result. The time to be able to see a change when coding could be anywhere from 30 seconds to 8 hours. That disconnect is hugely impactful, it means what we end up doing most of the time, instead of doing little things and trying them, we make huge changes and hope to god that we got it right.

Light Table removes that blindfold and applies real-time feedback. It allows you to modify a running program. What this opens up is a new level of connection to the software. It's interesting, being able to see how data flows through your program, even so far as taking your code and seeing variables get filled in. It enables a real-time level of debugging, you write way fewer problems into the software. 

Other software editors live in this world where the only thing we've ever had is text. Emacs is 36 years old, Vim is in the 20s, they were invented in the time where all you had was a teletype. As a result of that, they work in this very strict world where you have a file open and there's text in this file, and if you want more than that you're kind of screwed. One of the second things we're doing on top of connecting you is building an environment that basically mold it to the shape of your problem. We're talking about being able to edit running games and graph the performance, you immediately see it changing in front of you.  

We're moving away from this notion where the only thing we have is a single file we work in or a couple of buffers, you can actually have all sorts of crazy stuff on your work surface. It's about creating a real work surface. If you look at other professions, they work on giant graphing tables, they have blueprints all over the place. 3D modelers have far more advanced tools that programmers have today, their work spaces adapt. Light Table takes it to that same level of adaptation.

BI: What languages does Light Table support?

CG: Right now we started with Clojure, the fastest growing language out there right now. Now that we're out of Y Combinator, we're pushing into Python and JavaScript because they're massively popular. What we're ultimately building is a completely open platform. You can't do what Vim did, doing it all themselves. There's a ton of value to letting the community build whatever they want to on top of it. The end goal is to create an open platform, any language you can ever want to support will be there. It'll be much easier for the greater number of applications, even Sublime Text or Vim or Emacs.

BI: How much time do I save using Light Table, instead of a standard editor?

CG: It depends on the kind of programmer you are and where we are. What we'll see, based on what we've seen so far, is you can see upwards of 20 percent faster development time. We're basically re-imagining the way you program, this is still very early stuff and I don't think we've got it all yet. Ultimately the goal we're talking is orders of magnitude faster. Right now, these very general environments we have, they're not necessarily good at anything. Once you get to the point that you have an environment that's tailored to what you do, you're playing a very different game. That's the difference between digging a posthole with a postholer instead of a standard shovel.

"Once you get to the point that you have an environment that's tailored to what you do, you're playing a very different game. That's the difference between digging a posthole with a postholer instead of a standard shovel."

BI: Sounds like it would be good for teaching?

CG: One of the use cases we're most excited about is teaching. When we released the videos, a lot of organizations said it would be the most amazing teaching tool for programming that's been around. I feel very strongly about that. My cofounder, he wasn't a programmer when we started this. He learned himself, he provides great feedback for how to be a teaching tool.

BI: Where do you go from here?

CG: Right now we're looking to hire. We did a Kickstarter a while back just before we got into Y Combinator. We set out a plan for ourselves, we want to release our Version 1 in May next year. We're looking to hire four or five guys to finish this thing out. Toward the end of the year, we're trying to get a beta version of this JavaScript and Python stuff out. For us, it's getting back to the product.

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Startups working in "very un-hot" areas have become super sexy targets for VC funding, North Bridge partner Jamie Goldstein told Business Insider.

VCs are "calling my companies and asking, 'What can you do with $50 million?' The phone is ringing off the hook," he says.

Goldstein specializes in seed/early stage funding of IT infrastructure startups, particularly networking and storage. He funded AppIQ, a network management company bought by HP in 2005 and Cognio, a wireless networking company bought by Cisco in 2007.

"You wouldn't have seen that two years ago. The whole world was gaga for social media. But with Facebook/Groupon/Zynga showing weakness, they are seeing that social media is not infallible," he says.

For instance, he's funded Plexxi, a startup working on an enterprise networking product. It makes corporate networks run faster and cost less. (In wonky terms: it's a DWDM data center switch). It's a great fit for software-defined networks, Goldstein says.

Plexxi launched in 2010 and raised over $8 million at the time. It wasn't looking for more when Lightspeed and Matrix called. That lead to two more $20 million rounds, including one in that closed in June. So Plexxi has raised $48.4 million in two years, and the product hasn't even shipped yet.

Even Goldstein, who has been a VC since 1998, is surprised. That just "wouldn't have happened" a couple of years ago, he says.

Don't miss: The Next 25 Big Enterprise Startups

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Just a little more than a year ago, Justin.tv co-founders Emmett Shear and Justin Kan were kicking around an idea: building a website specifically around streaming video game matches.

Fast forward one year later, and now the site, called Twitch.tv instead of Justin.tv, has more than 20 million visitors every month and has support from some of the top video game publishers in the world.

On top of that, it's created a giant network of professional gamers that make money by streaming their video game matches, like StarCraft games and World of Warcraft games, on the site.

Who knew that there was a market for watching video game matches online?

We caught up with co-founder Emmett Shear and vice president Matt DiPietro to find out how the site is doing. Here's what we learned:

• After launching about a year ago, Twitch.TV now has more than 20 million visitors every month. It grows by about 10 percent month-over-month every month and partnering with a ton of publishers. For example, Twitch.tv is the streaming partner for PAX, one of the largest conventions in gaming and will unveil a host of new content from publishers like 2K Games.

• Twitch.tv now partners with 2,000 professional gamers, helping them earn money with their streams. They're launching a new program to find star talent that might be flying under the radar, too.

• Twitch.tv is giving out scholarships to high-performing academics who are also gamers. Think of it the same way that athletes get scholarships for playing games while in school.

Here's a lightly-edited transcript of the interview: 

BUSINESS INSIDER: So, give me a quick update. How are things going?

EMMETT SHEAR: Things are going great, I don't even know where to start. In terms of top-line, where we are in terms of numbers, in July we crossed 20 million uniques, that's greater than 10 percent growth month-over-month since we launched a little more than a year ago at E3. That's huge, we're very excited about that, the partner program now has 2,000 partners, the other number we like to talk about that we're really proud of is the engagement. It continues to be outstanding, we get about 75 minutes average viewing time per person per day, if you compare that to other video-type platforms it's just off the charts high. We're really proud of it, it goes to just how sticky this kind of content is, how passionate gamers are. All of that stuff is great, we're coming up on PAX Prime.

BI: Why PAX?

ES: PAX is very gamer-oriented. It's very much meant for the public, people who love games will come. We're gonna be the official streaming partner at PAX. We're gonna have a bunch of people streaming from our booth: Sony, Trion, we're getting debut content from a couple different developers including 2K Games.

MATT DIPIETRO: It's a much more gamer-driven show, there's lots of indie games that'll debut there. If you work in the video game space, you'll be very familiar with the idea of gaming media companies competing with each other in order to get the game preview, game reveal from publishers. What we're seeing now is that publishers are reaching out to us as first choice in order to get game reveals to their audiences. That's awesome, super exciting, we have a cross-section of the industry's largest publishers that are streaming on our site as a piece of their marketing program.

BI: Sounds like you guys have picked up a ton of buzz since. 

ES: At Gamescom in Germany, two weeks ago, Activision debuted COD: Black Ops 2 for the first time with Twitch as a launch vehicle for showing off the game. They chose Twitch for that because we really reach their audience and we let them do it live, instead of dropping a trailer. That's a huge vote of confidence, Call of Duty all on its own is the single-largest game, maybe the largest entertainment franchise on the planet. To work with a brand of that caliber is really fun.

At PAX, in addition to have developers show off new games, we're gonna be announcing the scholarship program. We went to Alienware and a few others, said people who devote themselves to gaming should be able to get scholarships the same way sports scholarships work. We're giving $5000, $10000 scholarships to great gamers who participate in the community and get a good GPA and are student gamers. We're gonna be announcing those five winners at PAX.

BI: Wait. A scholarship for gamers?

MD: The community went absolutely crazy for it. $50,000 total, $10,000 for five upstanding gamers. We're culling through the applications as we speak. We're gonna hand off the finalists to the scholarship  committee. It surprised me the impressive caliber of applications we got. People that are so involved in the gaming universe while studying is amazing. They're creating amazing content and personally they are just proud and passionate about their skill level and achievements within their given communities. Those guys, I can't wait to make those phone calls.

ES: We should probably show up with a giant check.

BI: Wow, sign me up. Anything interesting in the pipeline that you guys can talk about? 

ES: One thing we're working on, we're integrating streaming directly into games. We had that idea, when we were talking the very first time, we haven't gotten it into the games. We've partnered with Paradox Interactive, The Showdown Effect is gonna have one-click broadcast into Twitch. You'll be playing the game on your PC, and you click broadcast, and the gameplay will stream directly to your Twitch channel. This has been a very big initiative, we're working closely with lots and lots of publishers. We're hoping this becomes a standard piece of the game publishing business. Anyone who wants to be able to share their gaming experience should be able to, they shouldn't be held back by the fact that currently it's kind of tricky to do.

"Anyone who wants to be able to share their gaming experience should be able to, they shouldn't be held back by the fact that currently it's kind of tricky to do."

MD: We have a lot of game-changing, potentially game-changing announcements that are coming up in the next short- to mid-term, we can't talk about any of those things right now. We're building some apps too, the Twitch Xbox Live app will hopefully be available soon, that's dependent on Microsoft. We have a prototype that works right now on the office. 

BI: How is the partner program coming along? 

ES: The biggest thing for people is that as we've grown the number of partners, it's become clear that if you work hard as a community broadcaster you can get into the partner program. Most people we're adding now are community broadcasters. We've partnered with the major brands, ESL, they were major partners quickly. As we did more research, it's been lots of people in the community being inducted. That had a positive effect on the community, they can make it to that level if they can just grow their audience.

MD: Just yesterday, we launched a little program called the Twitch Hidden Gems program, our inside term for it. The idea was to find all of the undiscovered potential Twitch stars that don't get a lot of promotion, but create really great content and have a really passionate audience. We selected a bunch of those folks and are starting to highlight those smaller but really impressive channels. We plan on building that program out regularly going forward. We think there's a lot of people out there that we want to enjoy the same kind of promotion and getting to the threshold of becoming a partner.

BI: Are you feeling pretty good about your decision to pivot?

ES: I think, in retrospect I remember people asking me, is this even gonna work. It's pretty clear that it has, you can think of where we were in terms of uniques when we started this, we were at 3 million when we first looked at it, we're over 20 now. That's pretty awesome for one year. I personally feel really good about it. I really look forward to, especially with the SDK, grow it to something that's not just part of some gaming communities, but something that can be on the precipice of all gaming communities.

MD: I believe we are building the social video layer for the entire video game industry. If you look a the content, it really bares that out. There's an amazing cross-section of people streaming video game content. Individual gamers to the biggest publishers to media organizations, when we're able to get Twitch embedded into devices and set-top boxes with the SDK, I think we have the chance to really fundamentally change the entire industry.

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When startups receive press, it's usually evident in their traffic numbers. There's a spike, and then a sharp drop off after.

In some cases, startups are only hype and no substance. When the press is gone, so is the startup.

But Pinterest is one of the rare startups that may be more substance than hype.

Last month, without gracing many headlines, Pinterest's unique visitors jumped from 20 million unique visitors to more than 23 million.

Since last July, Pinterest's unique visitors have increased every month and it now generates more than 1.7 billion monthly pageviews.

Pinterest is a good case study for all startups: Focus on your product, not on press. Creating a loyal user base is better than scaling quickly.

Here are Pinterest's uniques and pageviews in millions since last summer, according to ComScore.

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We just spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, asking around to find out who the top new CEOs are in technology.

What follows is a round of the executives of the companies that people are most excited about, and what we've learned about them.

Will Harbin, CEO of Kixeye

Facebook games are not dead, Kixeye CEO Will Harbin will tell you.

That's because Kixeye goes after a slice of gamers that, while smaller than the typical casual crowd, pay much more than your traditional FarmVille player.

Harbin doesn't pull any punches and is quick to go for the jugular when it comes to casual competitors like Electronic Arts and Zynga. In a recruitment video, he's seen putting on a horse head mask and riding a helicopter out of his main office.

That's helped Kixeye significantly in the long run, giving Kixeye its explosion-loaded marketing message that's attracted a branch of gamers that prove that Facebook games are, indeed, not dead.

Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber

Travis Kalanick is quietly building one of the best startups in Silicon Valley.

It's pretty much impossible to get a cab in San Francisco, much less any city in the southern SF Bay Area. But thanks to Uber, that isn't much of a problem (though it is still quite pricey).

Now Uber just unveiled Uberx, which increases the size of its fleet. The cars also cost only a little more than what you might pay for a typical taxi, which makes them even more competitive.

Jamie Wong, CEO of Vayable

Jamie Wong speaks multiple languages and has spent her life traveling the world. Now she's building a startup that makes it much easier for everyone to do the same.

Vayable basically shortens the process of planning a vacation from 30 hours down to about 5 minutes. It makes it easy to plan "experiences," like touring the Louvre with a French student instead of riding a tour bus around town.

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Today's advice comes from our interview with Gene Wade, founder and CEO of UniversityNow:

"It takes a certain kind of person to be able to handle pushing for something one day, and pushing against it the next."

But this is exactly the thing that happens in a startup environment. 

Wade tells us that before you can achieve a repeatable business model, you actually have to search for it. This means that your company will go through all kinds of changes, and you have to employ people who can "live with ambiguity." These are people who are okay with frequent changes and can handle short-term failures. 

It's easy for employees to "get demoralized" when the culture and tone of the company is unclear, so to prevent this situation from happening at your own startup, the entrepreneur says you need to be completely honest with your staff as to why the changes are being made, and also to acknowledge that this time might be confusing for your team. 

"I have to constantly tell people at my company, 'This is where we are, we are not an established company and we're in a place where we don't have a repeatable business model yet.' "

Wade says that this doesn't mean that what they did last week was "bad work." This means that everything that anyone does at the company plays an integral role in defining the company's identity and forming an efficient business model.

"The market place has the right to vote, and as a new company, we're going to redefine ourselves all the time."

Want your business advice featured in Instant MBA? Submit your tips to tipoftheday@businessinsider.com. Be sure to include your name, your job title, and a photo of yourself in your email.

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