School systems have some of the oldest and worst technology in the world. It's difficult to access and parse data about students, from attendance to grades and just about anything else.

It's causing some major headaches as the rest of the world moves into the 21st century. 

Enter Clever, a new startup that parses that information and wraps it all together in a neat way that's easily accessible.

Clever gives trusted third-party developers a way to access that data and build new applications that can help teachers access and analyze the data they have, making them better at their jobs.

It's a startup that's long, long overdue. Better teachers make better students, so the results are good across the board.

We caught up with cofounder Tyler Bosmeny to find out how Clever is doing. Here's what we learned:

• Clever is now deployed in more than 1,000 schools. That's a pretty high number. Advisors at Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup incubator, had set a goal for Clever to be in 40 schools by Demo Day. It just shows how much pent-up demand there is for the service.

• Clever can reduce overhead tech costs by more than 50 percent. Since it's easier to access, update and move data, you don't have to spend a ton of money training people and buying up the latest up-to-date software. It also only takes a few minutes to get Clever running.

• Anyone can develop an app on Clever. Once a school deploys Clever, they can use a whole host of apps built by trusted third-party developers to access and parse the data they have on their students—and find out trends about how classes are doing. 

Here's a lightly edited transcript of the interview:

BUSINESS INSIDER: Can you tell me a little bit more about the team? 

TYLER BOSMENY: Dan, Raf and I were all best friends at Harvard. I studied applied math, Dan was biology, Raf was computer science and applied math. After we graduated we all went in different directions. Dan went into a school district, and over time was promoted to become director of technology for that district. He realized it was insanely difficult to use technology in the classroom. Everyone says, "Why hasn't technology transformed technology like it has for every other industry?" Technology was creating more work for teachers, and not less.

BI: How did you guys come to start Clever?

TB: Well, when we were just starting, we didn't have a key insight which is that we could build a business-to-business [B2B] company that could help developers right away. At first we thought it would be great to build a product, but it's hard to sell to schools. But we saw we could build a B2B company that could help developers who are having these big headaches, and that's what led to us founding Clever. That led to Y Combinator, and everything everything else.

BI: How did you find the Y Combinator experience?

TB: You get to talk to the smartest people, they're doing companies themselves. It's a really inspiring place to be. I'd say, in Y Combinator they put a lot of emphasis on growth. So, that was something that we put a lot of emphasis on as well. It's the kind of thing, they're mentioning their growth weekly. You show up to Y Combinator every Tuesday and you get asked about your growth. We're motivated to keep figuring out whatever it takes to grow. You gotta get those growth numbers higher. 

BI: So what does Clever actually do?

TB: We are helping get data out of school systems and into a common platform that applications can be built on. Right now, developers have all these frustrating ways to getting that data. There are just arcane ways of getting data. We've noticed that this problem of moving and managing data is one of the biggest problems in education today. You spend all your time reinventing the wheel trying to move data around. It was really frustrating developers who have to deal with it.

"You spend all your time reinventing the wheel trying to move data around. It was really frustrating developers who have to deal with it."

It adds a lot of overhead to costs.

Most companies we work with tell us moving this data is their No. 1 support cost. And it's also the No. 1 complaint about the products. Teachers say things like, "I set up the product, and by the second day of school everything was already out of date." When you use Clever, it's completely automated. You get modern, clean data from the school. We can do two things: decrease support costs by 50 percent, and we can make it possible to get things up and running and deployed in a school in minutes.

BI: How do you capture that data?

TB: We interface with all the systems that schools run on today, they're called student information systems. Those have information about students, attendance, grades, everything. We bring it out, clean it up and provide a modern way for developers to access it [an API, or application programming interface]. This is one of the most beautiful APIs that I've seen in education. This isn't an industry where things are usually moved around with APIs.

BI: What about security? Has there actually been a lot of interest?

TB: Before any data is moved, a school authorizes Clever to send data to a provider before Clever will do it. We launched in June. We were in basically no schools. We were in around four. Paul Graham gave us a goal of being in 40 schools by Demo Day. On Demo Day, we announced that we had hit 1,100 schools. There has been so much pent-up demand for this, it's grown in ways that we could never imagine.

BI: What happens next?

TB: Right now, we just need to keep growing. We have a huge backlog of schools, we have a lot of partners who want to come on to our platform. We want to be the best platform in the universe for education.

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They say "Half of life is just showing up," but in this economy, you need to prove that you can accomplish more than being in your cubicle by 9 a.m. 

You chances of succeeding in a "ROI Nation" depend on whether you can bring in money for your company, Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding, tells Payscale.com's Bridget Quiqq in a recent interview.

Are you a return on investment for your employers? Are you bringing in numbers? Does your work help attract investors? 

Schawbel goes on to explain it no longer matters if you're the first one in the office or rolling out of bed at 11 a.m. as long as your work is completed on time, the numbers are sufficient and the quality is phenomenal. 

“You’re going to see Millennials force companies to allow them to telecommute or work from home, however the job gets done. I think it goes back to the old term R.O.W.E., results only workplace environment," he says. "As long as you can prove results you’ll have a good career.”

"It doesn’t matter who you are doing it with or where you are doing it, it’s just that it is getting done."

Furthermore, Schawbel says this is why you see more young people working for smaller companies compared to more corporate, larger ones. Employees may have more resources and higher salaries at a larger company, but they won't experience the same flexibility and trust that they will at a smaller place. 

You'll also most likely be working longer hours at a smaller place, and this proves what Millennials really care about when it comes to their professional lives.

They'll happily put in more hours for less pay if they feel they're heading toward more opportunities in the near future. Most of these young people will choose to work around the clock at a startup environment instead of the 40 to 60 hours they might put in at a larger company. 

Employers need to understand these concepts and know that it's less about the "nine-to-five work week" and keep their sights on their end goal. 

Schawbel also says that young workers will likely have nine different jobs between the ages of 18 and 34, and typically leave after two years due to a "lack of career opportunities." 

NOW SEE: 14 ways the recession has changed how Millennials view work > 

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In our technologically-driven world, it's essential that when launching a new business that those involved can quickly share and access files between one another. 

There are a wide range of cloud computing services that can be crucial tools for businesses in the midst of growing rapidly, but also need to remain conscious about spending. 

To get some insights on what business owners should know when choosing cloud-based tools, we turned to tech coach Peter Bell, Senior Vice President of Engineering at General Assembly, an organization specializing in education in business and entrepreneurship. 

Below is a slightly-edited transcript of our conversation:

What is the most important thing most business owners should know about cloud computing?

Cloud computing is becoming the default option for companies large and small. It's usually quicker, cheaper, more secure and allows you to focus on building your business — not installing and configuring servers and software. For a long time people were concerned about the security of cloud computing platforms, but most of them are actually now much more secure than anything you're likely to be able to set up on your own.

What are some examples of cloud computing services that business owners should consider?

Start with Google. If you want to set up an email account for your company, Google apps for business is an inexpensive offering that allows you to set up email, calendaring, and document sharing for your team. The email is easy to set up and use, the calendaring is simple, but workable, and you can easily share documents both within the company and with external consultants and vendors.

As your company grows to between 50 and 100 employees you'll start to run into some of the limitations of the system in terms of administrative and security capabilities, but it's a great way to get started.

You probably also want to check out Dropbox for sharing files. Their "team" version is perfect for growing businesses.

Most of the other offerings depend on what you need to do.

SalesForce.com is probably the best CRM for most small-to-medium sized businesses, but if you're smaller or have simpler needs you should also check out Highrise from 37 signals. There are also passable online accounting offerings like Quickbooks Online or Freshbooks if you have simpler requirements and mainly care about invoicing. 

What if your company decides to write your own software?

Even if you have developers and are writing custom software, instead of renting servers, you should consider cloud based hosting. Amazon S3 — for storing and serving static files — and EC2 — for computing power — are the industry standards, but if you can, check out providers like Heroku that make it even easier for your developers to set up a robust staging and production environment for your applications.

What are some of the limitations of cloud computing?

The main limitation is that because someone else is controlling the software and the hardware, there are limits to how much control you have over configuration. With Software-as-a-Service offerings like Google apps for business, if you don't like the way the administrative setting work, you have to move your entire company to a new email hosting provider — you can't just get the code changed to meet your exact needs.

And even with cloud hosting of your own software, there are some optimizations you won't be able to perform with some of the cloud hosting providers that you could with your own server.

The other common limitation is that depending on the provider, the quality of customer support is not always great. If you call up SalesForce with a problem they'll take care of you, but if you have an issue with Google apps, you're pretty well stuck with checking the internet for similar issues. 

However, generally the limitations of cloud computing are a small price to pay for the huge savings in cost, complexity and time to market. It's OK to outgrow a system once in a while. That's a quality problem to have.

NOW SEE: How this tech startup expanded its operations from Paris to New York City > 

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Our company has a new rule: everybody on the team has to talk to users.

Everyday users can explain what they do not like about your product and provide crucial clues on how to make it better.

Admittedly, talking to users seems at face value like a blindingly obvious starting point for any company that has a product, since users (or customers) in a free economy ultimately determine whether you succeed or fail.

But it’s striking how easy it is not to talk to your users and thereby commit a huge mistake.

Users vote with their feet. And this is triply true on the Internet. Because the web is the most competitive, integrated marketplace on earth, it’s very easy for a user to shift from a bad service to a superior competitor, which is why the best online businesses can achieve hyper growth more quickly than, say, a dry-cleaning service.

Despite this, it doesn’t take long to come up with a dozen startups that died because they seemed to prioritize the user last. The biggest reason burgeoning companies don’t focus on users is that they get distracted, especially by agenda items that feel like real work but that don’t in fact contribute to the end product or the user experience.

This quickly kills startups that don’t yet even have a product, much less users. The uphill slope for younger startups is so steep that losing focus is bound to turn the idea belly-up. Startups that have a blog before they have a prototype, company t-shirts before they have users, or an office before they have growth, tend to be among the companies that die out fastest. It’s Darwinian law.

We didn’t want to be in that pool.

Our product, Verbling, is a site where language learners can practice with native speakers around the world through live video in the browser. Because we have the luxury of talking to users through our product, we get to do both quality-assurance testing and user-feedback gathering at the same time.

At the end of 2011, a point still early in Verbling’s life, spirits within our team were low because we weren’t seeing the explosive growth we wanted. We had a hunch that both productivity and morale would increase if we let our users hold us directly accountable for the work we did every day. We’d still look at the Mixpanel charts for macro trends, but all of us would also speak with “real human” users, a lot, every day, in order to understand why the numbers trended the way they did.

To do this, we’d simply link up to face-to-face conversations with our users, using the live video technology on which Verbling is built. We’d eliminate excuses and justifications for what was weighing down growth and instead zero in on actually solving big problems in users’ lives. Our typical user—a Spanish-speaking, 25-year-old, middle-class college graduate—needs to become fluent in English in order to reach her career goals, so she genuinely cares about this product.

Our premise was that if users told us they didn’t like a feature, or that our product was too broken, we’d understand this was our fault. Consequently, we’d do something quickly to fix it: improve the product, make users happy—users who’d in turn tell their friends and create generations of recommendations. Pretty simple. Except many companies fail at this and thereby commit suicide.

Seeing the faces of our users turned out to be the crucial part for us. Even though they were literally oceans away from us, the live video component of Verbling helped us emotionally connect with and commit to the people we talked to. We attached names, faces, and expressions to what for most companies is simply a different digit in an Excel spreadsheet. By our direct video link connection, we’ve personally promised to solve the problems of Andrea in Madrid, Susana in Bogotá, and Harry in Tennessee—and face-to-face promises are difficult to break.

But you don’t need a live video link to your users to get this effect. When we redesigned the most heavily used Verbling page, my cofounder and I ran around the Safeway on Bernardo & El Camino in Sunnyvale, asking grocery shoppers to point at the things on our paper mockups they thought looked important. This helped us understand how people unfamiliar with the site would try to interact with it. Obvious stuff, yet easy to neglect.

Most of the hypotheses we’ve had since starting this company have been wrong. This, however, was not one of them. We immediately became a more efficient, motivated, and happy team. We showed up at the office a little earlier in the morning and left a little later at night. Some nights, we even slept at the office.

Early morning hours just before sunrise were characterized by a deep sense of camaraderie. We were soldiers in the trench. Laughter, incredibly hard work, and the sense of being part of something greater than ourselves were all of a sudden part of our daily routine. And it showed in the end product.

So now we’re growing faster than ever. We’re focusing on all the right things—and only on the right things. We are seeing fresh, wide streams of users from around the world, while old users are sticking around because they see that the product is better. Engagement is up. And we’ve made that process a routine, systematized, core part of our company culture. Before implementing any changes, we ask ourselves if doing so will improve the experience. If the answer is no, we don’t do it.  

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Instead of relying on machine-driven algorithms to find you a potential date or new friend in the real world, New York-based startup Grouper tries to do things a little more, shall we say, humanely.

Here's how it works: You link your profile to your Grouper account when you sign up, and set up a few "preferences"—like how much older or younger you want the people you are meeting to be, and what kind of bar you want to go to.

Then, Grouper uses your Facebook profile to match you up with three other people—guys or girls, depending on what you select. You bring two friends—"wingmen" or "wingwomen"—and meet for a drink, and it goes from there.

Worst-case scenario, you had a quick drink with friends and some new people. Best-case scenario, you met your future wife, or friends that will last a life time.

Sounds like it's worth the quick hour.

We caught up with cofounder Michael Waxman to find out what makes Grouper different from other sites. Here's what we learned:

• Grouper has served tens of thousands of events since launching about a year ago. It's live in San Francisco and New York, as well as a few other cities. The best cities so far have been New York and San Francisco.

• Grouper is designed around "stacking the deck" in your favor. It still includes a big element of randomness, given that you're meeting people that you've never met before and that you are relying on a third party to match it. But the site, using an actual team of people and a few algorithms, makes sure the people you are meeting have enough in common.

• So far, it seems to be working as a dating app and a way to discover friends. Users have ended up dating since the site's inception, and the site's also ended up merging groups of friends into even larger groups. 

Here's a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:

BUSINESS INSIDER: How did you end up in New York starting a site like Grouper? 

MICHAEL WAXMAN: I dropped out of Yale after my freshman year to do my first tech company. I moved out to San Francisco, had 25 full-time employees—including a cofounder of Airbnb—but unfortunately we flamed out. I was really humbled to have been able to work with people like that. But when it didn't work out, I went back to school and graduated and moved to New York after graduating. I was newly single and looking for a way to meet new people that didn't have any labels attached, like meet ups or networking events or online dating.

"You need stories and experiences to take Instagram photos of, so that's where we come in, it creates friendships and adventures for those legendary stories."

A week later, I launched the first version of Grouper and invited two friends who didn't know each other. They each brought two friends for the first groupers in July last summer. It branched out from there, and months later we've done tens of thousands of drinks with each other—mostly in New York and now in San Francisco. I'm dating a girl I met on Grouper, bringing things full circle. 

BI: What is Grouper, exactly? A dating app?

MW: We're a social club that sets up drinks between two groups of friends, three guys and three girls typically. Also three guys and three guys, et cetera. We view it as a much better alternative to hanging out in a bar, and so whether it is to expand your social circle, make new friends, or meet a guy or a girl to date or hook up with, or whatever, we don't like labels. We just want to come up with a context for meeting people that's better than anything that currently exists online or offline.

One of our mantras is, "we like to treat humans like humans." We think it's a pretty dehumanizing and also just ineffective process to mechanically browse profiles and send hundreds of messages. We don't think it's enough in common to say, hey, we both downloaded the same app and we're near each other, we should hang out. Ultimately the goal of all these social services are face-to-face interactions and new relationships. We found a really cool way to jump right to the punchline. There are no profiles in Grouper, there's no browsing or randomness, it's six people matched up together, you spend five minutes on the site scheduling and figuring that out and it's straight to hanging out in person and seeing if there's chemistry.

BI: How do you match people on Grouper? 

MW: We use our members' Facebook profiles combined with just a few stated preferences that we asked people. Our insight there is that peoples' Facebook profiles tend to provide a very kind of deep and honest portrayal of what somebody's actually like, versus profiles on online dating sites where people are trying very hard to put their best foot forward. The short of it is that we use a combination of real humans who analyze your profiles and also algorithms.

BI: What makes this different from, say, OKCupid?

MW: We think we've just built up a really great context because, you're with your friends, you're in the real world, a third party brought you together. No one had to creepily lob a message or approach anyone at a bar. We think it's a really cool, comfortable, casual level because you're with your friends. It's like stacking the deck in your favor, social serendipity on steroids.

"It's like stacking the deck in your favor, social serendipity on steroids."

There's a balance between just pure randomness and first-come first-serve in meet ups and networking events versus the really analytical pure algorithm approach like OKCupid. For us, it's let's stack the deck, make sure the gender ratios are right, make sure everyone is pretty compatible and head straight to the most important part.

One of the things that's been so kind of cool and reassuring is just how much almost everyone has in common when you take an hour out of your schedule to share a drink with a few new people. It's like, slowing down and getting offline and remembering the point of all this. You need stories and experiences to take Instagram photos of, so that's where we come in, it creates friendships and adventures for those legendary stories.

BI: What are some of the best stories you've had come out of Grouper?

MW: We've literally heard everything. On one hand we've had a number of people who have dated. We've had people who have been dating for almost as long as the service has been around. On the other end of the spectrum, people go out to other bars with each other, they go to Karaoke, they join each others' co-ed volleyball team. They go to concerts together, we've seen a ton of times where it's just two friend groups come together. They're the same age with similar background that don't have mutual friends in common, and you realize how well they get along. Two friend groups sort of become one, they go out together and hang out. We've heard the full spectrum.

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The New York tech scene is filled with young talent.

We rounded up some of the most promising up-and-comers in the industry.

They're leading investments, heading up business development, and running the show at awesome NY tech companies.

These are the people to watch.

Josh Miller cofounded Branch. He's so captivating, a VC unexpectedly offered him a $500,000 investment over a 15-minute coffee meeting.

Age: 21

What he's done: Miller is one of Branch's cofounders. He left school a year early to pursue his startup and quickly captured attention from big names in tech like BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti and Twitter's Evan Williams.

Miller is so captivating, a VC once offered him a $500,000 investment unexpectedly at a coffee shop.

Libby Brittain is the director of editorial development Branch

Age: 22

What she's done: Having worked at Hearst Ventures, Libby Brittain recently joined hot NYC startup Branch as its Director of Editorial Development.

Branch is a group blogging platform that's backed by investors like Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams and BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti.

Scott Britton is a business development executive at SinglePlatform

Age: 24

What he's done: Britton co-founded a NYC startup, Sfter, and was an early employee at CollegeOnly. Britton has since been snatched up by Wiley Cerilli at Single Platform.

Britton now helps Biz Dev lead Kenny Herman with business development at SinglePlatform. SinglePlatform was recently acquired for $100 million in cash and stock.

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Near the end of 2008, Practice Fusion—now one of the fastest-growing startups in San Francisco—was out of cash.

He's sold his house. He'd sold his car. And in a motorcycle accident, CEO Ryan Howard had torn his rotator cuff in a motorcycle accident.

When Geico finally paid him for his injury, he used that money to pay his employees instead. 

Practice Fusion, a massive database of information for medical professionals and patients that includes everything from records and vitals to doctor reviews, has data for more than 50 million patients. More than 150,000 medical professionals use it to keep track of patient data.

Howard followed up that Geico payment by raising $70 million in fresh funding and a massive period of growth starting in the beginning of last year. That's quite the turnaround from struggling to make payroll, needing two root canals, and recovering from a motorcycle accident.

Here's the next big idea he's working on: Letting developers create apps that doctors can "prescribe" to patients. These might track their vitals, remind them when to take drugs, or otherwise help them stay on top of their health. They'll all tap into Practice Fusion's data.

We caught up with Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, to find out where they are today. Here's what we learned:

• More than 50 million patients have data stored in Practice Fusion in the United States. Howard expects that number to hit 70 million by the end of the year when they start rolling out consumer-oriented products.

• Soon, developers will be able to build apps that tap into that data. There are already a number of beta apps that are well-funded and on track to take advantage of it. One app, for example, is supposed to accurately predict how long you have to live.

• Because it's Web-based, Practice Fusion has a cost edge on on-premises medical-record solutions. Most solutions cost around $50,000 to deploy.  Practice Fusion cuts that cost to almost nothing. And you can access the data anywhere, so it makes it easier for doctors to share data amongst themselves.

• Because it's easier to share data, it's easier to save lives. Around 200,000 people die every year because there isn't adequate access to data. Howard says he has a number of stories about how having access to patient data has kept doctors for accidentally setting off negative reactions.

Here's a lightly edited transcript of the interview:

BUSINESS INSIDER: What exactly is Practice Fusion?

RYAN HOWARD: Basically, you're a sick patient, you go to see the doctor, your doctor ideally is using an electronic health record. We facilitate this entire process, when you call the doctor's office, that appointment is in Practice Fusion. We have the entire scheduling system. All your vitals are being gathered by the nurse into the system, electronically. Let's say you have depression, we have prescription data, we're connected to 70,000 pharmacies. We're connected to labs. On the referral side, making sure the data gets to another doctor in the network, we facilitate that. It's basically CRM for doctors.

"It's basically CRM (customer relationship management) for doctors."

We have 50 million patients on the service and 150,000 medical practitioners—it's the largest community by far. The data on the clinical side can be used for a number of things, we know when an epidemic or pandemic is happening in real time. We have more physician reviews that we haven't posted, more doctor's schedules. Most of the solutions out there cost around $40,000 to $60,000, in our model it's totally free and totally web-based. We have a Gmail-ish model, you can be sending prescriptions in an hour.

BI: Wow. How are you guys still a startup?

RH: We're definitely getting toward the end. It's kind of binary, you're a startup or you're a company that's gone public. That's the switch. We're getting substantial, the patients, the doctors with 200 employees, it's starting to churn up as well. We're starting to have a lot of presence.

BI: How did you guys get started?

RH: We're about five years old. I was in integration product management. But I woke up one day and said, man, I'm working in a cube. I just wanted to have some purpose in my life, around that time I ran the Team in Training marathon. I was looking to do something more like that. The company I worked with was just doing integration, retail, supply chain. My epiphany was, even if I work for a company, even if I'm a cog in a big wheel, at least if it's a health plan, someone is benefiting at the end of the day.

I had two jobs after that, one with the largest physician group in the Bay Area. They service a lot of doctors and patients, I learned a lot about the product space. You'll see 19 different doctors in your life, probably more, I was like, where's my data. How is it fetched. The answer is, it's in paper in the doctor's office, it doesn't get fetched. There are 200,000 deaths a year just because you can't get that data.

From there I worked for Halsey Minor, the founder of CNET. Halsey was also the largest investor in Salesforce.com. He started a company called GrandCentral, it ended up being Google Voice, but the first incarnation basically was the cloud. You could integrate and build on-demand apps in the cloud before anyone else with GrandCentral.

[That's where I realized] the doctors won't pay for software, this is a way to get doctors into a service.

While I was at GrandCentral I started working on the project, the first incarnation shut down. Then I sold my house, burned through that, and sold my car, and burned through that, and went into massive debt. We got to about 1,000 users when the market across the board totally dropped out. It was a disaster. By the time I got the company funded I was four years behind my back taxes, I needed two root canals. In 2008, there was just no more money, and I couldn't call anyone. The current investors were tapped, they had all lost about 30 percent in their portfolios. I thought I had to shut it down. I had gotten into a motorcycle accident a few years back, and right then Geico decided to pay me. Instead of fixing my rotator cuff, I used it to meet payroll. Then we closed [a round with] our investors, Salesforce.com, others, and that's how the story goes.

When I coach or mentor or I'm on a board, I always discuss about how far you're willing to go. You think you'll build it and it'll be done in a few months, that's not how it goes. Building technology is generally an unknown quantity.

BI: Is any of the service on-premise? Or entirely Web-based?

RH: It's all cloud-based. Regulations are pretty gnarly, it has to be certified against a federal standard. You as a patient have the ability to export your data at any time. The checks are cut if the doctor uses a certified system, they have to show that they used it on a large percentage of their patient population. It's, use the software in a meaningful way and start sharing data, because that's a key problem. 

BI: When did you guys starting hitting critical mass?

RH: Early last year we had about 10 million patients, that was the point where we were like, this is significant. Mid last year we had 20 million. This year and last year were the tipping points. What's the Schopenhauer quote? "All truths pass through three stages." First they're ridiculed, then they're violently opposed, then it's accepted as common knowledge. People would rip on it all the time, people thought it was vaporware. But we could set up implementation in a day or so. When we push an update, it goes to everyone. This data set can also be leveraged in a number of ways. We have more validated doctors, more schedules and reviews, this isn't even the core of what we do. 

At the end of this year, we will release websites for all of our doctors. No other vendor can do that. We have more physician reviews than any other site on the web. When you look up a doctor on Yelp, you don't even know if that doctor is real. Our reviews don't go out until after the doctor signs the chart. When I'm seeing you, I chart that, I put in your allergies, your immunizations, and at the end I sign that note and it becomes a legal document. We know the visit happened, that's when we send off the review. It shows up in your email. When you look for a primary care doctor, you'll see one of our doctors' validated pages. These are some of the macro assets we're starting to make available. On the mobile side, we're doing a lot of work, and not just surfacing your data. 

BI: How do you go about collecting data?

RH: It's basically grinding it out. Everything doctors did in paper, that's all gone. There's a lot of different tools we're starting to incorporate. We have a big iPad push coming at the end of the year. We have a ton of apps in beta. There are lots of devices that are pumping out data,  and they are coming to us to drop their data. If a doctor prescribes it, it's different. We imagine very soon a doctor will prescribe a drug and then prescribe an app. We have more doctors engaged and making decisions, so we have the largest data source. 

BI: How does it feel to be working on health care than, say, a photo-sharing app like Instagram? 

RH: The epiphany I had a decade ago with Walmart stock price on my headstone still reigns true today. At some point, you're going to have to decide, what's your own long-term value. What have you contributed. This rock is gonna keep spinning the day you're gone, was it a net positive or negative. We'll see 100,000 patients today. At some point in your career it'll get bad, you'll be like, what am I doing. Are you working on a human resource payment solution, or a solution where it's saving lives? 

"Facebook's a website, period. When you look at Google, they have self-driving cars. It put it in perspective."

We hear stories, where, a doctor is seeing a patient today, but without this data I would have killed the patient. The best story we have, we had a patient where the standard course of care would be to give a blood thinner, but the data showed they had a clotting disorder and the thinner would have killed them. A really smart guy I know said it the best the other day: Facebook's a website, period. When you look at Google, they have self-driving cars. It put it in perspective. I tend to think this is my life's work. I'm proud of it, but it's not like, standard pride. I just can't think of working on something with more meaning.

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Y Combinator is the Ivy League of startup schools.

The odds of getting in are incredibly slim, and only the top founders typically make the cut. Some graduates have gone on to become billion-dollar companies, like Airbnb and Dropbox.

But what is it actually like once you get accepted?

We've compiled thoughts from several Y Combinator founders about the incubator.

Tikhon Bernstam, cofounder of Parse, says you have to get a year's worth of work done in 10 weeks.

The best parts are, one, the YC founders support each other. They help with recommendations and suggestions for lawyers, fundraising, testing your product, help through the inevitable ups and downs of startup life, help with setting up payroll, hiring, leads on hires (like engineers), partnerships and deals.  Intros to whoever you need—you could ask for an intro almost anyone and someone in the group would have it (or one of the partners would).

The Y Combinator partners are top-notch. Their help was critical to almost everyone. They helped with fundraising, constantly pushing you to launch early ("if you're not embarrassed when you launch, you've waited too long").  

We demoed Parse (and Scribd the last time around) every week at dinner to our classmates, and that really helped push us every week to have something new to show.  The deadline of Demo Day forces you to get a years worth of work done in 10 weeks, and is a great motivator in general.

Ryan Mickle, cofounder of Yardsale, said the finish line is already in sight as soon as you join.

One of big advantages to being part of Y Combinator was the unfiltered advice. The partners and alums are exceptionally candid in helping founders navigate around easily avoidable mistakes that could waste time or come back to bite you later. Stuff like financing documents are standardized (and founder friendly) so you don't waste cycles and can focus on building your company. 

That's not to say that you won't make mistakes—you will—but at least you dodge many of the avoidable ones, without needing to build a network of trusted advisors from scratch. The Y Combinator experience itself is a pressure cooker, as the countdown to Demo Day begins the moment you get in. So you're forced to stay focused and work as hard as you can with the time you have. It seems to work to effectively "reset" your work/social life. At least it seemed like the case for us, since we were one of many who moved down to Mountain View for the summer, leaving many of the things that would have distracted us in the City [San Francisco], so we could work hard to get into the groove of being productive.

Finally, the support of alums was invaluable. They always seemed to make time when you needed help and the network is large enough that the problems you face are rarely if ever unique. And there definitely seems to be a spirit of indebtedness toward Y Combinator itself, so past founders look forward to helping future founders, because it wasn't that long ago when someone, perhaps an alum or YC partner, did the same for them.

James Beshara, cofounder of Crowdtilt, says Paul Graham has turned Y Combinator into a "flight control center."

During the program, I would say that the constraints of 90 days and weekly conversations about your product and growth are invaluable for focus and productivity.

And since the more recent your batch, the larger the network you graduate into—the network of other founders and companies has become the single biggest factor in why I tell every tech entrepreneur I know that they should apply to Y Combinator.

In their own words, PG et al. have almost turned into more of a flight control center ... "Oh you're having this problem, talk to these founders. Oh you're selling this solution, these guys need that." It's pretty incredible.

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Amazon has already conquered online retail, but it still takes too long to get your groceries. Why shouldn't they be at your door in an hour?

That's the problem that Instacart, a new startup coming out of prestigious startup school Y Combinator, wants to solve. It's not the only startup attacking same-day delivery, considered a "holy grail" in technology, but it's one that certainly shows an enormous amount of promise.

Instacart charges a flat fee to deliver groceries to your home in just an hour (or three). Its salespeople are equipped with the best tech and apps to get your groceries to your door immediately.

Here's how it works: you fire up the app, select some groceries to buy, and an hour later they arrive at your door. You pay a delivery fee that's about $15.

It might seem steep, but there's certainly a ton of demand for it: the app has already delivered tens of thousands of items.

It's not the first startup to do online grocery shopping, though. Webvan was a famous dotcom-era startup that did much the same thing, now owned by Amazon.

We caught up with co-founder Apoorva Mehta to find out where he plans to take Instacart. Here's what we learned:

• After being operational for just a few weeks, Instacart has delivered tens of thousands of items. That's pretty impressive growth for an app that just came out of Y Combinator, even for one of the top startups in the incubator.

• More than 90 percent of Instacart's users return after trying it. "They've stopped going grocery shopping," Mehta said.

• Instacart might expand to other verticals, but it's just groceries for now. Amazon started with just books, and now it's the top retail site on the web. Instacart just wants to do groceries right first before expanding into new verticals.

Here's a lightly edited transcript of the interview:

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

APOORVA MEHTA: I used to be at Amazon.com, I was working on supply chain, a lot of what we are doing at Instacart is inspired by my work at Amazon. We fulfill items from local stores. A lot of the routing algorithms we're building was inspired heavily from my work at Amazon. Amazon is like clockwork, it has taken some time to get there and become a well-oiled machine and it's great to have that experience to start off with at Instacart.

I was at Amazon for 2.5 years, and this problem was there for me all the time. You would realize that you would shop for everything, but to get groceries you'd have to go physically to the store. To me, that was a broken experience. Two places, one was offline and one was online, that was always broken. I wanted to create something that could solve that problem. For me, it was very clear, I had the exact product I wanted to build and had the logistic experience. That cross-section was what put me in the position of building instacart.

Since then I've brought on two co-founders, both have been working on several startups. One was the first engineer at AngelList, a foundational knowledge of building networks. The other, on the other hand, has previously been a founder and CEO of a company that was acquired recently by Location Labs. He has a lot of operational experience. Right now the team is structured, I'm focused on the product and the logistics, Brandon is focused on the technology and Max is doing the operations.

BI: Why start with groceries?

AM: Everyone has to go grocery shopping, even if you don't cook you do need the basic cereals, your sundries, your toilet paper, your toiletries. Strategically speaking, we started with that like Amazon started with books. Amazon expanded to other categories, but when they started with books they were doing better than everyone. We wanted to laser-focus on groceries and do better than what everyone else did.

"Amazon expanded to other categories, but when they started with books they were doing better than everyone. We wanted to laser-focus on groceries and do better than what everyone else did."

We started with groceries because that's a problem that's not solved. 

In the future, we'd like to add any unconsidered good as part of Instacart or if there are other apps we're building. We aren't going to get into the Apple Store, we're not gonna let you buy a big screen TV. We don't think we can add much value there, you don't need those things in an hour. You need something more impulsive or unconsidered. 

BI: How do you handle the logistics?

AM: We use something called managed crowdsourcing. It's different from other platforms, managed crowdsourcing means when you order something on Instacart, we ensure there's crowdsourced labor to serve your requests. These are trained people who are equipped with an Instacart shopper app. This app is extremely intelligent, when they are at the store, we know exactly where all the items are located, what department, what isle, what shelf. The drivers are routed in the store as well as outside. We get as much efficiency as possible when we fulfill these requests. We charge $14.99 for one hour and $3.99 for three-hour deliveries. We're going to expand it to scheduled deliveries, for later today, for the next day. Our logistics are so efficient that we can give you that pricing.

BI: Do you guys see yourselves as being the go-to option for same-day deliveries?

AM: The scale is enormous, we've already delivered tens of thousands of items and we've only been operational for three weeks. There's this concept of a jewel on the Internet, where there's Amazon.com, that's where you go to shop. In the upcoming years, Instacart is the place you're going to go shopping for groceries. After that, it's going to expand to other areas as well. Anything same-day, anything instant is something Instacart will be able to provide. Amazon has done an amazing job being the sole-shopping experience provider. They're also going into the same-day space, but they'll never have all the inventory in the city for you, and we'll be able to do that. Our scope is much larger than what it seems right now. Right now we're just focused on being the best grocery delivery.

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Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, the influential advisor to dozens of startups like Dropbox and Airbnb, sent his entrepreneurs an email Wednesday afternoon cautioning them against taking "lowball offers"—in particular, he said, from Google Ventures.

Graham's startups go through a months-long process of coaching to help them build products and raise money. Notes like this are part of Graham's ongoing process of steering them through the thickets of Silicon Valley startup life.

According to Graham, Google Ventures, a venture-capital firm backed by the tech giant, has systematically been offering to make seed investments in recent Y Combinator graduates, but only on substantially more favorable terms than other investors received.

Google Ventures managing partner Bill Maris strongly denied Graham's accusations, calling them "patently absurd."

"I don't know what Paul's thinking," Maris said. "It's just not true. Our portfolio speaks for itself."

Google Ventures has made more than 100 seed investments, Maris said, including some past and present Y Combinator companies, and is making one to two new ones a week.

Parse, one of the most-anticipated startups in Silicon Valley these days, went through Y Combinator last year and raised seed money from Google Ventures, for example.

Many if not most seed investments in startups these days are done in the form of convertible debt, which is a loan that can convert to equity in a subsequent financing. If the convertible debt has a "valuation cap" feature, the price at which the investor's debt converts into shares has a maximum. The higher the cap, the better it is for the entrepreneur; the lower the cap, the better it is for the investor, since they may get their shares at a lower price than they otherwise might.

According to Graham's email, Google Ventures has been seeking to cap the price at which their loans will convert into shares at half the price other investors are willing to take.

Maris said the firm did not have any "policy or practice" along these lines.

"Do we negotiate?" Maris said. "Sure. Sometimes we pay the market price because that's what's on the table."

It's simply not in Google Ventures' self-interest to behave in the way Graham alleges it has, Maris said: "We work really hard on our relationships and our reputation ... and most of us are entrepreneurs ourselves."

Here's what Graham wrote:

If you're talking to Google Ventures you may be part of a pattern. The pattern is: you've already raised some money at a cap of $x. Then GV says they're interested and wants to invest at a cap of $x/2.

If this happens to you in isolation, you worry "Oh dear, maybe my cap is too high." But in fact for some bizarre reason this is just their standard m.o.

What do you do in response? Just focus on other investors instead. Maybe you'll find enough from other sources that you can blow off GV. Or maybe you won't, and you'll need that offer to fall back upon. Either way it's better to wait.

At face value, this advice seems very different from the message Graham sent just a few months ago, in the wake of Facebook's poor IPO performance:

If it means new startups raise their first money on worse terms than they would have a few months ago, that's not the end of the world, because by historical standards valuations had been high.

Convertible notes technically don't set a price for startups. The whole point is to provide a fast, easy form of financing that avoids wrestling over valuation. But the convertible cap has increasingly been used as a guide for valuation. So ultimately, setting the cap has become a proxy for what founders and investors think a startup is worth.

What does this incident tell us?

First, the valuation of early-stage startups remains frothy and fraught with uncertainty.

And of course a venture-capital investor and an advisor to entrepreneurs would take opposite sides in a price negotiation.

It makes sense that Google Ventures might see an opportunity to make more seed investments at lower prices now, as other venture investors pull back on their seed programs.

While all Google Ventures partners make some seed investments, the firm recently hired Digg founder Kevin Rose as a partner; Rose focuses on early-stage and seed investments, drawing on his extensive experience as an angel investor.

Google Ventures also has extensive programs to help the entrepreneurs it backs with technology, analytics, design, and marketing—for which it might reasonably believe it should command good terms when investing.

What is surprising is that whatever approach Google Ventures took to these Y Combinator startups caused enough friction to provoke Graham's cautionary note.

Maris notes that not all of Graham's companies seem to be heeding his advice.

"We've already closed investments on companies from this class, so they don't seem to feel that way," Maris said.

We asked Y Combinator several times for comment and didn't hear back, though we understand our inquiry generated considerable discussion within the startup program.

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Most startups today are building some kind of app or software—like the next big-time photo-sharing app.

Double Robotics is the rare startup that's actually building a solid piece of hardware that you can actually see in action, in the real world.

Right now, Double is building motorized mounts for your iPad. You plug your iPad into the robot to turn it into a roaming camera.

The applications are pretty much limitless: remote videoconferences, campus tours, even doctor's visits.

Still, building a hardware startup is tough. The weakhearted need not apply. 

We caught up with cofounder Marc DeVidts to find out what it's like running a startup that's also a hardware company. Here's what we learned:

• Rapid-fire prototyping is a must for all startups, whether they make hardware or software. Even if your robot is going to crash into a wall, you still need to find ways to get customer feedback as quickly as possible.

• Good advice is universal—don't assume it won't work for you. Y Combinator is best known for software startups like Airbnb and Dropbox. But DeVidts found there were ways to apply the coaching and advice he got.

• Always look for the next step. For Double Robotics, that means it can't just build robots. Now it has to teach them how to be better robots capable of climbing stairs, opening doors, and all the other things humans do.

Here's a lightly edited transcript of the interview: 

BUSINESS INSIDER: Can you tell me a little bit about your history and the team?

MARC DEVIDTS: My cofounder David (Cann) and I met at a TV show, BattleBots, back on Comedy Central 10 years ago. He was a software developer. He was writing their management software. I was a competitor and was on the TV show for one season before it got canceled. We met there and we didn't really collaborate on anything until we ended up moving to Miami together because we had mutual friends there. We each had our own jobs, he was doing iOS app contract work, I was doing software on medical devices.

We started working on a product in 2009 that was a kid's toy, it was a Furby crossed with a Tomagotchi crossed with an iPhone. It was a plush doll that kids could play with using their iPhone or their parents' iPhone. We were trying to manufacture that in china. We thought China would wave their magic wand and make it cheaper and we found it was difficult to communicate with them. Around that time we were trying to figure out how to talk to China better and we decided there were telepresence robots out there, but they were expensive and clunky. This was around the time the iPad 2 came out and we said, maybe there was an opportunity to make something that replaces all these clunky robots with an iPad. So we went full-time on it about a year ago, last November, been working on it ever since.

The toy got put on the back-burner, because it was too hard to make margins on it. Maybe we'll make it again, there's a lot of new advancements since 2009 and prices have definitely come down.

BI: What's it like working on a hardware startup?

MD: We were in Y Combinator, the main issue was that most of the advice, a lot of it, was tiered toward software companies. us hardware guys, we had like five hardware startups in our batch. We were sitting in the back corner saying, does that apply to us, i don't think that applies to us. We had to paint our own paths different ways. A lot of ways it was useful, it's interesting on hinting how to use that advice that they're giving to software startups, how it applies to you. While hardware is a lot harder to do, they say, we're finding that out now, we actually had a great time in Y Combinator and a totally great time demoing. It's so much easier to demo a piece of hardware that you can carry around and people see immediately, rather than having to pull out your phone or laptop and showing them a website. It just kind of sells itself.

BI: What are some of the challenges to running a hardware startup?

"For us, it was difficult, because if our product isn't done, it falls over or smashes a wall."

MD: The big challenge for any software startup is probably the chicken or egg problem—getting users. So it's easy for someone to say, software might not be done yet, but you have some sort of presence on the site so people can use it and you can get feedback. Your product doesn't have to be done. But for us, it was difficult, because if our product isn't done, it falls over or smashes a wall.

Still, we ended up really taking that advice—it's amazing when you try to apply that advice, which is totally crazy for a hardware startup, and it totally works. Everyone wants their product to be perfect and when we finally got over the initial hurdle of realizing it's never going to be perfect, we really took that advice and started doing that and it's worked out really well. Another piece of advice was to start selling them even though they aren't done, try to sell features that don't exist yet. We stepped back a little from there, but said maybe we can do a beta program. We sold some of those, gave some away, to get that good feedback from people. We really did take that advice. 

BI: So what's the point of the robot?

MD: It's primarily a telepresence robot, though we're opening up a lot of new doors with customer feedback. Our typical customer is a business with multiple offices that wants to stay more connected. We're getting a lot of doctors that want to visit patients, schools offering campus tours, museums wanting to offer tours, new doors are opening up that you never even thought about. A museum in Europe is closed at night, but nighttime is actually daytime in the U.S., so all that time they're actually losing money when they could be offering the museum to U.S. residents with these robots. It doesn't require that much extra staff because it's just, well, robots.

"It doesn't require that much extra staff because it's just, well, robots."

 The other interesting thing is helping people with disabilities, we hear stories about what people are trying to overcome with our robots. We say, think about what you really want to use it for before you buy it. We don't want people to think, well that was cool, and then put it on a shelf. We want people really excited about it, and there's a lot of people like that. I wouldn't say we're going as far as revolutionizing travel, we're certainly in some cases it makes sense to send a robot.

BI: What are you guys working on next?

MD: Right now we have our hands full building this thing, but ultimately we see if the price gets down low enough it could be a consumer thing. Everyone could put it in their home to check on it while they're away.

I do agree the price is still a little prohibitive. It's interesting, when choosing the price we didn't say we're gonna do $1 million in research and figure out how much we can charge based on that. We said, what are people wiling to pay to attend a meeting remotely or drive around remotely and said, how do we do that, and we came up with this. We approached it from the bottom up, not the top down.

Next up, we're researching things like walking up stairs, manipulating things remotely, opening doors. It's not crazy to think that 50 or 100 years from now people will be doing more things remotely.

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Same-day delivery is the next most important problem for technology to solve. Some of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley are already working on ways to attack it.

Some of the biggest, most innovative technology companies in the world are also working on their own solutions for it, too.

We've heard whispers that Google is reportedly working on same-day delivery, and Amazon has its own version of same-day delivery. eBay has its own version of same-day delivery, which lets you buy things and have them delivered in an hour.

It's becoming more and more clear that—alongside a powerful discovery engine (Pinterest, valued at $1.5 billion) and finally creating a sexy solution for paying for things with your phone (Square, valued at $3.2 billion)—same-day delivery is the next holy grail for  technology-driven commerce.

FedEx is worth $28 billion today. UPS, nearly $70 billion. There will always be a market for logistics across all kinds of timeframes. But for e-commerce, the last big hurdle is matching or beating the convenience of walking into a store and walking out with the thing you want.

What if you could get the Kindle you ordered from Amazon, while you were at work, in about an hour—without having to leave your desk, drive to a store, park, wait in line, pay, and head back?

Same-day delivery is getting to the point it can no longer be ignored or written off as a simple experiment or an idea that is destined to fail. Here's why:

• Same-day delivery helps you do more, faster. By removing the need to go to the grocery store or run other errands, it cuts hours of transportation and menial tasks out of your day.

• Startups like TaskRabbit, Instacart, Exec, and Postmates have already shown people are willing to pay for this kind of service. Instacart, for example, charges about $15 for a one-hour delivery of groceries, and it's already delivered tens of thousands of goods in its first weeks of operation. Even Uber, the on-demand limo service, is thinking about branching out into deliveries.

• If the largest, most innovative companies in the world are attempting to do the same, then they recognize it as a huge opportunity. Companies like Google and Amazon don't go after new spaces lightly, so they have to be large enough to add something significant to their already hundreds of billions in market cap.

Consumer startups might be a little boring, according to our own Alyson Shontell, but that's because they've stopped tackling real problems with real money to be made.

Here's to the next billion-dollar startup: Whoever can finally master same-day delivery.

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You might think you need to be a master programmer to start your own company.

But that's not actually the case, says entrepreneur David Rose on Quora. In fact, the single most important person at a startup is "the entrepreneur:" basically the guy that gets the startup off the ground.

The entrepreneur isn't necessarily a technical master, but has a "combination of vision, passion, leadership, commitment, communication skills, hypomania, fundability, and, above all, willingness to take risks, that brings together all of the pieces and creates from them an enterprise that fills a value-producing role in our economy," Rose says.

So, even if you aren't a master coder, it doesn't mean you shouldn't try to start a company.

Check out his full response, embedded below:

Read Quote of David S. Rose's answer to How good of a programmer does one need to be to found a startup? on Quora

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One of the concerns I hear voiced most frequently by prospective entrepreneurs – and it’s usually first-timers — is how they can engage potential funding sources, strategic partners and employees in conversations without divulging and “giving away” their extra-super-secret business concept.

My response? 

Get over yourself.  You’re just not that clever.  Because there’s no such thing as an original business idea.

Let’s do the math: There are 7 billion people on this earth.  Let’s postulate that, say, even one-fiftieth of those people are somewhat “business smart.”  (I’ll bet you the proportion’s a lot higher, but let’s go with that just to be conservative.)  Then let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that one-tenth of those business-savvy folks have access to at least some money (either personally or through their employer).   

Now:  tell me with a straight face that someone among those 14 million people hasn’t already thought of your concept and pursued it a bit.  Seriously.

But relax.  Most great businesses aren’t built on original business ideas.  

There.  I said it.

The vast majority of great, new businesses are launched by entrepreneurs – or intrapreneurs in existing enterprises – who have a clever innovation on an existing concept.  Or sometimes just better branding, customer service and overall execution applied to a tried-and-true concept.  They’re the fast followers (or not-so-fast followers), not the first movers. 

What the successful ones have in common is superb business execution – rarely patent-protectable business concepts.

Oracle wasn’t the first relational database.  Facebook wasn’t the first social media site.  Disney wasn’t the first amusement-park company.  Nor, by any means, was iTunes the first source of MP3 music, nor Sam Adams the first craft beer, nor Foursquare the first location-based mobile couponing service, nor Prius the first fuel-efficient car.

Yet all ended up entering and dominating their respective markets through flawless business execution.

So what does this mean for us as entrepreneurs?  

First of all, go ahead and pitch your idea!  Don’t worry about somebody stealing it.  Your business concept isn’t what’s going to differentiate you from your competitors.  What’s going to spell success for you is your ability to build a high-performing team, set and meet goals, and build lasting customer relationships.

Secondly, if you Google your hot new business idea and get hits on a bunch of companies that are already pursuing similar concepts, don’t be bummed.  Rather than thinking, “Shoot, my idea is already taken,” take the attitude, “Great... other smart people are pursuing this.  That’s market validation!”  

Jim Price is a serial entrepreneur and Adjunct Lecturer of Entrepreneurial Studies at the Zell Lurie Institute at The University of Michigan Ross School of Business. ©2012, James D. Price. 

NOW READ: Entrepreneurs With 'Founder's Disease' Will Make Any Investor Run Away >

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Quirky, the super-hot New York startup founded by 24-year-old Ben Kaufman, just raised another $68 million in Series C funding.

That brings the total raised since it was founded in 2009 to $91.3 million.

This round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with significant participation from new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. So it also gets two new board members: Andreessen Horowitz's Scott Weiss and Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker. Weiss is perhaps best known as employee no. 13 at Hotmail before it was bought by Microsoft and the co-founder of IronPort (bought by Cisco).

Meeker is known as the "Queen of the Net" from her days as a powerhouse Morgan Stanley Internet stock analyst. Today she's known for investing in companies like Groupon, Square and Spotify.

Quirky makes it super easy for people to turn their ideas into real life products. People submit ideas for $10 and other readers choose which are best. If an idea is chosen, Quirky will make the product and pay a lifetime royalty for it.

Quirky has so far launched more than 200 products, many sold at retail stores. Big hits include Pivot Power, Cordies and Crates. It has paid out over $2 million in royalties to inventors and has 260,000 people participating on the site.

Don't miss: Here's What It's Like To Work For Quirky

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In San Francisco, a hotbed of transportation innovation from ferries to cable cars to high-speed rail, the latest way to get around is sporting a giant, pink, fluffy mustache.

If you see a car with that hood decoration, you're looking at a driver for Lyft, a new app from a startup called Zimride that lets you order a car ride from one point to another on demand.

Instead of working like Uber, a similar service for professional limo drivers, Lyft has more of a community aspect, focusing on regular car owners who want to help their friends and meet new people.

We caught up with John Zimmer, chief operating officer and cofounder of Zimride, the maker of Lyft. Here's what we learned:

• After being out for about three months, Lyft has served thousands of rides. Right now it's only available in San Francisco, but it should be expanding to other cities "once it gets San Francisco right," Zimmer says.

• The average cost of a Lyft ride is about $10. Most Web-based apps like Uber charge a lot more than that.

• For Lyft, it's more about the community. Think of Lyft as an Airbnb for cars. You can't quite turn it into a job yet, but you can make some money to recoup the cost of your auto bills.

Here's a lightly edited transcript of the interview:

BUSINESS INSIDER: Can you give me a little bit of background on Zimride and Lyft? 

JOHN ZIMMER: Lyft started three months ago, and Zimride started about 5 years go. Zimride and Lyft were founded by myself and Logan Green, my cofounder and CEO of Zimride. He has a background in transportation hacking, he built the first car-share program at University of California at Santa Barbara, before even Zipcar. He was on the transportation board in Santa Barbara working on buses. He was frustrated that public transportation was based on tax revenue, so only about 30 percent of the operating costs were covered by fares. When a bus line folded, he couldn't add more bus lines, so he wanted to build a transportation form that would get better as it got used.

I went to Cornell's hotel school. I studied hospitality and when I took a green cities class, we were looking at transportation. I saw a slide on the evolution of transportation, from canals to highways, and I thought about what would be the next slide. I thought it would be a layer of efficiency on top of our current cars and road systems, going back to that idea of occupancy I was learning in the program. 80 percent of our seats are empty and I thought if you could get that 20 percent occupancy up by even 10 percentage points, you'd have an incredible social, financial and utilitarian solution.

BI: So, I have to ask, what is the deal with the mustaches?

JZ: Every car has this "carstache," it's the pink furry mustache. When we were designing the app experience and the in-car physical experience, we wanted to create something that would help people recognize the car. It's a person's private vehicle, so they're all different. We wanted something for riders to identify. It's created a ton of buzz because people see these cars all the time in San Francisco, asking, "What is that?"

BI: What's the point of Lyft? Why shouldn't I use Uber, or Sidecar?

JZ: It's all part of the same mission to change the fact that 80 percent of seats are empty. Zimride was long-distance trips, we have saved $100 million for the population with our long-distance service. We said, with that milestone, "How can we do this even faster for more people?" We had long-distance, we should also tackle short-distance. That's where Lyft was born. We decided it was the product we wanted to build. Three months later, we've done thousands of rides.

BI: But what about cost?

JZ: The average ride is about $10, it's a little less expensive than a cab, and a lot less expensive than an Uber. It's about a third of the cost of Uber. The experience is different too, there's a professional driver feel to Uber and Sidecar. There's more of a community-powered feel to what we're doing. 80 percent of our passengers sit in the front seat when they get in the Lyft. The concept we're going after is "your friend with a car, on demand." We have a community and culture—we have pink mustaches on every car. It's part of that community experience, you smile when you see it, the passenger smiles, the driver smiles, it breaks the ice. The drivers often do a fist bump as part of welcoming someone into the culture. They're encouraged to express themselves. We've had drivers make coffee in the morning, it's like Airbnb with hosts. It's more of that feel.

"We've had drivers make coffee in the morning, it's like Airbnb with hosts. It's more of that feel."

BI: What's the advantage to drivers?

JZ: I don't have an exact number, but the basic idea is if people have a few extra hours in their days and they want to help others out in the community, they can fill their time and make some money using Lyft. It's similar to Airbnb, where you have extra space and need to do something with it. They're able to make some money and reimburse themselves for some of their auto expenses.

We've had people meet their new best friends, they've met people who they've hung out with several times outside of the experience. We've had people start a band because they met someone who's had similar music taste. There are some that do it more than others, the average is more in the 10 to 20 hours a week range, that's more of a side job. It does range from people doing it a couple hours to people doing it more. 

BI: What are you guys planning on doing next?

We want to do San Francisco really well, it's a market we understand. There's a transportation void that needs to be filled. In a few months we'll look to find other cities where that's also true.

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When Kontagent CEO Jeff Tseng wanted to find out how well his app was doing, he couldn't find a way to track his users and whether they were buying anything.

So he decided to build the app himself — and it worked. Unfortunately, it also showed that his app was actually pretty bad.

So instead of trying to change his app, he decided to change the direction of the company to sell the same technology he and his team built to track the app as a service to other business.

Now, the company tracks more than 200 million monthly active users. It helps business find out what to change and what to tweak to ensure that users are enjoying the experience and are paying for in-app purchases.

We caught up with CEO Jeff Tseng and chief science officer Josh Williams to find out what Kontagent does. Here's what we learned:

• Kontagent tracks hundreds of millions of app users, amounting to hundreds of billions of actions. It helps businesses track users from the moment they click on an advertisement to install an app all the way to the point that they decide to buy the equivalent of a FarmVille cow.

• More than half of Kontagent's traffic now comes from mobile. There was a big change-over from Facebook and desktop web surfing to mobile apps, and it only happened in the past few months.

• Kontagent has more than 100 employees and it's raised about $18 million. After starting off as a consumer app company, it's since enjoyed the ride as an enterprise startup.

Here's a lightly edited transcript of the interview:

BUSINESS INSIDER: Can you tell me a little bit about what Kontagent does?

JOSH WILLIAMS: We help business track and optimize their customer economics and customer experience in their social applications, mobile applications and websites. We track more than 200 million monthly active users across social and mobile applications. We handle more than 100 billion in-app user actions. We crunch all the data and track it in real-time as well as enabling deeper analyses. We give businesses tools and infrastructure to do that as well by providing a dashboard that delivers all that data back to them in reports and in a semi-real time basis.

JEFF TSENG: Mainly we're helping our customers, the businesses, efficiently spend their marketing dollars to acquire customers. In the case of social gaming companies, a company being like Zynga, or our customers like EA, they have to spend money to acquire users to play their games. We provide metrics and dashboards around which types of channels and advertising are most effective toward driving high-value users. We help companies optimize the value of the customer experience, showing them what changes they can make to the user experience that increase the likelihood of the user spending money or using the app more frequently.

For example, in the case of a company that heavily uses mobile, like Uber, we'd show them what parts of the customer experience are stopping me from booking more tabs or spending more money. If they analyze my behavior they'd see me keep clicking UBERx and see there aren't enough cabs, so they might want to sign up more drivers. 

Anywhere there's an advertisement where it's run online, we can track the users who click on the ad and actually register — download an application or install a Facebook application and do something within the application. We can track the user all the way from when they click the ad all the way to when they generate revenue in the appellation.

JW: We do all that, but take it a big step further and we follow users through their lifetime engagement with your service and can show you, hey, the group of users that saw this specific ad on this platform in this time window had greater attention that other users who clicked on a different acquisition channel. This sort of user sticks around longer so you should target more of them.

BI: Can you tell me more about how the company got started?

JW: In the early days, Kontagent was an app developer for mobile and social on Facebook. We wanted to understand what was going on inside their applications and realized there wasn't a good analytics service to use off the shelf. We started to build something internally, but once the data was available we realized our app wasn't that great. I mean, it was great that the analytics worked to show us that, but we needed to change the business.

"We started to build something internally, but once the data was available we realized our app wasn't that great. I mean, it was great that the analytics worked to show us that, but we needed to change the business."

By that point we had a cool analytics system and started to look at an enterprise model. It started taking off and we started signing up more and more customers over time. I came on a couple years ago as an investor and also as our president and head of data science, which is something we take really seriously. 

BI: What exactly is a "data scientist?"

JW: In general, data scientists have skills that are a combination of mathematics and computer science, and generally you need to be an expert in driving significant conclusions from large sets of data. What this means, if you had your own application and just started collecting data, unless you had a great deal of experience, it'd be difficult to measure things. We'll look at user retention and we'll try to boil it down to the most actionable ways. We'll try to help you as an organization learn how to be more data-driven and make decisions based on certain reports.  

BI: How do you guys feel about the big shift to mobile? It seems like it's just happened in the past few months.

JW: We were either smart or lucky that we started making the transition a long time ago. We started working with our first mobile customers a year ago before a lot of the changes happened with Facebook. We did that based on the data that we saw, talking with a lot of customers, realizing a lot of our customers were expanding into mobile. We started working with our first mobile customers over a year ago and we started building our mobile expertise in front of that. The vision has always been to be multi-screen and multi-channel, so we want to help you optimize your customer economics and customer experience regardless of where your users are. Your mobile, your social apps, your business, your tablet, if that's all you care about, we'll be there. We've been cross-platform for a long time. 

JT: Potentially, the usage can be a lot higher on mobile. Even through we still have a lot of customers on the social gaming side, over half our traffic, our data, is coming from mobile these days and that's only happened over the last few months.

"Even through we still have a lot of customers on the social gaming side, over half our traffic, our data, is coming from mobile these days and that's only happened over the last few months."

You see some pretty high engagement numbers throughout the day, I think that's a pretty big trend. We're also seeing a lot more people going in between tablets and phones and PCs, the experience is expanding to multiple touch points. When we looked at this there were a lot of gaming companies that were talking bout being able to provide user experiences that spanned multiple screens and now we're seeing a lot of companies adopting that.

BI: How do things look now?

JT: We've raised about $18 million to date, a little over that. We did our last round in November, from battery Ventures. We're pretty much exceeding the 100-person in the company right now. We've more than doubled our headcount every year over the last few years. If you look two years ago we were 7 or 8 people and now we're over 100. There's been very significant growth.

We're working with a few hundred enterprise customers, some of the companies we've disclosed are EA, Ubisoft, a bunch others. A lot of the big guys on Facebook and mobile now. Outside of gaming, we work with a number of companies like Whaleshark.

BI: What's it like running an enterprise startup instead of a consumer startup?

JT: Stressful in a different way, when we're on the consumer side it's on an hourly basis that things can change. On the enterprise side it's actually been a lot of fun because you can be a lot more strategic, you can plan things over longer periods of time. You don't have to be quite as reactive in how you plan products or how you plan marketing campaigns. It's also pretty satisfying to be able to help business change their business. It's been a really cool part of engaging with their teams, when we do see them actively using their products, it's really satisfying.

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Over a year ago, we reported that a stealthy startup named Dekko received an investment* to work in the augmented reality space.

Founded by Matt and Silka Miesnieks (husband and wife), Dekko finally launched on Friday and announced its $1.9 million financing.*

Dekko's other investors include Echo Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Venture 51, Blumberg apical, Launch Capital, Eniac Ventures, Zig Capital, Thornvest and angel investors like Raymond Tonsing and Howard Lindzon.

Dekko wants to become a platform for really good looking augmented reality apps. Right now most are makeshift and don't really make the user feel like their surroundings are coming to life. Dekko has three pending patents and it's already partnering with more than 40 people and companies, from toy manufacturers to game developers.

Currently Dekko utlizes a programming language, UNITY 3-D. TechCrunch further explains Dekko's product:

"It allows developers to create augmented reality experiences that take a user’s current environment into context, as well as those that build whole new experiences around imaginary characters that can operate in those surroundings. It can also be used to create digital copies of real-world objects and allow users to interact with them on their devices."

Its first game, Dekko Monkey, is available in the App Store now.

For more information on Dekko, we dug up Miesnieks' old pitch deck. We think he used it, or something very similar, to attract investors.

*Update: Although a source involved in the deal told us Justin Timberlake was an investor in Dekko, a spokesperson confirms that Mr. Timberlake is not involved with Dekko at all, financially or otherwise.

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Ben Kaufman just raised a $68 million Series C round for his invention creation startup, Quirky. But he isn't celebrating or boasting about it.

Instead, Kaufman wrote a lengthy article that cautions entrepreneurs about the perils of raising money for the wrong reasons. He also describes what fundraising really means to him after seven years of founding companies and working with investors.

"In the eye of the public, and specifically the tech community, funding is thought to mean much more that it actually does," Kaufman writes. "The world views funding as a badge of honor. I view it as a scarlet letter. I’m continually disturbed, insecure, and uncomfortable about what it means to raise money, and what it means to boast about it."

When founding his first company, Mophie, Kaufman thought money would solve all of his problems. "I had an idea. I believed the only thing standing in the way of my gift wrap and ribbon prototype of the first 'lanyard-headphone' becoming a mass market success was just a little bit of dough," he writes.

Later, he finagled his way into a $1 million financing. He was only 19, and this was in 2006.

"Mophie hits the big time," a newspaper headline read. The article was accompanied by a photoshoot Kaufman now refers to as "regrettable" and "douchy," where the founders wore sunglasses and held up cash (above).

But really, there was no reason to celebrate. "My grandfather called me to congratulate me on building a successful company," Kaufman recalls. "We still hadn’t done shit. We just got some dude to write a check."

Now, even though he was just cut a whopping $68 million check for Quirky, Kaufman isn't getting caught up in the hype. Instead, he asks people not to congratulate entrepreneurs for their fundraises.

“Congratulating an entrepreneur for raising money is like congratulating a chef for buying the ingredients,” Kaufman writes. "Don’t congratulate people for raising money. That was never the goal. The goal is building a successful and meaningful business. When people raise money, instead of congratulating them, wish them luck. Their work is just getting started."

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Did Dropbox and Airbnb just get a major boost in their valuations?

It came in a casual, everybody-knows-that aside in a blog post written by superstar investor Paul Graham, who took an early stake in both companies through his startup-coaching program, Y Combinator.

Graham noted that most of the returns in startup investing come from a handful of winners, and his portfolio was no exception. He wrote:

The total value of the companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.

(Graham recently embroiled himself in controversy by singling out the venture-capital arm of Google for criticism, so it's a good time for him to call attention to his investing track record.)

A year ago, Dropbox was worth $4 billion. And Airbnb was worth $1.3 billion. So that's a 42 percent jump in their valuations—at least according to one of their most prominent shareholders. (Y Combinator's stake in companies varies, but it's usually around 7 percent.)

As far as we know, the companies haven't raised money since their latest megarounds. So what's Graham going on?

One possibility is secondary markets which trade the shares of private companies. SecondMarket, which lost a major source of business when Facebook went public, reportedly trades Dropbox shares.

Another possible source of valuation figures are the 409a valuations companies must do when they issue stock options to employees, though for abstruse legal and financial reasons, those numbers can often come out lower than a company's most recent venture-financing valuation.

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