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"A \"startup renaissance\" could finally shrink America's record-high youth unemployment rate. At least that's how John Harthorne, CEO of startup accelerator MassChallenge, sees it. \nHarthorne is the founder and CEO of MassChallenge, a successful Boston-based competitive startup accelerator that grants $1 million to startups that have the \"highest impact.\" \nThose high-impact startups end up growing and hiring young talent, he says.\n\u201CAmerica has lost its creative edge. How do we restore it? It's created by startups.\"\n\"America has lost its creative edge,\" Harthorne says. \"How do we restore it? It's created by startups. All recent net job growth has been created by companies under five years of age.\"\nHarthorne's plan to ignite a worldwide rebirth of startups comes in three stages, modeled on the template of MassChallenge.\nFirst, Harthorne calls for the design of \"a massive startup accelerator based on input and support from experienced leaders.\" \nA startup accelerator is an organization that provides startups with early funding, office space or connections with influential people that can help bring a startup idea to fruition. \nIn building MassChallenge, Harthorne wanted to go big: at least 100 startups at a time. And he recognized that he didn't have the expertise to do it alone, so he enlisted the help and advice of top entrepreneurs and startup owners in the Boston tech community.\nNext, Harthorne suggests turning the accelerator into a competition. A competitive format helps MassChallenge address the challenges of attracting attention and engagement, it helps the tech community identify startups with the potential to succeed, and it celebrates and helps connect the most successful entrepreneurs with the resources they need to keep working.\nFinally, Harthorne's plan calls for celebrating startups that create something of value for everyone's benefit rather than those that focus on maximizing profits for themselves. He says this belief will encourage startups to serve as a rising tide that that lifts all boats, helping to reduce youth unemployment in the U.S.\n\"Startups are vital for value creation in the economy,\" he says. \"They are new businesses by definition, and as innovators, startups sometimes invent or redefine whole industries. We wanted to do our part to help re-emphasize sustainable value creation. Something pretty amazing happened when we made that decision. The community rallied around our tiny, unknown organization with an overwhelming outpouring of support.\"\nMassChallenge accelerated 111 startups in its first year, and another 125 the next. Those first 111 startups have gone from having fewer than 300 employees to more than 800 in a year's time. If MassChallenge's template could be applied to other places around the U.S., it may have the potential to make a serious dent in youth unemployment.\nHarthorne's full plan will be published in the #FixYoungAmerica book, available in May.\nFor that book, the #FixYoungAmerica campaign has asked the top thinkers in technology, business and education to come up with ideas for alleviating youth unemployment and underemployment through entrepreneurship. Mashable has been given an inside look at some of the ideas that focus on technology's role in helping to get more young people hired to do innovative work. For the next several weeks, Mashable will be highlighting these technology-focused ideas to create jobs for American youth.\nWhat do you think of MassChallenge's model as a way to help Fix Young America? Sound off in the comments below.\nBONUS: How Do Co-Founders Meet? 17 Startups Tell All\n\n\n\nHow Co-Founders Met\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n1. Airbnb -- Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia\n\nI moved to San Francisco in early 2007 and found an apartment and a roommate through Craigslist -- that's how I met Joe. He was a designer, and I was an engineer at another startup at the time. I later moved out, and Brian -- who knew Joe from the Rhode Island School of Design -- moved in. That was the initial connection for the three of us. \nWhile I lived with Joe, I came to appreciate two things about him -- he worked just as hard as I did, and his skills complemented my own. I have the technical abilities, and he had the creative design skills.\nIn the summer of 2008, there was a design conference in San Francisco, and there was a hotel shortage. We needed to make rent and thought a good way to make a little additional cash would be to rent out our air mattresses in the apartment. We made a website and got an incredible amount of responses, and we realized we could be on to something.\n- Nathan Blecharczyk\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n2. ZocDoc -- Dr. Oliver Kharraz, Cyrus Massoumi, Nick Ganju \n\nI first met [COO / co-founder] Dr. Oliver Kharraz when we were working together at McKinsey &amp; Company. We worked together on a project that had us flying to Europe every other week, so we became friends pretty quickly. My relationship with [CTO / co-founder] Nick Ganju actually dates back several years prior to that, when the two of us worked at the same folding table at Trilogy Software. I called them both up when several years later,  when I ruptured my eardrum and came up with the idea for ZocDoc. And the rest is history!\n- Cyrus Massoumi\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n3. DNA 11 -- Nazim Ahmed and Adrian Salamunovic\n\nI met my business partner, Nazim Ahmed, in kindergarten. I was getting adventurous on a climber in the playground and ended up falling off and knocking myself out. Naz came to my rescue and ran to get help. After that, we became fast friends.\nGrowing up, we moved in different friend circles but always had a deep respect for one another. After college, we managed to reconnect. Our friendship was based on sharing ideas and discussing the convergence of science and design. At the time, I was working as a web consultant, but Naz continually encouraged me to get into something more creative. And vice versa, Naz was doing sales for a biotechnology company, but I thought he had the mind of a savvy businessman.\nThe idea for DNA 11 was born when some of Naz\u2019s technical brochures caught my eye. I immediately thought it looked like art. We did the first ever DNA portraits from each others DNA.\nWhat works so well about our partnership is that we stimulate different ideas from one another; a typical right brain/left brain dichotomy. We play into each others skill set but value the others talents. It\u2019s a true representation of the yin-yang but with commonalities falling in the very important areas of motivation and vision.\n- Adrian Salamunovic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n4. Warby Parker -- Neil Blumenthal, Dave Gilboa, Andrew Hunt and Jeffrey Raider\n\nDave, Jeff, Andy and I met at graduate school [Wharton] in Philadelphia. We quickly became close friends and commiserated over the high cost of glasses. We each had that frustrating experience when you pick out a beautiful pair of glasses and then get hit with a $500 bill. We thought there had to be a better way -- it didn't make sense that glasses cost as much as an iPhone. Andy had the great idea to sell glasses online, and I knew the real cost of glasses from my experience running the non-profit VisionSpring which distributes glasses in the developing world. Immediately, the lightbulbs went off as the four of us thought there was an opportunity for us to disrupt the optical industry and do good in the world. That week we ended up going to our local bar, Roosevelt's on 23rd and Walnut in Philadelphia, and promised each other that we'd work incredibly hard and that we'd remain friends no matter what happened. We then set out to build Warby Parker by designing our first collection and building a website.  \n- Neil Blumenthal\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n5. Rent the Runway -- Jenn Hyman and Jenny Fleiss\n\nIn 2007, [Jenny and I] met as section-mates at Harvard Business School, where over frequent girls\u2019 night, we became fast friends. During a trip home for Thanksgiving, I witnessed my sister Becky struggle with a \u201Ccloset full of clothes and nothing to wear\u201D moment. Becky had an upcoming wedding and wanted something gorgeous -- an Herv\u00E9 L\u00E9ger maybe, or Proenza -- but her modest salary meant that everything high-end was out of reach. What if, I thought, the Beckys of this world could have access to their dream closet and a new dress for every occasion? What if designers were able to get their pieces into the hands of young, fashionable women and build an addiction for designer fashion?\nCut to Cambridge, Massachusetts, several days later. I told Jenny about Becky\u2019s dilemma, and, being business school students, we started working on building the business immediately. Jenny and I had a rule from the very beginning of Rent the Runway to never write a business plan because we think that is a waste of time. In our opinions, starting the business was going to be a series of iterative tests in the marketplace, with each test eliminating some of the risks of starting the business. We held a pop-up rental shop in an undergrad dorm at Harvard to garner initial interest in the idea. We purchased dressesat retail (in our sizes in case it did not work out!) and watched girls twirl around in the mirror and share comments like, \u201CHow hot do I look!\u201D and \u201CCan you imagine the look on his face if he saw me in this dress?\u201D\nBy the looks on their faces and the descriptions to their friends, we knew we had created Cinderella experiences from them. After several focus groups with thousands of women, along with formative meetings with top designers and retailers, Rent the Runway was born in New York City in November 2009.\n- Jenn Hyman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n6. Foursquare -- Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai\n\nDennis and I were working at different companies in a shared office space in 2007. We had several mutual friends who suggested we would get along because we had similar interests. His previous company, Dodgeball, was focused on helping people connect with their friends in the real world. I was always keeping to-do lists, ripping interesting places that I wanted to visit out of magazines and sticking them in my wallet, and I had started working on a few small hacks, including something like a del.icio.us (and a bookmarklet) for places.\nWhen Dennis and I finally became friends and started chatting, we realized that we could combine our ideas into a single app that would guide people's real-world experiences and encourage them to try new things and explore new places. We started hacking away at the first version of foursquare in mid-2008, working out of coffee shops around the East Village and from our kitchen tables, and we launched at SXSW in 2009.\nNow, just over two and a half years later, we have a community of over 15 million people worldwide, we've gotten over a billion checkins and we have a team of 100+ employees helping us crank out products that make the real world easier to use.\n- Naveen Selvadurai\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n7. Sugar Inc -- Lisa and Brian Sugar\n\nBrian and I first met in college. We were introduced freshman year by my roommate who went to high school with Brian. We dated off and on that first year and got engaged on my graduation day. Brian was already living in New York working at JCrew, so I moved there in 1998 and worked in advertising at Young &amp; Rubicam. At the end of 1999, we decided to move to San Francisco and start a new adventure.\nIn February 2005, while attending our Oscar party, our friend Om Malik, GigaOm founder and blogger, suggested that we start an online blog network based on all the celebrity news and information he heard me rattling off. Brian, who has a great technology and retail background, taught me the technical aspects of running a website. And so, PopSugar was created. I began blogging on the side while working at Goodby, Silverstein &amp; Partners. I was really passionate about celebrity and pop culture, so I focused on that, but occasionally I\u2019d blog about fashion and beauty must-have items as well.\nBy December, we had around 425,000 monthly unique visitors on PopSugar. Seeing this growth, Brian and I decided to quit our day jobs and focus on making PopSugar really big. I felt that an online destination for all things of interest to women didn\u2019t exist, so that became our mission. In the spring of 2006, we incorporated Sugar Publishing and later that year, we received venture funding from Sequoia Capital.\nPopSugar quickly grew from a single celebrity and pop culture site to a vast global network of 15 blogs spanning categories such as fashion, beauty, tech, fitness and more. We have a 55-person editorial staff that reports on breaking news, topical trends and expert opinions on a daily basis, in real-time. It\u2019s very much the fast-paced environment of a newsroom.\nIf you read our blogs or watch our videos, you\u2019ll see that we have a signature voice that\u2019s positive, conversational and authentic. It\u2019s just a fun and engaging place for our users and I think that\u2019s what sets us apart.\nAs editor-in-chief, I heavily concentrate on our editorial strategy and how we want to grow the PopSugar network whether it\u2019s new content experiences or strategic partnerships that extend the brand.\nAs CEO, Brian is focused on running the company and growing the business. A few years ago, we decided to branch out into e-commerce because we felt that was the right next step for the business and for our users. In 2007, we acquired ShopStyle, a Google-like fashion search engine. We\u2019ve also launched PopSugar Shop with national and local fashion, beauty, food and fitness offers. \nWe\u2019ve grown to over 200 employees in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and London and we have over 25 million monthly visitors. Our goal is to establish Sugar as a global new media company that offers the best content and commerce experience for Gen Y women. \n- Lisa Sugar\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n8. Spotify -- Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon\n\n[Martin Lorentzon and I] met 2005 when Martin moved back from Germany, where he had been based with his old business. We discussed a lot of ideas back and forth and spent a lot of time hanging out in my apartment in a suburb to Stockholm. We pretty much spent all of the autumn just discussion a ton of ideas. I remember, however, that we sat around my media HTPC machine quite a lot and thought that it was a cumbersome to get content, despite the technology having been around (Napster) since at least 2000. I think that's why we got stuck on the idea of Spotify.\nFor us, it was very much that we started out as friends, both wanting to do things together. The fact that we were very different, both in skill-sets and as individuals has only helped us. I think you can be very different as long as you have the same moral compass. \n[We came up with \"Spotify\" one day when] Martin and I were sitting in different rooms shouting ideas back and forth of company names. We were even using jargon generators and stuff. Out of the blue, Martin shouted a name that I misheard as Spotify. \nI immediately googled the name and realized there were no Google hits for the word at all. A few minutes later we registered the domain names and off we went. \nWe were a bit embarrassed to admit that's how the name came up, so our afterconstruction was to say that Spotify stems from \"spot\" and \"identify.\"\n- Daniel Ek\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n9. Shelby.TV -- Reece Pacheco and Dan Spinosa\n\nI transferred to Brown in the middle of my junior year (weird, I know). I met Dan my first night there, at a party with some of our other teammates (we played lacrosse). I was fresh off a semester abroad in Australia -- shaggy hair, traveler vibe, giant goofy smile on my face most of the time.\nDan, being the computer engineer he is, didn't open up as naturally as me, but we sniffed each other out that night and somehow -- every day together as college athletes, every night out together as best buddies, plus helping each other on class projects -- we became fast friends.\nIt's hard to explain, but our friendship is really just total trust. I know I could trust Dan to get anything done if i needed him ... of course, I also know that he'll be the first one to throw me under the bus for a good joke, but that's the fun of it.\nI pitched Dan an idea for a product that year, and while we thought it was a good idea at the time, it was too early and we sat on it. A few years out of school, the idea was still baking in my mind, and Dan was ready to quit his job at Cisco. So we started our first company, HomeField and bootstrapped our way into business. A few years later and we're onto our second company, Shelby.tv, which was really born out of our experience in web video with HomeField, and we're cranking away (team is now nine people!).\nAs cofounders, we work really well together. He's CTO, I'm CEO. He makes the joke that he's \"the most efficient networker ever because he knows me, and I know everyone else,\" but it is a good descriptor for our company, as he focuses on the technical, while i do all the fundraising, business, marketing and everything that requires you to remember someone's name (something Dan doesn't do).\n- Reece Pacheco\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n10. Artspace -- Catherine Levene and Christopher Vroom\n\nI was in the early stages of developing an online art ecommerce business and after learning about Catherine\u2019s 15 years of professional experience building successful consumer internet brands, I asked her to serve as a formal adviser to my young company. After spending a tremendous amount of time together developing the business and financial models, we discovered a shared passion for art and artists. Long hours of researching the market, developing our customer acquisition model, talking with prospective customers, dealers, museums and artists built a huge amount of mutual respect for our respective skills and experience. When I\u2019d email Catherine at midnight or one in the morning and get a response within 30 seconds, I knew that I had found a great partner to build this business. \nWe formed the company just about 12 months ago, raising $1.2 million in bridge capital. Catherine and I are totally complementary in our roles; I manage our supply partners and logistics while she\u2019s focused on brand building, customer acquisition and operations. We designed, developed and launched the site in four months and since our April debut have steadily built our visibility. I\u2019m fortunate to have a partner in Catherine who not only can effectively manage the wild ride of the startup but has experience managing larger organizations so that as we grow, I know we\u2019ll be positioned to scale.\nWhat Artspace is building is a platform that brings together the world\u2019s best artists, cultural institutions, non-profits and galleries to make fine art accessible to a broader audience. The idea to harness the power of networks to sustain creative production came from both my experience as a research analyst covering internet companies at Credit Suisse First Boston in the late 1990s as well as hundreds of discussions with artists and institutions conducted while expanding a non-profit visual arts organization called Artadia that I started while living in San Francisco.\nI became convinced that artists and the institutions that promote artistic practice are vitally important to our society both economically and spiritually; these are the people who are forging what will become our cultural legacy, so they need to be supported. At the same time, I recognized that even the largest institutions need help reaching new audiences. Conversely, those audiences need ways to filter the massive amount of information bombarding us daily both online and off.\nArtspace creates bridges to discover, learn about, connect with and ultimately collect great art. As I started to develop the idea further, it become clear that while I had broad art world and business relationships, there was definitely a secret sauce required to make an ecommerce company successful. I needed a partner with deep expertise in consumer internet and digital media. By combining our complementary experience sets and adding key management in technology and product management, we think we're positioned for growth.\n- Christopher Vroom\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n11. Thrillist -- Ben Lerer and Adam Rich\n\nWe were sitting on my roof six years ago hanging out having a beer (you know), half complaining that we were unhappy with our jobs or felt sort of under-utilized and a little bit lost, and the other half, Adam was getting ready to take a girl out to dinner. We were trying to find a place and both sort of started talking about how frustrated we were with the city guides that we were reading, and we had also been talking about how we just wanted to go and do something else. And that sort of sparked it. \nWe would choose a neighborhood and say, \"Okay, the West Village, let\u2019s go!\" and go to 15 to 20 places that we\u2019ve never been to and never heard of, and we would go out and have a drink at each place or a bite at each place or whatever it was and take notes.\nIt\u2019s a thankless process for a really long time. And so we said, \"Okay, whatever it was Tuesday nights and Thursday nights.\" After work we would meet at my place at 8pm and we\u2019d start coming up with ideas and seeing what we liked and throwing ideas up against the wall. At first, Adam and I were both reading and helping to write every article before it went out the door, and trafficking every ad that went onto it and selling every ad that went onto it, and doing the books, and interviewing and hiring and figuring out where we needed more help and building it.\n- Ben Lerer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n12. Artsicle -- Alex Tryon and Scott Carleton\n\nScott and I met back in college -- my friend Cale was visiting Penn for Spring Fling my senior year and brought Scott along. We ended up staying in touch and reconnected when Scott visited NYC one weekend. When we started dating, Scott was working as a nuclear engineer in Pittsburgh, and I was still at American Express. He quit first, to join a startup called SpeakerText as an intern. A few months later, we both found ourselves ready for a new project, and it felt natural to dive in to Artsicle together. \n- Alex Tryon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n13. Bump -- David Lieb, Andy Huibers, Jake Mintz\n\nOn my last day at Texas Instruments, I had lunch with Andy Huibers. Andy and I had gotten to know each other and work together briefly after TI acquired Andy\u2019s startup. Before the acquisition, I kept hearing upper management at TI cursing Andy\u2019s small competitive startup, so I figured he must be someone smart I should get to know.\nOn that last day, I was leaving TI to go to business school at the University of Chicago in order to learn whatever I needed to learn to one day start a startup. Andy was also leaving TI to focus on projects of his own and spend time with his soon-to-be-newborn son. At lunch, I distinctly remember telling Andy, \u201CYou know, we should start a company together one day.\u201D\nTurns out that day would come only two months later.  \nMeanwhile, on the very first day in business school, in the \u201CAccounting for Engineers\u201D class that all engineers are encouraged to take, I met Jake Mintz. As we went around the classroom introducing ourselves, Jake and I realized we had both worked at TI, and in fact lived only a few miles apart while Jake was based in Dallas. As we chatted after the first class, Jake and I almost immediately started tossing around ideas, and I quickly realized he was one of the best startup minds at the school.\nDuring that first week of school, I met my other 500 new classmates. Business school is all about networking, so I found myself constantly collecting business cards and entering names and phone numbers into my phone. It was tedious, and I got tired of the awkward social dance of giving my number, waiting for the other person to call, hanging up, storing the number and asking several times how to spell a last name. I thought, \u201CAll the information I want to share is inside my phone, there should be a better way to do this.\u201D\nThe idea for Bump hit me while daydreaming in Accounting class soon after. I emailed Andy that night, and we immediately started building a prototype. Soon after, I brought in Jake to help with the project, and the three of us worked together, Jake and I from the student lounge in Chicago, Andy from his home office in California with a newborn baby on his lap. Andy and Jake actually didn\u2019t meet in person until after we had launched Bump on the Apple App Store. Thankfully, they got along in person as well as they did over video chat.\n- David Leib\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n14. Deegr -- Guillaume de Malzac, Florent Teissier and Nicolas Kermarc\n\nOur story starts on a Friday. I, a Parisian living in London, was pitching at Startup Weekend London '10. Tweevents got through, thanks to @CoderHolic (Ben, the Briton) and @gtichy (Gabriel, the Slovakian). Along with @Arianna from another team (the American), we remained excellent friends afterwards, so we went for beers a week or so later. Ben thought of bringing his French intern (@MathieuLoutre) from work @Mendeley_com. Telling Mathieu of a project, I had (a content discovery site), he advised me to email one of his Uni teachers in order to submit it for students to work on. Mathieu didn't make the connection with the fact that two excellent friends of his (Florent and Nicolas) wanted to work on something they'd call QuoiMater (litterally \"WhattoWatch\"). Fortunately, when Nicolas and Florent pitched it to their teacher, she told them, \"I have just the right guy for you to make that project an actual startup.\"\nWe, Deegr, are now in a great European incubator based in Montpellier, Cap Omega. We often get help from some friends (such as Mathieu, Ben, Arianna ... and Ben Crespo, another French guy. We soon hope to sign a couple of deals for our API (not yet publicly released), which can let any ecommerce or community website match its users based on a key element.\nThe picture greatly reflects the very cool ambiance within the team -- being in Paris while Florent (left, 22) and Nicolas (right, 20) are in Montpellier, we work a lot through Skype. So I'm there, but spiritually, as in the picture they hold! But I come to see them all very frequently, and we always have an awesome time together!\n- Guillaume de Malzac \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n15. Savored -- Dan Leahy and Ben McKean\n\nI met Ben as a freshman at Georgetown University -- we studied together in the College of Arts and Sciences and became good friends. After graduating in 2008, we moved to New York together to cover technology companies on Wall Street -- Ben worked at Merrill Lynch's Technology Investment Banking Group, and I did M&amp;A for software and telecom companies at Brown Brothers Harriman. We were roommates, and we'd get home from work and talk about creating a more efficient way for small businesses to leverage the internet to drive customers. \nWe started speaking to restaurants and other small businesses whenever we could, developed a plan to drive traffic through a distributed yield management solution (think Expedia for restaurants), we left our jobs in September 2009 to launch VillageVines.com, which later became Savored.com.\n- Dan Leahy\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n16. Rockmelt -- Tim Howes and Eric Vishria\n\nI first met Eric Vishria in 1999 when he interviewed at Loudcloud (later Opsware), the company I co-founded with Marc Andreessen &amp; Ben Horowitz. We were looking for a smart, fired up young dude to be CEO Ben Horowitz\u2019s \u201Cmini me.\u201D Eric, then 20 years old, fit the bill and showed from the start that he had a ton of potential. He quickly rose through the ranks in various product and marketing roles, ending up running most of the company\u2019s marketing for us. We got to know each other well since as co-founder and CTO, my job was to be the technical guy explaining to the marketing guy what we were doing and why it mattered, so marketing could explain it to the world.\nWhen Opsware was sold to HP in September 2007, we spent a year there with Eric running a half-billion dollar BU for HP software while I was CTO. Both great jobs, but within a year we found ourselves missing the startup life. We began percolating new ideas independently, and the natural thing was to bounce ideas off each other.\nIn summer 2008, we were pitching each other our individual ideas and realized we should really work together. We hadn\u2019t nailed down what we wanted to do, but whatever it was, we knew it needed to be together. It had been Eric\u2019s dream since the age of eight to be CEO of his own great company. Being CEO was something I thought I might like to try this time around. One of my better decisions was making a bet on eight-year-old Eric\u2019s ambition rather than my own mid-life curiosity, paving the way for our collaboration. \nThroughout the fall of 2008 we were combing the Internet, making observations, and generating ideas. We would meet at each other\u2019s houses or Buck\u2019s in Woodside for breakfast, armed with onepagers to talk through. Most of the ideas were terrible, a fact that usually became obvious before the OJ arrived, but a few made it to the next round. \nOne idea we were both attracted to was reinventing the desktop in the cloud. It was clear virtually all applications were moving from the desktop into the cloud, leaving the desktop a bit of an empty shell. We quickly realized the browser was the new desktop -- why don\u2019t we reinvent that? We took the idea seriously enough to move our meetings from the dining table to a whiteboard, and soon hammered out the vision for what RockMelt would become -- a browser reinvented for the way people use the web today, with friends, sharing, and favorite sites built in.\nHaving worked together for nearly 10 years before founding RockMelt, we felt confident there wouldn\u2019t be any surprises; we knew each other\u2019s strengths and weaknesses. This worked to our advantage when we began seeking investment since it took away one of the big risks startups face \u2013 founders who don\u2019t end up getting along or who begin to develop conflicting company visions. \nOur first pitch was to Marc Andreessen, our longtime friend and industry visionary, and Ben Horowitz, one of the greatest company builders either of us had ever known. They immediately loved the idea, but in typical Marc and Ben style, put us through the wringer on the details. Several weeks, our first two engineers, a working prototype, and many pitch revisions later, Marc and Ben were on board along with our coach and mentor Bill Campbell, legendary angel investor Ron Conway, and a few other investors -- RockMelt was off to the races!\n- Tim Howes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n17. BridesView -- Daniel Maloney and Alex Topiler (shown with the whole team)\n\nWe were among a group that met for a drink at Think Coffee after a talk by Eric Reis at NYU back in March -- we were all attending Lean Startup Machine that weekend, and thought it would be great to kick around ideas with some potential teammates prior to the event. One beer turned into chatting for hours on end, as we just resonated right from the start. We wound up on different teams that weekend, but stayed connected afterwards. \nWhen it turned out we were all planning on attending NY Startup Weekend in April, we decided to work together as a team instead of pairing up randomly with folks we didn\u2019t know. My idea that sparked BridesView wasn\u2019t voted as one of the top pitches to work on by the attendees, but we pursued it anyway. Less than 48 hours later -- after brainstorming, talking to potential users and customers, pivoting, consulting with mentors, almost pivoting again, consuming lots of caffeine and relentlessly executing -- BridesView won Honorable Mention out of the 22 companies started that weekend. We found that having relationships to build on made us much more effective than our teams comprised of strangers had been at Lean Startup Machine. \nWe met up again the following week to figure out who was interested in seriously pursuing BridesView. Initially, all 5 team members expressed interest, but 3 bowed out soon after for various reasons, leaving only Danny and me. One major gap this left was in software development, but I recruit a team of engineers from my personal network, and they became the founding BridesView engineering team. Once again, building on existing relationships helped us make progress much faster than starting from scratch.\nDespite being only weeks old at the time, we decided to apply to Techstars NY. We were selected as a Techstars NY finalist out of more than 1,000 companies, validating that we were onto something and had the initial makings of a great team to pull it off. More importantly, going through the application process reinforced that we had the initial makings of a great team, a strong vision and a disruptive opportunity we were passionate about realizing. As a brand new company, there really isn\u2019t much more you can ask for than that.  \n- Danny Maloney\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, lisegagne"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/03/14/startup-renaissance/>