Well, the title says it all. Today we walked away with the top honor given at the Rice Alliance Information Technology & Web 2.0 Investor Forum. Essentially the investor audience voted us one of the “Most Promising” companies.

Our award is largely in part to Lisa Lloyd, who gave a fantastic elevator pitch to a crowd of 300 at Rice University, in Houston, TX.

Not to put all the spotlight on ourselves, several other innovative companies also walked away with the award. Notable standouts were opmom.com, a social networking website that connects and organizes Moms. Another good presenter was podcastready.com, a service that simplifies creating, listening, and subscribing to podcasts. Typically Apple has dominated this space, but podcastready is hoping to simplify the podcast process even further.



The headline speaker was Jeff Henley, Chairman of Oracle. Here are some notes from the talk (we’ll have an audio link up here tomorrow).

• Worked with successful entrepreneurs i.e. Larry Ellison
• Oracle has $5B cash flow
• Larry didn’t want to dilute, wanted control
• Software can do it with little capital.

Steps for successful startup
-Need a good idea
-Need smart people, don’t forget to look overseas
-Work hard & fast

• Google monetized existing technology
• Bill Gates bought IP
• Larry Ellison borrowed (legally) ideas
• Oracle wants niches or way to scale up
• No VC Oracle fund anymore

You can find more notes from the event in my Inventing Blog. Or listen to some recordings from the event. For more information, check out the Houston Startup Blog at www.startuphouston.com.

Happy Startup-ing!

Bryan Daigle