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Dorm Room Fund-Backed Skillbridge Is A Freelance Marketplace For High-End Professional Services

A startup called Skillbridge is trying to create a new kind of marketplace for freelance work - not for the programming and writing jobs that you'd find on a site like Elance, but for strategy, finance, marketing and other professional services.

The company is announcing today that it has been backed by First Round Capital's Dorm Room Fund, the firm's student-run investment arm that offers mentorship and $20,000 in funding to each company. (Skillbridge is also part of Highland Capital's summer incubator and the MassChallenge accelerator..)

Co-founders Brett Lewis and Raj Jeyakumar have worked as consultants themselves - Lewis, for example, spent nearly three years at Bain & Company. They're both recent graduates of Wharton Business School, and they said that when they were students, they wanted to use their experience for freelance work. However, they discovered that it was incredibly difficult to actually find interested companies, so they created Skillbridge to match qualified workers with businesses looking for professional services.

Lewis outlined the vision in a post for the Wharton Entrepreneurship Blog, where he said that the United States' freelancers have grown from 6 percent of the total workforce in 1990 to 20 to 30 percent now: "Elance, an early talent marketplace, has focused on low-end providers of technology and creative talent. Yet the biggest growth trends are in areas of financial planning and analysis, accounting and legal strategy, where only behemoth white-shoe firms have dominated until now."

Lewis and Jeyakumar said their core talent base consists of stay-at-home parents and graduate students who have either an MBA or at least three years of experience at a finance or consulting firm. These are people who either aren't in a position to work full-time or aren't interested, but they are willing to take on smaller projects or part-time work with flexible hours. And by hiring these workers, companies don't have to pay for the overhead of a traditional consulting firm.

Not that Skillbridge is trying to replace the big firms. Jeyakumar compared them to Ferraris: "There will always be a need for Ferraris, but there are people for whom a BMW is just fine." If the BMW doesn't seem like much of a compromise, that's Jeyakumar's point. With Skillbridge, companies that probably couldn't afford to hire a traditional consulting firm can still pay for high-quality work. He added that there's already been interest in companies ranging from "pre-revenue startups that need help with market sizing for their pitch decks" to large e-commerce organizations.

The company supposedly delivers a "highly curated" experience, where it provides customers with templates for work requests, identifies two or three of the best matches that they can choose from, and helps to create milestones for the project to ensure that things stay on track. It's currently in beta testing, with plans for a full launch later this year.

A Year In The Making, Machine Zone Launches Game of War, An Impressively Large MMO For iOS

While iOS games started out as either simple physics or casual simulation titles when the platform launched about five years ago, the bar has gotten steadily higher and more hard-core. Midcore studios like Kabam started to rise in prominence.

Now the iOS platform might be seeing is most hardcore title to date - a very, very massive multi-player title from YC- and Menlo Ventures-backed Machine Zone.

The company, which started out doing text-based RPGs a couple years ago like iMob, is launching Game of War: Fire Age. It's a title where players build and grow empires, train massive armies, forge alliances with other players to win kingdoms.

The game can handle hundreds of thousands of players concurrently in the same universe, which is not an easy technical feat. Blizzard's World of Warcraft, in contrast, typically handles a few thousand players simultaneously in a single realm. All movement on the game's map is visible to everyone else.

"We wanted to take the company to the next level and be really ambitious," said Machine Zone CEO Gabriel Leydon. "We decided to build some things that had never been done before. We had the capital to do it and the willpower."

Leydon didn't hire just typical game designers to build the title. He also found people who had experience in scaling massive systems. The game's user interface is in HTML5 and is rendered natively, allowing the company to handle different screen sizes.

The other really cool thing about the game's social capabilities is that there is a mechanical turk-like translation system where the players themselves translate chat in exchange for virtual currency rewards. That helps Game of War have really interactive play with a proper critical mass of users who can talk to each other, even if they don't speak the same language. The in-game chat system helps Game of War get manage slang and gamer speak, which a third-party translation system probably wouldn't handle correctly. If say, 50 players translate the same words in the same way, then the game will start using that translation automatically.

"It's like a highly structured Facebook," Leydon said. "My goal as a game designer was to create a feeling of what it would be to be a king, where you'd have a lot of people under you. You'd have to subjects, wealth and land."

Assuming say, the game grows to 1 million players, there might only be 20 kings in the game. To reach that level, players have to woo others to form alliances with them. Within those alliances, there are ranks for different officers.

"This is a very hardcore game. This is not Candy Crush," he said. "This is a complex system with a lot of potential trees of outcomes. If you're the type of person that's fascinated by systems like this, then this is for you."

Machine Zone used to be known as Addmired, and rebranded last year when it took $8 million in funding from Menlo Ventures. Leydon said this is what the company took the round for, even though its older titles like Original Gangstaz and iMob 2 were pretty lucrative early on.

Healthcare Crowdfunding Platform Watsi Grabs $1.2M From Tencent, Paul Graham, Vinod Khosla, Ron Conway And More

At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC back in April, former Facebook exec-turned-venture capitalist, Chamath Palihapitiya delivered a deflating critique of the tech industry - in particular, the quality of its startups. Had he been issuing a report card, the Tech World would have gotten an "F," with an extra side of "shame." His frustration seemed to emanate principally from the fact that "Big Ideas" are few and far between in the industry today. Rather than aiming high, he intoned, entrepreneurs seem content to reach for low-hanging fruit despite the diminishing returns inherent to that approach.

While Big Ideas may not be at all-time high, today's news brings some assurance that they are still alive and well in the tech industry - and that there's even capital to support them, for-profit or not. Watsi, a Y Combinator-backed healthcare crowdfunding platform, is tackling one of the biggest: That more than one billion people can't afford (or don't have access to) adequate medical services. Even Chamath would likely agree that falls in the "Big Idea" camp.

Today, the non-profit crowdfunding platform announced that it has raised $1.2 million in what is its first round of financing, or "philanthropic seed round," as the startup is calling it. Granted, if Watsi is setting its sights high, than $1.2 million will only be a drop in the bucket compared to the capital and resources it will need if it truly hopes to make a difference at scale.

A good start, to be sure, especially when considering the impressive roster of names contributing to its first financing, which includes institutional investors, like China's largest Internet services portal, Tencent, Y Combinator partners - including personal investments from founder Paul Graham and YC Partner Geoff Ralston - along with the "godfather of angel investing" and owner of the most pristine coiffure in the Valley, Ron Conway, Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures co-founder, Vinod Khosla, venture philanthropy fund (and Kiva investor), The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation and Flixter founder and Rotten Tomatoes CEO, Joe Greenstein - to name a few.

While the list is impressive, it's not a group of investors one would typically find contributing to a non-profit fundraiser. Watsi founder Chase Adam explains that the reason the company opted for this approach is that the traditional mechanisms for non-profit fundraising sometimes act as a counterproductive force by undermining the social movements they're trying to support. Instead of devoting themselves to their "Big Idea," socially-minded entrepreneurs often spend their time entering online voting competitions and hosting banquets to raise money to support their operations.

Instead, Adams hopes that the collection of VC, angel and institutional donations represents a move toward a new future of non-profit fundraising. Granted, Watsi is in the unusual (and fortunate) position to have been the first non-profit startup to be accepted into Y Combinator and to have had the vocal support of Y Combinator's founder, Paul Graham, who also recently accepted a seat on the startup's board - the first time he's done so for a YC incubation.

In reference to this question, Graham suggested to Watsi that they call this raise a "Series N" (non-profit and n=variable).

On the flip side, Adams tells us that he set a three-month deadline for fundraising, deciding to go after industry leaders and big names in the angel and venture world, regardless of whether or not the efforts proved to be successful. By doing so, the Watsi founder hopes that this might help encourage other social businesses to consider forgoing traditional sources of fundraising.

Ben Rattray, the founder and CEO of social action platform Change.org and I recently spoke on this very subject after the socially-minded for-profit company closed its own $15 million round of funding. As a for-profit business, there's more pressure for Change.org to raise institutional or venture capital.

As a non-profit, Watsi would likely be more attractive to investors, whereas Big Idea-based, for-profit companies have traditionally found it difficult to raise money from these types of investors. However, both Adams and Rattray share similar goals, as the Change.org founder that would enable them to remain independent without having to constantly be looking for a one-time liquidity event.

"These kind of social enterprise businesses are working over the long-term, 15 to 20 year windows, which is beyond the scope of most venture capitalists," Rattray said at the time. However, he believes that it's going to change: "I have no doubt this is going to change - that eventually more investors are going to start backing socially-conscious businesses," Rattray says. And it's for that very reason that I think the juxtaposition of Watsi and Change.org is worthwhile. Although perhaps idealistic - and, admittedly, Watsi is a non-profit, perhaps the startup's funding is the first sign that it is, in fact, beginning to change.

Nonetheless, for Watsi, this raise is an important validation of its own ambitious, "Big Idea" goals. Of course, eliminating poverty or fixing global healthcare and covering the uncovered, don't happen over night and aren't solved by one person or one founder. That's why Watsi is leveraging the "many hands" approach of crowdfunding to let anyone contribute to the funding of low-cost, high-impact medical treatments for those in need.

Furthermore, the platform automatically creates profiles for those in search of financial support for treatments or surgeries and makes it easy to make direct donations. Furthermore, these profiles, besides providing critical transparency into how your donation will be used and actually help someone, it also works towards attaching actual, human faces to global poverty - which sounds cheesy but is critical to conditions or problems like this that are so huge that providing real faces, one-by-one, can help discourage, say, just ignoring it and hanging for a lower-hanging fruit.

To further incentivize donations, Watsi offers 100 percent of the donations it collects from the crowd to those in need. Graham also says that the startup is paying "all their operational costs from their own funding, and none from your donations," and in turn, even stomach credit card processing fees. A noble gesture in its own right.

The startup hosts the profiles of people in need but who can't afford them, allowing donors to peruse profiles, donate as little as $5
, Watsi hosts profiles of people in dire need of medical care, but who can't afford it. Donors can browse the profiles and donate as little as $5 to help someone get well. 100% of donations go to the sick, and Watsi funds its operations and even pays credit card processing fees on donations out of its own pocket. We name

Canary Shatters Its Indiegogo Funding Goal For Its Smart, Dead-Simple Home Monitors

There are some 90 million homes in the U.S. without any security system whatsoever. Many of them are renters who don't want to invest heavily in a place they don't own, among hundreds of thousands of home owners who are simply priced out. There has never been a convenient, all-in-one system that could offer home security at an affordable rate, much less one you could pick up at the local Best Buy.

But that all changes with Canary, the latest crowd-funding sensation to hit Indiegogo. We caught up with NYC-based founder Adam Sager to discuss the project.

Canary is a little console, slightly smaller than the size of a paper towel roll, that's packed with a host of sensors, a mic, and an HD camera.

For $200 down, this little guy will connect to the Wifi, sync with your phone, and constantly watch your home. I say watch, and not monitor, because Canary can only see as far as its sensors will allow, whereas most home security systems are wired in to monitor every crack and crevice of a home. Canary can only hear as far as the mic allows, or the camera sees, or the sensors can sense.

However, Sager believes that when you place the Canary in the central part of your home, near the front door perhaps or watching over the living room, that a real threat, like a burglar, will likely set off the Canary no matter where it enters from.

Plus, if you have a larger space or want added security, you can always link more than one Canary (up to four, Sager tells me).

Canary's sensors include night vision, motion detection, temperature, air quality and humidity, along with a live feed to the HD camera at any given time. The phone will instantly alert the user whenever the home experiences a random change, like a temperature fluctuation or sudden movement.

But Canary is also smart enough to learn your home, sensing the difference between a burglary and a pet. It even understands when regularly scheduled events occur, like the arrival of a nanny or a dog walker at the same time each day, so that you don't have a panic attack each time Rover needs to take a wizz.

Canary's distribution model is different from any other home security system in that you will eventually be able to go pick one up at a local electronics store on the cheap. This has never really been available before, and the potential market is huge with 90 million homes completely unprotected and priced out of the alternatives.

Sager admits that margins on the hardware itself won't be that high, but the plan is to offer value-added services like monitoring (delivered by a TBD third-party) for $10/month.

Canary has been on Indiegogo for four days, and has blown far beyond its $100k goal to be at $550k at the time of writing. It only took a few hours to reach $100k, according to Sager.

If you'd like to back the project, head on over to the Canary website or check out the Indiegogo campaign.