SecondMarket is an SEC-registered alternative trading system for private company stock. SecondMarket just released its Q1 2012 report about the most popular privately-held or venture-backed companies on SecondMarket.

SecondMarket’s most popular stock is FaceBook’s.  After its long-waited IPO FaceBook will leave SecondMarket and Twitter seems to be leading the pack.

Interest in Pinterest is still growing very quickly — followed quickly by Warby Parker and payment provider Stripe.

When we look at SecondMarket’s VC Scoreboard, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers made the most deals in the first quarter this year. Andreessen-Horowitz was on the lower end.

Overall, SecondMarket saw $165 million in completed trades, up 32 percent from the previous quarter and up 42 percent from the same time a year ago. You can discover more information about SecondMarket  in this report.

Thomas Suarez has two published apps, a startup company and a compelling TED talk under his belt; all at the tender age of 12.

Most 12-year-olds love playing videogames — Thomas Suarez taught himself how to create them. After developing iPhone apps like “Bustin Jeiber,” a whack-a-mole game, he is now using his skills to help other kids become developers.

Thomas Suarez’s interest in technology and programming led him to learn Python, Java, and C “just to get the basics down.” He built an app and then coaxed his parents into paying the $99 fee to get his app, “Earth Fortune,” in the app store. Thomas also started an app club at school to help other kids build and share their creations, and is now starting his own company, CarrotCorp.

You should watch his inspiring speech at TEDx conference in Manhattan Beach, LA in the video below.

Having an idea for a killer website doesn’t necessarily mean you can build it yourself. When it comes to building a website, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. You have a great idea, however do you have the right configuration to execute and make this dream a reality? Developing a web business is a hard job, therefore you need additional talents or talented people to achieve success.

Talent marketplace Vitamin Talent prepared this handy flowchart to help you decide whether it’s time to build a great website or not.

Paul Graham is a well-known character in the startup world for his past successes and most recently, the launch of Y Combinator. In 1995, Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb, the first application service provider. Viaweb’s software, originally written mostly in Common Lisp, allowed users to make their own Internet stores. In 1998, Viaweb was sold to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million. Later Viaweb became Yahoo! Store. BusinessWeek included Paul Graham in 2008 edition of its annual feature, The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

Graham’s Y Combinator, founded in 2005, is an early-stage investment firm and boot camp for entrepreneurs. It seeks to find the country’s most promising startups. Twice a year, Graham and his five partners invite several dozen entrepreneurs to move to Silicon Valley for three months.

Y Combinator has a reasonably good reputation for producing “interesting” companies. As such, for those startups that need funding beyond what YC puts in, the fact that they’ve been one of the chosen few likely gives them an edge over a random startup looking for angel/VC money. Paul’s network is also pretty strong and he can “draw in” outside investors. Famous investors Yuri Milner and Ron Conway have started to offer every single seed-stage start-up firm Y Combinator  a $150,000 investment with very favorable terms: a loan in the form of a convertible note with no cap and no discount, the kind of fine print that would make most venture capitalists wince.

Let’s look at the numbers: As Paul Graham shared on his website; in 6 years, YCombinator has invested in 316 startups including this summer. YCombinator has only invested about $5 million, around $15,000 each. They’ve now had 25 companies acquired, 5 of them for over $10 million. As to valuation, the combined value of the top 21 companies that YC has funded is $4.7 billion! The data used for calculation is derived from the most recent funding rounds.

As Paul Graham says, “the numbers look encouraging so far”. I think It’s proved that Paul Graham’s YCombinator has become an absolute success. Congratulations.

Many people who want to start their own businesses and many people who want to invest in others’ ideas search answer of this question: “Which is more important the idea or the entrepreneur?” .

In academic journals, this is referred to as the horse (idea) and jockey (entrepreneur) debate. The horse and jockey analogy reflects two different financing philosophies: Either you believe the idea is the key and bet on the horse, or you believe management is the key and bet on the jockey. “Another way to phrase it is to say that you either bet on an A-team with a B-idea or on a B-team with an A-idea.

People have different thoughts on this topic. Generally, thoughts on this topic may be  grouped into 3.

1. The Idea: Some think that a good-idea will turn into a successful business in any manner whatsoever. They think business world has an evolutionary side which only good ideas can survive in time. Their motto is “Having the right idea is what counts.” .
2. The Entrepreneur: Many venture capitalists operate on the assumption that even if an idea isn’t perfect, it could be made so by the right management. So they think entrepreneur is more important than the idea.
3. Both The Idea&Entrepreneur: Some people believe that a successful business starts with a good idea. But firstly, an idea must be generated  and turned into a successful business by an entrepreneur. A good idea is a requirement but it’s not sufficient to succeed, it needs a good entrepreneur too.

I also think both the idea and the entrepreneur are important at the same time. A good idea is a start point. But don’t forget, most startups fail. A startup can begin with a revolutionary idea but execute dismally. Another startup can begin with a mediocre idea but execute spectacularly. The startup which executes dismally will fail and the one which executes spectacularly may succeed. But a startup which begins with a revolutionary idea and execute spectacularly will succeed. You may have the best idea but if you cannot reach your customers or you cannot pay your bills, you will fail. On the other hand, you may have the best management team but without a unique idea, growing your business and attracting investors will be very though job.

When you have a great idea, the questions to ask yourself is

1. Now that I have this great idea, do I have the right configuration to execute and make this dream a reality?”

2. Can I convince the marketplace that I can make this happen?

Consequently, I think the entrepreneur is 55% and the idea is %45 important to achieve success in business. What do you think about it? Would you bet on the Jockey or the Horse? Please comment…

As an entrepreneur, I frequently see entrepreneurs failing. I wonder why it is so common for entrepreneurs to fail and how the successful entrepreneurs succeed. There must be a way to crack the formula of startup success and reduce the failure rate of entrepreneurs. The Startup Genome Project has an answer to this question.

A group of international entrepreneurs (Bjoern Herrmann, Max Marmer, Fadi Bishara, Aleksandra Markova) came together to crack the “innovation code” of the successful startups like the Human Genome Project’s attemps to crack the human genetic code. They released the first Startup Genome Report with in-depth analysis on what makes internet startups successful based on data from 650+ Internet startups. The list below shows 14 indicators of success from the report. You can download the full report for more details.

1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.
2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.
3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.
4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)
5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.
6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.
7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.
8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.
10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.
11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.
12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.
13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse.They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.
14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymorebecause the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.

I hope this report will help all entrepreneurs like me to succeed and thanks for the contributors.

As an entrepreneur and an editor, I really like to hear founder stories. I think every entreprenur like me want to hear about what happened at famous technology companies in the very earliest days. Where did founders get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Matthew Wise also wondered what it would have been like to hear stories from founders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates during their startups’ early years. Wise felt a need for a way to get interviews of notable entrepreneurs and their success stories. Matthew Wise and Andy Saebjorensen invested co-built an open platform to enable other founders around the world to participate in FounderLY.  Any founder may film a fellow founder, so long as you follow the FounderLY roadmap, and submit the video to FounderLY. FounderLY will then package it with an intro, bumper, and a closing, and publish it to its website FounderLY.

Thanks for Wise and Saebjorensen for their visionary project. Below you can see an example video from FounderLY featuring serial entrepreneur Steve Blank.

Steve Blank Part 1 of 5 from FounderLY on Vimeo.

If you are an entrepreneur trying to introduce your startup or business idea to potential investors, you need the right “one sentence pitch for your startup” to attract the VCs or angel investors. Investors hear, on average, five to ten presentations each day from entrepreneurs. You’ve got one minute to grab an investor’s attention. Kicking your presentation off with a one sentence summary that highlights your idea and its potential value will help you get them interested.

Summarizing your business plan in one sentence is very hard but Adeo Ressi from Founder Institute can help you perfect the art of the one sentence pitch in an easy way. Ressi says “Most entrepreneurs manage to screw it up… How much better would the world be if every startup could explain their business well in one sentence?” . He has created created a rudimentary template in Mad Libs style:created a rudimentary template in Mad Libs style:

My company, __(insert name of company)__, is developing __(a defined offering)__ to help __(a defined audience)__ __(solve a problem)__ with __(secret sauce)__. You can see in the video below, how to use Ressi’s helpful tool for young entrepreneurs.

Madlibs for Pitching from Video4 on Vimeo.

Paul Buchheit is the mastermind behind Google’s Gmail and AdSense, and founder of FriendFeed (now part of Facebook). As one of the earliest Google employees. Buchheit first uttered those three words “Don’t be evil” during a meeting convened to discuss how Google should communicate its corporate values… Then “Don’t be evil” took on a life of its own, spreading rapidly through the Googleplex, and ultimately it was included in the company’s 2004 initial public offering prospectus.

As a successful developer and an entreprenur, here are 5 startups tips from Paul Buchheit:

1. Launch a scaled-back version
   It’s always possible to do a scaled-back version of what you have in mind without the need of a lot of money.
2. Notice sluggish competitors
   If your competitors are actively making their products worse, it is a really good indicator of an opportunity. When Paul Buchheit considered building Gmail, he saw that Yahoo! decreased their [email storage capacity] from 6 megabytes to 4 megabytes and Gmail started with 1 gigabytes.
3. You don’t need virality if your product is good
   “I think the best kind of virality,” he said, “is a product that people like so much that they just want to tell people about it.”
4. Follow your passion
   Instead of setting goals, he said, “I have a different approach. I look to see what things I enjoy doing and just try to figure out how to spend my time doing things that I enjoy.”
5. Sometimes you have to go off on your own
   It’s very good thing to work in a big Company like Google; but sometimes you have to go off on your own to release what you want. Big companies can limit you, because what you’re releasing can harm their brand over time.

* This post is a rewrite of an older Mashable post written by Andrew Warner.

Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder ofMixergy. He interviews successful people to learn how they did it.

In a funny, rapid-fire 4 minutes, Reddit Founder & Entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian tells the real-life fable of one humpback whale’s rise to Web stardom at TedIndia 2009 Event. The lesson of Mister Splashy Pants is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the Facebook age. A great story to show how social media can effect a change in the real World. If you want to watch the video, go ahead.

Alexis Ohanian co-founded Reddit, a social-voting news website with geek allegiances, a small-town feel and a penchant for lighting up the memes your friends IM you about next week. Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia. It received its initial funding from Y Combinator. Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit on October 31, 2006. Ohanian left Reddit in his official capacity in 2009, but continues to be involved with the site’s direction as a sort of godfather, dispensing friendly wisdom (and t-shirts) from his user account, kn0thing. Of late, he’s focusing on Breadpig, a hub for geeky books and merchandise.

Did you know, monkeys have 12 hairs at any one time

I can’t write valuable posts for a long time because of our ongoing projects and my full time job (In fact, there are more than  10 draft posts which i should check and update before I post if i could find enough time and a free brain).  But i try to share valuable resources, especially experiences of successful Internet entrepreneurs with you and this is one of them.

At The Future of Web Apps London, Kevin Rose shares the secrets to Digg and Wefollow‘s explosive user growth. He covers ten unique strategies that turn passive users into passionate advocates and what he did to increase his users to 1,000,000 and beyond.  You can both watch his presentation video or view his presentation slides.