Mint CEO Aaron Patzer presented a step-by-step narrative on how he built his company in three years to $170 million target for personal finance giant Intuit.

In a moment of nonchalance, Patzer, who spoke at the Juice Pitcher event, hosted by TheFunded.com and Vator.tv, admitted to Adeo Ressi, the founding member of The Funded, that he sold Mint for cash to Intuit, so it didn't matter to him what happened to Intuit's shares.

11:30 a.m. PT  Thursday, October 8, 2009 (US WEBCAST)

Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today
serving over 200 billion pages per month. The nature of social data
makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly
challenging proposition. In this presentation, I will discuss the
aspects of social data that present challenges for scalability and will
describe the the core architectural components and design principles
that Facebook has used to address these challenges. In addition, I will
discuss emerging technologies that offer new opportunities for building
cost-effective high performance web architectures.

The white paper is for marketers interested in  digital marketing and growing their brand’s social network.  The paper contains real case studies of successful social networks, which gives you a perspective of how others did it.

The paper looks at how sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flixster, RockYou, Slide and Plaxo grew their Online Community. Growth strategies have been divided into

What is operation Canine ?

Operation Canine is a project/experiment to start a company which will build, launch, and market a product in 3 days. We wanted to show people that it’s not as difficult as many people think to start a company, and getting a first version of a product built and deployed can be done fairly quickly.

With the economy the way it is at present there may be people that are thinking of starting up for themselves, or putting a project to the test, we’ll document the good the bad and the ugly as we go, and it may help people make their minds up one way or the other.

Operation Canine: We’re going to go from nothing to everything (hopefully) and launch a product that will help people monitor their advertising/campaign spend and responses, to better manage their spend. We’re going to donate 50% of the first year profits to charity, and hopefully offer a tool that will help businesses in the current economic downturn.

This is now live and the end results running on a Startup Essential hosted solution is at http://www.spendmeter.com/

If you want to follow this story and more then go to Operation Canine now, for the full story/

Make It Scale seminars exist to help facilitate networking and knowledge sharing amongst entrepreneurs and innovators that are on the path to building thriving new businesses.

Which is why we're delighted to welcome Nick Halstead, founder of Fav.or.it., together with Mike Brodbelt of LastFM and Mike Griffiths of Proven Scaling to our inaugural event on the 27th November, to talk about their experiences, different perspectives and the good, the bad and the ugly of scaling resources.

If you're thinking about starting a business, or are running one that's less than 6 years old, you're welcome to join us at 6.00pm., at Sun's City Customer Briefing Centre. For any new business, good information can make a real difference and a positive contribution to success. Make It Scale and the opportunity to network that it brings are free, so click below for more details and to register.

Where

 Sun - London CBC - 45 King William St

When

Thurs 27th November

Register HERE now 

Agenda:

18:00: Registration/Networking
18:30: Last FM
Why you should scale and lessons learnt
Mike Brodbelt
18:45: Sun Microsystems,
OpenSolaris- ZFS, Dtrace: Scaling and more scaling the easy way
Phil Harman
19:15: Break
19:30: Proven Scaling: MySQL
Optimise and Scale, now for the future
Mike Griffiths
20:00: Fav.or.it
Why I thought about scaling from day 1
Nick Halstead
20:15: Q&A Roundtable
20:30: Beer and pizza

Am 27.11.2008 findet in Berlin in der Location Radialsystem V wieder die Startup-Lounge statt.
Viele Gründer und erfolgreiche Unternehmer, wie z.B. Titus Dittmann von Titus, sowie VCs werden anwesend sein.
Dr. Stefan Schneider von Sun wird einen Vortrag zum Thema: "Startups müssen skalieren können; Beispiel die Conemis AG" halten. Wir freuen uns auf Startups und Startup Essentials Member. Hier kann man sich kostenlos für das Sun Startup Essentials Programm anmelden.

Berliner Sun Startup Essentials Mitglieder können sich gerne melden. Wir würden Sie auch am 26.1.1 Nachmittags gerne in Berlin sprechen (Bitte melden Sie sich unter stefan.schneider@sun.com).

Who needs Scaling, not me ?

I attended an event a few weeks back called "Top Cats" hosted by Paul Walsh and I bumped into Richard Tyler from The Telegraph, as usual with these types of events you have a little catch up then discuss whats happening in the Startup Space,  myself and Richard discussed Scaling, do companies need to think about it now, we both agreed its an aspect of a small startup company that get's pushed to one side as their isn't time to think or plan, its all happening to quickly ? Richard quoted a fantastic video that the BBC made on Firebox in 2000, and the message in that still stands the test of time today.

So as a Startup, how do you plan for Scaling, what happens when you  bridge the chasm and find that users, useage and power are being consumed so quickly that you are in danger of crashing and losing your business in 24 hours, well its easy you talk to me !!!!

Without being a blatant advert for Startup Essentials, a few hints and tips that has worked for companies already that I deal with

1. Think Scaling long term growth now, to late when you are at near capacity and spent all your cash.

2. Investors love due dilligence and a credible business plan, that shows costings for short and long term growth.

3. Investors get even more excited when you show that you are thinking these aspects and are working with a large global enterprise vendor to overcome short and long term challenges.

4. We are a Startup, been their, have the t shirt and know the pains, but also we have expertise in scaling and architectural build out that we talk about everyday to key accounts, these same engineers can help you as well.

5. Then once you are scaling and ready to take on the world, work with our global PR Engine.

To read the full Telegraph article, go here and also watch the video from Firebox as well, some fantastic elements within that ring true in 2008.