Update: read the TechCrunch article about Topicmarks
Update: watch the video of the winning pitch
On Tuesday, February 1st, Topicmarks won the final of the 6th Founder Showcase. The San-Francisco based summarization startup convinced the jury with a compelling pitch about organizing and summarizing your information in the cloud. “No one else had such fire in their presentation,” said Adeo Ressi, organizer of the Founder Showcase and CEO of the Founder Institute.
Among ten finalists, the San-Francisco based company won the first round by a whopping 66% of audience votes. In the run-off Q&A with the winner of the second round, Siebelink impressed the investor jury with his composure, short answers and essential information. ”Exactly as I would expect from a summarization company,” said FatMinds CEO Tejash Unadkat, who congratulated Topicmarks on their win.
The jury was composed of keynote speaker George Zachary of Charles River Ventures, Rebecca Lynn (Morgenthaler Ventures), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC), James Cham (Trinity Ventures) and Aaron Patzer (Founder of Mint, acquired by Intuit, and prolific angel investor), each of which will be taking meetings with Topicmarks in the coming days.
The win brings Topicmarks major exposure to the professional investors. Over 100 angels and early seed VCs attended the event, which took place the Microsoft Research Centre Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California (right around the corner from the Google headquarters).
Topicmarks also won a DEMO sponsorship, a digital HP projector, a yearly subscription to LawPivot and $2500 in prize money.
Topicmarks had been selected by other entrepreneurs who voted up the company’s pitch deck via TheFunded.com, an exclusive community for startup co-founders.
The Founder Showcase win follows on earlier victories that Topicmarks had scored at VCTaskForce, SFNewTech and Seedcamp.
“I am just elated with the massive support the audience has given us,” said Roland Siebelink, Topicmarks co-founder and CEO, “and I am particularly thankful to our first cloud partners Evernote and ShareVault with whom we will soon launch first joint products.”
“This shows that people are clamoring for better filters against information overflow,” said Karl Dawson, co-founder and Topicmarks inventor.
Topicmarks co-founder and co-inventor Jaromir Dzialo said “I am looking forward to many new users for our open beta on
www.topicmarks.com.”
A recent cover of Newseek, titled “I Can’t Think”, laments the ”Twitterization” of published online information. While perhaps overstating things, the article does do a nice job of reviewing our era of instant access. Newsweek concludes that information to decision making is like water: A little will sustain you (eight glasses), more can be better (a spring shower), and too much can kill you (when the levee breaks). Anyone who has been in a flood knows the irony that finding safe drinking water becomes difficult; making a decision in a flood of information is equally problematic. While you can act at any time with available inputs finding good information untainted by the surplus of needless data is difficult.
