He was the co-founder and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU, his third startup. He is the co-author of several books and the recipient of a number of awards.

Josh is the Managing Partner at Capital Factory. Capital Factory is an early stage accelerator program for tech startups that provides a small amount of seed capital and weekly mentoring sessions by entrepreneurs who have founded successful companies. Startup companies apply to participate in their 10 week summer program intended to get a startup pointed in the right direction with a clear path to profitability and growth.

Show Notes and Links:

• Capital Factory, $20K + Free Stuff + 20 mentors + 10 weeks to make your app happen!
• Austinpreneur Josh’s blog
• Marc Nathan Houston technology scene (Listen to Episode 55)
• YCombinator new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups
• The penny gap between founders Expectations between founders based on ownership
• UnsubCentral Opt-out, Unsubscribe and Suppression List Email Compliance Solutions
• Coremetrics enterprise analytics
• Bazzarvoice Social commerce technologies
• Pitch Deck from Kip McClanahan
• OtherInbox Reduce your email inbox clutter
• When Busy Schedule with someone when you don’t share a calendar

The conversation starts off with discovery. As we all know I have an un-quenchable thirst for learning about my guest’s past and the path taken to get them to where they are today.

Ethan Bloch is 24 years young, but has no shortage of interesting moments to discuss. We talk about the wonders of serendipity, what is means to follow your gut, and the ins and outs of iterating Flowtown with lean product iteration methods.

Before founding Flowtown with Dan Martell, Ethan was the host of WSYK, an internet TV show which was syndicated to Revision3.

Near the end of the show Ethan mentions that they are hiring. If a listener of the show gets hired, Flowtown is going to give me an iPad to giveaway! So, if you are a Rails developer in the San Francisco area email jobs@flowtown.com with links to your work!

For more details, see their job posting at the 37signals job board.

InfoChimps is based in Austin, TX and their mission is to increase the world’s access to structured data. They hope to do for structured data, what GitHub and SourceForge have done for Open Source software. InfoChimps is building tools to organize, explore and comprehend massive data sources and large structured data-sets. They are working hard to create a community and a marketplace around the procurment, development and exchange of these structured data-sets.

Flip, Dhruv and Joe share their experience with Capital Factory (a seed stage mentoring program for startups) and the mentorship they received. They were selected as a Finalist but just missed the cut for the 5 companies selected to receive funding and enter the mentorship program. Josh Baer and the Capital Factory team really liked the three founders and their vision and kept in touch to help out.

Capital Factory (Profiled in Episode 55 w/ guest Marc Nathan) is a seed stage mentoring program for startups that provides a small amount of seed capital ($20,000) and weekly mentoring sessions by entrepreneurs who have founded successful companies. Though InfoChimps wasn’t a selected startup of Capital Factory, Josh Baer and the team at Capital Factory remained involved and continues mentoring them and helping them get to where they are today.

Flip and his Founders give significant thanks to Capital Factory, specifically; Marc Yagjian (@marcyagjian), Josh Baer (@joshuabaer) and Jason Cohen.

As a result of the mentoring they received they were selected to “pitch” at Demo. For those of you who plan to Pitch the Show, you may want to pay close attention to what they have to say at this point in the call and be sure to read Josh Baer’s blog post, Case Study – Infochimps 90 second pitch for DEMO.

Also check out InfoChimps’ Data Cluster Meetup at SXSWi. The event is going to have some pretty impressive people from the data community and all the details are at datacluster.infochimps.org.

I’ve added the final result below, but I recommend that you read the post if you plan to Pitch the Show!

For those of you who have been die-hard Carsonified fans since “way back when”, you will appreciate Ryan giving us the juicy details on what took him to the UK, why he wears “the hat” and how he initially got started with Carson Systems, which eventually turned into the Carsonified we know and love today.

Early in the call, Ryan mentioned his recent loss of his grandmother and how that affected his drive for life. I recently lost my mother (2008) and it was an eye opener for me as well. It served as a reminder that you should do what you are passionate about when you have the means and ability to do so. Too often we take for granted that we have tomorrow to look forward to, and for some that’s just not the case. Love your family, tell your friends they are awesome, dig into your craft…DO WHAT YOU LOVE…TODAY! Thank you Ryan for sharing that personal piece of your story with us.

Ryan and I talked about how he tries to keep a clear separation of personal and business brands and how that tied into the naming of Carsonified. He even mentioned the fact that he tries to downplay his personal brand in an effort to elevate Carsonified and his steler team.

For those of you who are envious of the folks at LessEverything with their latest venture, LessConf (I know I am…) – Ryan gives Steve and Allan a nice nod wishing he could have hopped the pond to make an appearance. Running an event of any size is no simple task. Ryan spoke in depth about Carsonified’s world-class “Future of” conference circuit and what it takes to create and run a world class event.

I spoke with Ryan Holmes (@invoker), the Founder and CEO of HootSuite to talk about their Social Media Dashboard HootSuite, rebranding from BrightKit and pursuing VC funding and when it makes sense to take it.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with HootSuite, HootSuite is an awesome Twitter. It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more through Ping.fm.

On February 5th, 2009 BrightKit became HootSuite thanks to a gracious name suggestion @mattnathan (thanks for the great name!). Ryan and I talked in detail about why renaming to HootSuite made sense and what steps they took to make it happen.

We talked about how they iterated to get to the full on Social Media Dashboard that HootSuite aims to be. Originally it was just Twitter in their Radar, but soon after they pulled in Facebook, LinkedIn and Ping.fm to use as sources for your social content.

In the “Twitter client” space and the Social Media Dashboard space, there is a lot of demand for features and the competition is strong. Ryan helps us to understand what they are doing different to differentiate themselves from the competition regardless of the platform, web, mobile, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.

Ryan and I talked quite a bit in this episode about their recent Series A round of Financing of $1.9 Million dollars back in January 2010. In today’s startup world it’s sort of a “no no” to take funding, but for them they really needed that financial backing to take HootSuite to the next level and the places they want to take it.

Mike shares a ton of great advice on building a web app business, and the importance of choosing the RIGHT business partner and more in this jam packed episode. Are you going to LessConf 2010?

On the call we referenced a talk he gave at LessConf 2009 in Jacksonville, FL where he said “…your choice of co-founders will be THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION you make in building your business”.

You can view that talk below.

Use the invite code web20show to get in and give Venmo a try.

I caught up with the Founders of Venmo, Andrew Kortina (@kortina) and Iqram Magdon-Ismail (@iqram). They operate with no titles and both wear all available hats in their ultra lean 2 person startup based in Philadelphia, PA.

What’s the gist? Well, Venmo allows anyone to send and receive money with a cellphone that has text message capability. It’s really a simple way to pay for things, and to transfer money between your friends, face to face.

Right now they are in a closed, slow growth beta stage. Here’s the deal, they’re still small and they just want do their best and provide awesome service! They got a little more exposure than they were looking for with the blog post titled “Venmo: The Future of Payments” posted earlier this week.

I just wanted to emphasize the fact that they are in “beta” right now. They are working though various features to get the user experience were it needs to be. Venmo is a fantastic example of “release early, release often”. They have been iterating over features and tweaking things based on the feedback they get from the user-base instead of assuming what their users want and need.

Use the invite code web20show to get in and give Venmo a try.

If you do sign up, be sure to share your feedback. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it!

Ben is the Co-Founder and CEO of Earth Aid Enterprises, a Washington DC-based social venture specializing in developing and deploying sensible energy efficiency and renewable energy solutions.

Earth Aid has developed the Mint.com for energy – employing patent-pending technology to make it possible for households in the United States to automatically link all their utility accounts in one place, at any resolution of data. Earth Aid leverages this new datastream to help folks identify new ways to save energy and water, and to entice them to do so with an innovative rewards program called Earth Aid Rewards.

Ben saved Earth Aid Challenges so he could announce something SUPER SECRET on the show. Earth Aid Challenges is an extension of Earth Aid Rewards and takes earning Earth Aid Rewards to a new level by going social.

With Twilio you can easily make inbound/outbound calls. They have a surprisingly simple API. You can build to scale with their pay-as-you-go pricing model and have the peace of mind of no contract, and their pricing is just 3¢/minute for domestic (US) calls.

Delicious Links: http://delicious.com/web20show/ep63

I spoke with their Founders:

• Jeff Lawson, CEO (@jeffiel)
• Evan Cooke, CTO (@emcooke)
• John Wolthuis, Lead Engineer (@thuddwhirr)

They all come from a technical background and as you will hear in the podcast they developed the service to “scratch their own itch”.

Using Twilio’s simple API, customers build sales automation systems, order inquiry lines, CRM solutions, call routing apps, phone trees, appointment reminders, custom voicemail apps, and a whole lot more.

We talked about:

• Their service and where the idea of the Twilio service came from
• How they remain connected and communicate with their development community
• Netbook Mondays, where they blog about the dev community and the weekly contest they support
• How their LinkedIn Network for developers helps their devs stay in touch and get new business
• Their Google Map: Apps on a Map
• The various services they use to keep their business lean and agile