The 2012 Silicon Valley Index found job growth in the high-tech hub far outpaced the country as a whole last year. The region added 42,000 jobs, a jump of nearly 4 percent, compared with a nationwide increase of little more than 1 percent.

This according to The Washington Post. Thanks to Pando Daily for the heads up on that article.

This growth is certainly something the rest of the nation wants to emulate.  Closer to the home of StartUpHire, we have the DC Mayor giving his State of the District speech last night.  In that speech, he set this course for DC:

In fact, we want to be the tech destination city on the east coast, a rival to silicon valley for talent and fast-growing businesses. We plan to attract to the district a strong presence of mature, well-established tech companies that can bring new energy.

We wish DC all the luck in attracting new companies; Silicon Valley has set a high bar.  One we hope continues for many years to come.

Online education is growing and evolving at an exponential rate and promises to completely transform the education industry in the coming decade. E-learning, which comprises all out-of-the-classroom web-based learning, computer-based learning and virtual education, owes its popularity largely to the growth of the Internet and associated web tools that have made it easier, cheaper, and more satisfying for students to learn from home. These innovations have bred an incredible growth of revenue that is expected to see online education becoming a $30 billion annual market by 2014. Correspondingly, online education-focused startups such as 2tor Inc, Open Sesame and EduFire are paving the way to transform the accredited online degrees industry even more interactive and successful.

2tor, Inc.

One of the most successful online education startups is 2tor, Inc., an education company that has raised $65 million and seems primed to dominate for years to come. Devoted to providing higher education in the form of online programs, 2tor Inc. works with top-end universities in order to offer students and faculties with tools, funding, and recruiting. It also develops technological platforms that facilitate online learning.

Founded in 2008 by John Katzman, the founder of the Princeton Review, 2tor plans to integrate Web 2.0 technologies in order to give students an innovative new experience in online education. In 2008, 2tor partnered with the University of California’s Rossier School of Education to create an online degree program which offers a Masters of art in education. Since then, 2tor has also partnered with Georgetown and UNC. This ambitious startup seeks nothing less than a fundamental transformation in online education and is proving that business ventures comprised of new web tools can fundamentally transform the education industry.

OpenSesame

Founded in order to attempt to consolidate and organize the chaotic world of online education, a multibillion dollar industry, OpenSesame is another compelling startup that has been making waves in the education industry. Based out of Portland, Oregon, OpenSesame connects consumers of online education software—be they companies looking to train employees, or schools looking to refurbish their syllabus—with a network of tools that can bolster and enhance their learning. Specifically, purchasers of e-Learning tools are supplied with a library of courses which they can run on virtually any Learning Management System. The purpose of this is to simplify the process of discovering and acquiring online education courses and to considerably expand and augment the selection and quality of these courses.

OpenSesame essentially works kind of like a social networking site for content developers and online education consumers. Their proprietary technology safeguards the developer’s content so that it cannot be duplicated and resold, while at the same time offering the consumer a wide variety of options. OpenSesame’s most recent move was to partner with Mindleaders, which offers a broad, media-rich catalog of online courses (2,800 of them).

EduFire

EduFire is another online education startup whose funding shows the incredible potential for interactive innovative in the field of online degrees. EduFire offers online video classes and live tutoring in the subjects of language, business, and tech. They offer coursework in Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, marketing, entrepreneurship, design, web programming, online tools, and many other subjects. Launched in 2007 with the slogan “revolutionize education,” the EduFire platform integrates teachers and students into a single subscription-based online community, based on Adobe Acrobat. Imagine Skype mixed with social media, tutoring and cutting edge software and you have an idea of what EduFire offers. Additionally, EduFire offers test preparation for the ACT, SAT, and GRE and innovative diagnostic learning tools.

Summary

Startups like 2tor, OpenSesame and EduFire show the incredible value and promise of innovative online education tools. For both educators and students alike, the opportunity to learn and make a living through these web-based education platforms speaks to a changing dynamic in the academic world. Accredited online degrees are more respected and more valuable than ever before.

 About the Author

Jenna Smith is a journalism student at Saint Louis University. Upon graduation, she hopes to travel the world while producing compelling content for the masses. When she isn’t writing, you can find Jenna with her nose in a book, or her headphones in to block out the rest of the world. Enjoy!

He breaks it down in to several areas:

1. How do I get a good internship.

2. How do I pick where to apply/work.

3. What you learn.

He writes this guide from experience, having interned for Facebook and 2bkco.  Much of his advice boils down to talk to your contacts.  Admittedly, for a group of folks as generally introverted as engineers (his target audience), this is challenging.  However, it’s a skill that can be developed as well as any other.

If you’re looking for a co-founder, go read the handpicked list of posts on how to find a co-founders from StartupDigest.

Thanks to @ericstromberg for tweeting this one.

That is all.

Tribes and startups thrive when labor is efficiently divided. Long before Meyers met Briggs, people in tribal communities migrated to those roles which best suited their personalities, proclivities and skills. The key roles in tribes and startups are identical: Hunter, Skinner, Shaman, Chief and Tribal Elder.

Each member of the tribe has a significant and indispensable role to play.  Mr. Greathouse elaborates on the role played by each member, and why they are key to the success of the group.  Obviously, this really applies to startups that have reached a maturity which allows for all these roles to be filled.  Prior to that point, understanding the roles, and adjusting to fill the gaps is recommended.

As a bonus, Mr. Greathouse has created video, if you learn better from watching someone talk rather than reading.

OnStartups is a great resource for further learning about startups and for finding resources about startups.

From the Summary:

Thinking about joining a startup? Ask for a hiring bonus equal to the exercise cost, early exerciserights, and NSOs instead of ISOs. Exercise as soon as possible and ASAP file an 83(b) Election.Recently hired? If you can afford to fully exercise your options and are permitted to do so, ask to get your ISOs converted to NSOs, perform an early exercise, and file an 83(b) Election.

If you don’t have the background to understand that summary, read his paper.  It will explain in detail what all of those terms mean.

Founding a company is a marriage. You need to make sure you are going to work well together, can communicate, balance one another, and bring out the best in the other person. This is more intuitive. After a few “dates”, do you click and does it feel right?

TechCrunch has a post from Eric Eldon writing about a group that’s focused on match making between startup founders.  This post includes many other venues working to bring founders together.  The focus of the article, however, is FounderDating.  Taking a hands on approach, they screen and connect folks looking to found companies.  Their current focus is creating meetups to get potential founders together to see if they will hit it off. Because of this very focused method of working, they’re currently centered in San Francisco, New York, and Seattle, according to their upcoming events.  Perhaps some day they’ll expand to create virtual meetups as well?

Another group addressing the niche of startup founders is CoFoundersLab.  Based in Maryland, they’re also working to bring cofounders together.  They’re focus is on-line match making.  If you’re not actively looking for a co-founder, you can add your information to the site and let others find you – excellent for those who are interested in finding a new opportunity, but aren’t able to search full-time.  Their focus is currently DC, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Vancouver, BC.

Here’s the great thing:  if you really want to work as an intern for a startup, you’re going to have to find them.  Mr Rainey writes

The problem is: Startups often don’t have the resources or formal programs of larger companies to recruit interns, so candidates have to find them. And due to their smaller size and relative youth, finding the startups in your area isn’t always easy.

If you’ve made the leap to want to find a startup to intern for, chances are good you’re exactly what the startups want.  They need someone who will take ownership, who will take the initiative.  As an example, Mr. Rainey quotes Tim O’Shaugnessy of LivingSocial:

Our interns own projects on day one — we want to see if they can run with it and move the needle. We’ve hired dozens of interns, many of whom have now become some of our best managers and employees.

It’s January, and we know from history now is the time to start looking for that summer internship.  Go find them, and get going on your startup adventure.

The Lean Startup methodology says (among other things) fail quickly, and fail often, and learn from those failures.  Mr. Vacanti begins by relating what appears to be a failure:

Two users. That’s it.

It had been a week since we had announced to friends and family our latest idea, LinkFalcon, and only two of them had bothered to try it.

I thought LinkFalcon had some real potential. It solved a real problem for me and one that I hoped others had.

Complete disaster. Failure. Six months down the drain. Back to our real jobs.

That’s what should have happened; but, thanks to the Lean Startup movement, that wasn’t the case at all. Here’s why.

Read the rest of his post to understand why it wasn’t a complete failure.  You’ll also learn that a subsequent experiment lead to a VC backed company: Yipit.

The other great thing is being exposed to some really cool startups. The amount of innovation we run in to daily is really exciting. Today’s post is a short list of some interesting companies we’ve come across; by no means is this an exhaustive list of cool startups.

Cogo Labs – this is actually a startup incubator. There are many of these, but any group that can claim over $1 million in revenue per employee is worth a look.

Invincea is a Fairfax, VA based startup company with a very novel approach to browser security. If you’re worried about zero-day attacks on the most used application in your company, give them a look. If you’re interested in stopping malware before it’s known, take a look at their jobs.

Want in at the ground floor of what could be the next big startup? Check out the posting from Yapsee. They’re working on a new way to make friends online.

Roblox is mixing elements of Legos, Minecraft, and user-created MMO content to make some interesting web-based games. They’re hiring like crazy, which is usually the sign of a company doing great things.

We’ve previously posted about startups making tools for developers. Another example is Version One. They have a widely used tool to support agile development teams. If you’re interested in helping accelerate the pace of change in every industry, check them out.

Hopefully you’ve seen some interesting companies from today’s post. If you know of other interesting startups, drop us a line using our contact form.