It's been an exciting few months. I've been so busy, I haven't had much time to post the past six months or so. I know you have all been missing my treatises on the economics of cloud computing or dynamic pricing.
For one thing, I got married. It was a great ceremony, and I had an amazing honeymoon in Italy. The highlight was a DuVine Adventures bike tour through Tuscany that Vickie and I won at last year's TUGG charity auction.
Secondly, as you can tell by the image below, Upward Mobility, my mobile apps company, has hit the big time. Not a bad peer group of MIT startups in HubSpot and A123 Systems, huh?
Actually, that's just a joke. We're humbled to be on the same page, and appreciate Scott Stern and Bill Aulet hamming it up here at Justin Steinman's monthly Sloan Entrepreneurs Breakfast Club, but we're a long way from achieving the transformational businesses that Brian/Dharmesh and Ric Fulop have pulled off. Between Bill and Justin Adelson, I'm just ahead of the ball in learning about new initiatives at the E-Center, one of which is a list of MIT startups. Everyone should check out the new website the E-Center has been cooking up, it looks great.
That said, Upward Mobility has far exceeded my expectations for growth. We have 300+ mobile apps out now on Apple, Palm, Android and Blackberry app stores. We're working on Windows Mobile, an iPad specific edition, and a couple of secret ones that reflect exciting innovations in the mobile space. We've landed apps in the top 25 of two iPhone categories, two Android categories, and we were a winner in Palm's Hot Apps competition.
We reached cash flow positive several months ago, even though we're continuing to invest heavily in product development. I'm also really pleased with the team we've built, which is a virtual team spread between Boston, Seattle, Philippines, India and Vietnam, especially a talented young woman from my undergraduate alma mater Swarthmore College. In fact, things run so smoothly, sometimes I feel like I have very little to do.
The fact that Upward Mobility is running so smoothly makes me think that if another exciting opportunity came along, I'd be ready to start prototyping it. Upward Mobility is a great company in terms of its equity distribution (100% owned by my wife and me) and risk profile (not risky anymore), but an MIT entrepreneur never stops thinking about building something big...
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