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Startup: From Craigslist To Amazon Killer - Business Insider
Funding for startups soar 57%, highest since 2001

XXX Digital Traveler Well, unbeknownst to them, these three guys were part of the controversy. Their company, DigitalOcean, runs the cloud service that hosts Beyonce's website. But they didn't know about her album plans until they saw the traffic go crazy on their cloud that day. "We had no idea," co-founder and CEO Ben Uretsky told Business Insider. "Her development team chose DigitalOcean because of our fast cloud servers." That Beyonce's web developers had full confidence that this startup could safely handle the load when millions of people all jumped on the website the second the album launched says a lot about the startup. But it was just another milestone in a whirlwind that began two years ago, when brothers Ben and Moisey Uretsky met Mitch Wainer through Craigslist. "We met on Craigslist, but it wasn't the personals," laughs co-founder and CMO Wainer. "Ben and Moisey put out a job listing and I answered it." Wainer was bored with a dead-end job at a startup where he had no equity, and was surfing for new options. He had gotten an offer from another hot New York startup, ZocDoc, but made a "big bet" to go become a founder instead. The bet paid off. DigitalOcean landed a spot in the TechStars 2012 class in Boulder, Colo., and the team built a cloud service that quickly became astoundingly popular. In less than two years, mostly through word-of-mouth, DigitalOcean has become the ninth largest cloud infrastructure company in the world, according to a site that tracks such stats, Netcraft. IT professionals love it for something called "droplets," which is what the company calls its cloud computers. Droplets can be set up in 55 seconds, they use superfast solid-state disk (SSD) flash storage (that's what Beyonce's team liked) and cost as little as $5/month.
(Read recommended reference) Startup: From Craigslist To http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/your-watchdog/2014/04/20/need-complain-use-social-media/7929589/ Amazon Killer - Business Insider

It was the highest since the second quarter of 2001, when investments reached $11.5 billion. There were 951 deals completed in the quarter, up from 916 in the same period a year ago. Software companies received the most money $4 billion. Biotech was a distant second with $1.06 billion. The last time the software sector received this much money was in the fourth quarter of 2000, right as the dot-com bubble was about to burst. The sharp increase in venture funding in the first three months of the year comes amid a cooling of investor sentiment toward publicly traded technology stocks. Since March, shares of companies such as Netflix, Twitter and Facebook have sagged. With some technology stocks down as much as 40%, as in Twitter's case, the sharp decline is raising questions about whether the downturn is temporary or a sign that another bubble is about to pop. That said, one reason for the high level of funding activity may be that VCs are investing in maturing companies. Later-stage deals are bigger than early-stage investments because they help startups expand rather than get off the ground. Online storage startup Dropbox snagged the quarter's top deal with $325 million. It was the San Francisco company's fourth round of financing. Vacation rentals site Airbnb and mobile messaging service TangoMe tied for the No.
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