Kelly Smith - Made In Seattle

Kelly Smith is a Seattle based entrepreneur and self proclaimed “web slave”.  His personal blog mixes a random smattering of art, music, and design, with a dash of local Seattle venture news thrown in for good measure.  He is a founding partner of Curious Office Partners, a software concept lab, that provides resources to other software startups.  

Conceived in 2005, Curious Office was established in recognition of a new trend emerging in web development. Increasingly, small teams using emerging development frameworks, better tools and web services could deploy game changing new applications on small budgets and within extremely short periods of time. Around the same time, the term “Web 2.0″ became synonymous for this evolution and for the ever increasingly popularity of user-generated content that drove all manner of new social networks built on these applications.

Having developed companies themselves, Curious Officer Partners (Kelly Smith and Adrian Hanauer) observed that the traditional venture capital model was often not well suited to make seed stage investments of just a few hundred thousand dollars - an amount often requested by developers for early proofs of concept.

Curious Office Partners has gone on to follow their business plan of providing startups assistance with software development, graphic design, marketing, business plan development, and seed stage investment funding to bridge the gap in the traditional venture funding model.  They currently have a portfolio of 7 companies Pressplane, Imagekind, Shelfari, CoolSpotters, SEOmoz, Wishpot, and FeedDigest, in various stages of funding and development. Prior to Curious Office Partners, Kelly founded two other ventures that combined his interests in art and business, RocketVox and ImageKind.  

RocketVox was merged into thePlatform.com - now the leading developer of content management and publishing systems for rich media content (e.g. streaming audio & video).  thePlatform was purchased by Comcast in July 2006 and Imagekind was sold to Cafe Press in July 2008.

Kelly Smith’s blog is a must read if you are at all interested in starting a business within the arts, media or software industry, he has a proven track record, and a killer line up of companies he is currently working with.  Make sure to bookmark his site  www.kellysmith.com you can also follow him on Twitter.

Welcome

Startups That Blog was created because of a passion for learning about business startups, entrepreneurs, and venture capital and brought to life because of a great idea by Ashley Morgan over at Upstart Blogger.  The goal of this blog is to highlight new business startups, the venture capital they chase but more importantly their founders, and their products.  

Startups That Blog will seek to promote new startups as they fight their way into existence, while providing valuable information and insight to anyone who is interested in venture capital, wants to become an entrepreneur, or has ever had a startup business idea. 

I hope that you will enjoy what we have to offer, and will voice any and all opinions, comments, or suggestions along the way.  All that is left to do is to step out of the way and let the real business’s shine through.  

To have your blog featured on Startups That Blog simply email me at kirk@startupsthatblog.com. Please include a link to your website, a very brief explanation of what your company does and high resolution photo if possible.