Thrifty startups featured at Web 2.0 Summit

Yesterday at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Guy Kawasaki, author of “Reality Check,” led a panel featuring nine companies started for less than $50,000 — in some cases, a whole lot less.

The companies included Wufoo (online form building), Yoics (instant networking), DropBox (file sharing w/ automatic syncing), Disqus (blog commenting system), MightyQuiz (user contributed trivia contests), SlideShare.Net (repository of slideshow presentations), Posterous (dead simple blogging via email), RescueTime (non-creepy time management and monitoring) and PollEveryWhere (interactive polls). While you can argue the merits of whether these companies will be viable in the long term (maybe they are more features than companies) it shows that a couple of bright engineers with a good idea can go a long way on a modest budget.

One of the things we’ve found with startup companies using MySQL is that they want to “scale fast or fail fast.” That is, they have ambitions to scale to Facebook or YouTube levels if they are successful, without having to continuously re-architect their systems. At the same time, if their ideas suck and no one is interested, they want to find that out fast also, so they can do something else. (Or in venture capital terms, they want to “de-risk” their idea.) Who would have guessed that a company that enables easy sharing and viewing of PowerPoint or OpenOffice presentations could get 9 million unique visitors a month?

The fact that you can start a Web company on a shoestring budget thanks to open source software, commodity x86 servers and hosted cloud computing means that it’s often easier to test the idea in the real world rather than go out and raise money from VCs. These companies are testament to the fact that you don’t need $5 million to build and launch a Web 2.0 company.