Sibling from NJ sold their enterprise for $100 million

What were your priorities at 21 ?? Maybe enjoying your final year at college or peparing for the further "post graduation" studies. Perhaps for this sibling-duo from New Jersey, "studies" and "job oppurtunity" is holding the last proritization in their current life. Afterall not everybody make $100 million dollars at the young age of 21.

In 2005, Catherine Cook and her brother David had an idea for a startup. The high schoolers flipped through a yearbook and wanted to make a digital version.
The 15-and-16-year-olds got to work and created MyYearbook. In the 6-year span, the duo raised $17 million in financing, grew the site to 20 million users*, and generated 1.2 billion monthly pageviews.
Today, a publicly-traded Latino social network, Quepasa, announced its $100 million acquisition of MyYearbook. The majority of the deal, $82 million, is Quepasa common stock. The other $18 million is cash.

Geoff Cook, MyYearbook's CEO and sibling of Catherine and David, wrote a letter to his 100+ employees:
"I don’t consider this an exit or the end. I consider it the end of the beginning, and I believe we have a lot more innovative products to create," he says.
Welcome to retirement Catherine, Geoff and David! Although we're sure this won't be the last company they create.

DropBox : the next big thing ?

Silicon Valley has never been this optimistic at the same time careful in financially upgrading out of box ideas. Recently when Valley pundits predicted the over cash flow and irregular distribution of financial support to the ventures, it only turned out to be hoax call as valley is growing organically.

Here is one more promising web-sharing (not web hosting) company which is being seen as the potential venture and in simple words a money maker, through the eyes of PE firms and VCs. According to the company, Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, two MIT students tired of emailing files to themselves to work from more than one computer.

Today, more than 25 million people across every continent use Dropbox to always have their stuff at hand, share with family and friends, and work on team projects. the company is in expansion mode and hiring technical guys at the lightning pace.

Dropbox is expected to make $100 million in revenue this year and Fortune valuated the company somewhere between $1-2 Billion.

Dropbox provides free hosting till 2GB and is having clear revenue model which makes it even more promising venture.

Thogh dropbox needs to be cautious at certain fields. First of all Dropbox's paid service would get tough competition from the free hosting services. Besudes this Dropbox emphasizes on "Sharing" but unfortunately its multimedia file could be not be shared with social media platforms as there is no sync available.

Square got a new Venture capitalist

Square inc. announced that venture capitalist Vinod Khosla will join its board of directors. Khosla is already an investor in the mobile payment platform via his venture firm Khosla Ventures, which led Square’s initial financing round and participated in the Series B round last January. Square has raised a total of $37.5 million from Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Sequoia Capital and Visa since its founding in February 2009.

Khosla will replace Gideon Yu who recently left Khosla Ventures to join the San Francisco 49ers as Chief Strategy Officer. Yu will continue to angel invest in startups. In fact, sources tell me he has already backed a super stealthy startup called The Usual that lets you order food from your smartphone (yes, this sounds a lot like Jonathan Kaplan’s new startup The Melt which Kaplan debuted at the All Things D conference last week only with a better name, and more to disrupt than grilled cheese sandwiches).

Square was cofounded by Jim McKelvey and Twitter’s busy cofounder (and now chairman and chief product guru) Jack Dorsey, who still runs Square with chief operating officer Keith Rabois, a veteran of PayPal, Yelp and LinkedIn. See my colleague Tomio Geron’s interview with Rabois here.

A board seat at the mobile payments startup is a little off-strategy for Khosla, the Indian-born engineer who started Khosla Ventures in 2004 to invest in what he likes to call his “imprudent science experiments,” everything from wood-based biofuel and new types of batteries, engines and lights to water purification, greener glass and clean cement. As Khosla recently told The Economist: “I am only interested in technologies that have a 90% chance of failure but, if they do succeed, would change the infrastructure of society in some radical way.”

It is still too early to tell whether Square will radically disrupt the way we use our wallets, but the company is certainly off to a solid start. Since launching in February 2009, Square has shipped over 500,000 card readers, processed a million transactions last month alone, and is on target to process $1 billion in payments within the year.And as Rabois told, the company not only plans to transform the payments industry, it also wants to change how small businesses operate and how consumers manage their personal finances.

Khosla can certainly help as it tries to achieve those ends. Before starting Khosla Ventures, Khosla made an early fortune as cofounder of Sun Microsystems. He joined John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1996, where he mastered the art of incubating startups.

“Square is thrilled to welcome Vinod to our board. We have worked closely with Khosla Ventures since our inception and Vinod’s expertise, history and input will be a tremendous asset to our company as we continue to grow,” Dorsey said today in the press release.