Stockpickr.com - a unique Web 2.0 offering in a forum where people who want to learn how the rich get richer meet to compare and exchange investment strategies and techniques - got acquired by TheStreet.com.

With insight into over 800 professional portfolios (including the portfolios of Warren Buffett and George Soros) and thousands of individual investor portfolios, visitors to the site can learn how to invest following professionals’ strategies. Visitors to the site are also able to model their own investment practices after trends they observe professionals following, while mimicking professionals’ successful investment choices.

Two videos worth checking out:

Authors@Google by Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work:

Movie: The Pirates of Silicon Valley

An interesting article in the Mint today - Start-ups start heading for small towns - talks about an emerging and unchronicled subtheme of new businesses being incubated by the dozens in India: start-ups moving to smaller Indian cities.

Start-ups are flocking to the smaller cities for the lower employee attrition they promise and the lower costs, not just of hiring and staffing but also of rent, utilities and transport.

Industry insiders estimate that close to 1,000 start-ups were launched in all of India in 2006, of which roughly a tenth raised venture funding.

Residential & commercial real estate prices in Bangalore are high enough to act as a deterrent to startup founders & employees; and don’t even mention traffic!

I wrote previously about Jessica Livingston’s new book “Founders at Work” - a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days.

Here’s an interview with her, via The MicroISV Show:

Paul Graham’s latest essay - Why to Not Not Start A Startup - “lists all the components of people’s reluctance to start startups, and explains which are real”. He lists 16 reasons why people prefer a regular job over starting a company; here’s a sample:

3. Not determined enough

You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It’s probably the single best predictor of success . . . I’d say the test is whether you’re sufficiently driven to work on your own projects.

6. No cofounder

Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much for one person to bear. And though we differ from other investors on a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, without exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.

13. Fear of uncertainty

Well, if you’re troubled by uncertainty, I can solve that problem for you: if you start a startup, it will probably fail.

Indian micro-finance is in a “bull market”, with new companies rapidly entering the fray. The reason - it is “one of the few market-based, scalable anti-poverty solutions that is in place in India today”. Per the Asian Development Bank, the microfinance market in India could be as large as $8B! And a look at the interest rates charged by moneylenders makes one shudder & hope that things will improve for those in need of these loans:

Thanks to iInnovate, there are two sets of audio/video interviews worth checking out in this context:

First, a discussion with Alex Counts, (Founder of the Grameen Foundation - a microfinance network), who trained under this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank.

Second, a discussion with Chris Larsen, co-founder and CEO of Prosper.com, an online person-to-person lending marketplace. This is not exactly micro-finance, but a very related business model (lending rates vary from 8% to 28%) in my opinion. Due to various reasons, India has historically had a highly developed p2p lending network, with certain communities known to be “financiers” to most small businesses.

Watch Youtube co-founder Jawed Karim talk about how they took the company from concept to hyper-growth, and finally to $1.65 Billion!

Via Paul Kedrosky, venture capital investments in India almost doubled in 2006 - $508M across 92 deals, up from $268M across 44 deals in 2005.

The data was compiled by Venture Intelligence; which has a blog as well.

Guy Kawasaki shares this thoughts & excerpts from the recently released book by Jessica Livingston “Founders at Work” - a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. Paul Graham wrote the foreword, and here’s the list of all interviewees.

FYI, the interviews with Steve Wozniak & Joel Spolsky are available (in full) online - check them out.

Paul Graham runs Y Combinator - “a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups”. Recently, they have started publishing startup news in a blog format (with comments & RSS feed).

Topics that I found interesting:

• Moonlighter’s dilemma
• YC Presentations
• Startup articles