Angel Investing, Entrepreneurship & Learning

Brock Blake blogs…

UVEF Top 25 under 5 Years

Trent and I had the opportunity to attend the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum Top 25 under 5 award luncheon yesterday, and we had a great time.  We had found out last week that FundingUniverse would be one of the top 25 and we ended up at number 19!

After hearing about the top 5 companies, I think that I could’ve guessed all but the #1 company.  The top 5 were:

  1. Agel (www.agel.com):  Agel Enterprises, LLC has created a nutritional supplement in single-serving gel form packaging that is not a burden to consume, is convenient, tastes good, and quickly absorbs into the body.
  2. Control4 (www.control4.com):  Control4 is the platform for today’s digital home and makes whole-home automation a practical option for any residence. They believe that home automation is not just for the rich and that fully customizable solutions are not just for luxury homes.
  3. SkullCandy (www.skullcandy.com):  Skullcandy was founded in 2003 by CEO Rick Alden.  It is the fastest growing consumer electronics company on earth, specializing in audio & gaming headphones, audio accessories, integrated audio devices & mp3 players.
  4. Seastone (www.seastone.com):  Seastone Consumer Products Group is the market leader in specialty gift card packages and gift card promotional programs.
  5. Mindshare Technologies (www.mshare.net):  Mindshare’s business monitoring survey tools gather continuous real-time threads of customer feedback that can be immediately transformed into actionable intelligence.

I’m going to be honest, I was a little disappointed to find out that another MLM was at the top of the list. I really would’ve like to see MoveNetworks at the top of yesterday’s list.  From everything that I hear, it sounds like they are the real deal.  They must be, they just raised another $46M that was led by tier 1 VC Benchmark Capital.  It should be fun to see the company grow.

Anyway, congrats to all of the companies that were on the list!

UPDATE:  Because of a few misunderstandings (on the way that my original entry read), I have edited the current entry to better reflect my thoughts on the subject.