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FundingUniverse expanding across the U.S.

Great things are happening on the FundingUniverse front. It’s been a while since I’ve provided an update so I figured that I would talk about some of the exciting things that are happening lately.

Great team. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, so much of a company’s success depends on the quality of talent that you can attract. Thus far, we have a tremendous team in place and I’m excited about the results. When you have talented individuals around you (we added a new addition within the last couple of months — see here) that surpass expectations on a regular basis, it motivates you to be at your best — that is happening right now with our team and it’s exciting to be a part of it.
Expanding product line. Over the past year, we have really rounded out our offering in order to be almost a full-service business solution for our customers. What I’m most excited about is that we are constantly adding new funding resources to our model to help out more and more business owners. Recently, we’ve landed a partnership deal with an aggressive SBA lender and now more than 70% of the clients that we send their way are getting approved for a business loan. Instead of just helping on the angel/VC side of things, we can help a lot more entrepreneurs in a variety of ways.
Opening up new markets. Over the past few months, we’ve been pushing hard to open up new markets in Denver, CO; Phoenix, AZ; and Portland/Seattle. We’ve got great partners in each of the region (including Amazon, GangPlank, NOW advisors, Jive Communications, SEO.com, Newswire, etc.) and it’s allowing us to do some fun things at our CrowdPitch & Speedpitch events in those regions. Not only have we announced that all of our events will be FREE from now on (for everyone in attendance), we are also giving away a $15-$20k prize package for the winner of each event! This has attracted the attention of ABC phoenix and others.

Need your help: We are hoping to have 8-12 offices open throughout the US by the end of 2010 — if you live in an area outside of the above mentioned markets and are interested in being our local market rep (or know anyone that might be interested), please let me know! We are always looking for good talent.

December 11th 2009 Posted to Angel Investing, Entrepreneurship, FundingUniverse

221 Comments(3)2009-12-11+19%3A57%3A57Brock+Blake

A little bit of rivalry fun at the office!

For those of you that know me well, know that I’m a die-hard BYU fan. It would be a very rare occasion for our family to miss a BYU football game. You should also know that the BYU/Utah rivalry is one of the most heated rivalries in the country and dominates almost every conversation in the state of Utah no matter where the setting (work, school, church, etc.).

So this year, I decided to start the fun on Monday morning by bringing BYU football sugar cookies for everyone in the office. Afterward, I sent out an email to the entire company announcing that it was “BYU week.” Here are a few things that followed:

On Tuesday, our admin brought in UofU cookies and gave them to all of the employees
Our CTO, Trent Miskin, played a nice joke and replaced our company logo (on our website) with the BYU logo. The funny thing is that only those within our office network could see the logo. Most people didn’t know this and were shocked that we would change our FundingUniverse logo with the BYU logo for ALL to see!
Then, the other developers swapped the BYU logo with the UofU logo AND made it so everyone’s computer background was changed to a UofU picture.
Finally, on Wednesday afternoon (the day before Thanksgiving), my admin planned a fake meeting for me out of the office so that Alex (my partner) and the rest of the FundingUniverse team could do this:

Believe me… I was shocked! I couldn’t believe that they painted my office! That being said, I seriously thought it was hilarious and wasn’t upset for a second. Since then, everyone was asking how I would get him back. I had quite a few ideas on what to do, but I figured that the scoreboard was good enough. Since BYU won 26-23, here was my response:

At the end of the week, it was just all good and fun and I can’t wait until next year. All I know is that between now and then… BYU has all the bragging rights! GO COUGARS!