I was one of the employee co-founders of Quarry Technologies, a venture-funded networking startup that was spun out of a publicly listed company (GTE) in 1998. After two years, I left for another startup (Quantum Bridge Communications) lured by the promise of striking it rich when the company was to go public within months. The company never went public; a few months after joining them, the dot-com bubble burst and the telecom meltdown happened, and the company was forced to contract. I was one of the casualties of the downsizing.

When I was laid off, I reconnected with the CEO of my first startup as we tried to start a company developing an optical switch management system (ULISYS Communications) in early 2002. With telecom investment still reeling from the dot-bomb crash, we were unable to land VC funding. Four months later, we tried to start another company – this time in the storage switch space (Vestis Systems). Unfortunately, the angel and VC investor community was still in the midst of its hangover, so we weren’t able to get funding for this startup either. Since then, I have been consulting full time with startups and angel investors through my consultancy, Boxconcepts Consulting.

I am on the Board of Directors of The Capital Network (TCN), non-profit that provides education, resources and a community for entrepreneurs seeking early stage capital in New England. I serve as the Chair of the Marketing Technology subcommittee.

With all this time spent working for startups or consulting with them, I thought a blog would be a great way to share some of my views on this exciting world.

Eye on Startups is a companion blog to my website The Startup Guidebook that’s a work in progress – please feel free to check it out…

Jay Dia