At Founders League, we believe its important that the startup community know who's who in their 'hood. We'll be running a series of profiles to introduce community members and make it easier for us to connect, trade insights, and share resources.
Who: Kirsten Lambertsen
Company: Kuratur
Twitter: @mspseudolus
1) What is Kuratur? Kuratur is like getting a 24/7 content marketer for your blog. We take the manual, one-at-a-time, content curation that bloggers do online now and automate it for them without sacrificing control or their personal touch.
2) How did you get into entrepreneurship? I was bouncing from corporate job to corporate job in the mid-'90's. While I did good work, I always seemed to suffer from being a little too out-spoken, a little too ambitious, a little too counter-culture, and certainly not nearly politically-savvy enough.
In 1996, I found myself working in marketing at a CD (compact disc, for you kids) manufacturing company in Virginia. One of our customers was a guy out in San Francisco who had just launched a web startup. He asked me for a favor, and I obliged. When he asked what he could do for me in return, I said, "Give me job." So he did! I knew I'd found my people.
That was my first startup job, in 1997, at a free web homepage hosting service in San Francisco, XOOM.com. It was my gateway drug. I went from being a black sheep to being a "rockstar." I knew I would never work anywhere but a tech startup again.
Like everyone else working in tech at the time, I started working on my own company in 1999.
I went with something I was nuts about, beauty and celebrities (I was so shallow then, ha!), and started BeautyRiot.com. It was the first virtual beauty makeover application on the web, letting users to upload their photo and try new hairstyles (including celebrity hairstyles) and makeup looks on the photo. We were pushing the technology then -- there weren't apps like that on the web yet.
Of course, I thought I'd start BeautyRiot.com and sell it a year later. Instead, the internet bubble burst just as we were launching, and then 9/11 happened not long after. I ended up running BeautyRiot for ten years, much of it on nights and weekends while I worked another job to make ends meet. As John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
In 2007 BeautyRiot generated over $1 million in revenue with just me and one salesperson on the team. I sold the company in 2009 to a venture-backed beauty content site in Los Angeles, Total Beauty.
While I was waiting for the sale of BeautyRiot to make me rich (still waiting), I got the idea for Kuratur. As with BeautyRiot, I went looking for something to serve a need I had and found the options to be insufficient. So I designed a solution I thought was awesome.
3) What's your favorite part about being a Founders League member? Wow, that's a tough one! If pressed to pick a *favorite* part, I'd have to say the community. The last year and a half has taught me so much about the value (and I do mean *value*) of being part of a community when you're working as an entrepreneur. I can learn just about anything I want to from a book or the web. I cannot get the community and support from a book or app.
4) What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs? Find and participate in a community of entrepreneurs!
Know exactly *why* you are doing what you're doing. Know what impact you want to have on the lives of the people you are trying to serve with your endeavor. It will be your compass no matter how many difficult or complicated decisions you have to make. This advice applies even if you're working on a game - you don't have to be curing cancer.