500 Startups Demo Day: Motion Math Looks To Make Learning Fun Again. Dave McClure’s seed fund, accelerator, and incubator, 500 Startups, held an open house in Mountain View today to officially introduce the world to its first batch of companies.
The group of mostly consumer-focused startups (not much advertising to be found) at Demo Day put forth quite a few interesting ideas and business models. We’ll be posting a roundup of the best startups (with interviews) later tonight. Among those nifty ideas presenting today is Motion Math, a startup creating a suite of educational apps intended to give kids a more interactive (and fun) way to learn challenging topics.
The startup (which just raised an undisclosed seed round from 500 Startups and a flock of angels) wants to leverage the engaging physical aspects of the mobile experience, like the touch interface and accelerometer, to create that interactive quality which will help kids internalize what they’re learning. Paul Graham. How A Coder Launched A $375 Mil Company From His Living Room – with Lew Cirne. When his big idea came to him, Lew Cirne says, “I was so excited about the idea I almost drove off the road.”
His vision for a way to make any Java program self-diagnostic led him to create Wily Technology. In this interview, you’ll hear how he turned that idea into a company, how he got his first customers, how he hired people to help him grow it, and why he sold it eight years later to CA for $375 million. You’ll also hear how he’s taking what he learned at Wily and using it to grow his current company, New Relic, which reached an 85% share of app performance management in the Rails space within eight months of launching.