Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford

at the Oxford Said Business School

The web, today, is finally the platfrom for all kinds of things we thought it could be in 1997 - Allen Morgan, Managing Director, Mayfield

Some of Silicon Valley’s rising star start-ups have grown out of Oxford University.

Auctomatic

Talented Oxford team, cousins Kulveer Taggar and Harjeet Tagger are the joint founders of Auctomatic.com which was the first British company to be accepted on Silicon Valley’s Y-Combinator programme. After an intense period of hard work and perseverance, the online auction management company, Auctomatic has been sold for £2.5 million to a Canadian web company, Live Current Media. The completion of the sale is scheduled for May 2008.

Auctomatic is a software tool for managing eBay business. Sellers can use the software to track inventory, pictures, auction templates, and traffic on auction sites; stringent tracking helps to optimize listing strategies. Auctomatic does more than just list items and manage sales – it teaches how to maximize profits and increase the success of an eBay seller’s business.

In a series of reports for the BBC, Oxford PPE alumnus and Chief Executive of Auctomatic, Kulveer Tagger talks about the move to the West Coast and the development, growth and ultimate sale of the business he co-founded with Law graduate, Harjeet Taggar.

References:

YouNoodle.com

Bob Goodson, a former Oxford Mphil student of Medieval English Literature, took a sabbatical from his studies when recruited by PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin, whom he met at Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford 2003. Goodson was one of the first employees at Yelp, and co-founder of YouNoodle.com.

Oxford Mathematics graduate, Kirill Makharinsky is another co-founder of YouNoodle.com and former head of analytics and metrics at Slide.com, the world’s largest personal media network.

Located in San Francisco, YouNoodle.com develops start-up predictor software, employing a series of algorithms to automate aspects of the venture capital decision making process.

The New York Times
February 18 2008

A Start-Up Says It Can Predict Others’ Fate