Co-founders of Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, gave up their jobs to create their own startups, Asana and Jumo, respectively. The former creates software that helps people collaborate in work efficiently, and the latter is a social network which connects people looking to change the world. Other Silicon Valley sensations such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have also seen a stream of ex-employees leaving to found their own start-ups. Here are a few that caught our eye
tripline.net
Byron Dumbrill, ex-Yahoo, founded Tripline, where you can create a story out of your travels by putting the locations on a map, traced with an animated line that enables a visual journey through your trip, with a timeline, tags for the cities you visited, your itinerary and pictures.
ooyala.com
Sean Knapp, Bismarck Lepe and Celsasar Lepe, all worked at Google before founding Ooyala, a platform for videos. It simplifies, for companies, the transcoding, managing, publishing, analysing and monetising of their videos.
quora.com
Co-founder Adam D’Angelo was a part of the Facebook team. Quora is a knowledge base with a range of questions and answers that the users themselves generate, organise, and edit. Those with specialised knowledge are prompted to reply to questions relating to their expertise. Users can also choose to follow a question and the answers that continue to be added to it.
bigoven.com
Steve Murch worked at Microsoft for seven years, and then at Expedia, after which he started Big Oven to simplify the problem of cooking at home by walking you through not only the recipe, but grocery shopping and various tips, all without a clutter of ads.
polyvore.com
Co-founders Pasha Sadri, Jianing Hu, and Guangwei Yuan all once worked for Yahoo. They created Polyvore as a forum for style, where users can read about fashion trends around the world, shop and share fashion tips with other users, including members of Facebook, Twitter and various blogs. Their virtual styling tool also enables you to creatively mix and match clothes, accessories, and other products from numerous stores.
tellapart.com
Josh McFarland and Mark Ayzenshtat, both ex-Google, started TellApart to help vendors and companies put their customers together systematically, then help them ‘tell apart’ their best customers in the database. It also helps to find new customers who fit the profile of these top customers.
storm8.com
Storm8, a mobile games company, was started by ex-Facebookers Perry Tam and Chak Li. They create role playing games for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android.
weatherbill.com
David Friedberg and Siraj Khaliq, ex-Google, started Weatherbill, which offers inexpensive, convenient insurance policies to businesses and consumers who deal in agriculture, events, outdoor leisure, energy, skiing and other activities affected by the weather. The policies help manage the risk of weather by controlling costs and protecting revenue. There is no lengthy paperwork, claims process or other such hassles.
i2we.com
Founder Karen Baloun used to work with Facebook and left to start i2we, which essentially creates communities of members on Facebook where the users can interact with people most like themselves.
(This story appears in the 03 December, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)