Startup sees initial successes

Roundtable, a startup company co-founded by Princeton student Josh Miller, has been named one of Business Insider’s 20 most innovative tech startups of 2011, the online business journal announced on Nov. 8.

The website, atroundtable.com, provides an online forum for conversation that, Miller said, currently does not exist on the web. The site features conversations on topics like entrepreneurship, the future of blogging and startup funding, each hosted by a chair and featuring comments from people knowledgeable about the subject.

According to Miller, the site provides a platform for meaningful dialogue that current communication platforms cannot. While blogs and tweets can allow people to share their opinions, they are not conducive to a constructive conversation, Miller said.

“I’m tired of [Nancy] Pelosi and [John] Boehner trading press conferences,” Miller said in an email. “Let’s get them in a room and see how their perspectives hold up when they have to respond to one another directly. Meaningful discourse is exactly what our society needs, so we’ve built Roundtable to help fill that void.”

So far, the three conversations Roundtable has hosted have generated 10,000 unique visitors. Roundtable gathers the “thought leaders” that participate in each discussion, but anyone can follow the conversation and comment on the site using Twitter.

Business Insider collaborated with investors and entrepreneurs to come up with a list of startups with “fresh concepts with the potential to become industry leaders,” the site read. The journal also noted that it favored younger and more obscure startups.

Some of the firms chosen, like Dropbox and Instagram — which specialize in file sharing and photo sharing, respectively — are more established, have raised significantly more funds in venture capital and are worth more than many of the smaller, newer companies like Roundtable.

“It was incredibly humbling, especially given the company we’re with — Dropbox, Instagram, etc,” Miller said. “Roundtable is the only company on the list that hasn’t raised any money, and most have raised $10 million to $100 million. We’re very proud of that.”

Miller said he and his co-founders have “bootstrapped” up to this point, but at the time of the article he was in California meeting with investors to raise a round of seed funding.

A former member of the Class of 2012, Miller — Roundtable’s chief executive in charge of product and business development — deferred senior year along with Chief Technology Officer and NYU student Hursh Agrawal to work on getting the startup off the ground. The third cofounder, designer Cemre Gungor, is about to graduate from the NYU Media Research Lab.

“It was an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up, given our team, advisors, market opportunity and initial traction,” Miller said. “If we hit this out of the park, Roundtable will be in the same sentence as Facebook and Twitter. And if we don’t, then I’ll come back to Princeton and finish my degree. But I’m learning so much more than I feel I ever did in a precept or lecture.”

However, Miller said he does not measure Roundtable’s ultimate success in terms of profit.

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“When we get Jon Stewart to host a Roundtable, we’ll know we’ve made it,” Miller said. “Jon, if you’re listening, we’d love for you to make fun of Roundtable on ‘The Daily Show’!”