This week, TopSchool Inc. is introducing itself to its world, which is the world of for-profit, post-secondary educational institutions. That’s a mouthful, but it’s a significant mouthful because those schools, ones designed to address specific educational needs and to make a profit while doing it, have grown into about a third of the entire college-level educational system. That’s right: A third of the money paid by people attending school after high school is not paid to the institutions we all identify as our college and university system.

Instead, there is a large and vibrant system of schools — small and large, broad or narrow — that are run as profitable businesses. And our company, TopSchool, has developed the software to provide a service to these schools that is both their core function (keeping track of their students as customers) and that is still largely locked behind client server systems developed as much as 20 years ago. By providing that software as a service, TopSchool will also enable these schools to go beyond “merely” keeping track of their customers into new and innovative ways of recruiting new customers as well as providing service to existing customers. (We even think that eventually we can provide a Facebook application to our customers’ students that will help them register for classes and manage other aspects of student life.)

TopSchool is a great entrepreneurial story. The company was started several years ago by an engineer, Harout Kertajian. Harout got the basic idea right, which was to provide a school information system as a service rather than as licensed software. But he needed an aggressive, business guy to help him get the company financed and ready to roll out and that guy is Leon Lo, the entrepreneur whom we bet on in making our investment in the company.

The most remarkable part of this story is that Leon actually replaced himself as CEO of the company before we even had a chance to invest in it. Leon recruited two top executives from eCollege, now a division of Pearson Education, to become respectively the CEO (Matthew Schnittman, former president of eCollege) and SVP Sales & Marketing (Justin McMorrow, former VP Sales & Business Development of eCollege and a thought leader in alternative forms of secondary education to boot). Leon also up and moved him and his family from Southern California to Denver to create a new home office for the company. We love that Leon has the drive and vision to do everything that is necessary to help a great new company started, even if that involves relocating his family and reorganizing himself into a new job.

And we’re thrilled to be helping a new company bring the software-as-a-service revolution to a fast-growing industry that is on the leading edge of inventing new way to educate and train us.

Ribbit introduced itself formally to the world today. Talk about BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), but the company has adopted the line that it is “Silicon Valley’s first telephone company”. For the best coverage of the company’s proposition, read Techcrunch’s post, which goes pretty deep in understanding what’s possible.

Ribbit is a classic (and wonderful) startup problem: How do you decide what to do when everything is possible. Ribbit has a killer advantage, which is that — under the covers — it has a Class 5 soft switch, the innards of a traditional telephone company that allows it to set up, route, and terminate phone calls. No other startup can duplicate that infrastructure in less than 3-5 years; but, on top of that infrastructure, Ribbit has build a platform and a set of applications that integrate with standard Web applications and finally merge telephony and computing and that we believe give the company the chance to grow into a real, modern telephone company. That’s what leads to Ribbit’s BHAG.

We’ve been using the service, in alpha and pre-alpha, and despite all the reliability and performance issues of using a pre-release service, Ribbit has already transformed our telephony. So we tend to be total believers in Ribbit’s ability to reach its goal.

Alsop Louie Partners lead the Series A investment in Ribbit with participation from KPG Ventures in October, 2006. (The company is completing its Series B funding, lead by Allegis Capital.) But we love Ribbit for another reason; it was one of the two companies that agreed to be funded by us before we finished raising our capital. It takes a lot for an entrepreneur to take that much of chance on a new venture capital firm and, for that confidence, we owe a lot to Ted Griggs, Crick Waters, Ramani Narayan, Peter Leong and the rest of the founding team at Ribbit.

Last week, Cleversafe introduced a major update to its open source software. Cleversafe is a company with a big, hairy, audacious goal: transform the infrastructure for storing data. All data. Enterprise data. Consumer data. Internet data. Transform the storage of data by radically simplifying the underlying method of storing it and meanwhile making it much more secure and reliable, not to mention cheaper.

Like many startups, Cleversafe has gone through significant transformations itself as it has figured out how to navigate toward this goal. A key decision the company made early on was to put its core software into the open source domain. But it realized earlier this year that it had to rebuild that core software to handle much greater diversity in its prospective customer set. The result: Software that allows the customer to decide for themselves how reliable and secure they want their storage versus how inexpensive. As always, technology requires you to choose between cost and benefit; in Cleversafe’s case, it’s a relative decision because even the most reliable and secure application of the technology is still considerably less expensive than existing, mainstream choices.

Cleversafe’s basic proposition is that you can obviate the need for expensive, high-performance storage by using the Internet itself instead of your own disk farms. It proposes that you carve your data into N numbers of “slices” and then store those slices in discreet locations on the Internet, instead of storing all of your data in one location and then protecting that data by backing it up and archiving it. Cleversafe’s software manages those slices of your data in a way that means you can always get all of your data back even if some percentage of the discreet locations fail. The result, mathematically speaking, means storage is more reliable and more secure by spreading it around the open Internet than it can ever be by trying to maintain close control in your own infrastructure.

That’s an amazing idea; a big, hairy idea. It’s an idea that will take customers some time to absorb and adjust to. Cleversafe is right now identifying which customers will appreciate that idea the most quickly and be willing to pay the most for it as it plans to deliver a product to customers early next year.

Cleversafe holds a dear place in our greedy, venture capital hearts because the terms we offered for investment in Cleversafe were the first terms we offered to any company. We offered those terms before we had raised our fund. We were able to do that because the investment involves old friends on both sides of the investment: Chris Gladwin, the founder and now chairman and CTO of the company, was also the founder of a company where Stewart lead an investment in 1998, MusicNow. And the investor in that case, New Enterprise Associates, is also our co-investor in Cleversafe. Both Chris and NEA agreed to support our investment in Cleversafe before we got our first commitment to fund Alsop Louie Partners. Since we did get funded, NEA and Alsop Louie Partners along with the angel investors in the original funding of the company provided a Series B financing for Cleversafe in November, 2006.