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RouteSmith acquired by Runzheimer International

July 21, 2008

Last year, I invested in a company that I discovered through the CTEK angel network called RouteSmith. The company makes software for route optimization - think furniture and appliance delivery routes. I covered the company here in April, 2007.

From the CTEK presentations, there were three of us (investors) who thought this was an interesting opportunity and really liked Matt and Jeff, the founders. At the time, they were in early revenue and just needed to scale the business. Jeff (the CTO) was working full time, but Matt (the CEO) was stuck in a day job. The company needed a relatively small amount of financing in order to allow Matt to focus on the business full time, and to grow their marketing efforts. We decided to pull the trigger - this was a natural fit for me because I had some background in vehicle logistics through my first startup, ZOLL Data Systems.

What we came up was a creative financing. Rather than doing a straight equity deal, our small syndicate loaned the company money. The company was then to pay the loan down, with interest, based upon a small percentage of quarterly sales. This is the same creative structure that I had used to finance $100K of working capital for the first company I founded, so I was familiar with this model already. What’s nice about this model is that the company doesn’t need to pay back the money on any predefined timetable. As investors, we were literally vested in their success with their sales pipeline. This creates a nice dynamic. In return for the loan, the investors received warrants to purchase a small chunk of the company as upside.

This was just what the doctor ordered for Routesmith. With Matt on board full time, the pipeline started to grow immediately, and the company reached monthly profitability within about a year. Because it was software as a service, this was an annuity and became a dependable base to further grow the company. As we suspected, no further financing was necessary, and the founders were able to maintain the vast majority of the company stock. Matt and Jeff never lost sight of their bootstrapping nature, and they stayed hungry and lean as a company.

Then Runzheimer International came along and Jeff and Matt really liked the people and the company. They felt they had a similar vision. Routesmith was acquired last week by Runzheimer and it was a very positive outcome for everyone involved. I believe that Jeff and Matt could have successfully built a much larger company over time. This is what they decided they wanted to do, and as investors, none of us wanted to stand in their way of taking the early exit.

I caught up with one of the founders, Matt DeWolf, this weekend and he told me “One of the great things about the Runzheimer acquisition is the investment they plan to make in the Colorado community. Runzheimer is very impressed with the technology community here in Colorado and we plan to invest in this office as a new product development location.”

Congratulations to Matt and Jeff. They’re a class act, and Runzheimer made a great investment both in them and in Routesmith as a company.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Tech Cocktail comes back to Boulder August 20th

July 21, 2008

Frank Gruber (Somewhat Frank) and Eric Olson are bringing Tech Cocktail back to Boulder. It’s on August 20th at the Boulder Theater.

Tech Cocktail’s mission is to “help amplify the technology signal in under served markets and have fun doing it.” The format is great - everyone gets to have a couple drinks, talk about startups, and some local companies showcase their stuff. Here’s my coverage of the first Boulder Tech Cocktail held this past March, and here’s coverage on Somewhat Frank.

Register for Tech Cocktail Boulder II here. Registration is free, but consider making a small donation. Better yet, considering joining Lijit and TechStars as a Tech Cocktail sponsor (more info on sponsorships here).

I hope to see you there!

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

37 Signals Jason Fried speaking July 31

July 20, 2008

Crispin Porter + Bogusky asked me to post this information here on the blog.

You’re invited to a happy hour, informal lecture and discussion about “Getting Real,” featuring Jason Fried, Co-founder and President of 37 Signals. Jason will be speaking about some of the things he’s learned on collaboration, entrepreneurship, hiring people, stumbling into things, scratching your own itch, and figuring things out along the way.

Date: Thursday July 31, 2008
Time: Cocktails and Food – 6-7 Presentation – 7-8, followed by Q&A
Place: Oriental Theater 4335 West 44th Avenue Denver, Colorado
$10.00 NDAC Members $25.00 Non Members Get in free if you buy a membership RSVP and pay at www.regonline.com/JasonFried

Jason Fried, President of 37 Signals Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. 37signals’ unconventional approach to business (don’t hire a PR firm, don’t have meetings, don’t pay much attention to the competition, don’t work together in the same physical space, etc.) brings a fresh new perspective on how to be an entrepreneur and build a successful business today. 37signals’ products include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta- da List, and Writeboard. 37signals also developed and open-sourced the Ruby on Rails programming framework. 37signals’ products do less than the competition — intentionally. Jason believes there’s real value and beauty in the basics. Elegance, respect for people’s desire to simply get stuff done, and honest ease of use are the hallmarks of 37signals products.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Blast from earFeeders past

July 18, 2008

Robert Reich of Me.dium, who does a fantastic job of running the Boulder New Tech Meetup, just tagged me in this video on Facebook in which I present earFeeder at one of the first New Tech Meetups in Boulder (there were about 25 people there, now there are usually 300+).

I just watched it, and towards the end he asked me “What happens if you get on TechCrunch? Are you scalable?” I of course replied, “Uh… no.”

Then TechCrunch covered it about 5 days later. Amazingly, it didn’t fall over (much) and was interesting enough that SonicSwap.com acquired my little side project just 39 days later.

Looking back, this project magically allowed me to meet the original goals I stated in this original New Tech Meetup presentation. I learned a ton about RSS which has helped me with a bunch of my other investments, learned and wrote about The TechCrunch effect, and solved my own problem. In the end I even got a little something out of it. SonicSwap has since been venture funded and continues to look promising. In case you’re wondering about earFeeder itself, it was highly integrated into SonicSwap itself and now no longer exists as a stand alone product. If you dig music and want to share your playlists, give SonicSwap a try.

At TechStars, I spend alot of time telling people to focus and not do side projects. Before they all write me to complain, let me clarify: this was a side project for me when I had no “main project”. At that time I was only doing investing because my previous startup (iContact) had just vaporized. So TechStars founders: hush, and focus.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

iPhoneDevCamp set for August 1-3

July 15, 2008


 
 
 
 
ID345 is hosting iPhoneDevCamp from August 1-3 in Denver. This is a satellite event that will include the ability to watch the keynotes and participate in the nationwide Hack-a-thon. The event should offer something for every skill level and be very “un-conference” like. If you’re interested in all things iPhone and iPhone development, you’ll want to be there.

More info about iPhoneDevCamp is here.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Boulder Women Engaging Tech

July 15, 2008

Boulder Women Engaging Tech (BWET, believe it or not) is a group of entrepreneurial women that meet weekly to network and discuss new technology and their latest projects. Gwen Bell founded the group. The group has now met several times and when I peeked in on uStream at an event a couple of weeks ago, it looked like there were about 20 people in attendance.  Gwen tells me that there are now 33 members in the group.

In short, BWET is a small but growing group of women that are making an impact on our local community. If you know someone who might be interested in joining the group, point them at the BWET web site.

As the name implies, BWET is for ladies only. However, and this is just in…. I just received a hot tip about a similar new group that has formed for men only. Some people clearly have too much time on their hands.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

A better job board for startups

July 9, 2008

About a year ago, I started a job board here on ColoradoStartups.com. I wanted it to be free and only allow startups to post on it. Since then, 207 jobs at startups have been posted on my free job board to date. The bad news is that that only drew 59 applications in total from my readers. Not that great, but still a decent service to the community at no charge.

As of tonight, this job board will be shut down. But…. there’s good news too.

The good news is that I’ve replaced it with a much more functional job board that brings job posters many new benefits. Previously, job posts were only seen on ColoradoStartups.com. With the new job board, your posts are seen across the country on startup oriented job boards. For example, they’ll be seen as usual on ColoradoStartups.com, but also on the Texas Startup Blog, Kentucky Startups, North Carolina Startups, and so on. Better yet, this is a quickly growing list of startup oriented blogs which are perfect for reaching your audience. Better still, your ads will be seen whenever anyone searches for your keywords or geography across the entire SimplyHired.com network, which includes thousands of sites like MySpace, GigaOM, LinkedIn, VentureBeat, and the New York Post. Not bad, eh? In a nutshell, job posts on ColoradoStartups.com will now be seen much more widely.

The only downside is that the posting price has gone from free to $5 per listing. Using this new technology, this is the minimum that SimplyHired will allow us to charge. So of course, we picked that number since we love startups and don’t really do this for the money! This is still a great bargain as your listing is valid for 60 days, again, across the entire network. Just $5 for 60 days.

I hope you will continue to list your openings here on ColoradoStartups.com. I think the new job board will perform better for you. If you have any questions, just fire away in the comments.

It’s live, so you can post a job on the new and improved job board right now if you’d like to.

If you’re looking for a startup job in Colorado, here’s the full list and subscription options.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog |  

Green Tech Meetup is Thursday night at CU

July 9, 2008

The BCBR recently covered the Green Tech meetup, which has grown from an original group of 11 to now nearly 100 attendees and more than 400 members. Congrats to Kris Wiesenfeld on growing this great group.

The next meeting is this Thursday July 10th. Networking starts at 530pm, with presentations at 630pm. As of this moment, 81 people are attending this Thursday. It’s at the Koelbel building on the campus of the University of Colorado. If you’re into green tech / alternative energy in any way, I encourage you to check it out.

Join and follow the group on Meetup.com.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

The Keiretsu Forum one year later

July 4, 2008

Over a year ago, I covered the fact that the Keiretsu Forum (”the worlds largest angel investor network”) had opened up a chapter in Colorado. There are currently 17 chapters of the Keiretsu Forum worldwide.

Steve Murchie, who founded and runs the Denver chapter dropped me an email to update me on what’s been going on in the last year. He told me that the local chapter members have participated in funding over $2M in eight companies since inception. The group now has over 30 new active angel investors as members. These investors have seen more than 40 companies who have presented to the group. Steve also told me that they’ve raised more than $10k for charities and non-profits so far.

“The Keiretsu Forum got it right,” said Lu Cordova, CEO of Almacen, who received funding from presenting to Keiretsu Forum Denver. “I founded CTEK Angels as a way to fund tech companies, but we had nothing to offer a growing demand for diverse investment options. The Keiretsu Forum understands that innovation and opportunity comes in all forms, from tech to consumer goods to real estate, and that diversity maps well to individual investors seeking a broader allocation of their risk portfolio.”

The next investor forum meeting will be held on July 30 in Denver. Accredited investors who would like to learn more about Keiretsu Forum are invited to observe the meeting and should contact Steve Murchie at smurchie at keiretsuforum dot com.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Filtrbox - Got information overload?

July 3, 2008

Filtrbox, one of the TechStars companies from 2007 which provides a time-saving cure for information overload, has left private beta behind and is now available to everyone. Early feedback seems quite positive both from individuals and from sources such as Network World, which called the user interface “so good it should immediately be given an award.”

Filtrbox monitors both traditional and new media content sources based on “filtrs” which you define. These are simply definitions of keywords and concepts that you want to track any time they’re mentioned. Users can consume the result content via RSS, email, and/or in the beautiful new Filtrbox dashboard. One thing I love about Filtrbox is that it doesn’t try to change your content consumption habits. This makes it easy to integrate the results into my normal tools. In my case, I like to receive some of my most critical Filtrs with results that have a high FiltrRank (their unique scoring algorithm) in my email inbox each morning. I consume the rest via RSS and occasionally check the dashboard to look at trends, sources, and other detailed analytics.

I’ve heard Filtrbox described as “Google alerts on steroids.” It’s not a bad description.

I’ve been using Filtrbox for about 9 months now as part of the private beta. Man, has it evolved nicely - it’s now a tool that many of us have come to depend upon daily. Fundamentally, Filtrbox has changed the way I think about and consume content. I now think about “blogs” as something I catch up on once or twice a week and Filtrbox as my source of time sensitive news regardless of source. Subsequently, Filtrbox is now part of my daily system and my blog subscriptions are something I find myself looking at more occasionally.

Filtrbox feeds can be created and consumed in a highly distributed way as well. For example, Filtrbox is powering vips.alltop.com, which is a unique page on Alltop that is based on persistent search. I’ve also used Filtrbox in combination with Newsgator to power the TechStars news page, so that mentions of our companies or mentors are automatically picked up.

You can hear Ari Newman (founder and CEO) discussing the service on Mashable. There’s also a good review there.

Individuals who want to monitor up to 5 filtrs can use Filtrbox for free. Pro accounts are $20/month and include up to 25 filtrs and more history. Team accounts are $100/month and allow teams of users to define, manage, and share common filtrs.

Filtrbox has some great screencasts if you want to learn more about some of the key features of the service. But if you just need the latest and most relevant news in a timely and flexible fashion, go ahead and give Filtrbox a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

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