Startup2Startup is Tuesday - don’t miss it
June 28, 2009
I’m really excited that Dave McClure is bringing the popular Silicon Valley event “Startup2Startup” to Boulder this Tuesday night. I’m moderating a discussion called the “Ultimate Platform Hotness Smackdown: iPhone, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and the native web”. We’ll be comparing and contrasting these platforms and others, for the relative benefit and interest from the startup perspective on a variety of platform topics (features, distribution, monetization, etc).
The panel is a really great one, and we’re lucky to have them in town. Dave McClure runs FF Angel (part of the Founders Fund) and we’ll be joined by Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC - he’s a fantastic and very active seed stage investor with more than 50 web 2.0 investments to date. Howard Lindzon (Wallstrip, StockTwits) is also joining us, as is Ryan McIntyre of the Foundry Group. Dave, Jeff, and Howard were all coming to town this week as mentors for TechStars so I’m thrilled that Dave decided tack on this great community event.
This isn’t just another panel discussion. While I think that will be interesting, the real beauty of Startup2Startup is the great job that Dave does of getting people involved in their own discussions. The panel sets the topic, and then each table is pre-arranged so that there is a mix of investors, rookie entrepreneurs, and experienced entrepreneurs. A moderator is appointed for each table whose job it is to make sure everyone gets involved in the conversation. The format of the dinner ensures that you’ll make some new connections and strengthen some existing ones. I’ve been to Startup2Startup in Silicon Valley and they’re always fantastic events.
As I write this, only 18 seats remain. Tickets run from $20-$60 depending on your level of experience and they include dinner. It’s a great deal you’re sure to have a good time. Grab one of those last few tickets right now, before they’re gone. See you Tuesday!
Mentors matter
June 19, 2009
I’m often approached by entrepreneurs who are looking for mentors. A common misconception is that mentors are difficult to find. I always tell them that they’re just not trying hard enough. Colorado is full of experienced entrpereneurs and the vast majority of them are happy to help other entrepreneurs when asked. When approaching individuals that you think can help your business, they key is to build a real relationship with them. I’ve talked about this before in my post Find and Engage Great Mentors - it’s one of my personal favorites from this blog.
TechStars is mentorship on steroids, but alas: we only take about ten companies a year. So I’m often asked about other programs that offer a mentorship-based approach here in Colorado. One really great one that I was recently made aware of is TiE-Rockies - they appear to have a good mentorship program of their own.
Here’s a blurb from them:
TiE-Rockies, a chapter of TiE-Global–the largest organization in the world that supports entrepreneurs–has been recognized as having the best Mentoring Program of all the chapters. Membership is only $175 per year and this includes the award-winning one-on-one Mentoring Program. Every entrepreneur should have a Mentor and if you live in Colorado, this is a program you cannot afford to miss. If you don’t live in Colorado, all the national TiE chapters are adopting Colorado’s unique Mentoring Program. If there is a chapter near you, check out their Mentoring Program.
There’s also the Boulder Innovation Center, CTEK, and more that you should check out. Nicole Glaros also has a good list of resources towards the bottom of this page on her blog.
However you do it, finding and engaging great mentors with relevent experience can make a huge difference to you and your company. I wish I had known this when I started my first company - it’s one of those life lessons that most people learn the hard way. Go get a mentor for your business, or better yet, go get several.
The amazing portable OS of the future
June 7, 2009
I’ve been lugging my MacBook Pro back and forth on my 5 block daily commute to work for a couple of years now. I finally got sick of it, and decided to set up a second MacBook Pro that was identical, so that I could keep one at the office and one at home. I used Carbon Copy Cloner, and it took just a few hours and a spare external hard drive, which in typical Mac fashion, worked flawlessly on the first try.
I’m a Mobile Me subscriber, so I tested the multi-machine sync plus iPhone, and everything worked great. I can now update contacts, calendars, etc on either laptop or the iPhone, and they all sync beautifully. I was already using a cloud based IMAP email service so that worked easily too. My Pogoplug connection, my DropBox, my TextExpander snippets - everything was ready to go and worked just like they did on the source machine. A true clone - really easily.
One of the byproducts that I got out of doing the backup/restore with Carbon Copy Cloner was a bootable USB hard drive with the same cloned MacBook image on it. As part of the process, I had booted up the target (new) MacBook Pro from the external hard drive, and I was looking at the source machine exactly. This got me thinking.
There’s really no reason why everyone couldn’t use one of these portable hard drives as their primary computer image, and just boot any machine using that image. You’d just have to carry that around.
Then I started thinking about the iPhone. If only it had a 200 GB hard drive on it. I could dock it at home, at the office, or at my mom’s house, and boot my OS right from it. You can easily see the future heading in that direction. I’ve had a strange feeling that maybe we’ll even see Apple heading in that direction when it makes the much anticipated WWDC announcements on Monday. That would be a great direction. This seems likely to be how things will be done sometime in the next 5 years or so.
This seems like a good interim step between the OS in the cloud and what we have today. Would you like for things to work that way?
Failure in context
June 5, 2009
A few nights ago, I had dinner with some special guests who were visiting Boulder and TechStars. They were Joachim and Steven who are with the Singapore government and Ken Zolot, a TechStars mentor and MIT Lecturer from Boston who is also a Senior Fellow with the Kauffman Foundation and is working to understand entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Among many interesting parts of the discussion, one topic stuck out for me. It was about how failure is almost celebrated here in the US in the context of entrepreneurship. Things have changed in Singapore, but apparently Asian culture has historically made it shameful to fail. Of course, in the US it’s not exactly great to fail, but it certainly falls short of shameful. In fact, as the saying goes, if you haven’t failed you haven’t pushed your limits.
This made me think back to a video from Big Omaha that I had seen recently of Jason Fried saying that somehow “failure became cool” and he said that he didn’t get the “fail early, fail often” mantra it at all. Ever since I watched this the first time, it had bugged me. So I went back and watched it again. Then I read his related post on the 37Signals blog.
Some of this is semantics - I think “fail early, fail often” is usually used in the context of micro-failures and experimentation and not at the macro level of the entire enterprise.
In a post supporting his position that “this industry’s obsession with failure has got to stop“, Jason says “Many investors and entrepreneurs out there believe that you should fail a few times before you succeed.” I’ve never once come across this attitude, but I suppose it could exist. In clear contrast, Brad Feld has said that his favorite entrepreneur to invest in is a successful one coming off a recent failure. This is not just due to the lessons learned, but also because that entrepreneur is going to be very, very hungry. Of course he’d be somewhat less likely to invest in an entrepreneur who has failed and failed and failed with no success.
I think there is some confusion here between “fail early, fail often” and “fail fast.” Failing fast is about the case where you’re on a path that is going to fail and the writing is on the wall. In that context, failing the company fast makes sense.
When people say “Fail early, fail often” I think they generally mean something different. Of course people aren’t encouraging you to go out and start companies that fail just for the experience of it as if it somehow makes you stronger! Rather, it’s about testing and trying until you get it right - generating an overall success. Think little failures, early and often, and you’ve got the right context for “fail early, fail often.”
That’s what was bugging me. To me the two sayings are used in completely different contexts. Am I right? What does “fail early, fail often” mean to you, vs. “fail fast”?
UPDATE: After writing this, I watched Micah Baldwin’s video from the same event, where he made a similar point about the confusion about the “ending point” of failure in Jason’s talk at about the 11 minute mark.
Announcing my new startup seed fund
May 13, 2009
Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a new seed fund designed to invest in early stage web/software startups nationwide. This new $2.5M fund was finalized last week and will begin investing immediately.
As many of you know, I have personally invested in about a dozen startups over the past four years and have been fortunate enough that many of those have been successful. I have also been very encouraged with the results of funding pre-seed investment through TechStars, the mentorship-driven summer program based in Boulder and Boston. Based upon the successes I’ve had with these activities, I am humbled to now be joined by an amazing group of investors who are also providing capital for this new fund that I am managing.
The new fund will invest in approximately 20 startups over a five year period. It will invest between $50K and $200K per company, with a typical “bite size” being $100K. While this new fund will choose the best available investments nationally, we believe that some of those will naturally include companies exiting TechStars. With this fund, I will lead some investments and will follow other funds or angels in other cases. I am especially honored that the advisors to the fund are Howard Lindzon, Brad Feld, Howard Diamond, Lisa Rutherford, and Jason Mendelson, so the range of experience represented by the fund is quite extraordinary. More information about the fund is available at DavidGCohen.com.
I look forward to continuing to help fund, encourage and support the next generation of great entrepreneurs. I cannot imagine anything more fulfilling.
Occipital solves another hard image processing problem on the iPhone
Occipital, a TechStars 2008 company based in Boulder, has released the first accurate UPC/EAN scanning application for the iPhone, called RedLaser. Users can snap a picture of a barcode and search for online product prices. They can also email a list of scanned products to review later or share with others. It’s available on the App Store for $1.99.
What’s interesting is the hard image processing problem they had to solve to make it work. The current iPhones lack autofocus, causing images of barcodes to be extremely blurry and tough even for humans to read.
In RedLaser, the blurry barcodes are sent to Occipital’s servers to be analyzed, and the system mathematically compensates for the out-of-focus images. Occipital will be able to improve the accuracy of the system over time as they get more data.
Occipital is also releasing an SDK for their scanning technology, allowing iPhone developers to integrate it into their applications. Cor.kz, the leading iPhone wine application, will be integrating RedLaser technology to allow their users to easily search over 600,000 wines.
This isn’t the first time they’ve pulled off some cool image processing. I previously posted when they showed off this demo at CEA’s iStage competition. iSmashPhone covers RedLaser with screenshots and more. RockyRadar has a good writeup with some additional information as well.
What if CU’s Engineering Department was more focused on entrepreneurship?
May 7, 2009
I recently joined the University of Colorado Computer Science Department advisory board. I attended a day long meeting with the department and consciously went in “listen and learn” mode, as it was my first meeting. I learned quite a bit that day that I hope to keep acting upon. Let me tell you how I got there in the first place.
Over the past three years, I’ve been a participant in many lunch meetings where folks have wondered how the local entrepreneurial community can help the department more. Intentions have always been good and these meetings have been “brainstorming” sessions for the most part. Usually the discussion has centered around one of more of the following:
- Wishing the department would grow enrollment and ultimately crank out more graduates into the local work force.
- Wishing those who are graduating would have a better grasp on modern development technologies, such as web scripting languages.
- Wondering how they could help elevate the national reputation of the school.
- Wondering how they could help the university and the department become more focused on entrepreneurship.
In the end, the last point always seemed to be one that felt like the most important one, as it can ultimately drive the rest. I think it’s a very fair statement to say that the Computer Science department at CU is not focused on encouraging students to follow an entrepreneurial path. Ultimately, this is what we as a community should be working to change. But we can’t do it by throwing our hands up in the air and exclaiming “they just don’t get it.” I’ve been guilty of this in the past.
Most of us have noticed the great work going on at CU that seems to emanate from Silicon Flatirons. There are now regular fantastic events and real direction and leadership coming from this group, among others on campus. A few months ago, Jason Mendelson introduced me to Tom Lookabaugh. As I understand it, Tom had grown a little sick of hearing about these “brainstorming” sessions that were going on across town, and the fact that none of them were actually including folks from the department who could obviously be additive to the discussion. So much to Tom’s credit, he began organizing and paying for a series of small, manageable dinners with attendees from the local entrepreneurial community and folks from the CS department.
I attended one of these dinners and had a fantastic time. Tom baited the entrepreneurs into enumerating the points mentioned at the beginning of this post. He had the CS department reacting to the observations. As it turns out, most of these observations were actually assumptions.
Those dinners continued, and in fact I went to another one last night. The first such dinner I went to was respectfully adversarial, but now the tone is much more cooperative. They’ve resulted in real and successful initiatives to bridge the community and the department, such as Startup2Student and a sponsored intern program for which we raised $10,000 from Oracle, Rally, Webroot, Brad Feld, and Microsoft BizSpark to allow CU CS students to experience entrepreneurship through TechStars this summer.
As with most things in the world, the devil is in the details. When you learn about the incentive structures that are in place at CU (and most schools) and you meet the people who live and breathe the issues daily, you realize that many (but not all) of them do in fact “get it.” There are certainly thought leaders in the department that are working to affect these very changes, and who fully understand their value. But they live in a world where things do not change overnight, and the issues are complicated.
When Computer Science and other departments in a university become an entrepreneurial engine, the results can be absolutely stunning. Just read this report from MIT if you really want to understand the scope of what can be accomplished when such a culture exists. You can be a part of making it happen here. It’s going to take a long time - probably ten to twenty years. But it will be very worthwhile if we can help bring a more entrepreneurial focus to CU.
How can you help? Keep talking about it. Keep brainstorming. But do it with the right folks and really get involved. Figure out a way to help expose CU students to entreprneurship through creative internships. Organize events targeted at bringing students and entrepreneurs together. Support on campus organizations like CUDiv and Silicon Flatirons. Reach out to me or Paul Jerde, Brad Bernthal, Kurt Smith, Dirk Grunwald, Gary Nutt, Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson, Tom Lookabaugh, and others. I guarantee you they “get it.” When the call comes, just stand up and help. It’s what we do so well as a community. Just remember, CU is a big part of that community. And it will be even bigger in the future if we focus on it.
Reduced need for subscriptions?
April 29, 2009
I just opened NetNewsWire (my feed reader) for the first time in about three weeks. I think that’s the longest I’ve gone without looking at it in many years. Even when I did open it, it was more out of habit than out of necessity. Why isn’t it calling me any more?
These days individual feeds are far less relevant to me. The ambient awareness (in my case, emanating from Twitter and Filtrbox) seems to have relegated all of my “subscriptions” to second class citizens in my world of information. It seems that most of what I’m reading in my feed reader is either a) something I’ve already seen through a newsfeed or other amplification or b) not that interesting. Twitter has already sussed out the really interesting stuff, and my persistent searches through Filtrbox make sure I’m not missing something that’s directly on point.
I think that’s becuase I’m subscribed to way too many feeds via RSS. I think I can now cut back to a few dozen, instead of 120. Sure, I’ve got friends whose blogs I want to be sure I’m keeping up with in full. And I’ve got certain feeds that are just pure streams of brilliance. I won’t unsubscribe from those. But I think the trend is clear - most of us have already read the really good stuff before we even look at our RSS feeds.
Take TechCrunch for example. Does anyone but the truly die hard geek really read every post any more? Why? There’s just no need. If it’s really that interesting, I’m hearing about it elsewhere. I’ll keep my TechCrunch subscription but I’ll continue to fly past almost every article, never reading more than the title. Occasionally, I’ll learn something. It’s become more like a magazine, and less like news.
I suppose the new way of thinking is to understand that there are really three types of information that we’re now consuming:
Alerts - By this I mean “important current events”. Essentially 100% of my alerts come from Twitter. Whatever the story, if I care about it, I almost always see it there first.
News - I think of data as all of the stuff that’s highly specific and relevant to my world, but that isn’t really time critical. Twitter supplies me with an awful lot of this too, and Filtrbox fills in the void where my social connections don’t create the approprate ampliciation automatically. The news is needed, but it’s not needed immediately.
Feeds - Now I think of RSS feeds or “subscriptions” more like I used to think of magazines. It’s the stuff to pass some time with. It lets me catch up with old friends, and provides me with some random and interesting stuff to ponder.
I’m left to wonder though - shouldn’t there be a new breed of RSS reader that understands that I’ve already seen the alerts and the news? I’m now spending a meaningful chunk of time in my feed reader just skipping over stuff I’ve already read. It would be neat if NetNewsWire could automatically hide any articles that I’ve already visited based on my browser history.
There is one more type of information that I get through Twitter. It’s the one I don’t want:
Noise - This is the price you pay for using Twitter. You can be sure that Twitter will deliver the news, but you have to be willing to parse the noise. Fortunately, this is very easy to do as long as you have a reasonable amount of discipline in how you consume Twitter.
No wonder that when you attend media conferences, you now hear old school journalists in the know saying that Twitter is the most important technology that affects their industry. Twitter effectively delivers both types of important information (alerts and news) if you use it correctly, at a very small price.
This has me thinking. I think we’re going to see a real decline in the subscriber counts of long tail publishers. After all, if you write something really great, I’ll find out about it anyway, right? Unless I’m really close to you and/or I really want to read every word you say, there’s just no need to subscribe anymore. The good stuff you write will find it’s way to me, and my social filters will block the garbage. Subscriptions will remain only where strong community allegiance and/or participation exists.
How has your information consumption pattern changed in the last year?
Colorado Venture Capital Trends
April 19, 2009
Here is the recent data representing total venture capital investment in Colorado.
It’s easy to panic looking at this chart. However, let’s look at this same data with the benefit of more historical data.
Looking at this chart, it’s easy to see that while we’re down, in the grand scheme of things the bottom we’re testing again is not unheard of.
Keep in mind that this is total venture investment, and is not specific to software/IT. Unfortunately, the publicly available data doesn’t get sliced that way. If anyone has access to the raw data, I’d love to get a copy and repeat this exercise with that subset of the data.
Feld’s “Mid-life” achievement award
April 16, 2009
Congrats to Brad for his “lifetime achievement award” that was presented to him earlier this week. Here’s a video made by a few of us that wanted to let him know how much he means to our community and to entrepreneurs in general.
Apologies to my mom and to Brad’s mom for calling him some stuff in the video. I only do it because he knows it’s a compliment.
