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New Tech Meetup Sept 2 recap

September 2, 2008

Ah yes, I remember blogging. Now that TechStars is over, I’m planning to really be back at it. I always go into a lull in the summer. Thanks for staying with me. ;-)

So here’s my live blogging of the New Tech Meetup that happened tonight in Boulder. I’d say about 200 were in attendance tonight, down from around 300 last month. Robert did something great this month - for each company that presented there was a slide up on the side of the main screen showing the name of the company, url, what the company does, and what help it wants from the audience. Super helpful.

First there were some announcements.

Printfection announced $10,000 reward for developers they hire.

Ignite Denver is happening next week.

Then several companies did 5 minute presentations.

Fling It Girl showed off their “digg for womens products”. Looks like a straight up (although pink) digg clone targeted at stuff women would like. They reported that in a month they figured out that nobody wanted to submit products to the site (lots of lurkers/users, but very few content creators - shocking!), but instead the community wanted content to be pre-populated and then use the social ranking features. I like this change - they find cool stuff and populate the system, and then the community elevates the content. It was awesome that when asked for financial projections, they said “we have none - we expect to grow to infinity and beyond.”  Honesty and a no bullshit approach is often so refreshing.

Sports Data Hub is a Denver based startup for football data analysis for gamblers, fantasty football players, and football fans. ESPN has called it a “very impressive product.” They plan to add more sports over time and they want to be come “the place to go” for detailed sports data. They showed an awesome analytical example of passing completion percentage organized by referee. There is one referee who has a noticeably higher rate of calling completed passes when he works. They dove into why and they showed a clear trend of this referee coming in and out of the game and the passing percentage changing literally right along with his entry and exit. They even looked at how specific quarterbacks are affected. They showed how there was obviously a correlation using some neat charting. Really cool example - although I can’t imagine what the cause is. Perhaps it’s simply a coincidence inside a sea of data. If you live and breathe sports, I can see how this would be very addicting for the data lovers.

Next up was App Venture which makes software that makes software. They showed off “Foundations” - a great looking tool that allows you to model your data, properties, etc. The tool generates C# code for .NET. There is a ton of competition in this space ranging from Yahoo Pipes to Popfly to IronSpeed. Colorado’s own Hypersites reminds me of this in some ways. I was involved in that company and as one astute audience member pointed out, these things often drift into consulting driven businesses because of the expertise required to get up to speed on the tools. I’ve found these sorts of tools to be fantastic for generating simple applications, but they generally suck at helping you with the actual business logic. They’re great to help set up frameworks and get simple apps rolling. This looks like a product that could be extremely useful in certain situations - it appears to be very professionally done and well thought out. I like that it’s an open and extensible (non-proprietary code generation) - that differentiates it from some of the stuff I’ve seen out here. The product just launched about a month ago and I think they said it sells for around $700.

Then we heard from Navaraga. Luckily, they’re changing the name to Kamune.com (sounds like “com-myoon”) soon so you don’t have to learn how to pronounce Navaraga. The company is hoping to solve the problem that “collaborating on email is not working.” Kamune will be an online collaboration service, similar to an eRoom. It appears to try to overlay a geographic taxonomy on top of your data. The demo was pretty weak - I think mostly because they’re trying to introduce an entirely new paradigm and collaborative operating system and didn’t give much thought in advance of how to effectively introduce this in 5 minutes. The presenter broke the cardinal sin which was that he “told” more than he “showed”. I’m interested to see more - so I’ll be watching the site as this evolves to see if the benefits they espouse begin to surface. My initial concern is that they’re fundamentally trying to change user behaviors and I wasn’t able to see much in terms of “bridge” technologies to make existing workflows (emails, etc) to the new system. The audience was (correctly in my view) providing lots of feedback that their messaging around “reducing email” was confusing and not really a good way to help people understand the product. Sure - it can reduce email, but explaining it in an elevator pitch as email reduction really gets in the way of understanding what this complex piece of software really does. Hopefully they heard that. I’d like to see this company come back to the meetup with a more thought out approach to the demo for this forum. It’s going to be key for them to be able to explain this product in 60 seconds. It can be done.

Then we heard from Orchestr8 which can be used to create widgets from any web site. I covered this in January of 2007, and the product is fundamentally the same but the user experience has come a long way. This tool suprasses what their nearest competitor Dapper can do, as far as I can tell. However, Orchestr8’s messaging and presentation don’t see as clean as Dapper, perhaps because the technology goes deeper and is more complex. Orchestr8 is a really handy way to mash up web content and reuse it (again, ala Yahoo Pipes). The team here is obviously really talented and the technology is very deep - if you’re interested widgetization of content, this one is worth checking out. The company attempting to raise a multi-million dollar Series A around now, as a follow on to a past investment of $500k from angel investors.

All in all this was a high quality meetup this month. Some cool technologies, a few laughs, some food, and a bunch of geeks. What more could you ask for?

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Interview with Mark Solon on VCIR Fall

August 26, 2008

The following is an interview with Mark Solon of Highway 12 Ventures regarding VCIR Fall, which takes place Sept 9-11 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Q. Mark, for those who don’t know you, can you introduce yourself?

I’m the founder and managing partner of Highway 12 Ventures in Boise. We’re an early-stage venture firm focused on investing in high-growth companies in the fasting growing region in the country, the mountain west. I also used to have a pretty decent curveball until ‘cuff surgery a few years ago. All I’ve got left now is a decent wrist shot in our local ice hockey beer league…

Q. What’s your relationship with VCIR?

I’ve been attending VCIR since we started Highway 12 in 2001. From my perspective, VCIR in Beaver Creek each February is the premier event in the region each year. If you’re involved in any start-up activity in this region, it’s the “must attend” event of the year.

Q. VCIR is always a great annual event. Why was a Fall event set up for the first time this year?

After attending and participating in too many small regional venture events from 2000-2006 without the needed critical mass for success, I knew the region needed a flagship event; you know, a rising tide and all that. In 2006, I approached some of my colleagues who were members of the board of the Colorado Venture Capital Association to talk to them about the idea of expanding their footprint to become a regional association and to my pleasant surprise, they had already begun discussions about the idea. After the CVCA expanded to become the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association (RMVCA) in ‘06, I was asked to join that board and pleaded my case to expand VCIR to twice a year. I suggested keeping Venture in the Rockies in Beaver Creek each year given the national prestige that event had attained, but proposed adding a second VCIR event which would rotate around the rest of the region, highlighting all the other great startups in those states. For instance, each year in Idaho, we have a small handful of companies that are “venture-ready.” The problem is, we just don’t have enough of them to support a meaningful annual event on our own which would draw venture investors from outside the region. Other States like Montana, Utah and New Mexico were faced with the same challenge. Anyway, the board embraced the idea. Of course, it was like waking a sleeping baby; “you wake it, you take it.” Hence, I’m chairing the first VCIR Fall and we’re doing it in my home state of Idaho.

Q. How will the fall event be different?

We thought it was important to differentiate the two events somewhat. Venture Capital in the Rockies has always had 20-25 companies presenting with multiple tracks. Knowing that it’s going to take some time for VCIR Fall to attain the same notoriety as Venture in the Rockies, we wanted to create a more intimate feel with no tracks and everyone in the same room. Also, we’ve reduced the number of companies presenting and increased the content. We’ve got a handful a world renowned speakers. For instance, Bob Maynard – chief investment officer of PERSI will be talking about the private equity markets. Bob manages Idaho’s $11B pension and was recently named public pension manager of the year. Our keynote speaker is Wade Davis, a cultural anthropologist and explorer-in-residence at national geographic who will teach us about the effects of technology proliferation on vanishing cultures. When I saw him earlier this year, his presentation left the audience awestruck. Lastly, we’ve got senior managers from HP, Google, Yahoo and Amazon who will be speaking individually and on a panel together. However, the biggest difference will probably be the wardrobes. The overwhelming majority of folks registered have signed up for various activities the day after the conference. We expect to see more golf, mountain biking and fly-fishing outfits at the fall conference. Honestly, there may not be a more beautiful place in the world than Sun Valley, Idaho in September.

Q. Will there be two events annually going forward or is this an experiment?

The RMVCA is committed to putting on two events a year. The plan is to keep the hugely successful winter event in Beaver Creek each February and rotate the fall event throughout the region. We’ve already selected Park City, Utah for VCIR Fall ‘09 and we’re looking at places like Big Sky-Montana, Jackson Hole-Wyoming and Taos – New Mexico for future events. Lets face it, folks that have succeeded in places like Silicon Valley and Boston are flocking to this region because it’s no longer just the greatest place to live in the world, now it’s becoming the greatest place to start a company. The RMVCA firmly believes that we’re at the beginning of a wave of innovation in the region that’s going to create tremendous value for investors over the next few decades.

Q. Can you explain the transformation that VCIR has gone through from a Colorado-focused event to more of a regionally focused event?

We believe that VCIR Fall is going to showcase the rest of the region much like Venture in the Rockies did for Colorado. It’s evident to me that just expanding the CVCA to the RMVCA is already fostering a more collaborative working relationship among the regional VC’s. I know that VCIR Fall will do the same for mountain west by bringing entrepreneurs, service providers and investors together from throughout region.

Q. How is participation from out of state VCs looking?

We’re thrilled with the number of investors who have registered from outside the rockies. We’ve got VC’s registered from Boston, Silicon Valley, New York, Texas, the mid-atlantic states, Seattle, and more.

Q. What are you most looking forward to at VCIR Fall?

Personally, I love that VCIR gets us all out from behind our screens for a few days and talking about our businesses and our lives in a cool and interesting setting. The technology business seems to have less face-to-face interaction every year and I always see more business actually getting done in the weeks following an event like this. The energy from VCIR always recharges my batteries and reminds me how lucky we are to do what we do and be doing it in the mountain west.

Learn more and register to attend VCIR Fall from Sept 9-11 in Sun Valley, Idaho here. Thanks Mark!

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups, Venture Capital |  

AOL buys Socialthing

August 14, 2008

AOL has acquired Socialthing, a TechStars company from 2007 which built a popular digital life manager.

TechCrunch, Somewhat Frank, and Mashable all have coverage of the news, as does the TechStars blog in case you want more details.

Disclosure: Through TechStars, I was a small investor in Socialthing.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Lijit raises an additional $7.1M

August 12, 2008

Lijit continues to rock as it is now reporting that is has raised an additional $7.1M in venture funding from The Foundry Group, Boulder Ventures, and High Country Venture. This brings Lijit’s total funding to around $11M (it raised angel money and 3.3M previously) . Lijit will use the money to to launch their search powered ad network.

To me, Lijit is a great example of a company that “got the right people on the bus” and then “listened”. It started life as OutFoxed, which I covered here in mid-2006. The company quickly morphed the product from a plug-in which enhanced search results with social context to one which helped publishers to become the focal point of search, allowing them to expose a search box (like you see on ColoradoStartups.com) which leveraged the trusted network of the individual publisher to return more relevant results to the searcher.

Over time, Lijit developed the idea of “re-search”, which allowed publishers to intelligently include lijit-based search results as readers moved across enabled sites and pages. Here’s an example of what this functionality looks like:

As you can see, anyone who has searched for “colorado startups outfoxed” using Lijit and was led to my content gets to automagically see other content that is in my trusted network that might be related. The magic of this is that it tends to increase page views for me and those that I choose to include in my network.

More page views tend to be good for publishers, especially when more capability for the reader is being provided. Dave Taylor is a good example - he’s reporting that the re-search functionality on his popular AskDaveTaylor site is generating about 150,000 extra impressions each day.

The next challenge for Lijit is to build out the ad network which will allow targeted ads to be placed in these search results. This will allow publishers to monetize these extra impressions simply and effectively.

Congrats to Todd, Micah, Tara and the gang at Lijit on this next step in their evolution. It’s great to see VC money continuing to be deployed widely here in Boulder.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups, Venture Capital |  

Happy birthday - Boulder New Tech Meetup turns 2.0

August 9, 2008

Larry Nelson of W3W3 sent me some great photos of the New Tech Meetup this past Tuesday. The meetup is now two years old.

How time flies. I remember going to the first meetup and presenting EarFeeder at the second one ever. Me.dium hosted these early meetups in their office and somewhere between 15 and 30 people would attend. The meetup quickly outgrew that office and eventually moved to CU. The other night I’d conservatively guess that about 300 people were in the room. I was curious so I checked: Boulder’s New Tech Meetup is now the fifth largest of its kind in the country!

Thanks to Robert Reich of Me.dium and sponsors such as Silicon Flatirons, ViaWest, and W3W3 for making this happen. Our new tech meetup is just another great thing happen for the startup scene here in Boulder. If you haven’t been to a new tech meetup yet, or haven’t been in a while, I’d encourage you to join us for the next meetup on September 2nd.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

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 |  

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