Brad Feld

Month: March 2010

Gist just announced that they have acquired Learn that Name and incorporated it in the Gist iPhone app. 

There are a lot of fun connections here for me.  For starters, as many of you know, I’m an investor in Gist.  If you haven’t tried it – or haven’t played with it for a while – give it a shot.  The evolution of the product over the last six months has been remarkable as it gets better every two weeks (the Gist teams’ release cycle).

The iPhone app has been out for a while and is a killer.  I’ve seen the Android app – it’s equally cool and useful.  Each of them connect up to the Gist service that lives in the cloud and connects together all of your contact information, builds an implicit social network based on your email traffic and friends lists, and surfaces a variety of content (including news as well as real-time stuff) for your contacts.

Learn that Name was a Startup Weekend Seattle project from a few months ago.  Andrew Hyde, who is the community manager for TechStars, created Startup Weekend and I attended the first one in Boulder.  It has become an amazing worldwide phenomenon that is now run by Clint Nelsen and Marc Nager.  So – that’s linkage two for me.

The idea for Learn that Name came from Eric Koester, a lawyer in Cooley’s Seattle office.  Eric has been super helpful on the Startup Visa initiative as well, working on an ABA brief for us that will hopefully be officially approved soon.  Who said that lawyers weren’t a force for good in the world?  So – that’s linkage number three.

TechCrunch’s article gives a little more history on the deal and how the proceeds (yes – there are proceeds) are being split up among the team members that participated in the Startup Weekend project.  I know that at the very first Startup Weekend that I attended in Boulder there was a hope that some of these projects would spin out and either get commercialized or acquired.  I’m proud to be involved in one of the first ones to have this happen.  Oh – and Learn that Name when played within Gist’s iPhone app is a lot of fun.


I love the conferences we help sponsor (Glue and Defrag).  Eric Norlin is a genius at putting together a specialty technology conference.  He gets amazing people to attend, curates the content meticulously, isn’t afraid to try new things every year (and have some not work), and just keeps at it with single minded commitment.  He also totally gets why to do these things outside of the bay area – there’s a completely different tempo (and magic can happen) when people really commit two days of their life to a conference.

The 2010 Glue Conference is a few months away (5/26/10 and 5/27/10).  Instead of happening in Denver, Eric is doing Glue at the Omni Interlocken Resort on the outskirts of Boulder.  For a taste, here are some of the speakers:

  • Michael Barrett, CISO, PayPal
  • Professor Eric Brewer, creator of the CAP Theorem
  • Chris Hoff, Dir. of Cloud Solutions, Cisco
  • Ryan Sarver, Dir. of Platform, Twitter
  • Jonathan Ellis, Lead on the Cassandra project

Some of the sessions that are finalized include:

  • The Cassandra Database: Inside Twitter’s Choice
  • What’s up with OAuth/WRAP?
  • 5 Things I Hate about your API Terms of Service
  • The Apache Cloud Stack (Hadoop, HBase, Zookeeper, etc)
  • App PaaS vs. Enhanced Cloud System Infrastructure
  • Inside MongoDB: the internals of a NoSQL database
  • Understanding User-managed Access

Take a look at the fuller speaker list and agenda if you want, but beware that it moves around a lot.  If you register for Glue now you can get an additional 10% off the early bird price of $525 if you register by 4/2/10 and use the discount code “twit1” (full price at the door is $695).  As a special bonus, CloudCamp at Denver is happening the day before Glue (5/25/10).  CloudCamp is free, but only 98 tickets are left. 

Sign up for both of them now.  I’ll be there for the whole shebang, along with my partners at Foundry Group.  Plus, May in Boulder is just awesome.  And be on the lookout for an announcement soon about a third conference that you’ll have to really focus on (yeah – inside joke – but you’ll appreciate it.)


My long time friend Alan Shimel has been blogging up a storm on Network World (if you want to hear any amusing story, ask him about the first time he met me.)  When Alan started writing his column for Network World he asked me for introductions to a bunch of our portfolio companies that were using open source.  Alan is a tough critic and calls it like he sees it so while I knew there was no guarantee that he’d go easy on the companies, I knew that Alan would do an even handed job of highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.  I also know that everyone I invest in values any kind of feedback – both good and bad – and they work especially hard to delight their customers so any kind of feedback will make them better.

Earlier today, Alan wrote an article on Standing Cloud titled Seeding the Cloud with Open Source, Standing Cloud Makes It EasyOn Monday, Standing Cloud released their first version of their product (called the Trial Edition) which is a free version that lets you install and work with around 30 open source products on five different cloud service providers.  It’s the first step in a series of releases over the next two quarters that Standing Cloud has planned as they work create an environment where it is trivial to deploy and manage open source applications in the cloud.  Alan played around with Standing Cloud’s Trial Edition, totally understood what they are doing, and explained why the Trial Edition is interesting and where Standing Cloud is heading when they release their Community Edition at the end of April.

Alan’s also written several other articles about companies in our portfolio recently, including the open source work Gist has been doing with Twitter and a great review of the Pogoplug and how it uses open source.

I believe I’m one of the people that inspired Alan to start blogging a number of years ago.  Through his personal blog Ashimmy, the blog he writes for Network World titled Open Source Face and Fiction, and the blogging he does on security.exe (his company CISO Group’s blog), Alan is one of my must read technology bloggers.  And he’s often funny as hell, especially when he gets riled up.  Keep it up Alan!


As you may have noticed, I’ve got a new blog design, as do my partners Jason Mendelson, Ryan McIntyre, and Seth Levine.  Every year or so I get bored of my blog design and we go through a nice little upgrade.  Our good friends at Slice of Lime do all the design work and Ross (our IT guy) wrangles everything. 

We’re still changing some stuff, but if you have any suggestions or notice any bugs, please leave comments so I can tune things up.


Not long after I posted about Dave Jilk’s experience with the Pogoplug, he started using the phrase “Pogoplug Simple” to describe one of the goals of Standing Cloud.  The idea is that technology products should be so easy to set up and use that the experience is vaguely unsatisfying – you feel like you didn’t do anything.  Standing Cloud – a company we provided seed funding for last year – is launching publicly this week with its Trial Edition and I think they’ve managed to make cloud application management “Pogoplug Simple.”

The Trial Edition makes it easy to test drive any of about thirty different open source applications on any of several cloud server providers.  Register with your email address, log in, pick an application, click Install, and in about 30 seconds you’ll be up and running with a fully-functioning application accessible on the web.  You don’t need an Amazon EC2 or Rackspace account, as with “appliance” providers.  You don’t need to learn about “instances” and “images” and security groups.  You don’t need to know how to install and configure a web server or MySQL, or download, install and configure software code.  You don’t even need to configure the application itself – Standing Cloud plugs in default values for you.  And it’s free.

Like the Pogoplug, the Standing Cloud Trial Edition doesn’t do anything that a motivated IT professional couldn’t do another way.  It’s just a lot faster and easier.  But for someone who is *not* an IT professional, it removes some rather high barriers to both open source applications and cloud computing.

The Trial Edition is just the beginning for Standing Cloud.  Soon you will be able to host, manage, and scale applications with the same emphasis on simplicity.  Give it a try and give me feedback.


One of our internal mantras at TechStars is to “publish your data.”  We encourage every team to do this starting very early in their life.  To this day, I still get daily performance reports (I refer to them as TPS reports) from many of the companies that have gone through the program.

Last week, David Cohen published all of the historical TechStars data.  39 companies have gone through the program to date (30 through Boulder and 9 through Boston).  The data that David published covers a lot of ground, including status by individual company.  Some of the pertinent summary data follows:

  • In three years, about $16.5 million in seed-stage funding has been raised.
  • 27 of 39 (~70%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability.
  • TechStars companies currently employ 156 people.
  • Four of the first ten companies from the inaugural 2007 class have already achieved positive exits.
  • The most recent group of companies resulted in seven VC-led follow-on funding rounds and three additional angel-led rounds.

At the same time, Shawn Broderick, who runs the TechStars Boston program, just published the age demographics for the newest class of 10 companies that started the program at the beginning of March.  The numbers may surprise you as being higher than you might expect:

  • Youngest: 21
  • Oldest: 51
  • Average: 28.3
  • Median: 27

Our plan is to continue to update this data on a regular basis as we think it helps people better understand the TechStars program.  If there is additional data that you’d like to see, please feel free to suggest it.

Applications for the TechStars Boulder 2010 program are still open until March 22, 2010 at 11:59:59 PM Mountain Time.  If you haven’t applied but are thinking about it, apply now (it’ll only take a few minutes.)


If you happen to live in North Carolina or regularly attend the CED Venture Conference (the Southeast US’s longest running early stage company financing conference), come say hello to me on April 21st.  I’ll be spending the day at the conference and am speaking on a panel from 1:30pm to 2:45pm.  We don’t yet appear to have a panel title, but the other participants are Dana Callow (Boston Millennia Partners), Noel Fenton (Trinity Ventures), Todd Forrest (Hummer Winblad), and Patrick Kerins (NEA).  I don’t think I’ve ever been on a panel with any of them before (although I’m pretty certain I’ve fixed Dana Callow’s computer a few times back during my Feld Technologies days), so I’m looking forward to having some fun bwahahahahahahahaha.


Monday night, I’ll again be the co-host of Entrepreneurs Unplugged where we will be interviewing Tyler Tysdal, the Managing Director of Mantucket Capital.  We’ll start at 6pm at the CU Boulder ATLAS center.  Tyler has a neat background as both an entrepreneur and investor and I expect this will be another fun and enlightening session.  Tyler’s background follows:

Mr. Tysdal serves on the Board of Directors for the following Mantucket Capital portfolio companies: BrandJourney Capital and PRN Medical Services. His investment background includes venture capital, buyouts, restructurings, hedge funds, real estate, public equities, bonds and several entrepreneurial ventures. Prior to joining Mantucket Capital, Mr. Tysdal founded a private equity firm primarily focused on healthcare, media & entertainment and secondarily on real estate and construction services. Mr. Tysdal is also the founder of Sports Shares, a fractional luxury suite club. He began his career in investment banking with Alex. Brown & Sons, focused on corporate finance and mergers & acquisitions. Mr. Tysdal graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSBA in Finance from Georgetown University

Register and come join us.


I know I owe everyone a follow up to my post from last week titled The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents.  To the many of you out there that emailed me in response, thanks for all of the thought, ideas, suggestions, and offers of help.  More on that soon.

In the mean time, I noticed today that Dow Jones is running a seminar titled Negotiating an Angel Deal: What Angels, Entrepreneurs & VCs Need to KnowMy partner Jason Mendelson is one of the panelists, along with several other notable lawyers and angel investors.  If you are interested in this particular topic, I expect there will be a “robust” discussion as I know that the opinions between a few of the folks on the panel vary pretty widely.  If you are interested, sign up here.