Yesterday was a blast. The ten TechStars teams – which have been cranking away in Boulder for the past three months – all launched yesterday to a packed room of VCs, angel investors, mentors, and friends at the CU Boulder Atlas Institute. Don Dodge from Microsoft was in attendance and has a great summary of what each of the 10 companies do. TechCrunch has its own summary up along with links to several of the individual company reviews that it has done.
A healthy number of out of town investors were in attendance and their sentiments were largely echoed by the post from Kimbal Musk (CEO of Me.dium, owner of The Kitchen, board member at SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and a TechStars mentor) who stated simply that TechStars Rocks! Rather than describe each company, Kimbal came up with his own scoring system and scored each company based on his point of view, each which is listed on his blog. Todd Vernon (CEO of Lijit and a TechStars mentor) gave some feedback on a few of the companies as well. Tom Higley (CEO of iggli and a TechStars mentor) also weighed in. Anne Zelenka writing for GigaOM got excited about Search-To-Phone and Filtrbox.
26 entrepreneurs comprising 10 companies arrived in Boulder at the end of May. I’ve had the pleasure and honor of getting to work with them over the summer and watch them develop. I’m intensely proud of each of them for what they have accomplished in the last three months and am gleefully anticipating seeing what they can do in the future.
Mid-day entertainment included an Elvis Impersonator (thanks to Search-to-Phone – on the heals of their partnership with Gold Systems) and Zip Code Man (who is a mind blowing fixture of Boulder on the Pearl Street Mall.)
All of this came on the heals of TechStars winning the award for the Business category at the IQ Awards on Wednesday. My good friend David Cohen – the founder and ringleader of TechStars – deserves a nice, long quiet weekend with Jill.