Month: November 2011
Turn of your lights, close your door, and full screen this five minute video. It’s an incredibly time lapse video of the journey of the International Space Station (from one of my favorite random sites – NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day) around Earth. It’ll put whatever you are working on in perspective.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Tomorrow I’m running the Philadelphia Marathon, which will be the sixth marathon I’ll do this year and the last one for 2011. This year I’ve done marathons in Cincinnati, Madison WI, Bismarck ND, Newport RI, and St. Louis. My times have ranged from 4:47:27 to 5:24:45. Overall I’m pleased with what I’ve done, especially since I didn’t chance my normal life tempo for them.
As I sit alone in my hotel room the day before the marathon, I feel really flat and tired. I know at my core that it’s been an incredibly intense year for me and while I had an amazing summer, the last three months have been as busy, frenetic, and full of travel as any other time I can remember. I’ve run three marathons since labor day so I know that is adding to the fatigue, but I also know that my long runs have given me lots of Planet Brad time as I wrote yesterday as part of the RunKeeper Fitness Freak blog series.
This is the first marathon that Amy hasn’t joined me for. She’s in Tucson (where I’m heading after this) and even though we both talked about her coming to join me, I encouraged her not to this time since it was a lot of travel in the middle of a trip for her. My partner Ryan and his wife Katherine are showing up later today (Katherine is running the marathon also) so I’ll have some friends around, but I’m suddenly regretting not having her here.
When I reflect on my week, I was extremely happy. A bunch of good things happened, I had a few awesome board meetings, some of the companies I’m involved in released / announced neat new stuff, and I got to spend a ton of time with students at CU Boulder (Monday), University of Michigan (Thursday), and MIT (Friday). So the only thing I can pin my flatness on is fatigue.
Having run 20 marathons, I’m not concerned about finishing the one tomorrow. I don’t really care about my time – I’d be happy with sub 5 hours, but it’ll be whatever it’s going to be. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day, the course looks interesting, and there are apparently over 30,000 people running the full and the half, so I’m just going to go with it.
Over the last few weeks, many people have asked me and encouraged me about my marathon running. While I describe myself as strongly intrinsically motivated, as I sit here I realize that the encouragement is helpful. So – to anyone who has been supportive, thank you! And, if you want to track me tomorrow, it starts at 7am EST (although I probably won’t cross the start line until at least 7:15am) and I’ll be broadcasting my progress on my RunKeeper account.
I spent yesterday at University of Michigan with my partner Jason Mendelson (he’s a two time grad – economics undergrad and then law school.) This was my first trip to Ann Arbor and I had a great time. It was fun to have Jason show me his old haunts, our new friend Wes took good care of us throughout the day, and we met a ton of interesting people including a bunch of entrepreneurs.
In one of our early meetings I heard a great line from one of the members of the UM Tech Transfer Mentor-in-Residence program.
The line was “College is like a sandbox if you are an entrepreneur. Falling down doesn’t hurt much.”
This made me think of a brilliant phrase from Alex White, the CEO of Next Big Sound, in his TechStars Demo Day pitch. I can’t remember where in the presentation it was but Jason reminded me that one of Alex’s great moments was when he said something like “We don’t need to raise much money because we are cheap to keep alive.”
Throughout the day we met with a bunch of college students – law school students, undergrads, MBAs, and a few PhD’s. All of them were really lit up about entrepreneurship, were trying lots of stuff, had tons of questions, and challenged us to give them our views and feedback on what Ann Arbor needed to do to create a great entrepreneurial community.
At the end of the day we met with all the members in TechArb. This is the student accelerator – I was blown away by what they were doing. At some point I said to Jason “why doesn’t CU Boulder have a thing like this.” He had an answer that I’m still pondering, but effectively reinforced the initiative that the students and entrepreneurial leadership around the UMich were taking. During this session, I kept thinking “college is like a sandbox – it doesn’t hurt much when you fall down.”
Days like today are incredibly energizing for me. The level of enthusiasm and optimism among the people we met with was phenomenal. Their willingness and interest in learning and trying new stuff was apparent. And their understanding that plenty of things wouldn’t work, but they wouldn’t learn if they didn’t try, was front and center.
To all the folks I met with today, thanks for making my first trip to Ann Arbor really fun and interesting. And, even though I couldn’t care less about college football, good luck against Nebraska this weekend.
Today’s “founder hint of the day” is to create an email address called founders@yourcompanyname.com and have it automatically forward to all the founders of your company.
I interact with a ton of companies every day. For the ones we have a direct investment in via Foundry Group, I know each of the founder’s names (although with 40 companies, at age 45 – almost 46, there are moments where I have to sit quietly and think hard to remember them.) For the TechStars companies, especially early in each cycle, I have trouble remembering everyone’s names until I’ve met them. And for many other companies I have an indirect investment in (via a VC fund I’m an investor in) or that I’m simply interacting with, I often can’t remember all of the founders names.
Ok – that was my own little justification. But your justification is that as a young company, you want anyone interested in you to be able to reach you. While info@yourcompanyname.com is theoretically useful, in my experience very few people actually use it because they have no idea where it actually goes. On the other hand, founders@yourcompanyname.com goes to the founders. Bingo.
We’ve been using this at TechStars for a number of years and it’s awesome. I’ve set up my own email groups for many other companies, but this morning while I was doing it for another one I realized that they should just do it. Sure – there’s a point at which the company is big enough where you probably don’t want to have this list go to all the founders, or there are founders that leave, or something else comes up, but when you are just getting started, be obsessed with all the communication coming your way and make it easy to get it.
founders@yourcompanyname.com rules.
I am so psyched about the launch of Sphero. I’ve got mine (one of the first 10 made) and the line is gearing up to start shipping them out soon. Today I saw some of the new things getting cooked up to add on to the product and they are super amazing fun.
Today Sphero was awarded one of Popsci Best of What’s New 2011. They are joined by our friends at Sifteo who also won one of Popsci’s Best of What’s New Award.
Sphero Specs and Sphero Apps are now announced.
Order yours now.
If you are a running enthusiast you’re going to love today’s Brad Feld’s Amazing Deal. Today’s deal takes the barefoot running phenomena to its logical conclusion. Invisible Shoes, created by two former lead designers from Nike and Reebok, are the closest you will ever get to feeling barefoot, even if you aren’t. They’re perfect for running or walking or yoga. Did I mention that you put them together yourself for the perfect fit? Awesomely loving the DIY world.
At $16 (normally up to $35) these are definitely worth a look.
There are two very disturbing bills making their way through Congress: Protect IP Act (PIPA – S.968) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA – H.R.3261). These bills are coated in rhetoric that I find disgusting since at their core they are online censorship bills. It’s incredible to me that Congress would take seriously anything that censors the Internet and the American public but in the last few weeks PIPA and SOPA have burst forth with incredibly momentum, largely being underwritten by large media companies and their lobbyists.
A number of organizations in support of free speech and a free and open Internet have recently come out in opposition to these bills. They include EFF, Free Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, Demand Progress, Fight For the Future, Participatory Politics Foundation, and Creative Commons who have organized American Censorship Day tomorrow (11/16/11).
If you run a website or have a blog, go to the American Censorship site to see how you can participate on 11/16/11.
In addition to being censorship bills, these are anti-entrepreneurship bills. They are a classic example of industry incumbents trying to use the law to stifle disruptive innovation, or at least innovation that they view as disruptive to their established business. To date, the Internet has been an incredible force for entrepreneurship and positive change throughout the world (did anyone notice what recently happened in Egypt?) It’s beyond comprehension why some people in Congress would want to slow this down in any way.
While you can try to understand the bills, this short video does a phenomenal job of summarizing their potential impact along with second order effects (intended or unintended).
PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
I’m furious about this, as are many of my friends, including Fred Wilson who wrote today about how these bills undermine The Architecture of the Internet. But we are aware, as are many others, that simply being mad doesn’t solve anything. Join us and speak out loudly against censorship – right now! If you have a blog or website, please take part in American Censorship Day – the instructions are on their website which – so far – hasn’t been censored.
A week ago, Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Etsy Gift Finder. In it he described a new Etsy feature that uses your Facebook friends info to suggest gifts for your friends. He picked out what he called “a clay Farmville sheep thingy” and bought it for me. As you can see it has already made friends with Yoda but appears a little scared of my ray gun.
It arrived today with a nice order slip #41270774 (I love order slip numbers and trying to figure out the algorithm for them). It’s cool and a great example of “social shopping.”
Thanks Fred. I’ll definitely use the Etsy Gift Finder for some of my random gifts since I don’t believe in holidays, but just send people gifts whenever I feel like it. And thanks to ElvenStarClayworks for making the clay Farmville sheep thingy!
We launched Startup Colorado last week as part of the Startup America Partnership. I’m co-chairing this effort with Phil Weiser (Dean of CU Boulder Law School) and Jan Horsfall (CEO of Gelazzi). Dave Mangum (Silicon Flatirons Research Fellow) is the Executive Director and the effort is being sponsored by Silicon Flatirons at CU Boulder.
We’ve got a bunch of great entrepreneurs from Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs involved at this point and are reaching out to entrepreneurs in Fort Collins to help us get things up and running there. We’re taking a 20 year view to this effort so rather than create some grand conceptual plans, we’ve chosen six initiatives to go after in the first year. We are building off of the incredible entrepreneurial community that has been created in Boulder and starting by exporting several of the concepts that we know work, while trying some new things in Boulder. The six initiatives are:
- Export the magic of the Boulder tech community to Fort Collins, Denver, and Colorado Springs by expanding New Tech Meetups, Open Coffee Clubs, and Community Office Hours to these cities.
- Create an Entrepreneurial Summer Camp in Boulder for talented college students from throughout Colorado. These students will be housed at CU Boulder and work as paid interns for Boulder startups.
- Support entrepreneurial education in the Front Range by developing a New Venture Challenge business competition for Boulder-area high schools with the goal of seeding the other Front Range cities with leaders to expand the competition throughout Colorado.
- Evaluate current barriers that entrepreneurs face, including an assessment of what best practices are in place at entrepreneurial communities around the US and world. We’ll start by measuring in detail what’s going on in Boulder and try to create a framework for any city.
- Engage larger companies in the entrepreneurial ecosystem through commitments to help entrepreneurs.
- Build the Startup Colorado website to be a thorough database for information and connections.
We are very aware that there are plenty of other cities in Colorado, especially on the western slope, and hope to include them in Startup Colorado in year two. We know that some of the ideas above won’t work and we intend to make mistakes, kill things off quickly, and keep iterating on new ideas. Our goal is to do stuff, rather than just talk about stuff.
If you are an entrepreneur and want to get involved in helping lead the Startup Colorado effort, email me.