Month: January 2012
My mom and dad have a wonderful gift coming to them this week. Yesterday evening I read The Beautiful Bronx 1920-1950 and The Bronx: It Was Only Yesterday, 1935-1965. Well – I mostly looked at the pictures and read the descriptions of the pictures, as that was the meat of each book, but the intro sections were also very cool.
My parents were each born in the Bronx and lived there until they moved to Blytheville, Arkansas in 1965 for a year. Growing up, my brother Daniel and I visited the Bronx periodically, as that’s where our grandparents lived (until my dad’s parents moved to Ft. Lauderdale) and we often heard tales of their time growing up in the Bronx.
I discovered these books a few weeks ago at my close friend Len Fassler’s house. Len is key mentor of mine who has had a profound influence on me both personally and professionally. I was scanning his bookshelves during a break in the evening and noticed these two books. He noticed me noticing them and told me to borrow them. Instead, I emailed myself their names and bought them later that night on Amazon.
They are beautiful books about a different time in America. The Bronx was growing fast during the time period and was a magical place to live. It was close enough to Manhattan to get to use the New York, NY mailing address, yet far enough away to be its own place. It has huge ethnic diversity that was integrated in many ways, but also organized around the notion of neighborhoods. I recognized some of the street names, neighborhoods, and buildings from conversations with my parents and the few times that I’ve been through the Bronx in recent years. But mostly I just tried to transport myself back to a different time in our country.
I’ve encouraged my dad to write more about his childhood in the Bronx on his blog. He’s written a few, like Punch Ball In Claremont Park, The Bronx (NY) 1945-1953, Jake the Pickle Man, Summer of ’47, and StrikeOuts: A New York City Street Game. But he’s got a ton more in him so I hope these books inspire him.
Mom / Dad – the books are in the mail – you should have them this week!
One of the companies I’m an investor in has a gong in the office. They bang it every time they sign up a new customer. They also have a virtual gong – an email that goes out to the entire company and board that starts with GONG: (Client Name). The salesperson who closed the deal gets to send the email out and write whatever he or she wants. Everyone in the company then piles on with Reply-All commentary.
It’s just awesome. I know many companies that ring bells or make some kind of other noise in the office when they close a sale. But it’s not very noisy if you have multiple offices, people on the road, or board members who don’t work out of your office.
Now, if you have a self-serve, high velocity model you may not want an email going out with every signup. So how about a daily gong at the end of the day that the system automatically emails out. I’ve written about email robots in the past – many of the companies I’m an investor in have an email robot that sends out the sales summary for the day at 12:01am the following day. The formats vary, but they are all short and consumable by all. No fancy graphs. No complicated analysis. Just raw data every day that informs everyone in the company how many new customers we got yesterday.
So ring that gong loudly. Take a page from my friends’ playbook and get that email out every time a new deal closes.
Bwahahahaha – I know what it is, but I can’t tell you. But you can now play a text adventure game, created by Andrew Plotkin, which will give you hints. Remember Adventure?
You really shouldn’t have wandered away from your tour guide. The gleam of glass in a deserted room caught your eye for just a moment… but with that mob of chattering tourists out of sight, the MakerBot facility doesn’t seem quite as friendly as it did a moment ago.
Servos hiss behind you — but that’s not the guidebot’s cheery mask looming out of the shadows. It’s a security bot! You’re in trouble now. You duck into the laboratory. Or is it a showroom? Test chamber? You pull the door shut; hopefully you can hide out until the robot has passed.
No maze of twisty little passages here. Just a big scary security robot. I just played it for a while – it’s awesomely fun. I expect Seth Levine and Paul Kedrosky will get sucked in this afternoon and it’ll cause Paul to need to buy a MakerBot to print out the pieces in game.
I’ll see you at CES if you are going to be there. And keep your eyes on the MakerBot site for some cool new things.
I’ve been a big supporter of the Startup America Partnership since its inception at the beginning of last year. The organization is now a year old and is starting to really have some impact. I’m psyched about the groundwork they’ve laid down and their plans for 2012.
One of the initiatives I’ve been very involved in is Startup Colorado which we launched a few months ago. I also gave my first Startup America webinar today to a bunch of entrepreneurs who are members of Startup America Partnership about fundraising. And there’s a lot more coming to entrepreneurs who are members of the Startup America Partnership.
So – sign up now. If you are a Colorado-based company, this will automatically get you into the Startup Colorado infrastructure as well at the Startup America Partnership. If you are in any other state, you’ll be part of the whole Startup America Partnership as well as your state when they launch (if they haven’t already).
My simple appeal to all entrepreneurs in Colorado – please sign up. There is no cost to you. There are tons of benefits. It helps us more efficiently connect with you and engage you in the Colorado startup community and we want to show the world how powerful the startup community is in Colorado. Plus, I’m now in a heated match for the number of startups – competing with David Cohen and the other TechStars Managing Directors (David Tisch, Katie Rae, Andy Sack, Nicole Glaros, and Jason Seats.) You wouldn’t want them to show me up, now would you.
Sign up. And help everyone in America win as we create more and more entrepreneurial companies together.
For a number of years, my partner Jason Mendelson has been teaching an extremely popular course at CU Boulder Law School with Brad Bernthal titled Venture Capital – A 360 Degree Perspective. While it’s a course taught in the law school, it’s (not surprisingly) become popular with the MBA students at CU Boulder.
Brad Bernthal, Phil Weiser (the Dean of the CU Law School), and I have been talking about a new course to complement VC 360 called Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Public Policy. We’ve decided to take a crack at a cross-campus course (law, engineering, and business) that focused on contemporary issues around entrepreneurship, would be a great introduction to any student who wants to immerse herself in entrepreneurship, and would enable us to create some unique content around this topic.
We envision a two hour a week course (over seven sessions) that has a heavy reading, class participation, and writing component. Our goal will be to put this up on the web as well to provide content (and potentially interaction) to a much wider community.
Following is a first draft of a syllabus. I’m looking for two types of feedback: (1) comments on the syllabus and (2) suggestions for web services to use to package this content up for broader distribution.
This one credit course, available to first year law students in their second semester as well as a select number of graduate students in the Business School students and School of Engineering, will explore a set of cutting edge questions around entrepreneurship. Students in the class will be required to write a ten page paper as well as participate actively in the course (including on a class blog). Since class participation is a core part of the course (counting for 20% of the grade, with the other 80% based on the paper), any missed class must be made up by writing a 1 page reaction paper.
1. Being an Entrepreneur. Reading: The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Hoffman, Casnocha). Five Minds for the Future (Gardner).
2. Leadership and What Makes a Great Founding Team. Reading: Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup: (Cohen, Feld). Leadership Lessons From the Shackleton Expedition (Koehn).
3. Building and Scaling A Business. Reading: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Ries).
4. Entrepreneurial Communities. Reading: Startup Communities: Creating A Great Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your City (Feld). Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity 1996 – 2010.
5. Financing Entrepreneurial Companies. Reading: Venture Deals: How To Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer (Mendelson, Feld). Improving Access to Capital for High-Growth Companies (Department of Commerce – National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
6. Entrepreneurial Leadership in Government. Reading: Alfred Kahn As A Case Study of A Political Entrepreneur (Weiser). Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (Senor and Singer).
7. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy: Reading: Accelerating Energy Innovation: Insights from Multiple Sectors (Henderson, Newell).
In the “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me” category, “a Missouri federal judge ruled the FBI did not need a warrant to secretly attach a GPS monitoring device to a suspect’s car to track his public movements for two months.”
I had to read that sentence twice. I simply didn’t believe it. Fortunately this one will go to the Supreme Court. The punch line from Justice Breyer is right on the money: “If you win this case, there is nothing to prevent the police or government from monitoring 24 hours a day every citizen of the United States.”
GPS tracking. Hey – did you know that you can already track me through my cell phone without my permission? How about a little tag sewn into all clothing that uniquely identifies me. Or maybe something injected under my skin. Giving the government the right to do it without probable cause or any process, or suggesting that someone doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy, just feels evil to me.
The depth of the ethics of these issues are going to be significant over the next decade. It will be trivial for any of us to be tracked all the time without our knowledge. Don’t want a device – how about image recognition view the web of surveillance cameras everywhere.
I don’t have any answer for this, but I have a lot of questions and ideas. And I’m glad that I live in the US where presumably my civil liberties, privacy, and freedom of speech are sacred. I know there are plenty of people in the US that don’t agree with this, or believe that the government should have more control around this to “keep out or find the bad guys.”
Philosophically this is a hard and complex discussion and has been since the creation of the United States of America. The difference, right now, is that technology is about to take another step function leap that no one is ready for, or is thinking about, or even understands, that will create an entirely new set of dynamics in our society. Our government, especially leaders in Congress, the White House, and the Judicial System need to get much smarter – fast – about how this works. SOPA / PIPA is an example of terrible legislation that runs the risk of massively impacting innovation and individual freedom of speech. But it’s just a start – there is a lot more coming.
Denying that there is going to be a dramatic shift in how humans and computers interact is insane. Trying to hold on to incumbent business models and stifle innovation through legislation is dumb. Trying to create complex laws to contain and manage the evolution of technology, especially when it transfers power from innovators to non-innovators, or from the rights of private citizens to the government, is a mistake and will fail long term. Trying to repress free speech of any sort is wrong and won’t be sustainable.
I live in a world where you can’t anticipate or control change. It’s coming – and fast. Let’s embrace it and use it for good, not resist is and try to surpress it in the name of “protecting ourself from bad actors.” I pledge to do my best to always be thoughtful about it and be a force for good in the world. But please, don’t deny the inevitable – embrace it, and build off of it. It’s what makes America amazing and extremely durable long term.
I’ve been intrigued with robots since I was a little kid. When I was at MIT in the 1980’s, there was a huge movement around the future of robotics. A few of my friends, most notably Colin Angle, went on to do something and co-founded iRobot which he still runs 25 years later. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to robots or robotics in the 1990’s as I got caught up in the Internet, but started thinking about them again about five years ago. Over the past few years, as part of our human computer interaction theme, we’ve invested in several companies doing “robotics related stuff” including MakerBot (3D Printers) and Orbotix (a robotic ball controlled by a smartphone). I’ve also looked at lots of robot-related companies and thought hard about the notion that the machines have already taken over and are just waiting patiently for us to catch up.
Recently I met with Nikolaus Correll, an assistant professor at CU Boulder in the Computer Science department. Nikolaus does research on multi-robot systems and has a bunch of great commercial ideas about robotics. As we were talking, we started discussing other people in Boulder who were working on robotics related stuff. It turns out to be a long list and Nikolaus asked “why don’t people talk more about all the robotics stuff going on in Boulder?” I had no clue so I said “let’s start a movement – titled Boulder is for Robots. Let’s get anyone doing robotics related stuff together and create some entrepreneurial critical mass around this, just like we have for the software / Internet community.”
We agreed that Boulder Is For Robots is a great call to action and are having our first Boulder Is For Robots Meetup on February 7th from 5pm – 10pm. Bring your robots – I’ll supply pizza and beer. You have to sign up in the Boulder Is For Robots Meetup group to find out the location.
In the mean time, following are some thoughts on the robot-related stuff going on in Boulder from Nikolaus. If you are working on something interesting, please add to the list.
Why “Boulder is for Robots” can be tied to a single observation: when I was working as a Post-Doc at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, almost everything we ordered to build robots came from somewhere less than an hour from Boulder. Why is this important? Let’s consider how Steve Wozniak developed the Apple computer, which revolutionized the computer industry from a garage. Did he really create a computer from scratch, transistor by transistor? Or did he emerge from hundreds of tinkerers that relied on a large community that provided mail-order electronic kits, do-it-your-self magazines, inspirational people, and hundreds of man years of university research? The bay area was indeed the place to be at the time with the Homebrew Computer Club and marketing genius Steve Jobs who convinced Wozniak to sell his design, laying the foundation for Apple. Building robots is much more complex than building computers, however: robots consist not only of computers, but also of sensors and mechanisms that need to be invented, re-combined, and modified to create a compelling product. I therefore believe that being part of a community is even more important for developing successful robot companies and having all the tools, know-how, and manpower close by provides a unique competitive advantage.
Boulder provides this infrastructure: For example, Sparkfun enables tens of thousands of amateurs and researchers to create electronic and mechatronic artifacts. They do that not only by retailing hard-to-acquire electronic components and innovative pre-fabbed modules that drastically increase the productivity of hobbyists, entrepreneurs and researchers across the nation, but they also provide free access to a wealth of educational resources that allow amateurs to mimic industrial processes, often just using kitchen equipment. Similarly, Acroname and RoadNarrow Robotics retails sensors and ready-made devices for building state-of-the-art robots, including laser scanners, motor drivers, and digital servos. All three companies actively develop hardware and software that make the integration of ever more complex mechatronic products possible in garages. They also contribute to a pool of “Can-Do” people that spin off companies.
Boulder turns out to be also a hub for manufacturing: close-by Aurora is home to one of the best deals in PCB Manufacturing ($33/each) in the country (Advanced Circuits) and the first – and still only – assembly service in the nation (AAPCB) that assembles single boards for less than $50.
While developers across the nation benefit from these Boulder-area companies, this unique ecosystem of tinkerers, leading manufacturing techniques, and suppliers create a vivid community that amplifies innovation in the Boulder area and already has attracted a series of successful robotics start-ups: For example, Modrobotics, a CMU spin-off, makes transformative robotic construction kits that could be the next “Lego”. Orbotix co-founded by a duo of young engineers from CSU and UNC that became part of the Boulder TechStars 2010 class and subsequently raised over $6m of venture money for their new gaming robot, Sphero. OccamRobotics, founded by a serial entrepreneur who came to Boulder from the bay area, is working on low-cost, autonomous pallet trucks that build up on recent breakthroughs in robotic algorithms, availability of open-source tools, and novel sensors.
Each these companies have in common that their founders identified Boulder as the place that will make them most successful – often moving here from other hot-spots for high-tech entrepreneurship and engineering. These start-ups are complemented by mechatronic giants such as Ball Aerospace, close-by Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin; small and medium-sized companies that develop robotic equipment for satellites and defense organizations; by a myriad of self-financed tinkerers that develop everything from robotic insects to robotic wheel-chairs in their living rooms and next-generation agriculture systems at Boulder’s Hacker-space Solid State Depot; and of course, the University of Colorado of which many engineering programs are among the top of the nation and the world, and which has a strong research program in unmanned aerial systems.
My lab is working on our agriculture system’s most pressing challenges, robots that can assemble large-scale telescope dishes in space to see into remote galaxies, understanding how intelligence can emerge from large-scale distributed, individually simple components, and constructing robotic facades that help save us power. These efforts are complemented by hands-on classes such as Robotics, Advanced Robotics, Things that Think, or Real-time embedded systems, and others, to shape a new generation of engineers who think of computers as devices that cannot only compute, but sense and literally change the world.
Why now? Robotics has been an industry since the 1960’s when George Devol’s Unimate was sold to manipulate steel plates in a GM plant. Indeed, robots have revolutionized manufacturing, but still have not delivered on early claims of the field. Robot stunts delivered by the Unimate on the 1961 “Tonight” show, still remain a major challenge for artificial intelligence 50 years later: opening a can of beer, pouring it, or directing an orchestra. These commercially successful robots, which led to the raise of Japan to a major industrial power in the 1980’s, were not autonomous, but simply execute pre-calculated paths. This trend is finally changing right now, documented by companies such as iRobot, Husqvarna and KIVA systems who successfully market autonomous robotic products, and is mainly driven by exponential developments in computing (“Moore’s Law”), cell phones and cars – both industries who integrate computing and sensors at high density.
“Boulder is for Robots” is not only an observation, but also an imperative to bring entrepreneurs, tinkerers, and capital together to bring the next big robotic idea to life in Boulder by exchanging know-how, man-power, and tools, and combining them into great new products. In case you already knew that “Boulder is for Robots”, please comment on this post and share what you do!
Over the past decade, I’ve developed a very close friendship and work collaboration with Phil Weiser. Phil is now the Dean of the CU Law School. Prior to this he spent several years in the Obama Administration, most recently as the Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation to the National Economic Council Director. We first met when Phil was running Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, an organization he founded at CU Boulder.
Phil is an incredible thinker, totally understands entrepreneurship, is on a quest to level up law school education, and is my guide to all things politics. Simply put, he’s awesome.
He’s also hiring two positions – both of which report to him. If you are interested in these areas, I strongly encourage you to apply as Phil is a remarkable person to work with, and for.
Director of Communications and Public Relations: responsible for improving and expanding written and electronic communication within the Law School and for developing/ maintaining a public-relations program for the Law School. The Director will further serve to develop and implement an aggressive strategy to use traditional and innovative media work with the External Affairs team inorder to communicate the Law School’s research, teaching, and service excellence to external audiences.
Director of Information Technology: oversees all technology-related responsibilities and efforts for the University of Colorado Law School. In so doing, the Director will evaluate and support a range of strategies for using technology more effectively to advance the mission of the Law School and the effectiveness of its departments.
As a bonus, I expect you’ll get more time with me since I spend a chunk of mine with whatever Phil wants me to do.
In the fall of 2010 Mahendra Ramsinghani reached out to me by email about a new book he was working on called The Business of Venture Capital: Insights from Leading Practitioners on the Art of Raising a Fund, Deal Structuring, Value Creation, and Exit Strategies. He asked for two things: (1) some of my time for him to interview me and (2) intros to other VCs and LPs. I made a pile of intros and didn’t think much more of it.
A few months later Mahendra send me and my partner Seth Levine an early draft of the book. We each gave him a bunch of feedback. I was deep into writing Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and VC with one of my other partners – Jason Mendelson – and it was neat to see how Mahendra’s book complimented ours. I also appreciated how much work a book like this was and tried to give substantive feedback.
In June 2011 Mahendra sent me and Seth a final draft of the book. I read through it and thought it was really good. When the book came out in October Mahendra sent us final copies. I turned the pages, smiled, and then went about my business.
I finally met Mahendra in Ann Arbor when Jason and I spent the day there in November, prompting my post College Is Like A Sandbox. Manendra and I spent some time talking about an idea he had for a new book and I agreed to help him with it (more on that later this week in another post.) In the mean time when I got home I dug up The Business of Venture Capital, put in on the top of my infinite pile of books to read, and figured I’d get to it soon enough.
If you are interested in becoming a VC, are a junior VC, an associate, a principal, or even a partner who is relatively inexperienced, this book is aimed directly at you. If you are an angel investor working with VCs, this book is for you. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to know a lot more about venture capital, this book is for you. It’s thorough, covers all aspects of the venture capital business, has many interviews and pithy quotes and thoughts from a wide range of experienced VCs who were interviewed by Mahendra, and is incredibly readable for a 350 page book about “venture capital.”
My review of it is really simple: “I wish I had this book in 1994 when I made my first angel investment, and then again in 1996 when I made my first VC investment. Wow – it would have saved me a lot of time, energy, confusion, and grief.”
The book is expensive, but if you are a VC, you can afford it. It’ll pay for itself many times over.