Ok – so in addition to the Boulder events, I also go to Bay Area events. I’ve got a Return Path board meeting on 1/21 in the Bay Area and that evening Matt Blumberg – Return Path’s CEO – is going to be presenting at the great Startup2Startup series that Dave McClure puts on with the help of his glorious sponsors.
I’ll be there along with a bunch of other great folks (I even paid my $90 for my ticket). Matt’s got a fascinating story and Return Path is another company in my world that had an awesome 2009 and is poised for a phenomenal 2010 (how’s that for adverbs adjectives.) Matt will be talking about the history of Return Path (dating back to 1999), lessons he’s learned, and best practices in email deliverability.
If you don’t know Matt, he’s got a great blog titled “OnlyOnce” (since you can only be a “first time CEO once and this is Matt’s journey.”) Some special secrets about Matt – he was on the FeedBurner board so he can tell you funny stories about Twitter’s COO and he’s run two marathons with me so he can tell you funny stories about things I say after 4+ hours running.
January 21st, 6pm – 9:30pm at the Garden Court Hotel on 520 Cowper Street in Palo Alto. Sign up now. Be there or be forever destined to have email deliverability issues.
Enough with the calendar stuff. I promise my next post will be a long essay about some obscure topic that will generate a lot of controversy. Or maybe I’ll just list out the marathons I’m going to run in 2010.
Well, the world is back at work (as evidenced by the 327 new emails I got today). And my friends at Silicon Flatirons at CU Boulder are cranking up the head with Crash Courses, Entrepreneurs Unplugged, and Workshops.
1/13/10: 6-8pm @ Wolf: Crash Course: How to Build a Company by Jason Mendelson followed with a “Start-up Internships” networking event for local startups looking for CU students interested in internship opportunities.
1/25/10: 6:15-7:15pm @ Wolf: Entrepreneurs Unplugged With Ryan Martens (Founder/CTO) and Tim Miller (CEO) of Rally Software. I’ll be interviewing Ryan and Tim about their experiences with Avitek (their first company together), BEA (which acquired Avitek in 1999), and Rally Software – their second company together which had a spectacular 2009 and is poised for an even better 2010. Don’t forget to ask them about the really cool thing that they announced between the time I wrote this blog post and 1/25/10.
1/27/10: 6-7pm @ ATLAS: Workshop: Your Market: Connecting with your Customers by Tom Keller. Tom was most recently the CEO of Intense Debate (a TechStars 2007 company that was acquired by Automattic, the makers of WordPress). In addition to talking about marketing, Tom might drop a hint or two about his next gig which he’s getting started with the new year.
There is plenty more coming, but don’t miss these – I think they’ll all be great ones.
On Monday, I’ll be interviewing Tim Enwall, the founder, president, and COO of Tendril Networks as part of the Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged series. The event will be from 6:15pm to 7:15pm at the ATLAS Building at CU Boulder. As a special bonus, you can use my bathroom on the second floor (if you are a guy).
I’ve known Tim for many years and he’s another fantastic Boulder entrepreneur. I met him shortly after he had sold one of his previous companies – Solista – to Gartner Group. We’ve become good friends since and have done a handful of things together, including getting completely creamed at a monthly poker game we were regulars at (ok – I got creamed, Tim usually held his own and often came out on top.)
Tim and the Tendril team have created a a fast growing Boulder company that crosses over nicely between software and cleantech. In addition to their Colorado-based investors (Vista Ventures and Appian Ventures), Tendril has raised a substantial amount of capital from VC investors outside of Colorado, including RRE Ventures (NY-based) and VantagePoint (CA-based) as well as strategic partners such as GE Energy and Good Energies. So, we’ll have a wide range of topics to cover, including bootstrapping a business and then selling it as well as systematically building a business using VC and strategic financing that has the potential to be the undisputed market leader with regard to the smart grid.
Come join us for the last Entrepreneurs Unplugged event of 2009.
I’ve been to my share of tech conferences that either don’t have any music playing or have some horrible mix that the hotel supplies turned up either a little to much or not quite enough. In contrast, I know that Eric Norlin obsesses over every aspect of his conferences, including the soundtrack. He knows his audience well and nailed it this year. He’s published the soundtrack on the Defrag blog.
I’m now looking forward to the Glue Conference soundtrack (and conference).
My friends at OneRiot and Adaptive Blue are organizing the second annual Add-on-Con. It is being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on Dec 11. If you are involved in a company that makes browser add-ons of any sort, this conference is for you.
The conference is a full day of discussions about the browser and browser add-on market. The closing keynote is on the future of the web browser and is moderated by Douglas Crockford and features representatives from Microsoft, Mozilla and Google.
In addition, if you are a new company and want to get exposure to the community and the browser vendors, Add-on-Con09 has a Sandbox program. Companies that are accepted into the Sandbox receive promotion on the Add-on-Con website, $75 off the event cost of the event (50% discount), and the ability to demo their product in front of Browser representatives and conference attendees the morning of the conference.
If you aren’t a Sandbox company, you can still get a discount by using the discount code Bfeldaddoncon09 which takes $50 off of the $150 registration fee.
There are two CU Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged events next week – one on Monday November 2nd at CU Boulder in Atlas Room 100 and one on Wednesday November 4th at the Denver Art Museum.
The 11/2 Entrepreneurs Unplugged is with Steve Halstedt, the co-founder of Centennial Ventures. Steve co-founded Centennial in 1981 and was one of the fathers of the venture capital business in Colorado. When I moved to Boulder in 1995, Steve was one of the first VCs I met with here and he’s been a great friend and mentor ever since. I look forward to interviewing him about his experiences, especially how entrepreneurship has evolved in Colorado since the early 1980’s. Please register and join us!
The 11/4 Entrepreneurs Unplugged is with Nir Barkat, the Mayor of Jerusalem. This is a special Entrepreneurs Unplugged event Silicon Flatirons is co-hosting with Governor Ritter, the Colorado BioScience Association, CSIA, and the Mizel Family Foundation. I’ll be in Seattle at the TechStars 2009 Demo Day in Seattle so Brad Bernthal will be interviewing Mayor Barkat. In addition to being the Mayor of Jerusalem, Barkat is a successful entrepreneur and VC having started BRM Partners and subsequently Backweb Technologies. While I’ve never met Barkat, I remember Backweb well as SOFTBANK was an investor in the company when I was a SOFTBANK Affiliate – shortly before a group of us created Softbank Technology Ventures. This promises to be a special event held at the beautiful Denver Art Museum from 2pm to 4pm on Wednesday 11/4. Registration is now open.
The Defrag Conference in Denver is just around the corner – November 11 and 12 to be exact. Eric Norlin has put together a remarkable agenda for this one including an incredible closing panel titled Cluetrain at 10 starring JP Rangaswami, Chris Locke, Doc Searls, and Rick Levine. This will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the The Cluetrain Manifesto and as far as I understand is the first time in a decade that Chris, Doc, and Rick have shared the stage. If we are lucky, Rick might even bring us some Seth Ellis Chocolates.
I’ll be there the entire time as will my Foundry Group partners. Last year at Defrag was the first time I spent any time with TA McCann and that worked out pretty well for Gist (at least so far) – who knows, maybe this year will be someone else’s turn.
In the spring just before the Glue Conference, I offered up a group dinner event at a Boulder NewTech Meetup for anyone in Colorado that attended. A bunch of people ended up coming and I never followed through on the event. I’ve finally started to get my act together – we’re going to do an event in The Bunker (with lots of food and booze) in the January time frame. As a special bonus, I’m going to open it up to anyone from Colorado that also comes to Defrag (no – you don’t get two events if you went to Glue also, but I’ll give you a hug.)
But wait, there’s more. Use the discount code “fndry1” to get 20% off of your registration.
This year I’m the interviewer for the Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged series. On Monday @ 6:00 pm I’m interviewing David Cohen, the founder of TechStars at the Wolf Law Building in Room 204 on the CU Boulder Campus.
I’ve known and worked with David for about four years. Prior to starting TechStars, he started three companies – two that were successful and one that failed. Since starting TechStars, he’s had an incredible impact on the Boulder Entrepreneurial Ecosystem during that time, is an awesome entrepreneur, and can be hilarious. Come watch me pry some great stories, anecdotes, and advice out of him. Register here.
Including Monday’s interview with David, there are five more interviews in this year’s series. On 11/2, I’ll be interviewing Steve Halstedt, the co-founder of Centennial Ventures. On 11/4, Brad Bernthal will be interviewing Nir Barkat, the Mayor of Jerusalem and a special guest of the State of Colorado at the Denver Art Museum. On 11/13 I’ll be interviewing Ted Turner (yes – the Ted Turner), and then on 12/7 I’ll be interviewing Tim Enwall, the founder and President of Tendril. Please come join us.
I ingest a ton of information on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. My process for doing it today is entirely manual. I’m starting to look around for a way to automate this using the metaphor of a “personal dashboard”, not dissimilar to the idea from the 1980’s of an EIS (“executive information system”). Let me explain.
My Daily routine takes around an hour. Weekly, which includes reviewing my upcoming calendar, takes about 30 minutes. I don’t know how long Monthly, Quarterly, or Annual take as they are usually spread out over multiple days.
In theory, I’m using Firefox and Outlook as my personal dashboards to get to this data and then viewing it in a variety of apps including Excel, Adobe, and Word. However, this is really unsatisfying as the data is (a) in different formats, (b) impossible to search effectively, (c) not persistent, and (d) difficult to handle or manipulate.
My guess is I need both an (a) ingestion and (b) presentation layer. The ingestion layer seems straightforward – the software I’d use for my personal dashboard should be able to generate an XML template for each “type of data”. I should be able to configure this (or – optimally – the ingestion layer should be able to figure this out automatically). The ingestion layer should be able to handle different types of inputs – html files, xml files, emails, or some other quasi-API. So – “Glue”.
The presentation layer is a little harder for me to get my mind around. A year ago I would have said “hmtl is fine – just give it to me in Firefox via a web page.” In some cases this is fine, but I want finer grained control over how this stuff is displayed. Some of the web pages I look at are formatted worse and are less flexible than the DEC-based EISes I played with in the 1980’s. In many cases we haven’t made any progress on the presentation layer not withstanding all the efforts of Edward Tufte. So – “HCI”.
I’m hopeful that in a decade I’ll have a much more effective way of dealing with my periodic information routine. Until then, I’m searching for companies working on both the ingestion layer and presentation layer (preferably both). Feel free to give me a shout if this is something you are working on.