My friend Jonathan Weber – the publisher of NewWest.Net – is putting on second annual Designing the New West conference on 4/16 and 4/17 at the Gallatin Gateway Inn in Bozeman, Montana. While short notice at this point, Jonathan just told me there are still about 30 spots left. If you are interested in architecture and landscape in the Mountain West, the schedule and lineup of speakers looks awesome and the cost to attend is only $195.
Today, my partner Seth Levine, Eric Norlin, and I cooked up the idea to Pitch Brad and Seth at Glue. If you are an entrepreneur working in the area we define as Glue we’d love to spend some time with you at the Glue Conference. Here are the rules according to Eric:
If you aren’t aware of the history of the Glue Conference and the Defrag Conference, they both came out of our desire at Foundry Group to participate in focused conferences around themes that we are currently investing in (Defrag emerged from the Implicit Web theme; Glue emerged from Glue theme.) We couldn’t find any conferences like this so we decided to try to create them. We got lucky and found Eric Norlin (or – more accurately – he found us) and he has turned out to be a master at putting these types of conferences together.
Our fundamental goals were to hang out with super smart people working in these areas, help build and facilitate a community of thought leaders around the specific themes, mix it up some so that people could stretch their thinking, contribute where we can, and learn a ton. We’ve accomplished these goals, and much more, and are excited to be about to announce a new investment we are in the process of closing that came out of a relationship developed at last year’s Defrag Conference.
At the minimum, if you participate in Pitch Brad and Seth at Glue, we guarantee you focused, blunt, and thoughtful feedback. After that, who knows where it will lead!
From April 30 to May 2, the 10th annual Nantucket Conference is happening on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. I haven’t been to a Nantucket Conference, but I’ve heard of it and have considered going in the past. This year Scott Kirsner invited me to be on a panel and I happily accepted as I was already going to be in Boston for the TechStars Boston Mentor Dinner on April 30th before heading to Cincinnati to run the Flying Pig Marathon on May 3rd.
I’m on a panel on Friday afternoon titled “How is the Venture World Changing” with Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), Jo Tango (Kepha), and Paul Ciriello (Fairhaven). Dan Primack, the creator of peHUB Wire will be moderating, so it’s guaranteed to be spicy.
The agenda and list of participants look great. The conference is limited to around 150 people so rather than a 700 person noisefest it’ll be a neat opportunity to catch up with some long time east coast colleagues while meeting plenty of new smart people.
I’ve been told that there are only a dozen or so invitations left – if you are interested, feel free to request one.
In February, I did a “Beers and Boulder with Brad” event in Seattle. Local Seattle-based entrepreneurs Dave Schappell of TeachStreet and T.A. McCann of Gist put the event together and I was blown away by the response. Several hundred people showed up; I had a great evening of talking about entrepreneurship, local entrepreneurial communities, and the dynamics of startups. I also got to hang out for a few hours with a ton of Seattle entrepreneurs who looked like they were having as much fun as me.
Greg Huang summarized the evening and some of my messages very nicely in his Xconomy Seattle post titled VC Model Is Not Broken: Insights from Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group. Following are Greg’s bullet points from my talk – click through to the article to read the detail behind them:
Danny Robinson, a Vancouver based entrepreneur who runs Bootup Labs, invited me to do a similar event in Vancouver on April 22nd. Since I’m already in Seattle for a board meeting that day, I agreed to pop up to Vancouver and do it again (although I’m sure the content and questions will be different.) Danny put up a description and registration page post – it’s going to be April 22nd at the Steamworks Brewing Company.
I’m going to be at SXSW from 3/17 to 3/19. At 1pm on 3/17 at Mezzanine 1 at the Austin Convention Center I’ll be giving a talk titled What’s Next For Venture Capital Investing and Entrepreneurship in the US. It’s being hosted by CanadaConnects, a partnership of the Canadian Interactive Alliance, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Consulate General of Canada. If you are interested in attending, drop Michael Mendoza an email.
I don’t have a deep agenda at SXSW – I’m just going to wander in, take in the sites, check out some things I’m interested in, and have a few great meals. So – if you are there and want to connect, just send me a note on twitter between 3/17 and 3/19 and I’ll try to meet up with you somewhere.
I’m heading out to Seattle for a board meeting and a few other things. Tonight, I’m going to be doing an event called Beers and Boulder with Brad. I’m going to talk about entrepreneurial communities, the critical importance of entrepreneurship and innovation today, TechStars, what we’ve done in Boulder to drive entrepreneurship that can apply to other cities such as Seattle, and why we are expanding TechStars to Boston. I’m then going to stick around until they kick us out answering any and all questions and talking with whoever wants to hang out.
The event was the idea of Dave Schappell of TeachStreet and TA McCann of Gist. They’ve done an awesome job making it easy for me to “just show up, talk, and answer questions.” Three great sponsors – Beacon Law Advisors, Square 1 Bank, and Microsoft BizSpark are underwriting the event.
If you aren’t in Seattle tonight, the event will be streamed live. If you are in Seattle, come join us.
I spent last Sunday at CU Boulder at the Silicon Flatirons Digital Broadband Migration: Imagining the Internet’s Future conference. Not surprisingly it was an interesting day where early on, surrounded by lawyers, public policy people, academics, and telco executives, I realized I existed in a parallel universe to them. For example, when I asked who used twitter, less than five hands went up in a room of 250+ people.
Phil Weiser, the major domo of Silicon Flatirons, has a great post up summarizing the conference. If you are curious, go take a look at From Imagining The Internet’s Future To Examining The Internet Ecosystem.
My big insight from the conference was how badly all the telco / broadband providers want everyone – especially the mainstream consumer – to think that they are the Internet. At some point, I realized that Comcast, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon spend a zillion dollars a year on TV, print, and web ads that have the word “Internet” somewhere near their name. Maybe we should have all just stuck with “the web”.
Dick Green, the brilliant CEO of CableLabs, came up to me at a break and insightfully said “you may think there are two parallel universes, but they are deeply intertwined.” I responded “yup, that’s the beauty of parallel universes.” In my lifetime I expect we’ll actually be able to travel between them.
If you are in Seattle and interested in startups, entrepreneurship, venture capital, or TechStars, I’ll be in Seattle having a party with up to around 150 people to talk about these topics. T.A. McCann of Gist and Dave Schappell of TeachStreet have pulled this together – we’ll be doing it on Wednesday February 25th from 6pm to 8:30pm at the Palace Ballroom at 2100 5th Avenue in Seattle.
I’m going to spend the evening talking about my views on entrepreneurship, especially around early stage companies in today’s environment. I’ll provide a detailed view of TechStars and how/why it’s been working, along with an explanation about how I think about early stage VC investing. The evening with be heavily Q&A oriented – I’m open to any questions about anything.
We’ll have beer (and food) at the event. There’s a $5.99 fee (admission plus one drink) which will be donated to Seattle-based Vittana, an early-stage non-profit lead by a small group of ex-Amazonians who are building an education microfinance company. The event cost is being kept to a minimum thanks to the generous support of:
I’ve been a long time investor in companies in Seattle and have many friends there especially given all of my interactions with Microsoft dating back to 1990 when my first company – Feld Technologies – was a member of the inaugural Microsoft Solution Provider program. I’m currently on the board of Impinj and a personal investor in AdReady and Foundry Group is an investor in Smith & Tinker so we love to hang out in Seattle, especially when it’s sunny.
As a reader of this blog, if you are around, I’d love to see you so register and come have a beer with me and 150 of my new friends.
My partner Jason Mendelson – who is also my co-conspirator in writing the blog AsktheVC – is having an open session called Crash Course – Raising Venture Capital. It’s part of the Silicon Flatirons program and is happening on February 24th from 5:15pm to 6:45pm in Room 204 at the Wolf Law Building. Jason says he’s going to cover:
Everything from what makes VCs tick, who are our bosses, what are things that you can do to improve your chances of receiving funding and things that many VCs don’t want to talk about. No question is off limits and I hope that it will be a very interactive forum. Consider this to be a live version of Ask The VC.
Of course, beer goes really well with stuff like this. So BioBeers is hosting a Startup Drinks event at The Foundry starting at 6:30. This isn’t at our office, although we are always amused when “The Foundry” gets confused with “Foundry Group”. Rather, it’s across the street at The Foundry, 1109 Walnut Street. Hoist a few for me as I’ll be in Seattle (more on that in a minute.)