Having lived through the last major tech downturn (precipitated by our friend, the Internet bubble), one of the big lessons that I learned was to steadily play through. Specifically, I’ve reached the conclusion that there is no right or wrong time to start a company, or build a company. Great entrepreneurs will figure things out regardless of the macro environment. As I’m quick to say (and it’s now becoming one of my favorite cliches), "some of the best investments I’ve ever made / companies I’ve helped start were created / funded between 2001 and 2003."
MIT is having their 11th annual Venture Capital Conference on 12/6/08. This one is titled Reinventing Venture Capital. I’m sure that part will be stimulating for the VCs that are there, but the really good stuff appears to be the Entrepreneur Showcase.
Over 30 early-stage businesses from sectors including information technology, healthcare and clean technology will be selected to exhibit their business vision and technology prowess at the 11th MIT Venture Capital Conference. Entrepreneurs will have an opportunity to explain their business, display their products, learn from the MIT network, and find growth opportunities. Attendees include VCs, Angels, corporate executives, and the general public.
If you are a startup and want to apply to be part of this, the application is here and the directions for applying are here. If nothing else, you’ll get to hear Eran Egozy talk about Harmonix. If you ask, he might even play his clarinet for you.
The Defrag Conference is happening on Monday 11/3 and Tuesday 11/4. I’m totally psyched – Eric Norlin has put together a killer agenda. The list of people coming that I can’t wait to see and spend time with is dynamite.
When Eric and I cooked up the idea for Defrag, our goal was to create a "thinking person’s" conference for exploring ideas around the Implicit / Semantic Web. It’s evolved and – in its second year – we are planning on talking about the intersection of the following topics:
In addition, on Sunday 11/2 my partner Chris Wand is hosting a dinner for anyone interested in exploring the next generation of messaging.
There’s still time to register – use Foundry1 to get $300 off the registration. It looks like we will have well over 300 people in attendance this year so it’s big enough to have critical mass yet intimate enough to generate a lot of deep conversations.
I love charts like the following – so many pretty colors and funny names.
Matt Galligan, the co-founder of SocialThing (now part of AOL) is giving a talk on Social Networking: Using Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn at the ATLAS Institute (on the CU Boulder campus) on October 13th from 6pm to 8pm. This event is co-sponsored by my friends at The Van Heyst Group and Silicon Flatirons. Matt’s an entertaining speaker who was part of the inaugural TechStars program in 2007 – he’s got plenty of great stories and has been living in the social networking world for the past few years.
The CSIA’s annual event – DEMOgala – is happening tomorrow (10/2) all day at the Grand Hyatt, Denver (1750 Welton Street). There is a long list of companies involved, including the 20 DEMOgala Innovation Showcase companies.
If you are in town, go check it out.
Tomorrow is October 1st. I love the first day of every month as it starts the monthly cycle anew. Amy and I go out for "life dinner" almost every month on the 1st, exchange gifts with each other (I have a great one for her this month), reflect on the previous month, and talk about what we are working on and going to accomplish in the new month.
Tomorrow night we were going to have a nice dinner at Black Cat and just chill out. However, I just found out – via a tweet from Jeff Herman – that Neal Stephenson is in town for a talk and book signing (for Anathem) at the Boulder Book Store. Since Stephenson is one of our favorite contemporary writers, our plans have now shifted to a quick sushi dinner before hand followed by a Stephenson-worship session.
Come join us (at the book store – not at sushi) at 7:30pm at the Boulder Book Store on the Pearl Street Mall. Watch as Amy asks Stephenson when he decided to stop doing email (if you don’t get the reference, there is a fabulous Stephenson essay on his blog titled Why I am a Bad Correspondent.)
The gang from Lookery is in Boulder tonight and having a publisher meetup from 6:30pm to 9:00pm in the TechStars Bunker. I’ve started using Lookery on Feld Thoughts and am starting to collect a different set of analytics about you, oh blog reader.
Lookery is a user-targeting service and advertising network. They provide free analytics to promote to publishers, bringing them attention, organic traffic, sales leads, and partnership opportunities. They are looking for publishers who represent:
Cool stuff – definitely worth hanging out and having a beer with them if you fit the description or think you might want to partner with them. Sign up on the Facebook page for the event.
Eric Norlin – who runs the Defrag Conference – has a good post up today titled The metaphors we’ve outgrown. He riffs off of the Google Chrome announcement. At the end of it, he answers "what makes Defrag different."
People ask me all of the time what makes Defrag different? I kind of giggle and tell them that I’m proud that we’re not a conference loaded with case studies. Don’t get me wrong, that has a very useful place (in a nearly mature market). We’re just nowhere near that place. Defrag is about gathering to explore, imagine and build these new metaphors. The web should be getting smarter, more implicit, more enabling.
Let the rest of the world get mired down in economic uncertainty, productivity enhancement and cost reduction. There’s plenty of time for you to do that (trust me). Come to defrag and help us grow out of these metaphors. And then watch as the supposedly “pie in the sky” things you find at Defrag are suddenly “real world” things that you’re using and implementing everyday. Kinda cool, huh?
For all those interested, I’m still using Chrome – mostly enjoying it a lot but starting to notice the things it is missing, especially all those fun implicit web plugins I’ve been using.
I’m on a panel on Tuesday September 9th from 5pm – 8pm titled Early Stage Investing in an Uncertain Economy. It’s being sponsored by the Rockies Venture Club and is being held at the Denver Marriott City Center. If you are interested in attending, you can register here.
Since the Rockies Venture Club is largely targeted at angel investors and entrepreneurs it should be an interesting conversation. The TechStars Demo and Investor Day two weeks ago was packed and the 2008 TechStars teams are seeing very high interest in their early stage rounds. If this is a data point, it would indicate that the "uncertain economy" isn’t having much impact.
As an early stage VC investor, I don’t pay much attention to the macro economy. I’ve written about this in the past – some of our best investments have come during crappy economic periods (say 2001 – 2003). We are funding very early stage companies with an expectation that it will take them 5+ years to mature into a successful business. Lots can happen in 5+ years.
I’ll save my snarkier remarks for the panel.
At Foundry Group, one of our investment themes is Glue. We’ve done a handful of investments in this area, including Gnip. Since Gnip’s launch last month, it’s been put into production in a number of cases – some obvious, some subtle. Part of the fun is watching the adoption of it evolve rapidly as we continue to build out the core capabilities of the what Gnip can do.
I had a long conversation with a VC I work closely with about the value Gnip ultimately provides to its various constituencies (data providers, data consumers, and end users) and how / where it expects to get paid in the long term. During the conversation, we covered a number of different potential areas, but I realized that my thinking could be much crisper. That’s normal for this stage of a startup as Gnip is still very early stage (we’ve done one seed round of investment and are gearing up for the next financing) but the exercise of defining a clear business endgame (vs. just a technology endgame) is extremely helpful and self referential, as it creates more focus on what we should actually be building.
There is nothing quite like an example. Yesterday, we had the TechStars 2008 Investor and Demo Day. EventVue – one of the TechStars 2007 companies – provided the online community infrastructure for the event. They automatically extracted all the data from the registration system and build an online community. As part of this, members of the community could add their twitter account and – if they had already been a member of another EventVue conference community – like me – would automatically have all their information already in EventVue and wouldn’t have to do anything.
The then created a techstars08 twitter account. This rebroadcast all the tweets from anyone at the event that had a twitter account set up in their EventVue profile. However, rather than writing the polling software to Twitter to continually check for updates in the twitter stream, the used Gnip for this.
EventVue had a data set (I don’t know the number – but lets say it was 100 userids) of twitters at the conference. They wrote a tiny piece of code that monitored Gnip’s twitter notification stream. Whenever someone in the set of 100 usersids appeared in the twitter notification stream, EventVue’s handler then queried twitter for that one discrete piece of data and then rebroadcast it on techstars08.
This took a huge load off of Twitter. It was much easier code to write for EventVue. It created a virtually real time twitter rebroadcast stream. I’m sure I’m missing at least one of the technical nuances – hopefully the guys at EventVue will write up a deeper post on what they did, how they did it, and why it was valuable to them.
Update: Josh Fraser, the co-founder and CTO of EventVue, has posted How Gnip rescued us from our twitter nightmare.
Look for plenty of more thinking out loud from me on our Glue theme as we bring some of the investments we’ve made into sharper focus.