Dave Drach from Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team has a nice post up titled Wow, Venture Capital in the Rockies, it gets better every year. I agree – I think year 25 was the best one yet.
The annual Venture Capital in the Rockies conference has been going on all day. I’m taking a short 30 minute break to recharge my "extrovert battery" which is basically used up and about to flip into introvert mode (kind of like a hybrid car.)
The conference this year has been a blast and the Colorado weather gods have blessed us with two amazingly beautiful days. Several folks, including David Cohen (TechStars CEO), Todd Vernon (Lijit CEO), and Dan Primack (PE Hub) are liveblogging the events. Great stuff – including Dan’s analysis of the Best Conference Giftbag … Ever (and I’m sure he’s received a few.)
Congrats to Chris Onan (this year’s head organizer), all the folks involved in putting on VCIR, and all of the entrepreneurs who have come and participated. What fun.
Eric Olson – who I got to know through FeedBurner – is bringing his TECH Cocktail event to Boulder on March 6th. If you are part of the Boulder tech / entrepreneurial community and around on 3/6, register and come to The Foundry (not our office – but the bar across the street) from 6:30pm to 9:00pm for a good time with a bunch of your local friends and colleagues.
On March 4th at the CU Boulder Law School, there is another great event on Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Entrepreneurship in the Information Industries. The panelists include folks such as:
Phil Weiser – who hosts these events – is really on a roll this year.
Also, the transcript on The Entrepreneurial University: What the University of Colorado has to learn from MIT and Stanford is up on the web. Read carefully and learn how 20% and one day out of six can mean the same thing.
Yes – I know that phrase is yucky. That’s why Eric Norlin needs your help. He’s put out A Call for Ideas and Language surrounding Defrag 2008.
If any of the above phrases speak to you, go to Eric’s post and give him your thoughts.
The massive proliferation of web services, their corresponding APIs, and the notion that "the web is the platform" has caused me to spend a lot of time in what I call "horizontal land." This is a special place where software that nits everything together (sometimes nicely, sometimes not so nicely) lives. Our RSS theme and corresponding investments (FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati) arose from one aspect of this problem.
Shortly after I started thinking about the implicit web several years ago I hooked up with Eric Norlin. We bounced a bunch of thoughts around and Eric proposed the idea for what became the Defrag Conference. We had the first one in 2007 – I thought it was superb as did a bunch of other people. As a result, we are doing it again in 2008.
As Eric and I were debriefing on the 2007 conference, we realized that there was an interesting layer that we didn’t really address at Defrag. We started calling this layer Glue – some examples follow:
We are now working on how to integrate Glue into our thinking – either as an extension of Defrag or as a second conference. If you have ideas or want to be involved in helping us think this through, please comment or email.
I sponsor a roundtable series titled The Silicon Flatirons Roundtable on Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Public Policy. It is hosted four times a year by The Silicon Flatirons Program at CU Boulder and is modeled after the Union Square Ventures Sessions. We pick a topic and then get 30 or so smart and diverse thinkers in a room to kick the topic around for two hours. Phil Weiser (Professor of Law and Executive Director of Silicon Flatirons) moderates and someone always takes extensive notes and writes up a summary paper.
The paper from the first roundtable – The Unintended Consequences of Sarbanes-Oxley (2/26/07) – are up. We did this early in the year when the private equity boom was cranking and there are some juicy gems buried in the summary, including this one that seems prescient (or obvious) in hindsight.
"The roundtable’s discussion on private equity focused on private equity’s ever-increasing growth and whether such growth is, in fact, sustainable. Feld noted the similarity between this increase in growth and that of the VC industry before the bubble burst. Webroot’s Pace also addressed this point and noted that private equity deals are continuing to grow in both number and value. On this point, Feld noted there is a certain irony in these deals because the companies are traded from one firm to another, but the limited partners often remain the same. The discussion of private equity concluded with the point that, to some extent, the private equity market’s success is contingent on the credit markets. Thus, the concern, as Feld explained, is that if the credit markets tighten, private equity firms’ returns will decrease while cost of capital to these companies will increase, and overleveraged firms may see a sharp reduction in their equity value."
Our second roundtable was held in on 4/20/07 and the paper Rethinking Software Patents is also up on the web. I thought this was a much more contentious session as there were several clearly different opinions represented in the room. Pamela Samuelson – a professor at UC Berkeley School of Information and Boalt Hall School of Law – made the trip to Boulder and did an excellent job of kicking things off and getting the hornets buzzing around the "should there be software patents" nest.
The third roundtable – The Entrepreneurial University – was held a few months ago. I’ll get a link up to the paper when it’s out.
At BlogWorld last week, there was a lot of chatter about ClosedPrivate. Several of the key members of the initiative are blogging up a storm about it and there have been invitations to conferences to discuss ClosedPrivate vs. OpenSocial.
Lijit has even managed to turn me into a search wijit. My favorite search term – ClosedPrivate.
Yes – we had a lot of fun at BlogWorld, even though we ate way too much sushi at Nobu on Thursday night. Ok – it was the sake that did us in, not the sushi.
If you aren’t at Defrag but want to follow along at home, there are two solid summaries up on the web.
There is also now a ClosedPrivate Facebook group. Don’t bother joining.
When I left for home at 8:30 Eric Norlin was nursing a beer at the bar.