Saul Klein of Index Ventures turned me on a few weeks to OpenCoffee Club – a new program he started in London that is quickly making its way across the world (including Palo Alto, Paris and Amsterdam. Sacramento, Dublin, Brighton and Zagreb.)
Saul’s got a great overview of the first and second events on his blog. According to Saul, “the key is a regular place and a regular time – it’s not important who comes along, some days it might be no one – just that people know if they want to meet, this is the time and this is the place.”
Jason has committed to trying this in Boulder – look for more in the next month or so.
Just a reminder that the MIT Enterprise Forum will be having an event tomorrow night in Boulder called “Ask the VC: Venture Capital Outlook for 2007.” The Forum will start with a 40 minute digital presentation from MIT/Cambridge with a panel of Boston VCs discussing the trends that ended 2006 and what they forsee for 2007. This will be followed immediately with a live panel of Colorado VCs ready to answer you questions and compare the scenes in Boston and the Front Range.
The live panel includes me, Jason Mendelson (Foundry Group), Catharine Merigold (Vista Ventures), Kyle Lefkoff (Boulder Ventures), and Chris Scoggins (Sequel Venture Partners).
If you are interested contact Jim Pollock or sign up online. It’s Wednesday 2/28/07 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at the CU Boulder ATLAS Building Main Auditorium (18th Street & Euclid.)
If you are a Second Life dude and live in Boulder / Denver, there is now a local Meetup for you. The organizer – Richard Hackathorn – who is the president of Bolder Technology dropped me a note about it. Apparently Richard’s son Eric has created a NOAA Island as part of NOAA’s (the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration – which every Boulderite knows as the folks that have a building on the best real estate in town) education outreach program.
The next Meetup is on March 22nd at 6pm. It’s limited to 20 people so if you are interested, sign up now (Greenstein – you crazy sailor – that means you.)
The 24th annual Venture Capital in the Rockies conference is happening on February 20 – 22nd. In addition to showcasing a bunch of the emerging growth companies in the Rocky Mountain region, VCIR will feature keynotes from Greg Maffei, President and CEO of Liberty Media and Mark Heesen, President of the National Venture Capital Association. In addition to a couple of great parties and skiing (all day Thursday), there’s also a new poker event on the night of the 20th. The last few years of VCIR have been great – I’ve heard that this year’s lineup of companies is superb – so if you are a venture capitalist living outside the Rocky Mountain region that needs an excuse to ski (or if you just want to come see my smiling face), come join us.
In case you are really curious about what’s actually happening at Gnomedex, here’s Chris Pirillo thinking small.
After my enthusiastic Gnomedex post about the first half of the first day, things started to go downhill and most of the afternoon was disappointing to me. I had a fun dinner last night with some folks from Yahoo (and their friends), went home, got a good night sleep, and came back refreshed. This morning has been great again – some rambling nonsense, but that’s part of the experience. Interestingly, there aren’t many deep insights surfacing (at least to me), rather lots of good examples about how people are applying and dealing with issues and ideas and that have been bouncing around the past year.
When I was here a year ago, a lot of stuff we are discussing now was still fresh and new (at least to me.) The ideas and applications have matured a lot in the past year – as a result when the audience actually engages in a topic (like it is now – “Identity Woman” is leading the Gnomedex MVP session), the discussion goes a lot deeper – which I find a lot more interesting. Some of the conference leaders have done a great job; others haven’t – I suppose a 50% hit rate would be a good outcome.
The demographic is fascinating – there are definitely more women here than last year as well as a number of folks from larger tech companies. There are a few folks on the margin (e.g. VCs), but not many. The core audience – as expected – is the white male techy either from small companies, startups, or independent developers. The biases are strong, but most folks assert them tongue-in-cheek, so there’s room for a provocative debate, without it turning hostile.
Chris Pirillo and Ponzi work hard at this – it shows.
On Thursday April 6, 2006, I’m on a panel at the final Silicon Flatirons conference called “Re-examining The Patent System.” The conference is from 3:30 to 7:30. My panel – titled “The Uses and Abuses of Intellectual Property: Facilitating Startups or Entry Barrier?” – is from 5:50 to 6:50. My co-panelists are Steve Halsteadt (Managing Director, Centennial Ventures), Tom McGimpsey (General Counsel, McData), and Steve Rodgers (Director of Litigation, Intel).
If you happen to be in Boulder and like this kind of thing, please join us.
Yesterday, I wrote a high level summary of this year’s Venture Capital in the Rockies conference. I thought I’d give the local press one more day to see if anyone was going to write something substantive about some of the companies presenting. I haven’t seen anything, so here are my thoughts on the companies I saw.
24 companies presented in two tracks so the most I could see was 12. I had a couple of conference calls during the day so I only managed to see 7 of them: Collective Intellect, Confio Software, HomeSphere, Solidware Technologies, iPosi, CreekPath Systems, and XAware. The only company on this list that I directly have an investment in is Collective Intellect, although I have indirect investments (through VC funds that I’m an LP in) in XAware as well as Collective Intellect. I’ve listed the companies in rank order starting with the one that I thought was most interesting / did the best job.
Collective Intellect: I backed the founders – Don Springer and Tim Wolters – in their previous company (Dante Group – acquired in 2003 by WebMethods.) Don and Tim are super second time entrepreneurs, and the way they’ve started up Collective Intellect shows. Their tag line is “filtering new media for the securities industry” – they are using a bunch of hard core computer science to analyze new media content (blogs, chat rooms, discussion forums) for public market fund traders, analysts, portfolio managers, and quants (i.e. the dudes at hedge funds.) The intersection of new media, heavy computer science, and the massive hedge fund dollars sounds like a good place to hunt. Don did a great presentation and announced their round of funding led by Appian Ventures.
Confio Software: I met the CEO and primary backer of Confio – Charlie Sanders – about 18 months ago when he first got involved with Confio and its cofounder Matt Larson. Charlie’s an impressive guy having been a senior exec at Seagate (and previously Conner Peripherals.) It sounds like 2005 was a very good year for them as they landed 40 new customers, although reading between the lines it appeared that one or two customers accounted for about 50% of their revenue. Confio’s market – IT performance management – is a crowded one, but they appear to be doing some unique stuff around digging into the Oracle database layer to look for root cause defects (ah – “root cause” – the holy grail of all APM companies.) Charlie a super salesman and is determined to scale the business up nicely on modest capital. He’s off to a good start.
XAware: Tim Harvey, the new CEO of XAware, did a super job of presenting after a mere three weeks on the job. I generally like XAware – it’s in a market segment (SOA middleware) that I like, understand, and have made some money in. However, I don’t understand their approach to the business. While they generated a respectable $3m of revenue last year, it appears that most of it came from financial services customers. Consequently, I don’t understand why they present themselves as a horizontal SOA middleware provider when they could be kicking ass in the deep pocketed financial services vertical.
HomeSphere: I’ve got to hand it to James Waldrop and his team – they raised money in 2000/2001, survived their market falling apart, focused on growing slower but getting profitable, and have accomplished that. They now have a respectable $10m business that sells two things: (1) manufacturer incentive and rebate service for through group buying (80%) and (2) construction management software (20%). While #1 is a solid growth business (and HomeSphere has likely gotten to an interesting critical mass), #2 looks like a flat to declining business. As a result, HomeSphere is looking to raise $10m to roll out three new lines of business (none of which I can remember a few days later.) I don’t understand why they’d do this – if I was on their board I’d say “no more money – stay profitable – grow aggressively in segment #1.”
Solidware Technologies: Sue Kunz, the CEO of Solidware, is a firecracker. I’ve known her and her gang for about a year and watched them do unnatural acts (ah – the joys of entrepreneurship) to get their “Splat Software” up and running. Splat is an SQA product (software quality assurance) that helps identify software defects through visual analysis of the source code. I declined to invest last year as I’ve already got an investment in a somewhat competitive company (Klocwork), but I’ve tried to be helpful and encouraging to Sue and her team because I like their style. I only caught the tail end of Sue’s presentation so I don’t know how she did, but she handled the Q&A nicely.
iPosi: I don’t get iPosi. They presented a vision for a set of E911 products based on GSM-based location combined with IP geolocation (they are talking to one of my companies – Quova – about working together.) I listened to the presentation and really didn’t understand either (a) what exactly they were going to do or (b) how they were going to do it. My brain was working hard when I saw their revenue slide – immediately afterwards my nose started bleeding and I started fantasizing about steep upward sloping exponential curves. I know – and like – a few of the people involved – I’m sure I’m missing something obvious.
CreekPath Systems: I remember looking at Creekpath in 2000 when it was originally spun off from Exabyte. I was pretty excited about funding it until one of my partners vomited all over the floor after meeting with the team. As a result I passed – am I’m glad I did. They’ve been through a lot of ups and downs and retooled their leadership team – again – last year. Creekpath is a good example of the endlessly elusive storage success animal (hardware or software) that tantalizes, but eludes, the Colorado VC. Maybe this will be the one, but as many have gone before them, they have a long road ahead of them. I keep hearing that none of the storage vendors have this, but then I think about EMC’s software group and just shake my head.
Oh, and Seth and Chris assured me that the skiing on Wednesday was outstanding and the skiing on Friday was social (e.g. not much fresh powder, but lots of friends hanging around, blue skies, and 60 degrees.)
For the last 23 years, the Venture Capital in the Rockies conference has been the signature fund-raising conference in the Rocky Mountain region. A full day of presentations from companies looking for venture capital (with the presenters mostly in suits – a rarity in this part of the country) followed by a day of legendary skiing (and – while I don’t ski – this year was phenomenal) makes for a great conference. 320 attended this year – 100 were investors including a number from out of state.
It was fun to look through the list of presenters since 1996 and see the following companies that I’ve been involved in:
1996: Mercury Mail – IPO as Exactis
1998: Email Publishing – acquired by MessageMedia
Vstream – IPO as Raindance1999: Service Metrics – acquired by Exodus
Tellsoft – unsuccessful2000: Finali – acquired by Convergys
Service Magic – acquired by IAC2001: Deuxo – unsuccessful
Latis – now StillSecure – current portfolio company
Prosavvy – acquired by eWork2002: Dante Group – acquired by webMethods
Npulse (Xaffire) – acquired by Quest
Wideforce – unsuccessful2003: F4 Technologies – now Rally Software
Finali (again) – acquired by Convergys
Newmerix – current portfolio company2005: Oxlo – current portfolio company
Rally (again) – current portfolio company
It was also interesting to see all the companies I haven’t invested in over the years that presented at this conference that have either been successful (oops – missed that one) or unsuccessful (sorry – but I’m glad I didn’t invest.)
Chris Onan from Appian Ventures did an awesome job hosting the conference this year. He followed a tough act from Chris Wand of Mobius Venture Capital who hosted the preceding two years – and did great. Maybe they should rename the conference “Venture Capital in the Rockies: By Chris.”
All the local papers have now written up their piece on the conference at this point. The Boulder Daily Camera had a light weight piece on the conference in general. The Rocky Mountain News ran two pieces – one that highlighted David Moll – CEO of Webroot (and the article said that he didn’t stay long because he had more important things to do – ouch) and one that announced ITU Ventures new $120 million fund. The article in the Denver Post was the most substantive, actually highlighting several companies including Collective Intellect, Accucode, and Groople.
Given the lack of actual focus on the companies, I’ll write up a separate post talking about the ones I saw at the conference, offering feedback and (hopefully) constructive advice.