Category: Education
Join the Application Developers Alliance at a Boulder Developer Patent Summit August 28 at 6 PM at FUSE Coworking. The event is a chance to share stories of demand letters and lawsuits from trolls, discuss legal strategies and litigation costs, and share ideas for software patent reform.
DATE: August 28th | FREE | 6pm
LOCATION: The Riverside (FUSE Coworking) | 1724 Broadway | Boulder, CO 80302
AGENDA:
6:00pm Welcome (registration, drinks, food, and mingling)
6:30-8:00pm Brief Presentation, Panel Discussion, and Q&A
8:00pm Enjoy food and drinks, meet the panel, and network
The One Trillion Reasons To Rethink How Higher Education Funding Works
Last night at dinner I got into a conversation with Greg Gottesman about the trillion dollars of student loans outstanding in the United States. Greg pointed me to this awesome TEDx Talk that he did recently on the topic. I just watched it – if you are interested in higher education in any way it’s worth 12 minutes of your life to watch it right now. I’ll still be here when you finish.
While Amy and I don’t have kids, we’ve funded the college educations for several relatives and the children of several friends. We’re fortunate that we can write these checks as the parents couldn’t have, and in each case the experience has been life changing, with no strings attached, for the young men and women. They went to schools they previously couldn’t have afforded and when they graduated they had no student debt.
When I consider their paths without our support, it would have been harder. Each of them is an amazing young person, but they are able to explore more things, in different ways, because of the education they got. And as I watch them continue to learn and grow, through their work experience, additional education, and online activities, I realize that the chance they had to go to college is still a critical part of the American dream.
I’m interested in this at many levels. My wife Amy is on the board of trustees of Wellesley College and cares passionately about her alma mater, the amazing experience of going to school there, as well as the increasing cost of education. I’m on the CU Boulder Chancellor’s Strategic Advisory Council and one of the major topics we have been discussing is the escalating cost of education and the dramatically decreasing public funding of education. I’m an investor – directly and indirectly – in a number of companies creating new online education systems. I’m a content provider for some of these MOOCs, with some courses coming out over the next twelve months. And I’ve started to take some courses as a way of learning new things while understanding what works – and what doesn’t work – with this new approach.
Up to this point, I’ve been focused on the cost and content side of the equation. Until last night, I didn’t think much about the implication of the student funding side (e.g. debt) of the equation – either the long term macroeconomic effect on society or the short term microeconomic effect on the recent graduate now saddled with student debt.
There are plenty of creative approaches to this, including many experiments underway with schools like MIT and Stanford in conjunction with new companies like Udacity and Coursera. The activity on the course and content side seems vibrant, which has the opportunity to lower overall costs.
But I don’t have a clue about the financing side, and am going to think more about it. If you have any insights, feel free to toss them in the comments or point me at stuff I should read.
On Friday July 19th, I’ll be hosting Bill Aulet in Boulder to discuss his new book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Lessons To A Successful Startup.
Bill, the managing director for the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, is a close friend and amazing thinker on entrepreneurship. The book is a result of many years of his work and thinking on creating and scaling startups.
The event will take place at Rally Software in Boulder, CO from 9am – 12pm. Seating will be limited to 150 people which means you better get your tickets NOW!
Tickets are free and you can register for them on our Eventbrite page found here.
Bill’s book Disciplined Entrepreneurship is currently available for pre-order, but will officially go on sale August 13th.
I hope you will join us!
Enterprise development is once again white hot. More evidence is this year’s Gluecon. Not only does Gluecon have the usual raft of amazing startup/early stage sponsors, but this year, the “big guys” are showing up (SAP, Intel, HP, Google, IBM, General Motors, Rackspace). And, I also know (because Eric’s told me) that we’re seeing a leap in the number of enterprise developers that are registering for the show.
Is it cloud computing adoption that’s driving this? Or mobile? or Big Data, or APIs? I’m not sure if it’s one topically-driven thing, but it sure does seem like the little developer conference that we helped to start just over five years ago is turning into *the* place to be if you’re looking for technical content.
The most recent agenda is here. Click on the link and you’ll see loads of juicy, technical content. I don’t know of anywhere you can go to get this depth of content.
So, I hope to see you at Gluecon (in just under 3 weeks). I’ll be there – absorbing everything that I can along with the rest of you. Use “gluespring” to take 10% off of the registration price.
I’m going to the NVCA annual meeting May 14 and 15 and if you are a VC, you should also. I haven’t been to one in many years, but this year is different. First, my partner Jason is running it. That being said, if the meeting was going to suck I still wouldn’t go.
I’m excited about the agenda. Not only is my good friend Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter speaking, but so are General Colin Powell, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, and CEO of 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki. And for the first time, “fun” is part of the meeting in the form of NVCA Live! featuring Pat Monahan from Train and Legitimate Front, headed up by Jason and our other partner Ryan.
If you are a VC, I hope to see you there. If you are an entrepreneur, ask your VC funders for tickets to NVCA Live!, as that is open to everyone, although tickets are only purchasable by NVCA members.
As we enter the 5th year of Gluecon, I’m very excited to see it come together. Eric Norlin has been saying year after year that his goal is to make Gluecon “the most technical, developer-focused conference” out there and I love watching him try.
You can check out the most recent agenda here, but some of the sessions that are indicative of what Eric’s talking about include:
- Building a distributed data platform with Node.js, Storm, Kafka, and ZeroMQ
- An Enterprise Mobile Reference Architecture
- Building using Netflix’s Open Source Architecture (a 4 hour workshop)
- Using Swagger to Build a Great API Interface
- The Pros and Cons of Choosing Go
- Availability During Cloud Outages: Multi-Regional, Self-Healing MySQL
- Node.js is for APIs
Beyond the content, I can personally testify that you’ll find an amazing group of people to hang out with, a truly welcoming atmosphere, and the best conference wifi you’ll find anywhere. Plus, it’s in Boulder at the beginning of summer!
Be sure to grab the early bird price (which ends April 7th) while you can — and use “brad12” to take an additional 10% off.
Entrepreneurs Unplugged – Tuesday 1/29 Interview of Jeremy Bloom (Integrate)
Tomorrow night (Tuesday, 1/29) I’ll be doing another Entrepreneurs Unplugged – this time I’ll be interviewing Jeremy Bloom, the co-founder of Integrate.
We are investors in Jeremy’s company which is doing extraordinarily well. Jeremy has been a total joy to work with and has an amazing story. If you recognize his name, “olympic ski champion”, “college football star”, and “NFL football player” may come to mind. He’s also the founder of a dynamite non-profit called Wish of a Lifetime.
We’ll be at the University of Colorado Law School, Room 101 from 6:15 – 7:45 PM with a reception to follow.
Register to join us for a fun and interesting evening.
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Defrag and Blur are only two weeks away, and if you’re not yet registered to come, you should find a way. Why?
1. Makerbot will be there with the Replicator 2 in hand. And is there anything cooler than 3D printing right now?
2. The agenda is absolutely incredible — Kevin Kelly, Jeff Ma, Rachel Happe, Paul Kedrosky, Bre Pettis, Andrew Tschesnok.
3. The networking will be intimate and awesome, as usual.
You’ll see and interact with everything from social business software to big data stuff to robots to 3D printers to augmented reality.
If you’re a student, use the Defrag Student Scholarship and special Blur student tickets to get into both events.
If you’re not a student, use “ejnvip” to take 25% off of your Defrag registration , and if you’d like to come to Blur — use the super secret handshake code of “bifr12” to take 60% off of your blur registration (shhhh)….
Don’t miss it!
On Friday I spent three hours at Tufts University meeting with Chris Rogers and a few of his colleagues at the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach. We had an awesome, wide ranging conversation about what they are doing, how the accelerator model could apply, and how education, especially around engineering and computer science needs to radically change, as well as some concrete suggestions about how to change it. I also got a tour of the research lab which had an enormous number of legos everywhere as one of their key sponsors is Lego.
James Barlow, the Director of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Program for The Gordon Institute at the Tufts School of Engineering was also in the meeting. He was as awesome as Chris and was able to speak from experience around a lot of accelerator activities, especially in Europe.
Yesterday, he emailed me a brilliant RSA Animate talk by Sir Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms. I just watched it and found myself nodding my head up and down for most of the 11 minutes it took to watch the video.
I encourage you to invest 11 minutes of your life and watch it right now if you are interested in getting an insight into why much of our current approach to education is broken (the “why”) along with some of how it can be fixed (“the what”).
I believe strongly that accelerator programs like TechStars have become a very effective “education program” for entrepreneurs. While we’ve figured out pieces of it, we are now taking it up a level by trying to figure out the longer term arc around multi-year programs, along with additional programs linked to entrepreneurship, but not necessarily for entrepreneurs, such as Boston Startup School. Academic accelerators, like the one that MIT ran this summer called the MIT Founders Skills Accelerator, are introducing and experimenting with this in an academic setting. Finally, my friends at Startup Weekend are working on something called SW Next that they’ll be rolling out soon – we talked about it extensively at our board meeting ten days ago.
When we look back in 40 years, I expect another dramatic impact of the Internet and the web will be a massive shift in the way education is packaged and delivered. And that’s a good thing.