The Kauffman Foundation just announced that they are providing 15 scholarships to Defrag. If you are an entrepreneur running a startup that is pre-Series A funding, you are eligible for a scholarship. Kauffman will cover the full cost of the conference pass – all you have to do is get to the conference and find a place to sleep.
I’m hugely appreciative that Kauffman has stepped up to do this. Conferences are not cheap and it’s a big expense for a company that has no funding. On the other hand, it’s an incredible networking and learning opportunity for a startup that’s addressing issues in the ecosystem that Defrag covers. Paul Kedrosky had a big hand in this and has been super helpful to Eric Norlin at Defrag from the beginning – thanks Paul – you are a star.
If you are interested in applying for one of these scholarships, just email Eric Norlin (enorlin AT mac.com) with your name, company website, and a 100 word (no more) explanation of why you should be at Defrag.
Once again I’m moderating the Entrepreneurs Unplugged series hosted by Silicon Flatirons. Our first interviewee – this coming Monday night – is Andre Durand, the founder and CEO of Ping Identity.
Andre Durand brings 18 years of software industry executive leadership experience to his role as founder and CEO at Ping Identity. Durand co-founded Digital ID World, the identity industry conference (acquired by IDG in 2007). Prior to Ping Identity, Durand founded Jabber, Inc., an instant messaging and presence management software provider (acquired by Cisco in 2009). While at Jabber, Durand incubated the Jabber Software Foundation, a non-profit established to facilitate growth of the Jabber Open Source project. Prior to Jabber, Inc., Durand was founder and CEO of Durand Communications, a bulletin board software provider (acquired by Webb Interactive in 1998). Durand holds BA degrees in Biology and Economics from the University of California.
The event begins on Monday 9/20/10 at 6:15pm with brief networking and runs until 7:30pm in the ATLAS Building on the CU Boulder Campus. The event is free but please register in advance.
One of my favorite conferences, Defrag, is really heating up. As always, Eric Norlin is doing a magnificent job of curating the agenda and already has some great headliners such as Esther Dyson, Paul Kedrosky, Vinnie Mirchandani, David Weinberger, Stowe Boyd, and Vivek Wadhwa.
Today, Jeff Ma agreed to keynote Defrag. From Eric’s blog post:
“Jeff Ma, who was the inspiration for the movie “21″ and the book “Bringing Down the House,” and is the author of the *awesome* new book, “The House Advantage” is coming to keynote Defrag. Besides being a world-famous card counter in the game of blackjack (which he, literally, can no longer play in casinos), Jeff has started several businesses (PROTRADE and Citizen Sports – which sold to Yahoo! in May of this year). Jeff’s current focus is on applying the laws of statistics to business in order to give managers, entrepreneurs and leaders an edge (hence, “The House Advantage”).”
I was re-introduced to Jeff recently through our mutual friend Niel Robertson, the CEO of Trada. I wrote about this, and Jeff’s great book, in my post The House Advantage. We’e talked about getting together – it might be that the first time our paths cross physically will be at Defrag on November 17th and 18th in Boulder.
Come join us – register now for the Early Bird Price which is good through September 30th.
When my partners and I started Foundry Group, one of our key principles was to be “theme-based investors.” At the time the phrase “theme” wasn’t being used in VC-land so we got to make up what it meant, at least for us. We decided that a theme was a “broadly horizontal technology area that would have dramatic impact and opportunity over the next 10+ years.” (see Jason Mendelson’s post titled What Is Thematic Investing for a deeper explanation.)
At Foundry Group, our themes have become our intellectual filter to the world of what we invest in. As a result, they are always evolving, expanding, and changing as we learn more and as technological innovation continues its tireless march. We try to spend as much time as we can rolling around in our themes, playing with stuff, spending time with smart people in each theme, and just thinking and talking about stuff.
Several years ago a guy named Eric Norlin reached out to me after I wrote a blog post in 2006 titled Intelligence Amplification and suggested we start a conference around the idea, but with a better name. The Defrag Conference resulted from that discussion, as did our now four year old collaboration with Eric and his conferences. Not surprisingly, since we referred to one of our popular themes as “Glue” it made sense to start a Glue Conference several years ago.
Last year Eric and I started talking about doing a conference around our human computer interaction theme. We’ve now made a number of investments in this theme, including Oblong, Organic Motion, EmSense, and Sifteo. It took Eric about a year to get comfortable that the timing was right, but he’s now ready to do it. As a result, he’s launched his latest conference – Blur.
The Blur Conference, like our human computer interaction theme, is based on the premise that the current models of human computer interaction are undergoing a rapid change. Technologies that were until recently science fiction or university lab projects are now showing up all over the place. From the promise of the tablet computer to touch computing to motion capture to augmented reality to the “minority report” interface, the ways in which we interact with computers are moving far beyond the keyboard and mouse.
Eric’s goal with Blur is to have it be massively participatory. Everyone will get to use all tech at Blur, hack on it, explore it with their colleagues, and figure out new and inventive ways to work with it. Because the goal of Blur is so participatory, Eric is going to limit the number of attendees in year one to only 250 to make sure he nails the experience.
Blur is taking place on February 22nd and 23rd at the Omni Orlando at Championsgate. The facility looks awesome and Eric assures me Florida is a lot warmer than Colorado in February. Early bird signup is up for $995 (the full price is going to be $1495) so get a jump on things if this floats your boat. I’ll be there!
Mobile Monday Colorado is hosting a member of the TechStars mentor family, Dion Almaer, for their July 19th event. Dion is Managing Director of Developer Relations at Palm (now part of HP). Besides his involvement with TechStars as a mentor, he is a celebrity in the AJAX community as the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, and previously held senior positions within Mozilla and Google. Dion will be able to shed some light on how the largest consumer device company in the world will be integrating WebOS into various product lineups including tablets and intelligent printers. He will talk about the direction of the WebOS operating environment specifically and the future of mobile and the web. It is sure to be a solid event worth checking out.
On May 28th I’m going to swing through Dallas on my way to New York. I’m going to see some of my family, hang out with my cousin Jon Feld and the companies at Jon’s Tech Wildcatters program, and do a Beers with Brad event on Friday night from 6pm to 8pm at Lotus on 2900 McKinney Ave in Dallas. If you are in Dallas on Friday, come drink a beer with me, meet my cousin Jon and Gabriella Draney who runs Tech Wildcatters, and hang out with a bunch of great entrepreneurs.
Early tomorrow morning, I’m heading out to San Francisco to spend two days at Google I/O 2010. I love technical conferences – the Google I/O 2010 agenda looks killer. I’m also on two panels – they’ve invited some VCs who code to participate in Technology, innovation, computer science, & more: VC panel moderated by standup comedian Twitter COO Dick Costolo and Making Freemium work – converting free users to paying customers moderated by Microsoft evangelist Google Developer Advocate Don Dodge.
Then, next week I’m spending two days in Boulder (well – Broomfield, but close enough) at the second annual Glue Conference. The agenda is also killer, is built around the Foundry Group’s Glue theme (e.g. it’s super relevant to us), and has a superb list of sponsors who will be attending and participating. Did I say the agenda was killer? The amazing thing about Glue is that the speakers are part of the conference – part of the reason we have it in Boulder is to drive deep multi-day engagement amount all attendees (speakers, attendees, and sponsors). Eric Norlin, who created Glue (and Defrag, and Blur) is a master at creating these types of specialty conferences.
I know many of my friends will be at both and I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of folks that I have mostly an email relationship with. While you can’t get into Google I/O anymore, Glue is still open for registration. And Eric has set up a discount code of “googleio” for 10% off the conference price. Finally, to all my local Boulder and Denver friends that have been thinking about coming, your cost is about a round trip plane flight to the bay area and a night at a hotel, except this time everyone is coming to you. So come out and play!
Sometimes I feel like a conference promoter. It’s worth noting that while I put plenty of events up on this blog, I only post the ones that I’d consider going to. Specifically, I probably get 10 requests to post something for everyone one I do.
Over the past year, I’ve gotten to know Eric Ries through the work we’ve done together on the Startup Visa initiative. If you don’t know of Eric, he’s a software entrepreneur who over the past few years has been developing and evangelizing the idea of the Lean Startup. He’s an extraordinary writer – I gobble up every word that he writes on his blog Lessons Learned.
Eric wrote me the other day about a new conference he’s doing called Startup Lessons Learned in San Francisco on 4/23/10. The overview of the event follows:
Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups. We have a great lineup of speakers, including Kent Beck, Steve Blank, Sean Ellis, Andrew Chen, Randy Komisar, Hiten Shah, and many others.
While I can’t be there I highly recommend anything that Eric is involved in. He’s given me a discount code of ERIES25 which is good for 25% any ticket if you register for the event. If you are in the bay area on 4/23/10 I encourage you to check it out.
I’ve enjoyed my interviews on Vator.tv in the past and think Bambi Francisco and crew do a great job of highlighting up and coming entrepreneurs, companies, and their investors.
Vator is holding a Splash event on May 13, at the Cafe du Nord in San Francisco. Like its last event, about 400 attendees are expected. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh will talk about how he built a company to a $1 billion exit to Amazon and Gurbaksh Chahal will talk about how he started and sold two companies for $340 million before the age of 25. About 30 investors from VC firms will be there and as a special bonus, there will be an afterparty with a band consisting of Adbrite founder Philip Kaplan, Mayfield VC Raj Kapoor and Norwest VC Tim Chang.
While I can’t attend since I’ll be on my Q2 vacation with Amy hiding from the world , Bambi gave me a discount code of “Splashfeld” which gets you 30% off on the registration. And there is still time to join the competition and get on stage.