Amy and I love Santa Fe. We need a long weekend after the past few weeks so we’ve decided to hop in the batmobile and drive as fast as we can down I-25 to Santa Fe. While I’m there I’m going to do a handful of entrepreneurial events that have been arranged by a variety of folks but really spearheaded by Doruk Aytulu as described in his post Brad Feld is Coming to Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Los Alamos.
Following is the schedule:
– Wednesday March 31st @ 5:30pm: Beers with Brad in Albuquerque at Blackbird Buvette
– Thursday April 1st @ 10am: Open Coffee Club in Los Alamos at Los Alamos Research Park, 4200 W. Jemez Road
– Thursday April 1st @ 5:30pm: Beers with Brad in Santa Fe at the Santa Fe Complex
As with previous Beers with Brad events that I’ve done, there will be plenty of beer, talk about entrepreneurship, and Q&A about whatever is on your mind. I’m looking forward to meeting some entrepreneurial folks from New Mexico in advance of a food and art orgy in Santa Fe over the weekend.
I’ve been hinting about a new conference that we’ve been working on with Eric Norlin that complements Defrag and Glue. Eric is about to launch it and the splash page for the Blur Conference is up.
If you are familiar with Defrag and Glue, you know they are built around two of Foundry Group’s themes (Protocol and Glue respectively). Blur is being built around our Human Computer Interaction theme, but with a twist. Instead of simply being able to “see cool stuff up close”, our goal with Blur will be to create an environment where you can actually use and work with this stuff. We’ll have user-oriented demos, hackathons, and tons of crazy shit no one has ever seen before.
Plus, we’ll give away a lot of cool toys, have a ton of smart people who are working on the next generation of HCI in one place, and have some fun surprises. And we are doing it in an environment that is especially tuned for a conference like Blur.
I’m incredibly excited about what Eric has put together for this year’s Glue Conference (as I wrote about the other day). He’s setting a high bar for Blur, where the goal will now be to have a few brains explode! Get ready – it’s never dull around here.
I love the conferences we help sponsor (Glue and Defrag). Eric Norlin is a genius at putting together a specialty technology conference. He gets amazing people to attend, curates the content meticulously, isn’t afraid to try new things every year (and have some not work), and just keeps at it with single minded commitment. He also totally gets why to do these things outside of the bay area – there’s a completely different tempo (and magic can happen) when people really commit two days of their life to a conference.
The 2010 Glue Conference is a few months away (5/26/10 and 5/27/10). Instead of happening in Denver, Eric is doing Glue at the Omni Interlocken Resort on the outskirts of Boulder. For a taste, here are some of the speakers:
Some of the sessions that are finalized include:
Take a look at the fuller speaker list and agenda if you want, but beware that it moves around a lot. If you register for Glue now you can get an additional 10% off the early bird price of $525 if you register by 4/2/10 and use the discount code “twit1” (full price at the door is $695). As a special bonus, CloudCamp at Denver is happening the day before Glue (5/25/10). CloudCamp is free, but only 98 tickets are left.
Sign up for both of them now. I’ll be there for the whole shebang, along with my partners at Foundry Group. Plus, May in Boulder is just awesome. And be on the lookout for an announcement soon about a third conference that you’ll have to really focus on (yeah – inside joke – but you’ll appreciate it.)
If you happen to live in North Carolina or regularly attend the CED Venture Conference (the Southeast US’s longest running early stage company financing conference), come say hello to me on April 21st. I’ll be spending the day at the conference and am speaking on a panel from 1:30pm to 2:45pm. We don’t yet appear to have a panel title, but the other participants are Dana Callow (Boston Millennia Partners), Noel Fenton (Trinity Ventures), Todd Forrest (Hummer Winblad), and Patrick Kerins (NEA). I don’t think I’ve ever been on a panel with any of them before (although I’m pretty certain I’ve fixed Dana Callow’s computer a few times back during my Feld Technologies days), so I’m looking forward to having some fun bwahahahahahahahaha.
On Thursday, March 18th (during CU Entrepreneurship Week) there is going to be a great Silicon Flatirons Conference on “The Role of Place”. Brad Bernthal, who is chairing the conference, leads with a great quote from Harvard Professor and Monitor Group co-founder Michael Porter.
"Paradoxically, the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things – knowledge, relationships, and motivation – that distant rivals cannot match."
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this personally given all my work around the Boulder entrepreneurial community, TechStars, Foundry Group’s investments in different parts of the US, and the Startup Visa initiative.
I’ll be on the first panel titled Entrepreneurial Immigration Policy with Lance Nagel (partner in Morgan, Lewis & Bockius’ Labor and Employment Practice) and Vivek Wadhwa (Senior Research Associate, Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and an Adjunct Professor at the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering). I expect we’ll get a good chance to cover plenty of ground, including several of the incredible immigrant entrepreneur loci and projects like the Startup Visa initiative.
The second panel is Place and Iteration: Lessons From Storage and includes several folks who have been involved in the Boulder “storage ecosystem” over the past 30 years, including Jesse Aweida (founder of StorageTek) and Kyle Lefkoff (general partner of Boulder Ventures, who has invested in several Boulder storage companies over the years including McData and LeftHand Networks). Jim Linfield (partner at Cooley Godward, the founder of Cooley’s Colorado office, and counsel for a number of Colorado storage companies) will be anchoring the panel.
The third panel is Innovation and The Architecture of Geography and will explore broader lessons and insight concerning the role of place, regional architecture, and innovation.
Once again, my friends at Silicon Flatiron have put together a rich conference on a very important and timely topic. It’s taking place at the Wittemyer Courtroom, Wolf Law Building, University of Colorado on Thursday, March 18, 2010 from 2:30PM to 6:30PM. Register now and come join us.
I’m doing another Beers with Brad – this time in Boulder on next Thursday, February 18th from 6pm to 8pm at Twisted Pine Brewery (3201 Walnut Street). Lest you think this will be one of those boring events where a bunch of smart, interesting people stand around and drink beer and talk for a few hours, I promise I’ll spice this one up.
I’m going to tell three entrepreneurial stories I haven’t told in public before in Boulder. I haven’t decided which ones yet but they’ll be doozies. I promise a mix of success and failure to go with some very good beer. All in support of a good cause and some fun.
There might even be an after party.
My long time friend Warren Katz pointed me out to an event on March 3, 2010 called EO Boston Accelerator Shark Bowl 2010. It’s a competition for entrepreneurs under 40 with businesses between $100k / year and $1m / year in revenue. You present to a group of judges including Warren (MAK Technologies), Rich Farrell (Full Armor), Clark Waterfall (Boston Search Group), and Michael Hackel (DiningIN) who are all EO Boston members.
In 1993 I was the founder of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization Boston Chapter and member #1. My forum group, “Forum Group 1” is apparently still meeting monthly. And while YEO changed its name to EO, my friend Warren who has been a member from the very beginning tells me the group is still going very strong (the stats look like 88 members with total sales of $427m and 2,231 employees across all of the companies.)
If you fit the qualifications, I’d encourage you to participate. It’s free, you’ll get some great practice and advice, and meet a bunch of new entrepreneurial peers. To participate, you must register and to present you must sent your presentation to Caryn Saitz by March 1st.
Go Boston (and Cambridge) – you are making me proud these days!
I’ve done a few “Beers With Brad” in other cities such as Seattle and Vancouver. On February 18th from 6 to 8pm, I’m going to be doing Beers with Brad in Boulder at The Twisted Pine Brewery. It’s a fundraiser for KGNU (88.5 FM and 1390 AM in Denver) – tickets are $10 in advance or $15 at the door. There will be free munchies, music, and plenty of beer. Come join us for a fun evening where I’ll talk about whatever comes to my mind about entrepreneurship and innovation – especially ideas fueled by a few beers.
There’s a bunch of other great entrepreneurial stuff going on in Boulder in February. Don’t miss the Winter in the Bunker series – new things are being added regularly.
And – if you are a startup that wants to work with some CU students as interns (or recruit them for full time work), don’t miss University of Colorado Startup2Students 2010 on March 11th from 6:30 – 8:00pm.
I love this town.
On Friday I’ll be in LA at Mahalo headquarters at 1pm making a guest appearance on Jason Calacanis’s This Week In Startups show. I told Jason I’d be happy to discuss whatever he wanted to which I hope includes the Open Angel Forum, Startup Visa, Abolishing Software Patents, and all kinds of fun things around entrepreneurship and venture capital. Conversations with Jason are never dull so I expect this one to be spicy hot on top of the typical chocolately goodness.
I figured I should do a few Mahalo searches in advance so I looked up Brad Feld, Foundry Group, Sarah Palin, and “How To Cheat on Rock Band”. I then poked around on Mahalo Answers and Mahalo Tasks to see if I could earn any M$. So – at least I can now answer Jason’s question “have you played with Mahalo lately.”