Well – that was predictable. Rockies Blow Ticket-Sales Tech; World Series Next? About 30 minutes after Rockies world series tickets went on sale online (the only place you could buy them) their systems crashed. According to the Rockies Press Release, under 500 tickets were actually sold. The MLB ticket vendor – Paciolan – claims that the traffic (8.5m hits in some unspecified period of time) took down all their North American customers. Oops. Glad I was wearing my Red Sox jacket around town today. Maybe the Rockies should consider outsourcing the whole shebang to StubHub!
Last night I attended the Boulder 2007 Esprit Entrepreneur Awards where I was honored to receive the Rob Planchard Award. I shared the stage with two good friends – Tim Miller and Ryan Martens from Rally Software who won the Entrepreneur of the Year award. To highlight the evening – Bill Perry of Softbridge Advisors won the Lifetime Achievement Award.
When I moved to Boulder in 1995, Amy and I only knew one person and he moved away six months later. I had no expectations of doing any meaningful amount of business in Boulder – I moved here to live in a beautiful place that was between the two coasts (Boston and the Bay Area) that I was traveling between on a weekly basis.
In addition to being an amazing place to live, Boulder has been home to a superb entrepreneurial community in the area that I invest – namely software and Internet companies. I won the Esprit Entrepreneur of the Year award in 1999 with Brian Makare and Andrew Currie for a company we co-founded called Email Publishing (which was acquired by and morphed into MessageMedia.) By that point I realized (and was deeply involved) in some of the special stuff that was happening on the Colorado Front Range and knew that I’d call this place home for the rest of my life.
It’s very gratifying (and humbling) to be recognized again for my contribution to the entrepreneurial community in Boulder. I don’t do it for awards or recognition, but it always feels good. It was especially satisfying to look at the list of companies and entrepreneurs that have been recognized over the past 12 years since I moved here and see a number of companies that I’ve been involved with. Rally is the latest, and I’m immensely proud of what Tim, Ryan, and their team are creating.
The line of the night goes to Bill Perry. During his closing speech, Bill talked about his experiences since coming to Boulder 25 years ago (ironically, we are both MIT grads – there’s something about this place that attracts people from MIT.) Bill reflected on several times when the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Boulder hit low points, and referred to companies around during those periods of times as “Slinky Companies.” In his words, these are companies that “aren’t very useful but they are fun to watch as they tumble down the stairs.” Brilliant – and I’ve had my share of slinkies.
Thanks to everyone that participated in the event last night – it’s a powerful thing to see so many local entrepreneurs in one place. And a special thanks to everyone that organized and worked on the event. Often I find events like this to be tedious but last night’s was extremely well done, funny, and paced nicely.
Last Thursday, I shared the stage at the CSIA DEMOgala 2007 with Colorado Governor Bill Ritter. During his speech, Governor Ritter announced the formation of the Colorado Innovation Council. I’m one of three co-chairs, along with Juan Rodriguez (co-founder of StorageTek and Exabyte) and Phil Weiser (professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a national telecommunications policy expert.)
Phil and I have been working with Governor Ritter and his staff to form this since the beginning of the year. One of our goals was to create an organization that could have real impact, rather than just a collection of people who’s names would go on a web site and letterhead somewhere. We spent plenty of time talking to various folks both in and out of government who have been involved in things like this in the past and, as a result of our research, are hopeful that we’ve created an organization of “doers” vs. either “figureheads” or “pontificators.”
Now, before you say – “but wait, didn’t we go through this in 2000 when then Governor Owens declared that “Colorado is now an undisputed leader of the world technology revolution” – let’s hit pause (or reset) and try again. Ritter’s goal, of being “bold, ambitious and innovative when it comes to maximizing the use of technology” is much more interesting to me and one I’m behind. I have no desire to see Colorado become “the next Silicon Valley” (if I wanted to be in Silicon Valley, I’d move to Silicon Valley.) However, I’m a deep believer that a state like Colorado can continually improve and I’m proud to be part of an effort to work with the public sector to make an already great state even better.
The Colorado Innovation has three initiatives:
Each of the three co-chairs have taken a leadership role with one of these initiatives and is working with a subcommittee of about 10 high tech leaders. I’m leading State IT, Phil is handling Ubiquitous Broadband, and Juan is leading IT Entrepreneurship. There will be plenty of crossover between committees (e.g. many of the folks on State IT are also Colorado-based IT Entrepreneurs and vice versa.)
I’m working with the State CIO – Mike Locatis – on the State IT initiative. Our goal is a simple one – support Mike in his efforts to drive a multi-year IT consolidation throughout the state that ultimately results in appropriate centralizations of the state’s IT infrastructure. Currently, Colorado is operating under a massively decentralized IT model, which is horribly inefficient and very ineffective. As a first step of acknowledging the importance of the IT infrastructure to the functioning of state government, Governor Ritter elevated the CIO to a cabinet-level post.
I’ve been really impressed with all of my interactions with Mike around this. Governor Ritter’s commitment to getting some real stuff done here is exciting and the idea that the private sector can work with the public sector to move these three initiatives forward is attractive to me.
Overall, there are about 30 Colorado superstars involved in this initiative – look for me to write more about it as we start getting stuff done.
If you follow the Boulder entrepreneurship scene, Jerry Lewis – the editor-in-chief of the Boulder County Business Report – has a video interview series up on the web titled Entrepreneur BizCast. This week he interviewed Lijit Networks and has interviews up with Collective Intellect, me.dium, and TechStars. They are quick – and good. You can also follow along in your RSS reader on the BoulderNews.Info blog.
The really cool thing about having friends like Paul Berberian is that I can act out my desire to participate in a real life equivalent of Being John Malkovich. Paul has a fascinating new company that is launching at the end of the year. His product is both physical and virtual; the physical part of it (nicknamed “the bong” by me) is manufactured in China.
I don’t really have any desire to go on an eight day business trip to a factory in Qingdao, but it’s awesome to read Paul’s description of it in his post China visit – nothing is as it seems. Now – the conclusion (signaled by the title) is no surprise, but my voyeristic view of Paul’s week was satisfying this early morning in Boulder.
Best “how I viewed it” moment: “Generally negative on the food experience but positive on the environment – we ate inside a giant green house –trippy. BTW dog sucks – it is chewy and tastes like dog!”
As a special bonus this week, I got to go to GwangJu, South Korea as part of my experience of Being Kimbal Musk. Those pig heads look worst then I envision the dog did.
My friend Kimbal Musk (owner of The Kitchen and CEO of Me.dium) is in GwangJu, South Korea with his wife Jen installing her light harp. As usual, Kimbal is hysterical. A typical paragraph:
“And NO ONE speaks english. It’s like we’re aliens. They can’t even read the tourist map. We spent about 45 minutes in an insane, high speed taxi ride trying to explain where we wanted to go by pointing at the map the hotel gave us. I think the map we got was a joke played on the only western tourists to hit GwangJu this year. The cab driver thought we were retarded. We thought he was out to kill us.”
Or in a backyard. Yes – my backyard.
Amy has the full story on her blog in her post Q: When is a Sprinkler not a Sprinkler? No one died (including the snake) but some expletives were spoken. Fortunately I was at my office so all I got was the play by play via the telephone. If you are a snake lover (or just like red patio furniture), click here for an extensive photo retrospective.
As a follow up to my Summer of ‘49 post, I give you the Rockies vs. Mets box score from yesterday.
Sorry Mets fans. Looks like the Rockies finally made history by being the first team in 50 years to sweep two New York teams in the same season. Of course, this came on the heals of a 1–9 run by the Rockies. Lots of primes, a few cubes, and a lot of multiples of threes in these numbers.
Colorado is a beautiful place. I’ve lived her 12 years and while I’ve done plenty of hiking and trail running, I’ve never climbed a fourteener (mountain > 14,000 ft – there are 54 of them here.) Today I climbed two of them – Grays Peak (14,270 ft) and Torreys Peak (14,267 ft.)
This is Joe Jilk, Maureen Amundson, Dave Jilk, me, and Jason Mendelson on the top of Grays Peak (the first one.) Dave has a picture of us on top of Torreys on his Facebook page.
It was an awesome experience. We spent Sunday night at my place in Keystone, got up at 4am, and were on the trail at 5:45am. We got to the top of Grays around 8:30, bagged Torreys at about 9:30, and were back down to the trailhead at about 12:30 (about 8 miles round trip.) I ran the last mile and then went another mile and half down the road until Dave drove by and rescued me from myself. We finished it off with lunch in Idaho Springs at Two Brothers Deli and then headed home.
52 to go. Here’s another shot for perspective.