I had a really fun night in Montreal at the opening dinner for the C100 Conference that I’m speaking at tomorrow. The dinner was put on by Accelerate MTL and included some friends as well as a bunch of new people I met tonight.
Dinner was really well done. I sat next to Howard Lindzon who teased and entertained me all night long. Dinner was a pre-set menu so I ordered the non-meat choices and didn’t think twice about it.
I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 19. I eat fish, so I guess I’m a fishetarian or pescatarian or whatever you want to call me, but no beef, chicken, or pork. Once a year I end up accidentally eating some meat (usually on nachos, soup, or something Italian) and I always realize it around 3 am.
The first course was yellowfin sashmi, which was excellent. The second course was some kind of red tuna like thing which I dug into without a second thought. It was easily the best tuna I’ve ever had. Snarf – and gone. I then made fun of my tablemates who were eating a beet salad (which also looked really good.)
Brad: “You guys made the wrong choice – this tuna tartare was awesome.”
Howard: “That’s not tuna, that’s steak.”
Brad: “Howard – you know I’m a vegetarian – quit giving me shit.”
Howard: “No seriously, look at the menu, you just ate a plate full of stake tartare.”
I looked. In fact, they’d served me “Tartare de boeuf epice, truffe, parmesan, citron.” Yes – it was the best tuna I’ve ever had because it was in fact steak tartare. And it was awesome.
Much mockery of me ensued. It’s not quite 3 am, but my stomach is doing the once a year “you just ate meat” rumble.
My friends at Orbotix are hiring. Following is the list of open positions. If you fit the description, like playing with robots, want free beer all day, and live in Boulder, email them a note with a resume.
– Game Designer: Are you passionate about gaming and have a deep understanding of game design and game mechanics? This isn’t a programming job but you will need to be able to create wireframes and rough graphics for games that bridge the gap between the virtual world on your phone with the physical gameplay aspects of Sphero.
– iPhone Game Developer: Build amazing and crazy iPhone games that integrate with the Sphero API.
– Android Game Developer: Same as the iPhone developer but on the Android side.
– Social Media & Marketing Manager: Do you love robots, toys, and games and can think of nothing better to do than talk to people about them – both in person and on Twitter, Facebook, and a blog? If yes, then this is you!
– PHP Developer Internship: This paid internship is for someone fluent in PHP development who can help manage the Orbotix web sites.
– Marketing Internship: This paid internship is for someone who will be working with our marketing manager to promote Sphero.
Orbotix has some exciting announcements happening in the next 30 days; if you’ve been waiting for the right time to join a hot startup in Boulder, now is the time. And, if you are at SXSW, go hunt down the Orbotix gang and participate in their “Where are my balls?” contest to win a free Sphero.
My friends at Fitbit are hiring a director of marketing. If you, or someone you know, wants a director of marketing job in a fast growing, well funded company in San Francisco, go take a look at the job spec and apply.
There is a ton of hiring going on in our portfolio right now at all levels. We have a bunch of companies that are growing head count 100%+ in 2011 – much of it driven by revenue growth (vs. just a new financing). It’s pretty exciting and I’ll try to figure out a more effective way to broadcast what is going on and what the opportunities are.
In the mean time, I’ve heard of a number of jobs that have come from the Boulder CEO Jobs list that David Cohen and I are maintaining. including several exec jobs like the new CFO at Envysion, This is a reverse jobs list for all the random inbound job seekers that reach out to us for stuff in the Boulder area. If you are a CEO of a Boulder based company and you are not on this list, just email me to be added to it.
We are investors in Memeo, the leading Digital Content software and services platform for consumers and businesses. They are looking for a VP or a Director of Marketing to join them in Santa Clara, CA. If you are interested, please send your resume to MarketingSearch@memeo-inc.com.
A description of the job and Memeo follows:
Memeo is currently recruiting for a VP/Director of Marketing to drive its SasS SMB product growth. Responsibilities include the following:
Memeo’s suite of software products and cloud-based services helps users to “Simplify Your Digital Life.” Memeo’s offerings include local and online backup, multi-device, cloud synchronization, large file transfer, and multimedia file sharing. Memeo has issued over 50 million licenses in 20 languages in over 150 countries. In addition to millions of customers using Memeo products, there are over 100,000 companies using Memeo, including 1 out of every 7 Fortune 1000 companies. Memo’s partners include Google, Sony, Seagate, Western Digital, Buffalo Technology and NetGear.
There are two positions that I find difficult to fill in Boulder in the various companies we are investors in. The first is a real product manager (PM). We’ve got a bunch of great ones in Boulder, but there appears to be 100% employment for them and I don’t poach from myself as that seems counterproductive. The other difficult person to find is a UX design guru.
Now, there are a number of strong web design and development firms in Boulder, such as our friends at Slice of Lime, and we use them regularly throughout our portfolio. They are also plenty of strong UI developers. However, in some companies we really need a full time UX person, especially those that are software dev heavy. We’ve managed to solve this in most cases, but it’s hard and the pool of gurus is small.
So, I’m looking for one UX person that can also handle the UI development who is off the charts that wants to move to Boulder. I’ve got a well funded company with an awesome technical team for you to join that is working on some really interesting and difficult stuff. It’s going to market in Q4 with a unique product that has the potential to really shake up a particular segment. I’m not looking for a UI person that thinks he can do UX; rather I’m looking for an amazing UX person who specialized in web services and is comfortable crossing over the UI development.
If you are this person, email me right now.
I get a lot of inbound resumes from folks looking to relocate to Boulder. I also get a lot of requests from local CEOs for candidates for various positions. I do my best at connecting folks, but I’m sure plenty of connections slip through the cracks.
So – David Cohen of TechStars (who has the same thing happening to him all the time) and I have created a new private email list for CEOs of Boulder-based companies. We have started to email qualified inbound resumes to this list. By qualified, I mean that it’s a real inquiry, rather than a generic “resume spam email” which is the only email I get that I won’t respond to.
If you are a CEO of a Boulder-based company and want to be added to this list, just email me. Alternatively, if you are interested in relocating to Boulder and want to get exposure to the local CEOs, just email me.
Did someone recently say email was dead? Whatever.
More jobs – this time in San Francisco. We recently invested in Triggit – my partner Seth blogged about our investment and the rise of real time bidding platforms and we put up a post about Triggit on the Foundry Group blog.
Triggit is one of a group of recently emerging companies called demand side platforms (DSP) that provide technology to advertisers enabling them to buy display media across millions of websites. Triggit specializes in using a technology called real time bidding where they bid on and run the ads you see in real time as you move across the web. In the milliseconds that it takes your browser to request a new website, Triggit is looking at your ad impression for its customers and determining how much you are worth, what ad to serve, submitting a bid and tracking the results. Even more interestingly they do this billions of times a day around the world.
Needless to say the technology sitting inside Triggit is what engineers would call a nice hard problem. How do you build and operate a system that makes complex decisions in less then 50 milliseconds with a global QPS soon to be measured in the hundreds of thousands? If you are the sort of engineer that gets excited by this type of scale and latency then Triggit is hiring. They are looking for engineers with experience building large-scale, distributed systems in C / C++, data guys and gals familiar with the Hadoop eco-system and a Rails programmer. Bonus points if there are copies of W. Richard Stevens books under your pillow. If this sounds interesting you can apply to jobs@triggit.com or visit Triggit’s website to learn more.
The Feld job board has one for you today. If you are a sys admin and live in the Boulder area, StillSecure is interested in talking to you. The spec is below – if you fit it and are interested, please email Rhonda Grosz.
StillSecure, a network security software and services company is looking for a Systems Administrator for their Superior, CO office. We are looking for self-motivated, talented individuals who enjoy working in a fast paced environment. This individual will be responsible for managing, maintaining the IT infrastructure of the company and has at least 4 years of experience. He/she should be proficient in Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Windows Desktop and Server operating systems. Networking, Linux and Mac OS experience is a plus.
Do you remember the “Let’s Build a Filter” scene from Apollo 13? It remains – at least in my mind – one of the most heroic engineering scenes in the movies. The one minute segment with the meat of the scene follows:
Several times over the past week the BP Gulf Crisis has come up in conversation. The conversations have started in different places (politics, environment, leadership) but in each case quickly cycled toward the concept that the people involved need to try something different. Now, there might be plenty of orthogonal thinking going on in lots of places around the crisis, but I kept thinking about the scene from Apollo 13 whenever we got to this point.
I’ve always felt that MIT undergraduates represent the smartest and most creative independent thinkers on the planet. My friends at Caltech and Stanford will immediately come to defense of their colleagues and I’ll acknowledge that they are also extremely smart, but I’ve always thought the combination of MIT raw material with the four year undergraduate curriculum creates a unique type of thought process.
It’s summertime and classes are out. It would take a day to identify the top two juniors and seniors from each department. Why not immediately constitute a team of 25 amazing students, give them access to 100% of the data surrounding the crisis, show them the above movie clip, and tell them to come up with a solution to the problem. Pay them each $25k for the rest of the summer – this is tiny compared to the amount of money being spent daily on the outside consultants working on solving the problem.
Then, open source all of their thinking. Have them put their ideas on the web as they evolve. Get anyone involved who wants to try to help solve the problem. MIT has long been a leader in using the web for education – most recently with MIT Open Courseware. MIT and BP already have a longstanding relationship – let’s take it up a level.
If nothing else, this will rally a bunch of smart people to engage in understanding and trying to help with the problem. In the upside case, there is a small chance that it can come up with a solution to the problem. And it will have the added benefit of inspiring a new generation of engineers to go after doing heroic things.