Category: Techstars
Eric Ries is this week’s guest star on The Founders. Eric is an incredible speaker and is traveling the world on a mission to help people stop wasting other people’s time. If you don’t follow Eric’s thoughts on Lean Startups on his blog Lessons Learned, you should.
You get a little taste of the shift Omniar is making while they wander around the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art along with a surprise birthday party for David Cohen at The Lazy Dog on a beautiful Boulder evening. And a few special bonus visitors. And some great shots of Boulder in the summertime. I love Homer but I’m starting to miss Boulder.
“Conditions of Extreme Uncertainty” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 9 from TechStars on Vimeo.
A few weeks ago I had my weekly mentor meeting with Ian and Adam from Gearbox. We messed around with the latest version of “the ball” on an Android phone and then talked about a bunch of things that were going on. I am totally amazed at the technical progress they are making this summer – these guys are magicians. But they’ve been shy about getting out there and showing off what they’ve been up to. My sense after talking to them is that their hesitancy was a combination of prioritization, focus, and “the need to get everything right.”
I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something like “this stuff is so fucking cool – just start blogging about what you are doing, get the API out there, and get out in front of the world with this.” Two days later they sent me a note that their first blog post Gear What? was up and they’ve been blogging and talking up a storm ever since, including emerging on the bunker to play on the Pearl Street Mall and flying to Aspen in Paul Berberian’s plane to spend the day at Mini Maker Faire Aspen.
Now they are having a Hackathon on the weekend of July 24th/25th. An early version of their API is out and I’ve seen some cool shit running on an Android phone so I know it’s hackable. If you are an Android developer, this is going to be fun, plus there’s the staple of every hackathon (free food, beer, and red bull.) If you want to play, send an email to ian [at] gearbox [dot] me.
Oh – and if you are into robots, go check out the 2010 Denver Robot Expo & Mini Maker Faire. Yup – the Gearbox guys will be there.
This week’s episode of The Founders is all about “the team.” Ryan Sarver from Twitter is the guest of honor so all my links will be twitter handles. David’s mom (gingerale) makes a nice appearance (follow her and follow my dad sfeld while you are at it) along with Eric Norlin of Glue, Defrag, and now Blur.
“The Team” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 8 from TechStars on Vimeo.
Gearbox, one of the teams that I’m mentoring in this year’s TechStars Boulder program, is starting to blog about their product. One of their taglines is “reinventing the ball” and while this potentially generates plenty of 14 year old boy jokes it’s pretty amazing stuff.
The ball, which consists of a custom circuit board inside a 3D printed spherical shell (which is pretty cool all by itself) with lots of fun things on it, is completely controlled by a smartphone (in this case, an Android).
The software is still evolving rapidly but if you know anything about trying to control a spherical shell remotely, watching this video will make you pretty excited.
They are planning to release at least one Android based game by demo day along with an open API to let anyone write applications that incorporate the ball. I’m totally psyched to get my hands on one of these.
After a long and awesome day in Seattle ending with a great dinner with the BigDoor board at Emmer & Rye, I came back to my room and watched Episode 6 of this year’s TechStars Founders video serious. It was about the TechStars reunion event and included scenes from the world’s largest Ignite event as well as some beautiful Boulder pictures. It made me smile a big smile. Whenever I see stuff like this and reflect on what I spent my life doing, I’m just a happy little kid.
“We’re Not Alone” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 6 from TechStars on Vimeo.
I’ve got a two board meeting day tomorrow (Impinj and Gist) as I gear up to head to Alaska for the month of July. Seattle and TechStars – thanks for the glorious day! Homer, I’ll see you Thursday.
It is so nice to be back in Boulder after my 10 hours trip home from New York yesterday that included a lot of time on tarmacs, a diverted landing in Colorado Springs, and an I-25 road trip. I really want a personal portable teleportation machine.
I’m about to head out for a run but thought I’d toss up a few fun posts and videos that I saw when scanning through my email and news this morning.
First up is a story from my dad about why He Loves His Pogoplug. It turns out that he is Pogoplug customer #1 and he tells the story of it. He was also in my office last week when Dan and Jed Putterman (the Pogoplug co-founders) were there for a board meeting and they all had fun hanging out together. I love when technology and family cross over.
Next up is a great interview by Steve Bell with Vikas Reddy of Occipital. Late last week eBay announced that they had acquired the RedLaser product from Occipital. I subsequently crowned Occipital the Bootstrappers of TechStars Boulder class of 2008. And, if you watch the video carefully, you’ll see a Pogoplug to the left of Vikas in parts of the video.
Finally, here’s episode #5 of the TechStars Founders 2010 video series titled Risk Takers.
“Risk Takers” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 5 from TechStars on Vimeo.
Recently, TechStars began expanding outside the United States through its new TechStars Global Affiliate program. From experience, we know that investing internationally from the United States is difficult. However, the demand from entrepreneurs throughout the world for a TechStars-like program has been substantial. So, TechStars opted for an affiliate model which gives the local partner the benefits of working with TechStars such as process know-know and access to the TechStars network. TechStars Global Affiliates are independent entities but we intend to bring them together at least once a year and are in touch with them continuously to help out as we can.
The first TechStars Global Affiliate is Startupbootcamp which is based in Copenhagen but covers Northern Europe (from Scandinavia to the Baltics and even northern Germany and Poland). What does it take to be an affiliate? TechStars is a community-based model so a top requirement is a large local network of serial entrepreneurs. It’s also a chemistry thing and we have to feel that we share values (intellectual honesty, passion and simplicity). And of course you have to know a thing or two about entrepreneurship.
Applications for Startupbootcamp are open until the end of June. If you are in Northern Europe, take a look and apply now!