As the TechStars Boulder program starts its third week, the TechStars Boston program kicks off its first week. Andrew Hyde has a good summary of the first two weeks of Boulder (along with a callout to TechStars TV) and the Boston Herald ran an interview with me, Shawn Broderick, and David Cohen on the creation and goals for TechStars Boston. Plus, I came up with the idea for this summer’s TechStars Boulder hack – let’s see if the gang can live up to the standards set by MIT Hackers.
My friends at Foodzie (TechStars 2008) and Brightkite (TechStars 2007) were both recently named Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. There are a bunch of neat links up on the Businessweek.com site:
Congrats guys. You make me (and everyone at TechStars) proud! We’ll be sure to roast y’all at the TechStars Boulder Mentor dinner tonight.
Last night, Brightkite announced that it has merged with Limbo. The resulting company, which will be called Brightkite, recently closed a $9 million financing. I’m psyched for Martin, Brady, and the Brightkite crew as this merger positions them really strongly for their next phase of growth.
Brightkite was a member of the TechStars 2007 class. They’ve crafted an outstanding mobile social networking app that really started to take off after the release of their excellent iPhone app. It’s become one of my signaling devices for where I am in the world – if you want to keep track of me friend and follow me on Brightkite.
Congrats guys – I’m looking forward to seeing what the future brings!
Off for a run on the Embarcadero (without my iPhone this time.)
There has been a lot of activity around entrepreneurship at CU Boulder lately, especially in computer science and engineering. This is encouraging to me as I believe that a strong culture of entrepreneurship at “your local university” is important to the long term health of any entrepreneurial ecosystem.
TechStars recently coordinated with CU Boulder to create five summer internships. Each of these internships will enable a CU Boulder student to work as a software engineer at TechStars for the summer. The overall dynamics are:
To get things started, I’m going to sponsor one of these. We are looking for four three (thanks Microsoft for sponsoring one!) more Boulder-area software / Internet companies to participate in these sponsorships. And – as a special bonus – I plan to host an event at the end of the summer for all five interns, the TechStars founders they worked with, and the execs from their sponsoring companies.
If you are Boulder-based, I encourage you to jump in now. Email me or Nicole Glaros to get involved.
If you have been thinking about applying to TechStars for either the Summer 2009 program in either Boulder or Boston, now is the time to do it as the application deadline is Saturday, March 21, 2009 at 11:59:59 PM MDT.
In my first company (Feld Technologies), when we set deadlines we started out with days of the week (e.g. Wednesday). In the late 1980’s, this meant “sometime before Thursday morning when people start showing up at work.” So – we tightened it up and put a date on it (e.g. Wednesday 3/18). This was supposed to mean “by the end of the day” but inevitably meant 11:59:59 PM. So – we started putting date and time stamps on deadlines. I continue that practice to this day.
So – the deadline is Saturday, March 21, 2009 at 11:59:59 PM MDT. It’ll take you about as long to apply as it took you to read this blog post (ok – maybe a little longer, but not much.) What are you waiting for?
Last week while I was off the grid for my Q1 vacation, TechStars announced that we are doing a Boston program this summer. Applications for both the Boston and the Boulder programs are open until March 21, 2009 at 11:59:59 PM MDT, but apply before 3/1/09 and be eligible to attend TechStars for a Day.
We launched the original TechStars program in January 2007. We’ve now run TechStars in Boulder for two years and have had a dynamite time, helped create some super companies (we’ve had 20 companies go through the program, 2 have been profitably acquired, 2 are profitable, and 12 have been funded), and have been able to contribute meaningfully to the Boulder entrepreneurial scene.
In October, I spent a few days in Boston with Amy. Among other things, I arranged a “nerd dinner” for some of my old Boston friends, including Shawn Broderick, Warren Katz, Colin Angle, Eran Egozy, and Steve Munroe. While I have regular contact with each of them, they hadn’t been together in a gang for a while so we enjoyed a rambunctious meal at Sel de la Terre (thanks Warren for dinner) and ended up talking about entrepreneurship in Boston for a while. There was a lot of discussion about how to energize the community more, what we had been doing in Boulder, and who was doing what to whom. As part of the discussion, Eran told me I had to get together with Bill Warner, who had been thinking of some of the same things.
Coincidentally I’d been connected with Bill a few weeks earlier by David Cohen. Bill was considering investing in EventVue (one of the TechStars 2007 companies), was interested in talking more about it, TechStars, and Boston. We had lunch scheduled for the next day. I’d never met Bill, but I knew of him from MIT and his experience as the founder of Avid and Wildfire, and had seen him speak about his experiences (I think at an MIT Enterprise Forum event) when I was living in Boston.
We had an awesome lunch and hit it off immediately. Bill totally got TechStars and our mentor driven approach and said, in short “we’ve got to do this in Boston.” A logical next step was to have Bill come out to Boulder, spend a day really immersed in things with David, and figure out if it made sense. We did this and the three of us got more excited about the idea of doing TechStars in Boston, but realized we needed to find “a David” to run things on a daily basis.
We made our list of potential David’s, checked it twice, and started calling. Shawn Broderick was at the top of the list. I’ve known and worked with Shawn since 1988 – he was the third employee at Feld Technologies, I was the lead angel investor in Genetic Anomalies which had a very successful acquisition by THQ, and am an investor in TrustPlus. Shawn was a perfect fit, spent time with David in Boulder, and voila, we decided to do TechStars Boston.
Wade Roush at Xconomy Boston has a thorough interview up with David Cohen titled TechStars “Entrepreneurship Boot Camp” Comes to Boston: An Interview with Co-founder David Cohen that goes deeper in to the why and how. Shawn has hit the ground running and we are totally psyched with how the Boston program is coming together.
Having spent 1983 to 1995 in Boston, this is a wonderful “going full circle moment” for me. I’m planning on spending some chunks of time in Boston this summer both with our investments (we’ve got two in Boston), TechStars, MIT, and old friends. Bill – thanks for being the spark that got this started!
Ever since David Cohen started TechStars, I’ve encouraged him to “open source” everything. We regularly get approached by people all over the world to talk about the program. We do – we tell them everything about what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. We share our documents with them. We try to help and support them.
We regularly get asked for the documents we use for doing early stage financings. I personally believe these documents should be able to be done on a single piece of paper and sealed with a handshake (or more preferably, a fist bump), but I’m generally alone in that view. So, we’ve worked closely with Cooley Godward Kronish, LLP (and specifically Mike Platt, who has been my go to lawyer and a close friend since I moved to Boulder in 1995) to put together a set of “Model Seed Funding Documents” that anyone can use.
There are five primary documents in the set:
Of course, these are just example documents so all legal disclaimers about usage apply (e.g. “do with them what you want, but we take no responsibility for your actions.”) That said, I think these are a great starting point for anyone doing an early stage financing.
I’ve always enjoyed Greg Galant’s interviews on Venture Voice. He interviewed me early on (Show #10) and the list of folks he has interviewed is dynamite.
Greg just interviewed David Cohen on TechStars. The show notes give you a great outline of the interview content where David answers a lot of questions about TechStars, why it exists, how it works, and why you should care.
Don’t forget – TechStars applications are now open.
Applications for the 2009 TechStars program are now open. If you apply before March 1st, you’ll be eligible to receive an invitation to TechStars For A Day on March 3rd. The applications deadline is March 21, 2009 at 11:59:59 PM MDT.
For an example of one of the TechStars 2008 companies, take a look at the recent article in the NY Times titled An Online Farmers Market. It’s a great profile of Foodzie – one of last year’s companies which was founded by Rob LeFave, Emily Olson, and Nik Bauman. Foodzie recently raised $1m from First Round Capital and SoftTech VC, have launched a dynamite site, and are off to the races.
Hint: Foodzie applied early, came to TechStars For A Day, got into the program, and knocked the cover off the ball.
Apply now. ‘Nuff said.