As the TechStars 2008 companies gear up for Investor Demo Day, many of them are asking me to write about them on this humble blog.  I’m really proud of what they all have accomplished this summer – it’s pretty remarkable to look at them now and compare them to where there were at the beginning of the summer.  Many of them are launching (or have recently launched) so I’ll start talking about them as individual companies.

The Ignighter team – in addition to coming up with a new approach to online dating – have provided endless laughs throughout the summer (note to self – always include at least one team of comedians in the program each year.)  The first time the Ignighter guys did the now infamous "elevator pitch" exercise, I was confused and simply responded "Oh – you have a group sex site." 

The Ignighter guys (and everyone else in the room) took this in stride and I found out later that they were secretly almost pleased with the misconception.  I made it clear to them that this wasn’t a good thing and that I thought it was important to deliver the message of their site more clearly. Over the course of the summer they worked really hard on it and now it’s a novelty when someone’s mind goes to group sex when he/she hears Ignighter’s elevator pitch.

Ignighter is launching this week and their first fun launch event is a group date between Obama and Clinton supporters in NYC. If you’re going to be in NYC and want to attend or learn more about the event, RSVP here.  They promise me there won’t be any political sex scandals that emerge from the event.

I have been looking forward to this day for a while.  I’ve always been obsessed with following any news or blog mentions of any of the companies I’m an investor and the people I work with.  For the past few years I’ve satisfied my obsession with an extensive set of Google Alerts (via email), Yahoo Alerts (via email) and Technorati Alerts (via RSS).  Occasionally I’ll add something else to the mix usually through RSS (such as a FriendFeed or Summize keyword feed.)  My email rules shunt everything to my "daily" folder so I only have to look through it once a day (when I read through my RSS feeds.)

Last week I deleted all my alerts.  I was able to do this because Filtrbox – one of the TechStars companies from last year – is now finding much more than 100% of the information that my alerts were picking up, including 100% of what I got from the alerts.  I’d been running the two in parallel for about six months and saw the lines cross about two months ago, but went ahead and had both run just in case.  I’m now confident that I won’t miss any of the alert stuff.

Dealing with Filtrbox is so much easier and more pleasant.  I enter my keywords into one UI instead of Google, Yahoo, Technorati, and others.  I get a daily email digest of everything Filtrbox found.  I have a history of all the data so if I want to go find an article from a month ago, I can easily find it in Filtrbox.  And I get a bunch of cool data visualizations.

I’ve watched Ari Newman, Tom Chikoore, and team evolve Filtrbox from its starting point last summer at TechStars.  I’m blown away – they’ve really nailed it.  Ari and Tom took a deliberately "slow and steady" approach – making sure they really built something deep and robust before releasing it to the world.  They accomplished this – and it’s ready for action.

As a special bonus for all you Olympic fans (like me), they’ve put together an Olympic Blog Widget that is customizable and pulls from their data sources.  Guys – super cool.

Allen Stern has a great interview up with Jon Fox, the co-founder of Intense Debate.  Jon and Intense Debate were part of the first year’s crop of companies from TechStars and are going great guns right now.  They create the comment replacement system that I use on my blog – if you are a blogger and haven’t tried it yet, wander on over to Intense Debate and take a look.

Jon covers a lot of ground in his interview, but I especially like his answer to Allen’s last question: "What tips do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?"

Jon: I would say two things. First, find yourself a mentor, or at least a friend in the business that can help to get you hooked in. If you don’t know anybody yet, reach out to a handful. My experience is that these people are generally more than willing to help, and happy to bring someone new into the mix.

Second, don’t be afraid to just dive in. I realize not everyone can do this, but it’s really hard to go half way into the startup lifestyle. Recruiting a team, raising money, building a product, etc all require lots of time and effort and you really can’t do it only on the weekend. It’s a bit scary at first, but once you get in it’s tough to believe you’ve lived any other way.

As the second year’s group of TechStars’ companies gear up for investor day in a few weeks, it’s fun to ponder how far some of last year’s companies have come.

Part one of a video interview with Mike Cote of ColoradoBiz talking about TechStars.  Get answers to the following questions in under four minutes.

1. What’s the elevator pitch of TechStars (payback for David since he makes all the TechStars teams give their elevator pitches over and over.)

2. What’s the latest crop look like?

3. Are there any women in TechStars?

4. How many applicants did you have this year?

5. What criteria did you use to select them (see me make a nerdy Dungeons and Dragons reference.)

6. Is it the idea you get excited about?

Observe also that I have a much larger proboscis than David.

Month 1 of this year’s TechStars program is over.  Andrew Hyde captures the sights and the people of TechStars in a fun three minute video.

While you are at it, if you were a Lego fanatic take a ride down Lego Memory Lane.

Finally, in the continued emergence of the Kindle as a serious thing, Princeton University is now publishing Kindle textbooks.  No more giant backpacks full of books and lecture notes.

One of this year’s TechStar’s companies – Devver – is building web-service tools for Ruby developers. They are taking the tools that Rudy developers already use and putting them into the cloud, adding benefits like faster execution, easy setup and configuration, and change management.

Devver is currently looking for feedback from Rubyists on the types of tools that would be most useful. You can help them out by filling out their survey.

They’re also interested in talking to Ruby teams in the Denver/Boulder area. If you’re willing to talk to them and interested in getting an early look at what they are working on, send them email to set up a meeting.  The Devver guys are also going to be in the bay area on July 16th so if you are a bay area Ruby developer, they are interested in meeting you.

There is some TechStars love this morning from the gang at FriendFeed (thanks guys!)  They added two of last years TechStars class – IntenseDebate and BrightKite – during their FriendFeed Fix-it Day.  I know this was one of the often requested features from IntenseDebate users and – while it could be hacked into FriendFeed through the magic of RSS – native support is sweet (and trivial to use.)  No surprise – like most other services, I am bfeld on FriendFeed.

TechStars 2008 is in full swing as it heads into week two.  Today was Google day.  During the day Kevin Marks and Dion Almaer were in The Bunker talking about Google AppEngine and OpenSocial.  In the evening Dick Costolo, Rick Klau, and I talked about the FeedBurner story from inception through the acquisition of FeedBurner by Google.  I forgot to make my crack about ClosedPrivate, but we got plenty of other good stuff out there.  Thanks to Kevin, Dion, Dick, and Rick for coming out to Boulder!

Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft are also in town this week.  I expect videos from the evening events will be up on the recently launched TechStars Community site.  Andrew Hyde is responsible for the videos and he’s putting them up pretty quickly after they happen – like the Starting Your Startup session – with me, Todd Vernon (Lijit CEO), and David Cohen.

The concept of "sucking" has been a recurring theme in my work that I’ve co-opted for the good of the universe.  I’ve written about it plenty on this blog, including the origin of the concept – the motto of my first company – We Suck Less. 

At last night’s TechStars orientation, one of the exercises that David Cohen had everyone in the room do was talk about one thing they suck at.  Mine was portion control.  I eat too much.  If there is a full plate of food in front of me, I will eat it.  I like to live an abundant life and I have trouble limiting my abundance when it comes to eating.

We only went around the room one time, but as David noted we could easily go around ten times and have everyone self-identify nine other things they suck at.  The meta-message was that we all suck at some things; understanding them and being able to articulate them is the first step to addressing (or managing) them.

Ironically, I had done a pretty good job on portion control all day until I showed up at the orientation. I had a nice modest dinner at The Kitchen beforehand that I topped up at TechStars with a nice big plate of Noodle’s Mac and Cheese.  I did manage to stop after one plate.  Fortunately I ran for two and a half hours in the morning.