BusinessWeek has a fun article about my buddies Jesse and Joe from J-Squared Media titled Who wants to be a Facebook millionaire? Jesse and Joe were founders of one of the TechStars teams this summer – when they showed up their original idea was to create a sharing tools that would distribute links to your networks of friends (not in Facebook – on the web.) The Facebook Platform launched shortly after TechStars started and Jesse and Joe got all over it – today they have two very popular apps on Facebook (Sticky Notes and GlitterBox) and are generating over $45,000 / month of revenue (wow – not bad for two dudes in a basement on $10,000 of investment.)
Jesse and Joe exemplify scrappy first time entrepreneurs. Other than the tiny initial TechStars investment, they bootstrapped everything. I fondly remember a meeting in early July when Sticky Notes started taking off and Jesse and Joe were dying – they were staying up all night every night trying to keep their rapidly expanding number of servers up. We tossed some smart people at them (including Tony – the ClickCaster stud) who quickly helped them figure out some magic server stuff to deal with scale. By late July, Jesse and Joe still looked tired, but they weren’t lying on the floor in agony.
The BusinessWeek article is a quick read through the kinds of things Jesse and Joe are dealing with as they figure out their next step. Early acquisition offers (from both private and public companies), rapidly growing revenue (reinvest this cash now while it’s coming in!), potential VC investment (how much should we take at what price and why?), and endless feature requests (“Hii! Awsome app!! Just one thing You have the PowerPuffs except for one, Bubbles!! Can she be added, plz?”)
What a great example of early stage entrepreneurship.
Yesterday was a blast. The ten TechStars teams – which have been cranking away in Boulder for the past three months – all launched yesterday to a packed room of VCs, angel investors, mentors, and friends at the CU Boulder Atlas Institute. Don Dodge from Microsoft was in attendance and has a great summary of what each of the 10 companies do. TechCrunch has its own summary up along with links to several of the individual company reviews that it has done.
A healthy number of out of town investors were in attendance and their sentiments were largely echoed by the post from Kimbal Musk (CEO of Me.dium, owner of The Kitchen, board member at SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and a TechStars mentor) who stated simply that TechStars Rocks! Rather than describe each company, Kimbal came up with his own scoring system and scored each company based on his point of view, each which is listed on his blog. Todd Vernon (CEO of Lijit and a TechStars mentor) gave some feedback on a few of the companies as well. Tom Higley (CEO of iggli and a TechStars mentor) also weighed in. Anne Zelenka writing for GigaOM got excited about Search-To-Phone and Filtrbox.
26 entrepreneurs comprising 10 companies arrived in Boulder at the end of May. I’ve had the pleasure and honor of getting to work with them over the summer and watch them develop. I’m intensely proud of each of them for what they have accomplished in the last three months and am gleefully anticipating seeing what they can do in the future.
Mid-day entertainment included an Elvis Impersonator (thanks to Search-to-Phone – on the heals of their partnership with Gold Systems) and Zip Code Man (who is a mind blowing fixture of Boulder on the Pearl Street Mall.)
All of this came on the heals of TechStars winning the award for the Business category at the IQ Awards on Wednesday. My good friend David Cohen – the founder and ringleader of TechStars – deserves a nice, long quiet weekend with Jill.
The TechStars hiring wave is beginning. One of the companies – J-Squared – which makes the popular Facebook application “Sticky Notes” (Facebook app #31 – over 1.5m users) is looking for a hot shot developer to add to the team with the following background.
Ruby/Ruby on Rails
Flex 2
XHTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX/JSON/XML
MySQL
Apache2/Mongrel
If you fit this and want to join an early startup that is playing in the Facebook ecosystem and cranking away like crazy, drop me an email and I’ll forward it on.
This job brought to you by the Feld Job Board – always free for companies I have an investment in.
It’s August and there must be extra “release mix” in the water in Boulder (in addition to the city supplied Accelerate and Endurox.) I come from a land (MIT) where “demo or die” is the motto. Since I started doing Internet-related stuff in 1994 I’ve often chanted “release early and often.” There is nothing like exposing your software to the world to get quick feedback.
Intense Debate – another one of the TechStars teams – has started to release their comment replacement system out into big bad world of blogs. David Cohen – the ringleader of TechStars – has integrated Intense Debate into his ColoradoStartups blog and describes how it works in his post Intense Debate – Exposing comment “Dark Matter.”
In my The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere post I discussed the lameness of the blog comment infrastructure. Intense Debate is addressing “the future” of this with a complete blog replacement system that plays nice with existing blog comments (one of my other investments – BigSwerve – is addressing “the past.”) Right now Intense Debate supports WordPress.org, Blogger, and Typepad; Movable Type is coming soon (and – once it’s ready – you’ll get to play around with it on this blog.) They are in a controlled beta to insure that they are 100% stable with each blog platform – if you are interested in getting on the list to experiment with their stuff, sign up for the closed beta.
Last week I had an afternoon meeting with the founders of several companies, including Intense Debate, BigSwerve, Lijit, and NewsGator – each who are working on different parts of the Dark Matter problem. I’ve also been talking to a handful of other folks that are going after various parts of this problem. I’m starting to get my mind around interesting ways to address the extremely large number of comments out there in the wild.
Are you fascinated with Facebook? If so, it’s worth following the blog of the J-Squared guys. They are now actively blogging their Facebook lessons with posts including:
J-Squared is one of the TechStars teams. Their first Facebook app – Sticky Notes – is already over 1.2 million users, app #34, and continuing to grow at a rapid pace every day. They’ve got another cool one in the works, have turned on the revenue spigot, and are watching the dollars fly into their bank account.
Fascinating stuff.
One of the TechStars companies – MadKast – has launched. You’ll notice a new and exciting button to the right of every blog post on my blog – this is the MadKast Share icon.
Click on it to share a post with your friends via email, mobile phone (MMS), or IM. Or – bookmark it on any of the popular bookmarking services.
MadKast already does a bunch of really clever things.
The install is trivial (under 60 seconds) – just click on “get this on my blog” on the bottom right of the share window or go to the MadKast site. There is a one click install for Blogger and TypePad and a single line of Javascript for everyone else (look for some clever distribution stuff coming soon.)
I’ve gotten to know Johann, Josh, Doug, and Tony over the summer and think they are stars. They’ve decided to permanently relocated to Boulder from LA and build MadKast here. Welcome guys!
If you are a blogger, give MadKast a try – feel free to give Doug feedback (he loves it.)
At least this time it wasn’t me – it was my partner Seth Levine. In Seth’s post titled Setting the record straight he discusses a USA Today article in which he is quoted about TechStars and Y Combinator.
When I read the article (I got several copies of it immediately after it came out via my search feeds on “Seth Levine” and “TechStars”) I burst out laughing. My first thought was “boy – Seth is going to be embarrassed and annoyed when he reads this.” I knew that the quote was wrong – in fact – it was about 180 degrees wrong.
I sent Seth a friendly note (as friendly as partners who love to tease each other can do) and suggested he write a post with his point of view since I expected if any of the TechStars guys read it they’d be confused, especially since Seth has been a big supporter of a few of the TechStars teams.
Seth intelligently ended with a lesson I learned a long time ago after being misquoted for the 4,327th time.
I will not do interviews over the phone. I will not do interviews over the phone.
I will not do interviews over the phone. I will not do interviews over the phone.
I will not do interviews over the phone. I will not do interviews over the phone.
I will not do interviews over the phone. I will not do interviews over the phone.
I will not do interviews over the phone. I will not do interviews over the phone.
I will not do interviews over the phone. I will not do interviews over the phone.
Last week Don Dodge, Dan’l Lewin, and Dave Drach from Microsoft visited TechStars. Don has a nice post up about his visit including brief descriptions of several of the TechStars companies that I don’t think has appeared in the wild yet.
Don, Dan’l, and Dave are good friends – among other things Dan’l runs the Microsoft Emerging Business Team which is responsible for Microsoft’s relationship with the VC community and venture-backed startups. Scott Maxwell from OpenView – who sits on Dan’ls advisory board with me – summarized how EBT works from a VC’s perspective in a 2006 post titled Microsoft’s Work with Emerging Growth Companies – Five Stars.
TechStars was one of the stops on a day long tour that Don, Dan’l, and Dave made through Boulder. This was true evangelism – only two of the ten TechStars teams are heavy users of Microsoft technology. Some eyes got opened along the way – both directions – and I think the dialogue was great.
Don followed up his post on TechStars with a thoughtful essay titled Angel investors deserve respect from VCs which riffed off of Rick Segal’s post titled Shortsighted Greed. Great stuff for anyone playing in the seed stage of the investing universe.
I met Brian Williams – the CEO of Viget – on his swing through Boulder on Thursday. Brian runs a successful web design and development company that has been involved in a number of interesting projects including Seth Godin’s Squidoo.
Brian spent the afternoon at TechStars and gave a presentation on his 9 Conflicting Tips for Start-ups. I agree with them all, especially since most of them are the opposite of each other. Maybe my friends at Startup Weekend will put this up on a board somewhere.