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Earlier this week I did a one hour interview on “Meet the Angels” sponsored by Tech Coast Angels (one of the LA Angel groups.) It was supposed to live but for some reason there were some problems getting into the webcast. It’s now up on the web – if you were trying to watch it and couldn’t, it’s posted below.
Live video event with Brad Feld from TechCoastAngels on Vimeo.
A week ago I had just gotten home after a month in Homer, Alaska. I was totally chilled out – I worked plenty in July but had very little physical human interaction with anyone other than Amy. I’m sitting here in my Boulder condo today thinking about the entrepreneurial tour de force that was the last six days. I think I interacted with more different people each day than I did cumulatively over the previous 30 days in Homer.
The Boulder New Tech Meetup double header (Tuesday and Wednesday) started things off. The second Boulder Open Angel Forum delivered. Then we had TechStars Demo Day which was amazing, followed by an Open House at Jive Software (they acquired TechStars Boulder 2007 company Filtrbox last year and are growing like crazy), a Return Path board dinner at Black Cat, and the the TechStars Afterparty at the Draft House. Friday saw a Return Path board meeting and lunch with the folks at Return Path followed by TEDxBoulder on Saturday. Oh, and in between I had piles of “regular work.”
There were numerous blog posts and tweets from the week, but my favorite post about an event from the week is up on the True Ventures web site titled On The Road With TechStars Boulder. In addition to all the locals, there were a huge number of folks from out of town who participated in the various events and I smiled a big smile when I read the post.
Last night during the TEDxBoulder intermission break, I had a few quiet moments to myself as I wandered around the grounds of the Boulder Chautauqua. I was filled with a deep satisfaction about the amazingness of the people of Boulder. While there are lots of other great places in the world, I am most at home here. And it’s good to be back home.
Another TechStars company has been acquired. Well – part of it has been acquired. Today it was announced that eBay has acquired the RedLaser product from Occipital. The Occipital guys tell the story in their post titled Arrival at the Launchpad.
Occipital’s founders – Jeff and Vikas – are the epitome of bootstrap entrepreneurs. Every TechStars class seems to have one and Occipital wins the bootstrapper of TechStars Boulder 2008 award. At the end of the program they had a few chances to raise money but weren’t happy with the valuations so decided to hunker down and just bootstrap things. They reinvented themselves several times until they launched RedLaser which has been a runaway hit (over two million copies sold to date.) As RedLaser took off, they had another set of interesting investment offers but no longer have any need for outside capital.
While they were on their way to creating an interesting mobile ecommerce company, they wanted to work on a much bigger set of technical challenges than RedLaser in computer vision and augmented reality, their areas of passion and technical expertise. In their travels they had a few inquires for an acquisition of the company, but really only wanted to sell the RedLaser product, not the entire company. Fortunately, eBay was very interested in the RedLaser product and the match worked extremely well for both parties.
Given this sale, I expect Occipital is now a long way from ever raising outside capital. Jeff and Vikas are now extremely well funded, are scaling up a very interesting team, and going after a huge vision. Oh – and RedLaser is now free in the iPhone AppStore. Congrats to Occipital, Vikas and Jeff!
Monday night, I’ll again be the co-host of Entrepreneurs Unplugged where we will be interviewing Tyler Tysdal, the Managing Director of Mantucket Capital. We’ll start at 6pm at the CU Boulder ATLAS center. Tyler has a neat background as both an entrepreneur and investor and I expect this will be another fun and enlightening session. Tyler’s background follows:
Mr. Tysdal serves on the Board of Directors for the following Mantucket Capital portfolio companies: BrandJourney Capital and PRN Medical Services. His investment background includes venture capital, buyouts, restructurings, hedge funds, real estate, public equities, bonds and several entrepreneurial ventures. Prior to joining Mantucket Capital, Mr. Tysdal founded a private equity firm primarily focused on healthcare, media & entertainment and secondarily on real estate and construction services. Mr. Tysdal is also the founder of Sports Shares, a fractional luxury suite club. He began his career in investment banking with Alex. Brown & Sons, focused on corporate finance and mergers & acquisitions. Mr. Tysdal graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSBA in Finance from Georgetown University
Register and come join us.
Techstars Boulder Companies SendGrid and ReTel Announce Financings
Speaking of the metaverse, we had a great TechStars summer program this year. The companies that graduated from the program are starting to announce their financings and two announced this week.
SendGrid Raises $750K For Email Deliverability Software: I love these guys. If your company sends transaction outbound email to your end users (e.g. confirmations, alerts, notifications) you can either (a) do it yourself and build all the infrastructure / support around it or (b) outsource it to SendGrid. I’m a huge fan and really excited about their investor group led by Highway 12 Ventures, with SoftTech VC and FF Angel.
ReTel Technologies, Inc. Raises $1M Seed Financing: , which is an advanced surveillance video analytics company, was one of the companies profiled in this summer’s video series on TechStars called The Founders. Funny, smart, and willing to travel the world for video surveillance, ReTel closed a great financing led by Jeff Clavier at SoftTechVC with participation from Hyde Park Angels, FF Angel, Maples Investments, eonBusiness and Zelkova Ventures.
And, while we announced our investment in Next Big Sound at the end of September, it was picked up in TechCrunch and listed several of our co-investors including Alsop Louie and SoftTechVC.
Wait, there’s more. The Everlater financing, led by Highway 12 Ventures, was also announced about a month ago.
Guys – congrats – you rock! And there’s lots more coming. If you want to follow along on your iPhone (assuming AT&T is connecting properly), there’s an app for TechStars.
I’ve always hated walled gardens. Before I started blogging in 2004, I had a point of view that was driven from my desire to share interesting information with my friends and colleagues. Since I’m a big reader, I run across a lot of stuff and have always enjoyed sharing, going back to the late 1980’s when I used to cut articles out of magazines and mail them to people.
When I started blogging, I gained an entirely new perspective. As a writer, I was proud when people referenced things I wrote. I loved the debate and discussion around topics that were controversial. I’ve always been comfortable expressing my opinion and having people express a different opinion, as I almost always learn something as long as there is a real discussion.
Over the weekend, Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Why Comments Matter. Fred and I had a discussion about comments several years ago shortly after Intense Debate and Disqus appeared on the scene. Fred went on to invest in Disqus (WordPress acquired Intense Debate) and Fred has demonstrated that he’s a master at building a community that really engages with his blog (167 comments so far on Why Comments Matter – a little recursive, but proves the point.) Fred ends his post (well worth reading) with:
“So my advice to the world of journalism is to ignore Douglas Bailey’s advice and keep the comment threads at the end of news stories. But doing that is not enough. You need to use the best comment systems out there and they are usually from third parties like Disqus, not from your CMS vendor. And you need to have your journalists participate actively in the discussions. If you do all of that, you can host great discussions at the end of your news stories and who wouldn’t want that?”
I was pondering the last sentence as I read Sam Harris’ Op-Ed titled Science Is in the Details in the New York Times this morning. It’s a sharply written op-ed about Obama’s nomination of Francis Collins as the next director of the National Institutes of Health. Harris – a well known atheist who recently wrote Letter to a Christian Nation – dissects a recent presentation by Collins which scared the shit out of me. As I worked my way through the article, I was looking forward to the comments (which I expected would be strongly polarized) and noticed that – voila – there were no comments.
I then decided to tweet the article. As this is the NYT, I remembered that if I just used the base URL, then anyone who came across it would be forced to register for the NYT to read the article that I had just shared (dumb). But – there’s a solution – using the NYT “E-mail” option I emailed the article to myself and then tweeted that URL (after running it through awe.sm to shorten it). I thought about this some more and realized that I could have chosen the “Share” option on the NYT site (instead of the “E-mail” option) which gives me a “permalink” for the article.
“To link to this article from your blog, copy and paste the url below into your blog or homepage. Using this link will ensure access to the article, even after it becomes part of the NYT archive.”
For a few minutes, I thought I was really clever to figure out the “email to myself” thing. Then I realized I wasn’t actually clever at all; instead, the NYT was being obtuse by making this hard to figure out. Most people don’t know what a permalink is – they are just going to forward the article around using the “Send Link” feature in their browser.
Sam Harris should just get a blog and follow Fred’s lead. Oh wait – he has one. Sam – turn your comments on! Like so many things, the debate is the most interesting and important part.
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I spent last Thursday at TechStars Boston meeting with all of the TechStars Boston 2009 teams. They’ve all made a ton of progress since I met with them a month ago and many of them are shaping up really nicely.
A few of them are starting to be more public about what they are up to. One of them – Sensobi – is ready to roll. I’m not a BlackBerry user (I use an iPhone), but when I fiddled around with their app on a BlackBerry a month ago I totally got it. BlackBerryCool calls it an “enterprise-grade address book.”
If you are a BlackBerry user give it a try – you can sign up using my magic special invite code. The Sensobi guys – Andy and Ajay – are interested in your feedback.
Update: My magic special invite code is all used up at this point. It turns out that Boy Genius also wrote a post today (Get ‘em while they’re hot: 200 Sensobi invites for BGR readers) and the well has run temporarily dry. More soon.
Yummy – that’s a fun tongue twister. It doesn’t quite mean “synchronizing data”, but it’s in the same family. I don’t have a better phrase yet for “renormalizing denormalized data”, but there is probably a construct for it that someone reading this blog can tell me (or invent – here’s your choice to replace the TLA RDD with something else.)
Two companies – Gnip and Brightkite – that I’m involved with (there – full disclosure!) made announcements today about data integrations.
- Gnip is now supporting the Seesmic firehouse of specific user activities. Loic at Seesmic (a company I’m not involved with, but I’m a big fan of Loic’s ever since he took me and Amy out for an amazing dinner one night in Paris) has a good post up about what Seesmic is trying to accomplish by working with Gnip (and others).
- Brightkite just released Facebook integration. While I wasn’t looking, they also integrated with Flickr (which I just enabled.)
Here’s a bizarre use case.
- I register my location with Brightkite, take a picture, and write a note.
- Brightkite saves this data to Brightkite and these starts putting this data out to services I’ve integrated with.
- Service 1: Twitter
- Service 2: Flickr
- Service 3: Facebook
- I’m running a Twitter / Facebook status synchronizer. So – when I twitter something it shows up on Facebook. When I put a status on Facebook, it shows up on Twitter.
Theoretically, Brightkite, Twitter, and Facebook should know enough about each other not to repost the same thing in cases 2.1, 2.3, and 3 (recursive). But I don’t think it’s going to do the right thing. Let’s try and see how many tweets we get! I’m guessing three.
Nope – it only showed up once. I’m guess this is either because (a) Brightkite takes care of the issue (smart people at Brightkite), (b) something isn’t set up correctly (just tried twice with two different configurations), or (c) something unknown and mysterious is going on somewhere.
I’m going to bet on (a). However, not everyone is going to be a tuned in to the issue as the guys at Brightkite and as this dynamic proliferates, the RDD problem will get worse. Remember that this is bad:
10 Print “Hello”
20 Goto 10
I can’t wait until integration between three services get stuck in an infinite loop, bring down the entire Internet, and suck us all into a black hole.