Tag: Boulder
This morning we announced that we have just led a $3m investment in Modular Robotics. I’ve joined the board and am psyched to now be an investor in two Boulder-based robotics companies – ModRobotics and Orbotix. In the spirit of “show” vs. “tell” (which everyone in TechStars has driven into their brains over and over again) here’s a short three minute video that shows how ModRobotics first product – Cubelets – works.
Dan Primack at Fortune has a nice article up about ModRobotics titled ‘Robotics for kids’ start-up raises $3 million. For a little history of the rapid progression of the robotics movement in Boulder, take a look at my post titled Boulder is for Robots. And – if you are in Boulder and interested in robots, join the Boulder is for Robots Meetup Group.
My partners at Foundry Group and I are psyched to be working with Eric and team on creating the next generation robot construction platform. I believe the machines have already taken over and are just patiently waiting for us to catch up with them. As part of this, every kid should learn how to program, create things, and work with robots. ModRobotics plans to be an integral part of that.
For starters, Amy and I are fine. The fires are not threatening our house (yet). But all we talked about at dinner last night at Ruby Tuesday was fire.
Colorado is having a horrible fire season. We are only at the end of June and have four massive wildfires going on in the state, including the High Park Fire in Fort Collins and the Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs. Yesterday afternoon as the Flagstaff Fire began in Boulder, I heard from a friend that she’d lost her house in the High Park Fire. Everything – totally burned to the ground. They were on a trip so they literally have nothing other than the clothes they had with them.
We live in an age where forest fires have hashtags #FlagstaffFire
— Joe Moore (@joem) June 27, 2012
Amy and I are in Keystone so we are 90 miles away from Boulder. We shifted into obsessive monitoring of Twitter hashtag mode around 5pm and eventually wandered downstairs and watched the 5:30 news to see live video of the fire. During this time dozens of emails came in from friends around the country asking if we were ok and offering to help, since Eldorado Canyon (where our home is) was mentioned as one of the risk areas. As of this morning we still seem safe but today will tell the story.
My brother Daniel is in more danger. His house is in Table Mesa and one ridge separates his house and the fire. He lives down the road from NCAR which I expect the country will be hearing about a lot today as the fire is adjacent to the NCAR land and building. I have a hard time believing that the fire could consume NCAR and get over the ridge, but who knows. Either way, Daniel and his family decamped to our condo in Boulder last night so they are safe, but I’m thinking of them constantly.
Amy and I have had to evacuate for fires twice. The first was one that was started on our land in Eldorado Canyon. There is a trail that borders our land and often people come off the trail to sit on a giant rock on our land. That giant rock used to have a bunch of trees near it. One morning, in 1999, when I was sitting at Cooley’s office with Mike Platt working on the deal that would become BodyShop.com, I got a frantic call from Amy that said simply “come home right now – our land is on fire.” She had woken up to smoke about a quarter of a mile away from our house. As the sun came up, the fire began to blaze. Ultimately 10 acres burned, we (and all of our neighbors) had to evacuate for the day (with 10 minutes notice), and we went through the mental process of “ok – if our house burns to the ground, all our stuff will be gone.” It was ultimately determined that a human – probably someone smoking a cigarette or a joint on the rock – started the fire the night before. For two days, we had 50 amazing firepeople living around our house protecting it as the fire got within 200 yards of our house. Amazing amazing people.
The second fire was the Walker Ranch Fire of 2000. This was a much larger fire – ultimately consuming thousands of acres – and resulted in a three day evacuation for us. It stalled one ridge away from Eldorado Canyon – if it had gotten over the last ridge it would have been a disaster. This time it started the weekend of my brother’s wedding so I spend his entire wedding completely distracted by the slurry bombers flying overhead. This one was much more stressful as it stretched out for days and days.
Last year the Four Mile Canyon fire threatened Boulder and was devastating to many people in the Boulder foothills. This was my partners first taste of real “scary fire shit” as both Ryan and Jason’s houses were on the edge of the evac zone. Since they both live in downtown Boulder, that’s terrifying to consider – if the fire ended up in the residential areas in downtown Boulder, that would have been really bad.
Basically, fire completely scares the shit out of me. I’ve read about 30 books on it and find it fascinating. scary, intense, amazing, and complicated. The anxiety that it provokes in me, and many others, is incredible. I’ve now had several friends who have lost all the physical things they had in a fire – they all have similar stories of complete and total disbelief followed by a powerful rebuilding phase.
As the sun comes up in Keystone this morning, it’s another beautiful day in Colorado. You wouldn’t know that 90 miles away an entire city faces a very threatening fire. This is a big planet, and days like this remind me how fragile it all is.
Here’s hoping the awesome firefighters in Boulder get things under control today. I’m sending good karma to all of my Boulder friends. And for everyone who reached out, thank you – you guys are awesome.
This week I’ll be kicking off the second day of Big Boulder with a talk about how the Boulder startup community has come to be what it is today. Big Boulder is a conference on social data held by our portfolio company Gnip.
Last year Chris Moody wrote a blog post about how companies should pursue thought leadership. To me, Big Boulder is the embodiment of this. Gnip believes that social data will change the world. To that end, they’ve brought together some of the biggest players from social media publishers including Facebook, Twitter, Klout, LinkedIn, StockTwits, Disqus, Tumblr and WordPress. They’ve put together a killer agenda talking about the many uses of social data and how publishers are thinking about it and what is enabling people to do.
Part of Boulder’s ability to grow as a startup community is our ability to bring high-level events to Boulder. To that end, Foundry Group has worked hard to bring and keep Defrag and Glue in Boulder. We’re excited to have Big Boulder as another high-profile event attracting people to our city. This affords more people to see everything Boulder has to offer a startup community and for our community to interact with attendees. I know that some Big Boulder speakers like Daniel Ha of Disqus are also sticking around to speak to the TechStars teams.
If you’ll be at the conference, please come and say hi.
I judged Lean Startup Machine Boulder yesterday afternoon. I had a blast and thought the program was really impressive. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into and usually protect my weekends pretty aggressively from stuff like this so I can spend time with Amy and recover / catch up from the week but for some reason Trevor Owens (Lean Startup Machine CEO) and Ray Wu convinced me to come out and play.
I’m a huge Eric Ries / Lean Startup fan and believe that the methodology can be quickly taught. What I saw yesterday is further evidence of this – 13 teams spent from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon using the Lean Startup Methodology, the concept of customer development, and the lean startup canvas to go from idea through a series of validated learnings to get to a better idea. It’s not a coding / hacking weekend – it’s an applied process of the Lean Startup Methodology.
The event took place in the Scrib co-working space in downtown Boulder. I hadn’t been there yet so it was a good chance to meet the founders of Scrib, see the space in use, and get a sense of the energy. It was excellent and I expect Scrib will be a great contribution to the Boulder Startup Community for a long time to come.
After we saw 5 minute presentations from each team, the judges sequestered for a while and came up with first and second place. The winner of Lean Startup Machine Boulder was I Want My Bike Back and second place went to Dig Rentals. We came up with fun awards for all of the other teams and there was no doubt in my mind that it was a useful event for everyone.
Lean Startup Machine has a goal of doing 50 events in 2012 and 200 events in 2013. The next ones are in San Francisco (5/25), Toronto (6/8), Rotterdam (Netherlands – 6/8), Los Angeles (6/15), Boston (6/15), and Seattle (6/29). If you are in any of these cities, I encourage you to check it out.
Yesterday, President Obama was in Boulder. The guys at Orbotix showed up and got him to play around with a Sphero. Watch the video (it’s pretty awesome) and then I’ll tell you the story of how they made it happen. The short answer – always be ready to demo your product – you never know when the President (or a key customer) is nearby.
Our main characters for this story are Ross Ingram and Damon Arniotes. Ross is the one demoing Sphero to the President. Ross is Mr. Everywhere for Orbotix – his job is to handle every hack event, be at every party, and show up everywhere that might be interesting with a bunch of Spheros. Damion is the guy filming everything on his iPhone. His full time job is to video Sphero in the wild and tell the story all the time.
On Monday night after Ross and Damon found out the President would be at CU Boulder they starting talking about how awesome it would be to get a Sphero into Obama’s hands. No one knew Obama’s route around CU and Boulder, but Ross and Damon drove around the Campus and the Hill (next to CU) to scope things out. I’m betting at least one beer was consumed.
On Tuesday, they drove to CU with Spheros in hand but still didn’t know where Obama was going to be. They had to leave Damon’s camera gear behind because of security and the fact that Damon isn’t press (apparently only press is allowed cameras).
While they were driving to campus they saw a bunch of yellow police tape and took a guess that this was a spot that might see some action. If you are a fly fisherman, you know this drill. Go where you think the fish are going to be and wait. They found a parking spot near the Sink (one of the venerable old college hangouts on the Hill) and parked.
Ross called Paul Berberian, Orbotix’s CEO around 6pm and asked Paul if they should drive Sphero past the yellow tape towards Obama. Paul, who went to the Air Force Academy, responded with “No fucking way – you’ll end up in jail – remote control ball rolling to the president – bad idea.”
Around 6:45 Secret Service starts cherry picking folks from the crowd to be in the receiving line for the President. Magically Ross and Damon get picked – they get screened with metal detectors and are allowed in with Sphero. A girl with a Slurpie had to throw it away – apparently Slurpies are more dangerous than robotic balls. I bet she had one of those neon blue ones.
The President rolls up minutes later and starts shaking hands. Damon starts filming on his iPhone. Ross greets the President and asks him to see his iPhone to drive the robot ball. The President immediately gets it; Ross asks him if he wants to drive it – and the rest is what you saw on the video. While this is happening, the Secret Service rushed in around Ross and Damon as soon as the President engaged, but the President kept going with Sphero so they hung back.
Someone in the crowd took the Sphero while Ross and Damon frantically played back to video to see if they got it. They did and the rest is memorialized for history – this is the first time we are aware of that a President of the United States has played with a robotic ball controlled with an iPhone.
There are two big lessons here. First, always be ready. Second, hire amazing guys like Ross and Damon and let the loose on the world. Guys – incredible!
Boulder Startup Week, a five day celebration of the tech scene here in Boulder, is offering several free plane tickets to people who would consider relocating.
Since I moved to Boulder in 1995, I’ve watched and participated in the evolution of an amazing startup community which I believe currently has the highest entrepreneurial density in the United States. On top of the the hundreds of open tech company positions, Boulder has an incredible quality of life which I believe makes it the best small city in the United States to live in.
May 16th-20th will be packed with several dozen meetups, events, parties, and outdoors activities. It’s a great way to learn a few things, socialize, job-hunt, and discover the magic of Boulder.
Boulder Startup Week is open to all, and full of (mostly) free events. Come visit and, if money is tight, see if you can convince the organizers to fly you out for free.
The Magic Moment When You Shift To Executing As Fast As You Can
There is this magical moment that happens when a startup finally puts the key components together to build a successful business. After months or years of iterating and pivoting, they finally have the right product for the right market at the right price. At this point, the company has to shift gears and change their mindset a little. They need to stop looking for gold and start mining as fast as possible. My friend Chris Moody, President/COO at Gnip, refers to this as the execution phase of a business and there is no better example of execution in our current portfolio than the team at Gnip.
After 2.5 years of product development and varying business approaches, Gnip found their magic moment about a year and half ago. Since that time they have been heads down executing and the results have been incredible.
Today Gnip announced an exclusive partnership with Tumblr. This monumental partnership will give Gnip’s customers full coverage of an amazing source of social data that has never been available. With 50 million new posts per day and 15 billion page views per month, Tumblr offers a huge new data stream for companies to analyze and use to drive business decisions. The fact that businesses will be able to receive this data via the same reliable and scalable Gnip infrastructure that currently delivers Twitter and other important data sources is a major win for the ever growing social data economy.
The Tumblr partnership is the kind of announcement that companies plan their entire year around. However, in Gnip’s case, it is just the latest activity in an impressive series of events that shows the Gnip team knows how to get shit done. It is only April and Gnip has already done the following in 2012:
- In January, Gnip announced an exclusive partnership with Automattic to provide firehose streams of WordPress.com and WordPress.org data to the enterprise. This partnership increased the amount of real-time blog data available for business analysis by 70% overnight.
- In February, Gnip announced a premium partnership with Disqus. Disqus is the largest third party commenting system in the world (I use it on my blog) and the data offers tons of valuable insights to drive lots of cool business use cases. The Gnip/Disqus partnership makes this comment data available in full firehose coverage form to businesses for the first time ever.
- Also in February, Gnip released the first ever commercial Twitter historical product. Gnip’s 30-day replay product allows their customers to go back and replay Twitter history. As the old saying goes, hindsight is 20/20, and Gnip’s replay product allows companies to replay the entire Twitter stream for a full 30 days to look for things they might have missed. This product was a monumental engineering feat and a huge portion of Gnip’s customers have already taken advantage of this product in just the first two months after its release.
- In March, Gnip announced Big Boulder, the first ever conference dedicated to social data. Take a look at the list of speakers – it will blow your mind.
- Just last week Gnip announced that they added the largest microblogging service in China to their Enterprise Data Collector offering. Sina Weibo has over 300 million members; brands across the world are very interested in the conversations happening on this enormous platform. Gnip continues to push to increase the number of international data sources in their offerings and Sina Weibo represents a huge addition to their portfolio.
Okay, so the Gnip team is getting stuff done, but at what price? They must be cracking the whip pretty hard and creating a real sweat shop, right? Wrong. In spite of growing their number of employees by 300% in 2011, Gnip was just named The Best Place To Work in Boulder. Not the best startup, the best company. And, the best news of all? They are hiring!
The Glue Conference is happening again this year on May 23rd and May 24th in Boulder, CO. This is the awesome conference that Eric Norlin puts on around our Glue theme. 500+ people obsessed about mobile app development, cloud computing, and big data are going to be there this year.
As part of the conference, Eric provides 15 early-stage startups with FREE exhibit space. Did I say FREE? Yes FREE! Alcatel-Lucent acts as the Community Underwriter for Gluecon and funds this activity.
The demo pods are designed specifically for the event that have lit signage included, hard wired internet drops included, space for your laptop (to demo) included, passes to the event itself included — basically everything you need to come show your early wares to developers, customers and venture capitalists. All you have to do is get to Boulder, which I’ve discovered through experience isn’t very difficult.
I’ll be there both days as will be my partners at Foundry Group. If you are an early-sage startup (pre-funding or seed funding) in mobile app development, cloud computing or big data, this is a great way to get some face time with us.
Did I say the demo pods were free? Apply now – the deadline is Friday.
It dawned on me last night that as of tomorrow TechStars will have three programs running at same time with about 40 companies actively engaged in programs in Boston, New York, and San Antonio. Last week David Cohen, the co-founder and CEO of TechStars announced that he had raised a new $28 million seed fund called Bullet Time Ventures II. The final companies are being selected for The Kinect Accelerator. The TechStars Boulder applications for this summer’s program close on Friday March 16th.
Not including the active programs, 126 companies have gone through TechStars since we ran our first program in Boulder in the Summer of 2007. We publish all of the results – as of now 110 are still active, 8 have been acquired, and 8 have failed. 772 people are employed by these companies. The percentage of companies getting funded at the end of a class has increased from 70% in 2007 to 90%. When we started, companies received $12,000 to $18,000 depending on number of founders. Today, they receive that, plus $100,000 in the form of a convertible note.
I’m most proud of the mentor network that has been created, the engagement from TechStars alumni in new companies, and the community involvement of local angels and VC investors in each geography where the programs occur. Whenever I visit one of the programs, the energy level is off the charts, whether it’s the first day or the 73rd day of the program.
In 2007, the idea of an accelerator was a new concept. Today it’s mainstream, as evidenced by the proliferation of accelerators around the goal and exemplified by the Global Accelerator Network.
The number of things in play at TechStars in 2012 is awesome. I’m incredibly proud of the entire team for what they’ve created, and where they are going with it.
If you are an entrepreneur, don’t miss out. Apply for TechStars Boulder now. And be part of the awesomeness being created in 2012 by TechStars.