One of the really fun things about working with Eric Norlin, the creator of Defrag and Glue , is watching how he evolves the agenda from a conference from idea to reality. It’s a very fluid process that Eric handles masterfully. Eric’s post The Glue agenda starts to get sticky summarizes some of the latest highlights on the ever evolving agenda. The headliner: Mitch Kapor is going to be giving the keynote on Wednesday, May 13th. ...
The National Venture Capital Association regularly has webcasts aimed at various members of the venture capital community. On January 23rd from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. Eastern they are having one titled Beyond the Limited Partnership Agreement – Issues For Challenging Times. The description follows: The current global financial crisis is impacting the venture community in ways that no other economic crisis has. For the first time in our industry’s history, some of the most committed, long term investors in the private equity asset class are reevaluating their commitment, shifting strategy and making the future uncertain. Join us on January 23rd for a provocative discussion as our panel discusses many of the provisions that define the relationship between General Partners and Limited Partner investors, and how these are impacted by challenging economic conditions. In addition, our panel will cover some of the inevitable consequences that may affect the internal operations of the venture firm. ...
Late last year, Phil Weiser (the omnipresent head of Silicon Flatirons and CU professor of Law and Telecommunications) asked me if I was interested in doing a “One-on-One” public interview series with him. Phil and I have stirred up plenty of trouble together over the past few years and I’d never pass up an opportunity to share a stage with him. So – on February 3 from 5pm to 6pm at the Wittemeyer Courtroom in the Wolf Law Building at CU Boulder we will be doing our first One-on-One on “Finance”. Here’s the summary: ...
As I sat at Gate C18 of the Las Vegas McCarran International Airport on Friday afternoon, I heard the phrase “Wheel of Fortune” about 120 times during the 40 minutes I waited to board my flight home. I was amused the first three times, increasingly annoyed the next 37 times, and then just numb the remaining 80 times. While I was on the edge of one of those “going postal” moments (if my plane had taken 50 minutes to board, I might not have made it as the Las Vegas police officers would have taken me somewhere dark and quiet for destroying a Wheel of Fortune slot machine with my bare hands), it did occur that me that the phrase “wheel of fortune” has some applicability to my universe. ...
Are you into browser Add-on’s? The first Add-on-Con is happening on December 11th in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. My friends at OneRiot and AdaptiveBlue are organizing it along with Sxipper. The lineup is shaping up nicely to including folks from Mozilla, Google, Xoopit, Alexa, and Microsoft. It’s only $150 for the day. If you use the discount code “feld” it’s only $100.
On Wednesday, November 12th Silicon Flatirons is hosting a panel discussion titled Crash Course – Growing a Startup Amid Uncertain Economic Times*.* The discussion will be held at Room 204 in the Wolf Law Building on the CU Boulder campus from 5:15pm to 6:45pm. My partner Jason Mendelson will be speaking along with Ken Fugate of Square 1 Bank and Jim Cowgill of EKS&H. Brad Bernthal, Brad Bernthal, Associate Clinical Professor and Silicon Flatirons’ Director of Entrepreneurship Initiatives, will be moderating. ...
David Cohen has a detailed post up describing the types of companies that should apply to be presenters at Venture Capital In The Rockies Winter 2009. VCIR is now in its 26th year and is the premier conference for startups in the Rocky Mountain region. If you think you fit the bill, drop an executive summary to submissions@vcintherockies.com .
Having lived through the last major tech downturn (precipitated by our friend, the Internet bubble), one of the big lessons that I learned was to steadily play through. Specifically, I’ve reached the conclusion that there is no right or wrong time to start a company, or build a company. Great entrepreneurs will figure things out regardless of the macro environment. As I’m quick to say (and it’s now becoming one of my favorite cliches), “some of the best investments I’ve ever made / companies I’ve helped start were created / funded between 2001 and 2003.” ...
The Defrag Conference is happening on Monday 11/3 and Tuesday 11/4. I’m totally psyched – Eric Norlin has put together a killer agenda. The list of people coming that I can’t wait to see and spend time with is dynamite. When Eric and I cooked up the idea for Defrag, our goal was to create a “thinking person’s” conference for exploring ideas around the Implicit / Semantic Web. It’s evolved and – in its second year – we are planning on talking about the intersection of the following topics: ...
I love charts like the following – so many pretty colors and funny names. Matt Galligan, the co-founder of SocialThing (now part of AOL) is giving a talk on Social Networking: Using Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn at the ATLAS Institute (on the CU Boulder campus) on October 13th from 6pm to 8pm. This event is co-sponsored by my friends at The Van Heyst Group and Silicon Flatirons. Matt’s an entertaining speaker who was part of the inaugural TechStars program in 2007 – he’s got plenty of great stories and has been living in the social networking world for the past few years.