Random

There are two positions that I find difficult to fill in Boulder in the various companies we are investors in. The first is a real product manager (PM). We’ve got a bunch of great ones in Boulder, but there appears to be 100% employment for them and I don’t poach from myself as that seems counterproductive. The other difficult person to find is a UX design guru . Now, there are a number of strong web design and development firms in Boulder, such as our friends at Slice of Lime, and we use them regularly throughout our portfolio. They are also plenty of strong UI developers. However, in some companies we really need a full time UX person, especially those that are software dev heavy. We’ve managed to solve this in most cases, but it’s hard and the pool of gurus is small. ...

I get a lot of inbound resumes from folks looking to relocate to Boulder. I also get a lot of requests from local CEOs for candidates for various positions. I do my best at connecting folks, but I’m sure plenty of connections slip through the cracks. So – David Cohen of TechStars (who has the same thing happening to him all the time) and I have created a new private email list for CEOs of Boulder-based companies. We have started to email qualified inbound resumes to this list. By qualified, I mean that it’s a real inquiry, rather than a generic “resume spam email” which is the only email I get that I won’t respond to. ...

More jobs – this time in San Francisco. We recently invested in Triggit – my partner Seth blogged about our investment and the rise of real time bidding platforms and we put up a post about Triggit on the Foundry Group blog . Triggit is one of a group of recently emerging companies called demand side platforms (DSP ) that provide technology to advertisers enabling them to buy display media across millions of websites. Triggit specializes in using a technology called real time bidding where they bid on and run the ads you see in real time as you move across the web. In the milliseconds that it takes your browser to request a new website, Triggit is looking at your ad impression for its customers and determining how much you are worth, what ad to serve, submitting a bid and tracking the results. Even more interestingly they do this billions of times a day around the world. ...

The Feld job board has one for you today. If you are a sys admin and live in the Boulder area, StillSecure is interested in talking to you. The spec is below – if you fit it and are interested, please email Rhonda Grosz . StillSecure, a network security software and services company is looking for a Systems Administrator for their Superior, CO office. We are looking for self-motivated, talented individuals who enjoy working in a fast paced environment. This individual will be responsible for managing, maintaining the IT infrastructure of the company and has at least 4 years of experience. He/she should be proficient in Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Windows Desktop and Server operating systems. Networking, Linux and Mac OS experience is a plus. ...

Do you remember the “Let’s Build a Filter” scene from Apollo 13? It remains – at least in my mind – one of the most heroic engineering scenes in the movies. The one minute segment with the meat of the scene follows: Several times over the past week the BP Gulf Crisis has come up in conversation. The conversations have started in different places (politics, environment, leadership) but in each case quickly cycled toward the concept that the people involved need to try something different. Now, there might be plenty of orthogonal thinking going on in lots of places around the crisis, but I kept thinking about the scene from Apollo 13 whenever we got to this point. ...

Jason and I were at an Oblong board meeting last week and spent the entire day at the company. It’s grown a lot over the past few months and it was fun to spend time with a number of folks we hadn’t met before. The first Oblong baby was born while we were all eating lunch which resulted in lots of good cheer, karma, and the revelation from another member of the Oblong team that his wife recently found out that she was pregnant. ...

I’ve always had a knack for quickly finding bugs. It’s not hard with most software / web services as the bugs are everywhere, but they like to emerge from the shadows when I tickle my computer. I’ve been running Outlook 2010 for a few weeks since it shipped. Now that I’m used to the new ribbon UI, I find it much improved over Outlook 2007. I particularly like the Conversations view which was long overdue (and works really well) and am amused that most of the memory leaks / shut down issues are gone. Given the amount of email I jam through on a daily basis, my Outlook workflow is particularly well tuned and while I’ve tried to switch to Gmail, it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe I’ll try again when Gmail gives me an option to not have a conversation view. ...

I just finished up spending the past two days at Google I/O. On one of the panels I participated in yesterday (VCs Who Code ), the endless discussion about open (e.g. Google) vs. closed (e.g. Apple) came up with Dave McClure stating “Open is for losers.” We had a short but spirited debate about a topic that could easily consume an entire panel before Dick Costolo (our moderator) quickly moved us on. Of course, we got bogged down again later in “native apps vs. web apps” question (which I think is irrelevant in the long run, and said so.) ...

If you are a senior Java developer anywhere in the US and are interested in moving to Boulder, I’d like to hear from you . There was a nice article in Bloomberg Businessweek last week about Why Boulder Is America’s Best Town for Startups. With the combination of the new startup activity over the past few years combined with the rapid growth of a number of medium sized companies and renewed hiring from some of the outposts of major tech companies based here, we’ve clearly entered another cycle in Boulder where talent is tight and demand for senior folks is once again at a high point. ...

Standing Cloud , one of the Boulder-based companies we seed funded last year, is hiring a Java Developer. They are a provider of software and services that facilitate deployment and management of application software, using on-demand cloud servers from providers such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud, GoGrid, and others. The role is to build, maintain, and support client code that interacts with third party cloud services and virtualization APIs. You’ll be deep in the weeds with the various emerging cloud services and part of a young team of eight other people. ...