Techstars

If you are thinking about applying to the TechStars Boston 2010 program, take 15 minutes and do it now. Tomorrow (Tuesday 1/5) is TechStars for a Day in Cambridge, MA. You’ll only get an invitation if you have applied by today. You’ll get to spend the day learning about TechStars and hanging out with TechStars mentors like Shawn Broderick, David Cohen, Bill Warner, Bijan Sabet along with some of founders from TechStars Boston 2009 companies, such as AccelGolf , AmpIdea , Localytics , and TempMine . ...

We’ve run TechStars in Boulder for three years. So far each year at least one of the teams ends up with a runaway success on a bootstrapped business. In year one it was J-Squared with their Facebook (and now MySpace) apps. The bootstrapper of year two is Occipital with their awesome RedLaser iPhone app. RedLaser has been at the top of the iPhone App Store paids apps listing for over three months. Rather than review the app here, I’ll just point you to a recent TechCrunch article about it reaching over 750k downloads and a recent WSJ article about Price Checking: Finding Deals With a Phone . Or just download RedLaser – it’s only $1.99 and you’ll love it. ...

Yesterday, TechStars announced that it is a launching a new program in Seattle. This will be the third program that TechStars runs – with the other two being in Boulder over the summer and Boston in the spring (we are currently accepting applications for the Boston program.) The Seattle program will be run this fall. There’s been some great initial press on this including TechCrunch , ReadWriteWeb, PEHub, and Seattle’s TechFlash . Greg Huang – who writes for Xconomy (which has also done a great job of covering TechStars Boston) covered the launch well and had a nice follow up post linking the Boston and Seattle programs origins . It’s really satisfying to read the articles as pretty much everyone gets that a key part of TechStars are the mentors – and the Seattle mentors are just awesome. ...

We are doing another TechStars 2009 Demo Day, this time in Seattle on 11/4/09. It’s part of a two day TechStars mini-reunion across all three TechStars years – part retreat, part spend time with a bunch of Seattle colleagues, and part party – TechStars style. The agenda for the Investor part of the event on the after of 11/4 follows: 2:30 PM – Investor Panel – You’ll hear from some of the top angel investors and venture capitalists in the country, including Brad Feld (Foundry Group), Greg Gottesman (Madrona), David Cohen (TechStars), Andy Sack (Founders Co-Op), Stephen Hall (Vulcan Capital) and many more. They’ll discuss their investment philosophies, emerging trends, and innovation. ...

If you’ve been watching the TechStars Founders video series, you’ll love the Behind the Scene (aka “bloopers”) episode that just came out. The Founders | Behind the Scenes from Megan Leigh Sweeney on Vimeo . Watch otherwise chatty people be speechless, learn more about the use of the word “fuck”, try to figure out which one is Nate and which one is Natty, see Canadians sing and learn what happens when they get nervous, and go on a rocket ship. Great stuff Megan (and TechStars ).

If you’ve enjoyed the TechStars video series, this one is a really fun one. It focuses on the TechStars Bay Area Demo Day which happened at the end of September. Among the beautiful and inspiring scenes of the bay area are a bunch of super capable entrepreneurs from Boulder and Boston who grew an enormous amount in the last three months (yes – I’m very proud of them.) As a special bonus, you find out that the Everlater guys can “give as good as they get” (after getting punked by David Cohen in Episode 8: Your Best Friend .) ...

This year TechStars ran a program in Boston. Shawn Broderick was the ring leader and everyone had an awesome time. To get a feel for the scene, take a look at The Founders video on Bean Town. The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 13 | Bean Town from Andrew on Vimeo .

The other day I wrote about two TechStars companies (Occipital and DailyBurn ) teaming up to create FoodScanner for the iPhone. That app is now in the top 65 in the app store. Occipital provided the underlying scanning technology which is based on the RedLaser SDK. Anyone can use that SDK to easily add magic bar code scanning to their own app. As of right now, RedLaser itself is #2 on the top paid apps list in the app store. You can use it to scan any barcode to quickly check online pricing. I love stuff that works like “magic” and RedLaser qualifies because it’s fast and effortless and uses nothing more than the built in camera to read the barcode, even on curved surfaces, and even without autofocus**.** ...

In an intense environment like TechStars , filled with smart and extremely driven people, you might expect that things would get competitive among the teams. However, one of the most interesting things I’ve seen over the three years of the program has been the level of collaboration among the teams. I’ve seen them practice their pitches together, test product strategies, discuss approaches to getting investment, and share stories when things are going well and when they are not. ...

We’ve just wrapped up our third year of doing TechStars and not only do we have some interesting companies coming out of Boulder, we also have a bunch coming out of our new Boston program as well. In all, we had 19 companies go through the program this summer. I expect at least 14 of the 2009 companies will eventually close their seed rounds, which is similar to the ratio we’ve seen in past years. ...