Metaphor: VC as a Produce Supplier
I was in a meeting with Rich Miner from Google Ventures on Friday with some entrepreneurs we are working with on a potential investment. While the team isn’t a rookie
I was in a meeting with Rich Miner from Google Ventures on Friday with some entrepreneurs we are working with on a potential investment. While the team isn’t a rookie
The video from the second panel I was on at Google I/O 2010 – Technology, innovation, computer science, & more: A VC panel – is up. Dick Costolo – the COO of Twitter – is the moderator and my fellow panelists are Albert Wenger, Chris Dixon, Dave McClure, and Paul Graham. Someone didn’t like the title so it was renamed “VCs Who Code” but apparently that didn’t stick with the official event panel namers.
The TechStars Boston 2010 program finished up the other day. I was at investor day and it was awesome to see how far the ten companies came over the last 90 days, especially since I was there on the first day of the program and really had a baseline perspective. If you follow my twitter feed, you’ll notice that I’ve been posting a bunch of “Mar.gy links” from a company called Marginize. This is one of the companies that I was a mentor for this year and I love what they are doing and what their vision is. But they weren’t recently on CNN – and StarStreet Sports was. If you are into The World Cup, you’ll love this one.
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.
A few weeks ago I was on two panels at Google I/O 2010. The video from one of them – Making Freemium work – converting free users to paying customers is up. Don Dodge from Google is the moderator and my fellow panelists are Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, Matt Holleran, and Joe Kraus. It’s 60 minutes long, but we covered a lot of ground.
I’m on an Acela train between Boston and New York (listening to Boston’s More Than A Feeling – how recursive) on my way to the TechStars Boston 2010 Investor / Demo day. I wasn’t able to make it to Boston yesterday for the Angel Boot Camp as I was running around NYC with the CEO of a company I invested in last week introducing him to a bunch of potential customers and partners.
Google gave all 5000 Google I/O attendees an HTC EVO (I guess it’s a Sprint EVO) running Android. For the past two years I’ve been using an iPhone and have become increasingly disgusted by AT&T’s service which is horrible (and deteriorating) in the cities I frequent – most notably Boulder, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, NY, and Boston. So – I decided to give the EVO+Android a real shot and use it for a week as my permanent phone.
And now, on the eve of TechStars Boston 2010 Demo Day, here is your weekly dose of The Founders video series. If you are going to be in Boston tonight at TechStars Demo Day, I’ll see you there! “The Innovation Lab” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 2 from TechStars on Vimeo.
“In five years when you buy a computer you’ll get this.” John Underkoffler, Oblong’s Chief Scientist, at 14:20 in the video. I’ve been friends with John Underkoffler since 1984 and we’ve been investors in Oblong since 2007. Ever since I first met John I knew that he was an amazing thinker. John, his co-founders at Oblong, and the team they have assembled are creating the future of user interfaces. This year has started off incredibly fast for them – they’ve spent the last five months scaling the business as the result of several large customers and are in the home stretch of releasing their first “shrink wrapped product” in Q3. Get ready – the future is closer than you imagine.
I love summertime. Amy and I spent Memorial Day weekend in Manhattan. We stayed in Soho, hung out with some friends, ate a lot, and just wandered around. Oh – and I slept 17 hours yesterday once again demonstrating that I have amazing sleeping powers. I needed it after two full days at the Glue Conference, a day at Tech Wildcatters in Dallas, and a full week of “normal work.”