Boulder

I had never heard of the organization called Downtown Boulder, Inc. until I was asked to keynote at the annual meeting which I did a few weeks ago where I talked about “entrepreneurial communities and why Boulder is such an awesome one.” I got plenty of positive feedback and met a number of owners of businesses – most of them retail – based in downtown Boulder. A week or so later Dave Jilk, the CEO of Standing Cloud , forwarded me a newsletter where Downtown Boulder was endorsing HR 5660 – Main Street Fairness Act which is yet another poorly thought out Internet-related tax aimed at online retailers not operating within the state asserting the tax. I’ve written about the stupidity of these types of taxes before in posts like Amazon Fires Its Affiliates in Colorado Because of Colorado HB 10-1193 . I blew this off (incorrectly, I might add) because I’m just so annoyed by all of this sort of stuff since it’s just evidence that organizations like Downtown Boulder, Inc. don’t really understand the actual business economics of having a vibrant entrepreneurial community in their downtown. ...

There are tons of startup events in Boulder. I get asked almost daily by folks what they should attend to get involved in the local Boulder startup scene. Fortunately, Tom Markiewicz (founder / CEO of StatsMix , a TechStars Boulder 2010 company) is now curating the Boulder Edition of StartupDigest . It’s a great resource for anyone that wants to know what is going on in the Boulder startup scene. Thanks Tom!

If you are in Boulder, come to my community hours today between 1 and 5 at the Boulder Bookstore on Pearl Street. David Cohen (TechStars CEO and co-author of Do More Faster) and I will be hanging out all afternoon, talking to whoever shows up about anything that is on your mind, and signing copies of Do More Faster until the Boulder Bookstore runs out of them. As readers of this blog likely know, I do monthly community hours (also known as random days) where I’ll meet with anyone for 15 minutes about anything they want to discuss. Usually they are scheduled – today’s is an open free-for-all. ...

The Defrag Conference is happening in Boulder on Wednesday November 17th and Thursday November 18th and is looking like it will be the best one yet. If you haven’t yet registered, use the code “foundry2” to take 15% off of your registration. The confirmed Keynote Speakers include: Alex Wright addressing the “deep history” of Oral Culture and Social Networks Stowe Boyd speaking about “social cognition” Esther Dyson on Exploration and innovation Dion Hinchcliffe on the future of social analytics Jeff Ma on Business Lessons from the Blackjack Table David Weinberger on the Philosophy of Knowing Paul Kedrosky talking about Monkeys, Typewriters and Data Jeff Jonas on Organizations Getting Dumber, and IT’s to Blame JP Rangaswami on Information as seen through the eyes of a Foodie And that’s just some of the keynotes. Toss in a bunch of networking, lots of stimulating discussion, and breakouts that cover everything from APIs to shifting to the Cloud to Social Media Analytics to the Social Customer and it’s shaping up to be dynamite. ...

Last week I posted an article on peHUB titled How to Create a Sustainable Entrepreneurial Community . Here it is in its entirety. I’ve lived in Boulder for 15 years after living in Boston for a dozen. While I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley — both as an angel and venture capital investor — I’ve never lived there. While the firm I’m a partner in — Foundry Group — invests all over the United States, I regularly hear statements like, “The only place to start a tech company is in Silicon Valley.” ...

Want to work for a startup? Have you ever wanted to work for a web startup, but aren’t sure where to look or how it might be different from a big company gig? Come check out the TechStars Smackdown event on October 12th in Boulder. It’s not a typical job fair. The event starts with a panel of entrepreneurs that will answer questions about what it means to work for a startup – common questions such as salary levels, equity versus salary compensation, work/life balance, and job security. Then 12 Boulder companies (Vacation Rental Partner, ScriptPad, Rezora , SendGrid , Omniar, StatsMix , Spot Influence, Graphic.ly , Snapabug, Next Big Sound , Orbotix , BlipSnips, and Gnip ) will each get 5 minutes to sell you on why working for their startup will be a great career move. ...

Entrepreneurial communities grow up around smart people. Whenever someone in state or local government asks me what they can do to accelerate entrepreneurship, I always tell them to put as much money and energy as they can into education. If you build a broad base of smart, inquisitive, curious people that are long term members of your community (e.g. they don’t move somewhere else), you’ll be delighted with the results over a long period of time (think 20+ years). ...

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. ...

Last week I co-hosted a lunch for Jared Polis with Kyle Lefkoff at Boulder Ventures which Jud Valeski covered nicely in his post titled Luncheon with Jared Polis . Jared was one of the first people I met when I moved to Boulder (thanks to an introduction from my long time friend Dave Jilk) and we’ve been great friends and partners on a number of fronts ever since. The attendees at lunch were a bunch of Boulder entrepreneurs in three areas – software / Internet, biotech, and natural foods. While I spend almost all of my time focused on software / Internet, it’s always interesting to hang out with some of the Boulder entrepreneurs in other segments to hear what they are thinking and working on. ...

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. ...