Trada is no longer doing Codespace – they’ve filled up the area with other companies. However, if you are looking for office space in Boulder for your startup, take a look at PivotDesk and give it a try . When developers come through Boulder, I regularly get asked if I know a place for them to camp out and work for the day. There’s now a great solution – Codespace – hosted by Trada. ...
I went on vacation for a few days to celebrate Amy’s birthday and those sneaky scarf makers at Big Red Scarves expose me on the Internets. I’ve been trying for months to discover their secrets to no avail. I’ve even had Amy take up knitting to try to figure it out . But now I know. It’s Trada. The real secret is out – Big Red Scarves has been using Trada for their search engine marketing campaigns. I should have been able to figure it out from the previous videos on the Internets staring Niel Robertson and Seth Levine , but I guess I missed them because I was too busy sheering sheep and cleaning off my sneakers. ...
My partner Seth Levine has a detailed post up today titled Trada – from the beginning that describes the creation and financing of Trada. Foundry Group is the seed investor in Trada and Seth’s post describes one example of what I think is effective VC seed investing. The meat of the funding story follows: “Of course coming up with the idea is the easy part. Executing against that idea is another matter. In this case neither Niel (nor I) had any interest in creating a traditional syndicate to fund the company. Instead we quickly put our heads together about a financing (we like to say it was over beers, but the truth is more mundane – we hammered out the details in a 10 minute conversation in the conference room of the Foundry office). We decided that we wanted to bring in some experts to help us with the business and together flew around pitching the business to a small handful of strategic angel investors to pull together a small syndicate that became the initial Trada investor base. Niel and I hammered out a second financing in similar fashion (again around the Foundry conference table, this time without the need for an angel roadshow). It’s a great example of how we like to work with entrepreneurs – especially those that we have a long history with. We like to be involved early (in this case before an idea for a business even existed) and we think of our angel investments as a down payment on a subsequent investment in the business (we’ realize that we need to give early businesses some time to develop).” ...
Trada – one of our investments that is based in Boulder – is absolutely killing it. It was started by Niel Robertson, who we’ve worked with in various forms going back to the mid-1990’s. When Niel first came up with the idea, he and my partner Seth Levine spent a few months really going deep and figuring out how (PPC) pay per click marketing campaigns (e.g. Google AdWords) worked and whether a crowdsourcing approach could materially improve their performance. It turns out that it does – if you are doing any sort of PPC marketing you will see dramatic improvements by using Trada’s service. And – if you are a PPC expert, you can make extra bucks by being one of the optimizers for Trada’s service. But don’t take my word for it, hear it directly from Niel the scarf maker. ...
We’ve been having a running joke within Foundry Group for several years about “stealth mode.” My partner Seth alludes to it in his blog post a few years back titled To stealth or not to stealth . I’ve always been on the side of “not to stealth” but after watching the remarkable stealth experience of Trada, thinking about how Niel Robertson (Trada’s CEO), Seth, and the Trada team have effectively used stealth mode, and reflecting on what “stealth mode” actually means, I’ve changed my mind. ...
On March 8, 2010 Amazon fired me as an Amazon Affiliate because of Colorado HB 10-1193 . I proceeded to have a dozen different conversations (email and live) with several of my state representatives, including one of the co-sponsors of the bill, and each conversation made me more incensed at the abject stupidity and lack of understanding of the dynamics surrounding the situation. Ultimately, the argument came down to one of protectionism – e.g. “we have to protect our local merchants so Amazon shouldn’t get an unfair advantage by not having to charge state tax.” I could rant about this for a while, but I’ve got better things to spend my time on at this point. ...