Todd Vernon approached me last week to tell me that his perception – and that of a number of people in the Denver/Boulder community – was that the VCIR company selection process was a complete black box. This was eye opening to me (being involved in the process for years, I thought we had done an ok job letting people know how things work) and as I thought about it I realized that we really haven’t talked a lot about how we find companies for the conference and what the vetting process looks like. The reality is that the process is pretty well thought out and (I hope) very fair. We have a large number of people on the selection…
Archives / February, 2009
Start your business now! (revisited)
I wrote a post a few weeks ago listing out the reasons that right now is a great time to start a business. A few days ago TechCrunch came out with their TechCrunch 2008 Year in Review (their first paid report). The post that summarized the report had a preview of some of the data they write about and included the following graph that does a great job of showing why the current market can work in your favor. Have at it!
What vs. how
The distinction of "what" a company does vs. "how" it does it has come up recently in a bunch of different contexts and it got me thinking about this idea as a useful distinction for companies to consider as they talk with customers, partners, media, etc. The idea stems from a tendency that companies have to focus not on what they do, but on how they’re doing it. In my experience this tendency is particularly true of technology companies and very prevalent in early stage companies – who in both cases are often heavily weighted towards technologists in their staffing (and therefore thinking). It’s easy to understand how companies fall into this trap. They’ve developed a new bright shiny object…
Glue just keeps getting better
In case you still haven’t signed up for Glue (see my compelling post on why you should be coming here) let me give you two more reasons: Josh Elman and Bob Frankston. Josh is the "platform guy" at Facebook (and is helping push a greater degree of openness at FB) and Bob is the co-creator of VisiCalc (and will be talking about how he’s thinking about the web as a platform). Both have signed up to give keynotes at the conference (along with David Heinemeier Hanson and Mitch Kapor both of whom I wrote about in my previous post about the conference). You can see the latest agenda here. Note that we’ve also added a handful of new workshops and…
WSJ Venture Capital Blog
I’ve been enjoying Scott Austin’s Venture Capital Dispatch. It’s a great source of information, easy to read and is a great summary of information for those of us who don’t have time to read the Journal every day. Thought it was worth a pointer.
Techstars Beantown!
I’ve been a *huge* fan of Techstars since first meeting David Cohen just over two years ago and have not been bashful about my love of the concept in previous blog posts. For those of you not familiar with the program, Techstars brings together teams of entrepreneurs from across the country to participate in an intensive 3 month summer program to jumpstart their businesses. It’s heavily mentor and experiential driven – the teams work extremely closely with the program’s mentors to advance their businesses and the summer program is filled with guest speakers that cover an array of topics of specific interest to building young businesses. Since launching in 2007 we’ve had 20 companies through the program (of which 12…
Seattle Techstars meetup
My partner Chris Wand and I will be in Seattle tomorrow and are hosting a meetup about Techstars (in case anyone missed the event a few weeks ago that Brad held there). Info can be found at www.techstars.org/meetups.
VCIR Featured on Rocky Radar
[cross-post from the VCIR Winter blog] There’s a nice article up on Rocky Radar that highlights VCIR Winter. One of my favorite excerpts is below. Venture Capital in the Rockies was designed by the organizers to cater to a diverse audience. For CEOs, there is plentiful networking time and a chance to experience novel technologies. For venture capitalists there is an occasion to catch up with colleagues and “see some opportunities not on the radar screen of Sand Hill Road.” And for the entrepreneurs there are the eyeballs of over a hundred investors in attendance, as well as the chance to mingle with other companies and service providers. But let’s not forget the snow. The Colorado mountains are having one…
VCIR Blog
Some of you know that I’m chairing the annual Venture Capital in the Rockies conference this year (now called VCIR Winter). VCIR is put on annually by the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association and brings together a national group of venture capitalists for presentations by 22 rocky mountain companies that are currently seeking capital. This year’s conference will be held March 3rd through 5th up at the Hyatt in Beaver Creek (hey – we play to our strengths and the skiing up there is fantastic!). Being the conference chair has been a pretty involving job (certainly more than I thought I was signing up for – especially in a down economy with sponsorship budgets tight) but also a very rewarding…