Uncategorized

I receive a large number of “check out my new cool bright shiny web thing” emails. I’m amazed at how crappy the user experience is on many of these new tools. Sure – if I spent 20 minutes setting it up and clicking through a bunch of different layers of the application I might find out how great it is, but honestly, if the site doesn’t grab me in the first 30 to 60 seconds I typically close the browser tab and move on. I understand that it’s a challenge for application designers to figure out how to move a user through their system and many designers have a big vision about what their app can do. But often what’s…

In case you don’t have 12 hours to actually do the Colorado Hajj yourself, Walker has conveniently condensed the trip into a ~3 minute video. Enjoy!

In a reminder to both follow my own 10 minute rule advice and to be more careful blogging on 4 hours sleep, it turns out that I misattributed the Bits Blog article I pointed to in my last post on young vs. old VCs to the Journal instead of the Times.  Apologies on that one. I just corrected it, but it was worth noting in it’s own post (and no – this doesn’t count as today’s post!).

Today Foundry Group announced that we’ve invested in Gist and I couldn’t be more excited about what they are working on (see our blog post here; Gist’s post here). Gist has developed a powerful product that helps users find and sort information about the people, places and companies that are meaningful to them ("where your inbox meets the web") . It’s an implicit service – they use information contained in your inbox, calendar and contacts to determine the strength of various connections and surface both public and private information about topics that are both timely and relevant for you. For example for an upcoming meeting Gist will organize not only news stories and social media mentions of the company and/or…

I’ve blogged plenty about TechStars (see how much I love TechStars here) so I won’t drone on again about what a great experience the program is . . . but it totally rocks and if you’re an entrepreneur with a great idea I’d strongly encourage you to apply. The application deadline is this Saturday (for both Boston and Boulder).

Cross posting from the VCIR Blog. We’re liveblogging VCIR today – I won’t post everything here, but you can follow the action over at the VCIR Blog. We’ll be posting live from VCIR today. You can follow the action here at the VCIR blog (David Cohen already has a post up about the media panel that kicked off the morning session).  You can also follow the action via the VCIR Winter Twitter feed. A few stats on this year’s conference. We have just under 300 attendees at this year’s conference. They are roughly split 1/3 venture capitalists, 1/3 company executives and 1/3 service providers. This is generally comparable to last year’s attendance which was approximately 320. We’ve added two company…

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…

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.