There’s a wealth of experience and expertise around us every day. We probably don’t give most people we pass running around our respective busy cities a second look, but rushing by you are people with interesting expertise and experience. Artists and actors; olympic athletes and monks; sailors and graffiti artists.

SideTour looks to unlock this community and enable them to market and generate income off of their unique expertise. These experts – “hosts” in SideTour’s terminology – use the SideTour platform to advertise their experiences. SideTour helps them market these experiences and handles bookings, billing, refunds, etc. on their behalf. SideTour events are designed to be shared in groups – often people who haven’t met each other before the experience (although the platform does allow for group booking). And the entire experience ultimately becomes about the event, about the host and about the participants. The results so far have been fantastic.

Importantly, SideTour isn’t just a listing service for events, as some other companies pursuing similar models are. And SideTour heavily curates the experiences hosted on its site to ensure that they are both unique and that the hosts have true expertise. The variety of experience on SideTour really show the effect of this curation (and you thought I was kidding about luging and monks).

I met the SideTour team at the beginning of TechStars NYC and immediately loved what they were up to. And I love the story of four founders, friends and colleagues for over a decade, coming together to form a business (sounds like the Foundry story). They’ve made incredible progress over the summer at TechStars.

The company announced today a $1.5M seed financing led by Foundry and RRE (there’s a great write-up on TechCrunch here). This money will help the company further build out the functionality of the SideTour platform and begin expansion to markets beyond its launch market of New York City.

It’s great to have the chance to work with them!

I recently waked into a pitch meeting for a social networking related business and was surprised by what I saw. I had interacted with the entrepreneur over email – taking a look at the initial business plan and setting up the meeting – but we hadn’t met in person before. In front of me were three guys in suits, each in their late 40’s or early 50’s, with an older Dell laptop and a paper print-out of some product ideas. And as I sat there listening to their pitch I couldn’t help but think about how differently I might have reacted if this team was in their 20’s or 30’s, dressed in full tech/nerd hipster outfits (or at least jeans and sneakers), and whether there is a negative age bias in venture capital. Here were three guys with 20-30 years of business experience, but I was having trouble getting past my expectation of what they were going to look and act like, versus what was in front of me.

An LP of ours once asked a question that dealt with a similar subject (ironically, although we were in our Boulder office and the LP in question was in jeans, my partners and I were all in sport coats, as we always are when presenting to our investors). I can’t remember exactly how he phrased it but it was something like: “When do you guys get to be too old to do this? To relate to the younger entrepreneurs who are starting companies in the investment areas in which you guys focus.” To be quite frank, this question had never actually occurred to me before. Likely because I still think of my self as young and hip (although I am neither). And because I figured that as long as we are passionate about what we’re doing, we’ll relate to entrepreneurs who have that similar passion (some variant of that is how we answered our investor at the time).

But actually it’s true. Certainly there is some amount of age bias in venture. Early stage tech is considered somewhat of a young person’s game. And while I’ve worked with many very experienced entrepreneurs who were and are fantastic, I wonder if the initial pangs of question I felt on entering a room with 3 middle aged guys in suits pitching me their business plan is something that is deeper than a momentary hesitation.

I’d love your thoughts on this.

This morning Federated Media announced that it has acquired Lijit Networks in a private stock deal.

I’m incredibly proud of what the Lijit team has accomplished in the almost 4 years we’ve been investors in the business – charting a course that wasn’t exactly always a straight line, but one that has always placed publishers first. As a result of this never wavering focus on web publishers, Lijit has built a large and ultimately very valuable company.

I’ve always thought that Federated was the natural acquirer for Lijit (and we’ve been partners with Federated for some time now). Federated shares Lijit’s focus on publishers (“the best of the independent web”), but unlike Lijit, who helps publishers generate revenue through better monitizing their non-premium inventory, Federated sells unique, high value premium inventory across their federated group of publishers. For a time, Lijit pursued a similar model and having bumped into Federated in many a sales process we can attest to the strength of the Federated sales team. Ultimately Lijit chose a different path – integrating with over 30 buying channels and standing up their own RTB exchange. All the while, Lijit has been rapidly growing the list of publishers they work with by providing not only an advertising channel, but search, analytics and insight tools to help Lijit publishers better understand and engage with their audience.

The fit is a natural one. Federated brings to the combined entity a large and established sales force and the ability for Lijit publishers to access premium content relationships and advertising. Lijit brings a strong technology background, a rapidly scaling publisher base and the ability of both Federated and Lijit publishers to place their inventory to auction through the Lijit exchange.

As part of the acquisition I’ll be joining the Federated Media board of directors (along with Federated founder, John Battelle, FM’s CEO Deanna Brown, FM’s early investor from Panorama Capital Chris Albinson and Fred Harmon of Oak Investment Partners, who led the large Federated financing in 2008). I’m thrilled to be working with such an accomplished group and to continue my close relationship with Lijit through my continued role at Federated Media.

I’d also note that, while the financial details of this transaction haven’t been released, this is a significant win not only for Lijit and its investors, but also a nice outcome for Boulder (Lijit’s offices are in the heart of downtown – just upstairs from the Foundry office, in fact). While ultimately the exit will be measured by the outcome of the combined Lijit/Federated business, based just on this deal’s value alone this ranks as one of the larger transactions for a Denver or Boulder based business in the last decade.

You can read the FM release here (or on their home page, which they’ve completely taken over with the deal announcement), Lijit’s founder and CEO Todd Vernon’s thoughts here and FM’s founder and chairman John Battelle’s post on the deal here.

Congratulations to both the Lijit and Federated teams! This is big!

 

Like you, I’m a pretty busy guy. I’ve always been high energy and (I hope) high velocity. My job requires me to be in many places at one time (and at any one time have a few dozen different things spinning around in my head). It’s tiring and doesn’t always leave time for the kind of balance I look for in my life. There’s always someone else to talk with, some other conference or “it” even to attend; another great idea to look at investing in. But in the last 6 months or so I’ve really hit a different stride that’s allowed me to both feel more productive and more balanced. Given that every one I know struggles with this I thought it would be worth putting a few ideas down on paper in hopes that others will pile in with what’s worked for them.

Gmail: Gmail is simply fantastic. Sitting here it’s hard to even contemplate the number of years I spent in the purgatory known as Outlook/Exchange. It was a strange purgatory – I didn’t really know I was in it, but at the same time always had an uneasy feeling about it. You’re probably already on Gmail (what hipster tech person isn’t?), but just in case – it’s at the top of my list of things I’ve done in the past year that have really impacted my time. Plus Gmail enables a bunch of other productivity enhancing apps (see immediately below for a few of them).

Unsubscribe.com: If you don’t have Unsubscribe.com run, don’t walk, to get the plug-in. It’s free now, which makes the bar to install it even lower (although as I posted previously, I’d gladly pay for this functionality). The key here is to actually use it. And use it often. I’m absolutely relentless about my use of Unsubscribe. I’ve had the same email address for at least a decade and over the years the newsletters and lists have piled up. At some point I tried to unsubscribe myself from them, but it was impossible to stay on top of. Now with a click of the Unsubcribe.com button they’re gone. I’m not joking when I say that I’ve cut back my email traffic by 150 emails A DAY by my relentless (and continued) use of this tool.

SaneBox: Here’s one you may not of heard of. I understand that messing with people’s email is a recipe for disaster. And everyone has their thing in terms of how they like to have their email sorted. For me that wasn’t any of the other email productivity tools I tried and it definitely wasn’t Priority Inbox from Google. SaneBox uses information in my social graph, contacts, calendar and past email behavior to separate out my email into important (in my inbox), deal with later (send to *another folder* to deal with later, possible spam (anything that’s not caught by Postini) and blog comments (there are some other options as well if you want to mess around with it). What I like most about it is that non-important emails never get into my line of sight. And since I have no email self control this turns out to be pretty important for keeping me from getting distracted. I have one inbox for stuff that I need to deal with right away and another (that I can train by the way) for everything else that I can batch process a few times a day. Slick.

Just say no: Not to be a jerk about it but I say “no” more than ever now. It’s too easy to end up with a full schedule and running from meeting to meeting can make for a very unproductive day (and despite this increase in “no’s” I still have plenty of days where I’m doing just that). But I’m ruthless about saying no to scheduled meetings. Instead, I’m pushing people to Community Hours, which is a great, rapid fire way to meet new people; or I’m calling people; or I’m saying “no”. Meeting time is generally reserved for companies in the Foundry portfolio, companies in which we’re thinking of making an investment and little else. It’s really helped me prioritize what’s most important (which is to say companies in the Foundry portfolio and companies in which we’re thinking of making an investment).

Few scheduled calls: See above for step one of this process. Step two is that I try to stay away from scheduled calls. The more on my set schedule, the less flexibility I have to either work in solid blocks of time or to respond to things that come up during the day. I posted a while ago about my need for a call list app. I found one (CallList), which is a bit kluge but generally does the trick (it’s sole purpose is to manage – both online and in an iPhone app – a list of people that I need to call along with some basic notes and information to give me context). I use this app to effectively manage these call backs. This opens up time on my schedule and also allows me to better make use of down time (for example on my drive to the airport, which if you’ve been to DIA you know is a long one from anywhere one actually might want to live in Colorado).

Batch email: All the research suggests that humans do better when they concentrate on one task for a period of time, rather than jumping from task to task. I’m trying to move my behavior from an interrupt driven mode where I am constantly stopping what I am doing to check in on email, to one where I’m batch processing instead. So I work in blocks of time and try to keep my email in the background except when I’m actually working on email (which is still plenty of my day given how much of my job is done over email).

Get out of the office: I wrote an entire chapter on this in Do More Faster and I’m trying to take my own advice to heart. Maybe it’s Boulder. Or maybe I can get away with it more because I’m a VC. Whatever it its, I’m trying to take more walks, hikes and bike rides in lieu of lunch meetings, “coffee” and meetings where I sit in a conference room. I’m not talking every meeting, but a few times a week where instead of sitting around talking, I’m walking and talking. Not only are the meetings more fun, but I find that I stay much sharper for the rest of the day when I get both some time outside and some basic exercise. Obviously these are to be avoided if you need to whiteboard something out or if you need to dial someone else in, but if you think about it you’ll realize that you have plenty of meetings each week that can happen outside of the four walls of your conference room or office.

Don’t worry about Inbox Zero. I was never a great Inbox Zero guy – I use my inbox to keep emails to deal with later too much to get down to fewer than about 5-10 emails at one time. But it used to stress me out that I always had a few things left to do. No longer. I try to get back to people who email me in a reasonable period of time. And I try to respond to most emails (I’ve given up on “all” emails in that last sentence in the last 6 months as well – some emails just don’t deserve to be responded to…). But I’m a lot less stressed about it and as a result I’m a lot more efficient at getting back to people.

Don’t panic! In this world of social media and always being connected, there’s somehow always the sense that you’re missing out on something. And you know what – that’s right. At this very second you’re missing out on something. It’s probably fun too. And there are lots of other cool people involved. But not you. So don’t worry about it and pay attention to what you’re doing now, vs. what you’re not doing. This goes for missing something in your Facebook feed, letting something pass you by on Twitter, etc. If it’s that important someone will repost or retweet it and you’ll see it. Or maybe not. And the world will go on.

This is one of those topics that could go on forever. These are just a few ideas that have worked for me to lessen the load at “work” and make more time for “life.” I’d love your thoughts as well. (and here I’ve focused on the work side of the equation – there’s another entire post that one could write on the life side)

Yesterday we released a video written, produced and directed by my partner Jason, that attempts to capture “the human struggle of four venture capitalists trying to make the world a better place.” From the response on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere on the web it seems to have hit a chord with people; and I hope has been taken for what it was intended – a parody of lives as VCs (certainly no one can accuse the four of us of taking ourselves too seriously!).

It was for me a unique experience, not just creating the video but also recording in Jason’s studio and watching the editing and finishing process. For 5:56 of video (including outtakes) we spend hours recording and filming (not to mention all the time Jason spent mixing, re-recording and editing). It was a blast. Especially the day we spent running around Boulder in full costume(s) filming. We turned quite a few heads and at a couple of points had a full audience watching us perform. I learned a few important things that I thought I’d share:

I can’t sing. Like most people I think I have a pretty good singing voice. I sing in the car, sing along to my iPod, occasionally sing in the shower. And I thought I really had it. So when I got to the studio I belted it out like I was feeling it (and I was). And then Jason played it back for me and it turns out that I suck at singing. It’s disappointing to admit, but it’s true. Alas, I better stick to my day job.

Brad sings even worse than I do. If I can take any solice in the fact that I can’t really sing, it’s that Brad can’t sing either. And he’s even worse than I am. So at least there’s that.

Go big or go home. There was no question for the four of us that if we were going to do this, we were going to go all out. For me that was the beard (thanks to my wife Greeley for shaving it down to JT perfection the night before the shoot!). And for all of us (thanks to the internets) the costumes. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as embarrassingly as possible!

Impromptu can work (sort of). Most of our shoots were meticulously planned out by Jason in advance of the crew arriving, but the scene we shot in the shower (which I’m a bit mixed on, actually) was completely impromptu. Like “hey – do you think we could all fit in the shower?!” kind of impromptu. Sometimes you just need to go with it!

I love my partners and the fact that Jason conceived of this project and more importantly that we actually went ahead and did it is a testament to why I like working with them so much. Here’s to having a good time. And to not taking yourself too seriously!

Photo credit, Brian Sweeney (who did yomans work the entire day of filing by both being in charge of still photography but also carried around the music, carted equipment and generally did anything/everything that needed doing. His wife Megan Sweeney was the lead videographer and editor, btw.

With the performance of the public markets looking like an EKG read-out, I’ve been asked frequently in the past two weeks what effect this will have on the venture financing market. How tied are private company valuations to the public markets? If you’re planning on raising money in a few months would it be better to go out now or better to keep your original plans? Should companies be altering their cash burn projections to become more capital efficient in the face of potential funding challenges?

Here are a few thoughts:

Generally it takes some time for public market declines to make their way down to the venture market. And while I’m sure you have an opinion about the current state of valuations in the private market (who doesn’t?), there’s not a direct correlation between public market valuations and private market ones (ie., when the Dow drops 10% it’s not like term sheets headed out the door that week do the same). That said, a prolonged period of decline in the public markets, eventually has some effect on private markets as I outline below. In addition, I’d note that in this case we’re not talking about a a shock to the system but rather the natural movements of the market (shocks – such as 9/11 – tend to have more immediate effects across all market segments both public and private).

Different firms will react differently based on where they are in their fund cycle, the perceived strength of their portfolio, how well funded that portfolio is, and their view of how deep and long a downturn is likely to be. It’s worth thinking about all of these potential effects on your fundraising.

A downturn of any length of time is likely to have some effect on the fundraising market for venture capitalists themselves. This market has already been relatively difficult (with a complete bifurcation of funds into a category of “haves” who appear to be able to raise funds at will, and “have nots” who just can’t seem to get any attention from LPs) and a down market will both exacerbate this existing trend as well as perhaps move a few firms from the “have” category to “have not”. And of course there’s the well discussed “denominator” problem (which is really a numerator problem) whereby the actual dollars allocated to alternative asset classes (i.e,. venture) by the large LPs shrinks as the overall value of their portfolio decreases (they tend to allocate based on a % of assets). None of this is likely to be of any immediate concern to a company raising money in the next number of months, and because a large number of funds have “fresh powder” (i.e, money to invest) this is likely only to effect the company fundraising market if the downturn is a sustained one vs. simply short term market volatility. But its a trend worth watching if “volatility” turns into a downturn of any real length or depth.

However the perceived strength of a firms portfolio and the relative capital efficiency of the companies in which they have investeded in (as well as thier current overall funding status) are likely to have some effects – even in the short term and especially if it becomes clear that we’re in a true down market. For starters, as the markets become more uncertain there is a tendency among venture capitalists to batten down the hatches a bit. This was famously done by Seqouia in 2008 with their widely publicized CEO meeting (and accompanying PowerPoint), but was and is done much more quietly by many firms. As funding becomes uncertain VCs tend to focus inward on their existing portfolios.

A derivative of this inward focus is a tendency of VCs in down markets to focus their new investment activities more locally. Over the past few years of relative market strength, VCs have ventured further and further from their respective home bases in search of new technologies and companies (especially right now given the heated state of the funding market in California). If the markets decline for any period of time, I’d expect to see this trend repeated. This perhaps won’t effect you if you’re in Silicon Valley, but for those entrepreneurs in smaller markets – especially those with relatively weak local funding environments – there may be a real effect to their fundraising prospects from this.

So what’s a start-up to do?

For starters, don’t panic! You’re probably not like all those other startups with shitty business ideas, so you’ll be fine.

More seriously, you should think about these trends as you consider both your own fundraising strategy (and timing) as well as your plans to increase cash burn. Down markets favor ideas that are truly capital efficient (and I don’t mean just because you run your business on AWS). Think about your spending plans – you’re probably burning too much cash – and think about taking incremental spending risk, not step function risk. Gauge your current investors. Where are they in their own funds? How likely are they going to be to support an inside round if that’s required for your next round? Ask them their opinion on the current market and its effect on your future fundraising plans. If you’re planning on being out in the market in the next 4-6 months, I’d consider going out now. Better to get market feedback now when you still have more time to react, then 2 months before you run out of cash.

For good or bad, the venture markets always pendulum. And while at Foundry we believe in time diversifying our investing (i.e,. investing at a relatively steady pace), the market as a whole doesn’t work that way. Ultimately the strong venture market that we’re currently in will wane and in the long term this will be good for the overall market (although not necessarily for your specific start-up) as the market swings itself back past what should be its equilibrium to the other side of the pendulum. And then we’ll start the last few years all over again. And while I’m not certain that the current market environment will force the pendulum backward in this way, I do know that something in the future will. It always does.

One of my favorite services is unsubscribe.com. It’s a gmail plug-in that with one click lets you rid your inbox of unwanted newsletters. I recently analogized newsletters to tending a garden. You have to stay on top of the weeds or they get out of control. Unsubscribe.com lets you do that.

With this as a backdrop, I was pretty surprised to receive the following in my inbox last week:

Thank you for being one of our paying customers, your trust and support helped propel us to where we are today.

With that being said, I’m excited to tell you that beginning yesterday, August 4th, 2011, we have made our full suite of products (Email Unsubscribe and Social Monitor) completely free, which means we owe you the pro-rated amount of $9.62 and have discontinued any further billing.

Please fill out this quick form on your Account Settings page so that we can send you a refund check. We would like to simply refund your card, however that is not something we can do with our current payment processor so we will instead have to send you a physical check, sorry.

Thank you again and we look forward to keeping your inbox clean and your social networks secured.

Team Unsubscribe

I was blown away. Here was a company that was deciding to stop charging for it’s product. That’s not all that uncommon (although see my post with some thougths on free models here for a few ideas on pricing). But giving back my pro-rated unused account balance? Now that’s really taking it to another level. Here was my response:

Hi. You guys rock. Seriously. I love your product. I think it’s great that you have a model that will now allow you to offer the unsubscribe product for free. I think it’s even greater that you decided that if you were going to make the product free that you should grandfather in existing customers (even though we all signed up with no expectation that we’d receive a later discount). I’ve personally received much more value out of the unsubscribe.com service than I realized I would at the time I signed up (I’ve even tweeted about my love of unsubscribe.com a few times!). You’ve saved me countless hours either deleting emails I never had an interest in reading or trying to navigate the labyrinth of dozens and dozens of companies “unsubscribe” processes. Please keep the balance on my account. I couldn’t be happier with you guys and I couldn’t possibly accept anything back given the tremendous value I’ve received by using your product.

I love it when companies do the right thing. Even if I’m not planning on taking them up on their offer…

Before Foundry makes an investment we perform extensive due diligence. We meet with various company managers, talk to other people in industry to get their take, call current and prospective customers, exercise our own network of contacts to get background on the idea and team, perform reference checks on key management, etc. While this process varies, we’re always diligent before entering into what we view as a long term partnership with the company.

What more and more entrepreneurs are realizing is that they should be doing the same kind of due diligence on their potential funders.

We’ve been long time fans of this kind of reverse due diligence and always encourage entrepreneurs to “check us out” before making a decision to invest with us. My partners and I all have blogs which I think are good indications of our varied personalities, but we also provide a list of references (CEOs, other portfolio execs, other people who know us well) for them to look into how we really are to work with.

It’s particularly important to find a few reference points for deals that didn’t go well. You really learn about someone’s true character in those situations.

I was reminded of this fact recently. Through various activities (mostly pre-dating the formation of Foundry Group), I’m a shareholder in a number of non-Foundry related companies. One of those recently sold off a significant piece of technology for quite a bit money. The business has raised a lot of capital and struggled at times, but selling off this technology and continuing to focus on the additional technology that was to remain in the business, was a major step for the company. As a common shareholder my first reaction was “great; this deal will reduce the preference overhang on the business and there’s still some really interesting potential upside with the remaining asset.”

Sadly, I forgot the golden rule of venture: MANY VCs ARE ASSHOLES

Not all that shockingly, given who the VCs are in this case, they decided that – magically – this sale of a portion of the company’s assets could be convoluted into a liquidation of the entire business (a technical definition that relates to language in the charter and the “judgement” of the board). This helped them with a number of things. First – they achieved a significantly better tax outcome on the distribution of proceeds. More importantly, this handily resulted in their ability to completely wipe out the common ownership in the business. That’s right. Instead of paying down the preference and leaving the common in their rightful place – better off for having paid off a significant portion of the preference overhang on the business – these ASSHOLE VCs instead decided to take the opportunity to not only pay back a substantial portion of their investment but also to cut the common completely out of the cap table.

Aren’t there lawyers involved? How could they let this happen?

Here’s where working with ASSHOLE VCs really screws with you. Company counsel is a very well known valley firm. They do a LOT of work for these ASSHOLE VCs. So when it came down to it, they were on the side of the investors not the company.

How about the common shareholders? Couldn’t they do anything?

Well, unfortunately (and I am actually pretty sympathetic here), the vast majority of the common was held by the management of the business. And thanks to a (not particularly generous) carve-out program for management, these ASSHOLE VCs were able to hold their vote ransom. “We’ll push this through either way,” I suspect they said, “so either vote with us and at least get a cut of the proceeds in the form of this bonus or vote against us and lose it all.” And really management had no great choice.

The irony here from my perspective is that it actually wasn’t even a very smart economic move by the investors involved (ASSHOLE VCs aren’t always that smart). If it turns out that the company was worth quite a bit, the common shareholders will surely sue for their fair share (I will likely be at the front of that line). If it’s not, then there was no skin off their back to begin with. Of course there is a matter of the statute of limitations (even fraud, which I believe this is, has a time window for action), so there is some outside chance that they’ll rip everyone off and get away scott free.  Of course I’ll know who they are… (there’s a long story about why I’m not going after them now which isn’t something I can get into here; it’s the same reason I’m not just calling them out in this post by name).

So the moral of the story is: check out your investors before you go into business with them. They may dress in smart looking khakis and polo shirts; they may have fancy offices on Sand Hill Road and drive hybrid cars; but they may also be ASSHOLE VCs. And that would be bad for your business.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A friend recently sent me a link to a talk John Mack gave at Wharton that I think is absolutely fascinating. I’ve read a number of books and articles about the key events surrounding the financial crisis but I find these sorts of first person accounts so much more interesting. And I think Mack is an extremely engaging person.

I started my career at Morgan Stanley as an analyst in 1994 and actually had a great personal encounter with Mack that was probably my most memorable moment working in the banking industry. I was just starting my 2nd year at MS and was holed up in an empty office editing a draft of an offering document. Having undoubtably slept only a few hours the night before, I’m sure I was hardly the picture of professionalism with my slightly long hair, undone tie and stocking feet up on a chair, when in walks the head of my group, the head of the Investment Banking Division and John Mack. Mack says to me: “Do you mind if we use this conference room for a few minutes?” Startled, I respond something to the effect of: “Of course. I was just using this for a quiet place to review this document,” and started to gather my things. Walking out of the office, Mack calls to me and says: “I know a quiet place for you to read up on the 42nd floor.” (that’s the executive floor). I sort of chuckle but quickly realize that he’s serious. He introduces himself and picks up the conference phone: “Barbara [I’m making that up – I can’t remember his assistant’s name], Seth Levine is on his way up – can you please make him comfortable in my office.” Five minutes later I’m sitting in John Mack’s office. Alone. Reading (or trying to read, at least) and mark up a prospectus. And for context, at the time my apartment in NY was maybe 300 sq ft. Mack’s office was probably 8 times that size. I was sitting at a small round conference table, but the room also contained a sofa and chairs seating area, at least two desks and plenty of other things I was likely too nervous to notice. About 30 minutes later Mack comes back and proceeds to sit down and talk with me for probably 20 minutes. What did I study in school? how did I come to work at Morgan Stanley? how has my experience been? etc. The man is as engaging as he appears on this video. I can see why so many people are incredibly loyal to him.

One of the many things that makes Boulder a great city for start-ups is its incredibly collaborative environment (see posts on my love of Boulder here and here). From the willingness of mentors to help out TechStars companies, to collaborative efforts around recruiting great talent to our city, I’m constantly amazed at how many people are working to make Boulder an amazing place for businesses to thrive.

Today there’s another new initiative launching to help young tech companies in our community – Trada is opening CodeSpace, a free co-working space dedicated to startup developers and software engineers. CodeSpace will be located in Trada’s downtown Boulder offices and will have over 2000 sq ft of space dedicated to the effort.

While there are many places where non-technical entrepreneurs can meet up in Boulder to discuss their startups, there are few places where software developers can camp out for the day, week or month and work together on a project. We wanted to add this environment to the mix of coffee shops, traditional co-working spaces, and rented offices in Boulder. And in CodeSpace you don’t even have to buy coffee to camp out there (in fact the coffee is on Trada!).

But you do need to apply. There are spots for three dev teams (1-4 people each) for semi-permanent space as well as come-as-you-are dev and co-working space (with whiteboards, internet, access to caffeinated beverages, etc).

To start, CodeSpace will be open 8am to 5pm Monday through Friday. The program will run through the summer with the expectation that it will extend/expand in the fall as we learn what works best.

To apply for one of the 3 dedicated co-working spaces please visit trada.com/codespace