I’ll admit (since it should be obvious to anyone who follows this blog) that I’ve done a terrible job this year of blogging consistently. I’m sure that much of it has to do with my schedule, but then again there are a lot of people who blog regularly who are plenty busy, so that’s not such a great excuse. I suspect that much of my problem is that I’ve just gotten out of the habit of regular blogging. What’s doubly frustrating from my end is that one of my explicit goals for the year for myself was to “blog more consistently”.  So far, not so good on that front.

So with this in mind, I’m going to throw my hat over the wall and commit to put up a post every business day through the end of the month. I can’t promise that they’ll all be tomes of knowledge and I haven’t stored up a bunch of posts in anticipation of making this declaration (actually, I haven’t stored up any posts for this – I’ll be writing as I go). We’ll see how this project goes and hopefully from there I can keep up a regular pace.

Today over on the Foundry Group blog, we announced an investment in Medialets – a mobile analytics and advertising company that helps mobile application developers track usage and other statistics about their applications and provides technology that enables them to monetize those applications via advertising.

I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about Foundry’s "thematic" investing approach in the past (here’s the key post to read if you haven’t and you’re interested).  It surprises people however, when they hear us talk about some of the investments we’ve made in online advertising not as "advertising" but as part of our glue theme. Specifically we view advertising through the lens of connective technologies – those that help advertisers connect with users and remove friction from the overall system (both AdMeld and Lijit are examples of companies in the Foundry portfolio that fit into this line of thinking).

Medialets is a perfect example of this idea in action – the company sits right at the intersection of new advertising technologies and our glue theme. Medialets has built out this rich media advertising and analytics platform for iPhone and Android with support for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm Pre coming later this year. The company develops technologies that enable publishers to measure their audience and monetize their applications through advertising and that allow brands to leverage the unique capabilities of mobile platforms in advertisements in a way that is measureable whether the device is on- or off-line.

Founded in June of 2008 by a team led by multi-time entrepreneur Eric Litman, and launched concurrently with the iPhone AppStore in July 2008, Medialets quickly became a market leader in mobile analytics and advertising. By working directly with large brand advertisers and their agencies, Medialets has pushed the bounds on mobile advertising and has used its success with advertisers and agencies to more quickly grow the use of its analytics platform. To date, the company has seen over 70M downloads of its analytics code across 14M unique devices. In March of this year the company created the world’s first shakable advertisement, and in April it announced that it had processed its billionth event through Medialytics, the company’s analytics product.

I’ve been working with the company since shortly after their launch last summer and have had the opportunity to really dig into the business with Eric, Rana, David Theo and Bill (the core founding team at Medialets). I’ve loved working with these guys and feel extremely fortunate that they’ve chosen to work with Foundry.  We couldn’t be more excited to go public today with our investment in the company.

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 people you’re meeting with, but also organizes all of your correspondence with people from that organization (separating out email, attachments, etc.). I use it every day to help me sift through the mass of data and information that’s important to me (see my post on that subject from a few weeks ago here).  For Foundry, the problem Gist is attempting to solve is right at the intersection of Email and Implicit Web – two themes that we’ve been involved with for many years.

We’re extremely excited to be working with TA, Steve and the entire team at Gist

The initial signs of hope in a market are often just the sense that things are swinging in the right direction. This is why measures such as "consumer sentiment" are so important to the outlook of an economy – when people think things are going well, they often do (and because consumers power over 70% of our economy how people are thinking about spending has a pretty material impact on how the economy actually does).

There’s no venture capital equivalent to consumer sentiment (and frankly how could you poll a group of VCs and get them to agree on something anyway) but I feel that things are on the upswing – at least in the world of early-stage investing. Here’s a few factors influencing my thinking:

• People are talking about when not if the economy is going to pick up. There was a time not so long ago that people wouldn’t even dare to talk about coming out of this downturn at the risk of sounding too optimistic. Now people are actively debating exactly when the recession will be officially over.
• Companies are looking at their results and seeing that the bottom didn’t really fall out. This is a topic for a full post, but as I look across our portfolio, there are many companies – particularly our more established businesses – that prepared for the worse but didn’t see it. The fourth quarter of 2008 wasn’t so bad for these companies and most had extremely strong first quarters of 2009 as well. And because they were careful with their cash many have never been in as strong a business position.
• While plenty of VCs got scared to the sidelines, many (including Foundry) are investing consistently through the down market. We’ve all heard the stories about VC’s sitting on the sidelines – many of which are true – but there’s a core group of early stage VCs that have been consistently looking for new investments throughout the downturn and I see more and more VCs jumping back into the market.
• People are at least talking about the possibility of a tech IPO market. Fred Wilson has a great post up today talking about the possible return of an IPO market for venture backed companies. The NVCA highlighted this topic as well at their annual meeting last week in Boston.
• I’m seeing better, not worse, business ideas come through our office. There is no question in my mind that the quality of business plans coming across my desk is higher than its been in a while.  Great entrepreneurs know that this is a great time to start a business and they’re doing just that.

As a VC I’m paid to be both optimistic and realistic. In this case I think I’m being both.  Thoughts?

I can’t promise that this will be my last pre-conference post on Glue, but I can promise that if you’re not planning on attending the conference you’re going to be missing out on a great event.  To give you a sense of who is coming (other than our great group of speakers), below is a list of some of the companies and organizations that have people already registered for the event:

AdMeld
Alsop Louie Partners
Avaya
Best Buy
Citizen Sports
Cloud Ave
Cloud Security Alliance
Denver Art Museum
Devver
Facebook
Filtrbox
FreshBooks
Gartner
Guidewire Group
IntelliWare Systems
Internet Broadcasting
Intuit Inc.
Los Alamos Nat’l Lab Research Library
Massachusetts Institue of Technology
Meritage Funds
NASA Ames
Network World
NeuStar
Paypal
Salesforce.com
Symantec Corporatiion
SynapticHealth
Union Square Ventures
UserSphere Research
Yahoo! Inc.

The level of excitement around Glue is increasing every day – I can’t wait for May 12th!

Reposting from my partner Jason Mendelson’s blog about an upcoming event at CU Boulder featuring Sam Zell. This will be a great event.

 

In the continuing Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, next week Sam Zell will be visiting the university.

April 22nd, at noon in the large (Boulder NewTech Meetup) courtroom at the law school.  More info here.  It is free, but you must register, so keep that in mind.

Sam is always an interesting interviewee and speaker and even more so this year with his recent sale of Equity Office Property and sell of the Chicago Cubs.

Brad, Eric and I came up with the idea yesterday we’re calling Pitch Brad and Seth at Glue. The concept is pretty simple: if you’re an entrepreneur who is attending Glue (and you should be attending Glue) and you have a great business idea you’re working on and you’d like to get feedback from a few VCs (that would be Brad and me), we’d love to see you.  Here’s what you have to do:

1. Register for Glue (use "pitch1" to take $100 off the price)

2. Shoot Eric (or Brad or me) a paragraph describing what you want to pitch and why

3. We’ll pick 6 startups

4. Your pitch will be 5 minutes (in a room with just us, so no pressure and no big audience), and 5 minutes of honest feedback

While we’ve set this up for 6 pitches, we’ll be around the conference and looking to hook up with as many people as we can. 

For us this fits nicely with our driving goals behind Glue of using the conference to help participate in and push forward the national conversation around topics and themes that are important to us. I feel a bit like a broken record each time I write about what a great opportunity I believe Glue to be so I won’t repeat myself here other than to say that I hope to see you there!

I get this question all the time from friends and colleagues. Between portfolio companies, prospective investments, our investment themes, my partners, family and other topics that interest me, there’s a lot of information in my universe that I need to track. And this information ranges from blog posts, to tweets to mainstream press articles. It’s a lot to pay attention to (not to mention all of the individual blogs I follow ….).  For a while I was using Google Alerts but 1) there wasn’t a great way to organize them (they just showed up when they showed up – as individual "hits"); 2) they seemed to be missing a ton of information; 3) at least 2/3rds of what came through was old news (i.e., someone had made a minor change to a page which caused the Google crawler to mark it as ‘new’); 4) there was no history, tracking, etc; and 5) they were clogging up my inbox. I could go on, but if you’re a heavy user of Google Alerts, I’m sure you’re already shaking your head up and down in sympathy.

So what’s an information junky to do?  Here’s my solution (which skips the obvious morning blog perusal and clicking through the handful of news sties that I’ve set my browser to open to):

Filtrbox

Filtrbox is an information gathering and tracking service, that was founded here in Boulder and was a part of the inaugural group of TechStars companies (note: I have a small personal investment in the company).  Think of it as Google Alerts on steroids (or just Google Alerts that actually works).  I’ve organized Filtrbox into a handful of folders (one for each portfolio company I track, for Foundry, for a handful of companies not in the portfolio I’m paying attention to, for family, themes, etc.).  A folder’s "filtrs" cover all of the key topics for that subject (for example, a folder for a portfolio company would include mentions for the company, it’s products, management team, competitors, etc).  Filtrbox allows me to easily tune these folders and filtrs to make sure that I’m getting relevant information (for example by adding excluded words to a filtr so "TopSpin" isn’t returning me 100 results on tennis).  I can also turn on or off social media coverage and the like to easily see only mainstream media mentions or to include blogs, twitter, etc.  Every day I receive a morning digest of top stories from which I can click through to stories that interest me or just peruse the digetst to get a general sense of what topics are being written about on a given day. I can also head to their dashboard for charts, analytics, etc.  They have a free trial which I’d highly encourage you to check out. Pricing starts at $10/month.

 

Gist

What Filtrbox is for explicit information gathering Gist is for implicit information gathering.  Gist is still in private beta (I met their CEO at Defrag and he gave me a log-in to the system – he’ll be at Glue as well and you might be able to sweet-talk him into letting you in the beta if you’re there…) but I think will soon open up to a larger audience. Gist scans my email, contacts and calendar and draws inferences about who in my universe is important to me and what companies I’m paying attention to (or should be) and then organizes an online dashboard of information sorted by person or company based on their read of the information they’ve collected.  I can quickly scan the first paragraph or so of stories they’ve come up with directly in the Gist dashboard or click through to read the full story. This is great for grabbing timely information (for example about a company that is on my calendar that day, since Gist recognizes that this is important information and treats it as such) and quickly scanning who/what are the handful of topics for the day.

I love how I can set the specific parameters in Filtrbox to grab information on just those topics that are of key importance to me.  And I love that Gist discovers for me who/what are most important in my world and shows me the news accordingly. Together they allow me to make sure I’m completely overloaded with information … which is just how I like it.

On my drive in this morning I was trying to think of reasons for you to NOT come to Glue…and came up completely blank.

Glue is a unique chance to engage about some of the most current topics surrounding web technology with a national audience. Come talk with George Reese about securing cloud infrastructure (he has an upcoming O’Rielly book on the subject); hear about OAuth, OpenID and how they play into web architectures and services from Andrew Nash (PayPal) and Danny Kolke (etelos); debate the role of XMPP with Peter Stain-Andre, Jack Moffitt and Seth Fitsimmons (3 XMPP heavyweights); rub shoulders with Mitch Kapor (uber-angel/advisor, founder of Lotus Development Corp); geek out about cloud databases with Alex Iskold (AdaptiveBlue/ReadWriteWeb) and Stu Charleton (Elastra); and much much more (see the full agenda).

I’d challenge you to find another conference of this caliber.  And because the goal of Glue is to bring as many people to the conversation as we possibly can, we’ve aggressively priced the two day event at $495.  I don’t care what you think about the current economy – $495 to join a discussion at this level across two days and nights I think is impossible to turn down. You can register here for the event – do it now before you forget!

Will Herman’s post yesterday on the challenges of co-CEO’s reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest. Many businesses run loose and fast in their early days. And lets face it, the kind of people who are drawn to starting companies often aren’t process people – they are creative thinkers. While that’s part of the fun of early stage companies, don’t forget that there’s a side to what you are doing that needs to be properly documented and orderly. It’s not just Mark Zuckerberg who has founder problems – I’ve seen many business partnerships with the best intentions disintegrate, where their founders who were no longer seeing eye to eye, had to work out (or not work out as the case may be) the details of their split. And while I’m certainly not your lawyer, I’d strongly recommend that even if you are starting your company with your childhood best friend who you just got out of the army with that you put together at least a basic set of documents that will cover not only the formation of the company itself (which most people don’t tend to forget…) but also clarifies who owns what, what – if any – vesting there might be on your founders stock, what IP is owned by the company (and that the work you are doing together is company property, not individual property), etc, etc.

And hopefully things will go great and none of this will really matter. But if they don’t, you’ll be happy you have all this in place.