TechStars blog update

Here are a couple of updates relating to the TechStars blog.

First, we’ve swapped out our blog platform, so it’s possible that you’ll see a refresh of your feed along with this post. This means you may see posts that you’ve already read. This should only happen once, around the time you see this post (assuming you’re using a feed reader, of course).

Second, we’ve launched the TechStars Blog Network courtesy of FeedBurner. Now you can subscribe to one blog and get updates from TechStars as well as the new companies that TechStars is funding and mentoring. These companies will add their blogs on to the network as we go through the summer.

As I was turning the pages in the April 23, 2007 Forbes in the bathroom today, I came across The South Rises Again and a great map of the top metro areas in the US according to Forbes. One of the rankings was based on college degrees (percentage of adult population with bachelor’s degree or higher.) Boulder ranked at the top and the list of the top five was interesting.

Boulder, CO: 52.3%
Bethesda, MD: 50.2%
Ann Arbor, MI: 48.1%
San Francisco, CA: 43.5%
Cambridge, MA: 43.4%

Having lived in Cambridge and having spent a lot of time in San Francisco, it intrigues me how much I’m attracted to these three places. I guess I should go spend some time in Ann Arbor and see what I think. Since I don’t work for the CIA, I think I’ll pass on Bethesda.

By the way, the national average is 23.1%.

For those who live in Colorado and/or may be attending the Denver IT Summit on May 30th - I hope to see you there.

I’m presenting the TechStars funding model in a 1:00pm presentation in suite 707 at the Colorado Convention Center.

TechStars wil also have an information booth on site all day (booth 515) - please stop by and say hello.

Just last week, there was an event here in Boulder put on by the MIT Club of Colorado. I covered it on my blog and posted the full video and audio segments there as well.

I thought this segment was particularly interesting. We’ve heard so often lately that you have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful with a software startup. While it’s clear to those of us that know or have built or invested in great companies here in Colorado that this is a load of crap, many people seem to buy into that idea.

The reality is that you could build a great tech startup in any market that has a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem. Here are some of the Colorado VCs (two of which recently relocated from Silicon Valley) talking about this very issue.

You can see the entire event over on ColoradoStartups.com. if you’d like to.

TechStars notified all of our finalists personally as of last night, April 10th.

We sent out notifications to our non-finalists between April 6 and April 9 via email. There have been some reports of people not receiving this notification. This could be because of spam filters, invalid addresses on the application, or other technical reasons.

If you haven’t heard from us in person today, your company has not been selected as a finalist.

If you applied, we would like to thank you for your application. We received over 300 applications for this summer for only ten spots - selecting our finalists has been a real challenge. We’ve all been generally amazed at the overall quality of the applications.

If your company wasn’t selected as a finalist, we would like to stress that this is not a vote against your team or your idea. There are many reasons that we may not have selected your company for this summer, so we hope that you are not deterred. We will podcast many of our events this summer, so please follow along on the blog if you’re interested. We are also hoping to have at least one event in Boulder that is open to all applicants during the summer - we’ll notify you about this as it gets closer and hope that you may be able to attend.

If you’re still unsure of your status, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you to everyone who applied to TechStars! I know you’re anxiously awaiting the results. We can’t wait either.
 
We’re carefully sifting through more than 300 applications, and will be communicating with applicants again no later than April 10th.
 
The hardest part of running this program is that there will be hundreds of disappointed applicants. We hope that it won’t discourage anyone who we don’t invite to Boulder this summer. I’ve been very impressed by the overall quality of the applications, teams, and ideas we’ve seen. Getting down to ten companies is going to be really tough.
 
Thanks for your patience. We’ll be in touch soon.