Programmatic Shuffleboard

Boulder is one of the most athletic cities in the world. Even though I’m a marathoner and can do +/– 2,000 feet on a two hour run, I’m way down low on the fitness ladder here. The range of sports people play are wildly diverse, including stuff like “I ran up a 14,000’ mountain and back with one arm tied behind my back and all the toes on my left foot taped together while wearing sandals and a bike helmet.” So – it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone living here that we have excellent shuffleboard facilities in Boulder.

My friends at Slice of Lime hosted a real shuffleboard dustup session with the TechStars gang last Friday. At the end of it they retreated to a more traditional Boulder experience – having beers on a roof deck on a beautiful night while looking at the mountains.

Photo Montage – “Summertime” – The first 30 days

Well, we’re 30 days into TechStars now, and I have to say it’s been a blast.

Eight of our ten teams have significantly changed course and are pursuing improved or completely new ideas. More on this soon.

TechStars.tv has some great fresh content every week, including this look at the first 30 days. I couldn’t be more excited about the next two months.

Keep watching TechStars.tv to see what happens next.

TechStars TV

TechStars.tv is now live. It’s an easy place to go and check out the video coming out of TechStars in Boulder this summer.

We’ll continue to post the videos here on the blog as well, but TechStars.tv is a great place to go to catch up on what’s happening at TechStars this summer.

If you want to subscribe to the media-RSS feed, or the XSPF playlist, please do!

Noah Kagan in the HQ

Noah Kagan recently came out to TechStars to hang out with our founders and talk about building community and awesome user experiences. Noah worked at Facebook as a project manager back in the day, and helped grow that somewhat successful community.

These days, Noah is working at a cool new startup called Mint. I’m one of the first 100 or so beta testers, and I have to say it’s going to be a pretty exciting service. It’s a new way to manage your personal finance, and it’s unlike anything else out there both in user experience and convenience (ping Noah if you’re really into it, he may let you in early if you promise to send lots of feedback). Noah is also running Community Next, a conference on building viral communities which is happening again in July. And of course, he’s blabbing away on his blog at OkDork.com as only Noah can.

Noah shared with the TechStars founders some of his tricks for obsessively understanding your users in order to make their experience better. He showed us how he uses tools like CrazyEgg to satisfy his compulsion for understanding exactly what his users are trying to do and what they care most about. If you want to mess with Noah, go click on stuff on his blog in a completely incomprehensible way. He loves trying to figure out what you’re trying to do and this will really melt him down.

Noah was great at helping some of our guys understand the opportunity presented by the F8 platform on Facebook, and how they might be able to leverage it. I think all of the founders approached me independently to tell me how many great ideas Noah gave them in his short time at TechStars.

After Noah got back home, he wrote me to tell me that he really enjoyed teaching, and feels like it’s in his blood to do it. I fed him back his favorite phrase. Solid, Noah, just solid.

Thanks, Noah, and we’ll see you at Community Next.

MyBlogLog: Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson visit TechStars

Last week was pretty cool here at TechStars.

One of the highlights was a two day visit from Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson of MyBlogLog, which was recently acquired by Yahoo. I have to say that these are two of the nicest, smartest, coolest, laid back dudes I’ve met in a while. They fit in here in Boulder pretty nicely.

My favorite line from Eric is when he says “recognize me now?” and frames his head by making L’s with his fingers to form a frame.

Eric and Todd rolled into town on Wednesday of last week, and Brad Feld and I had a great dinner with them. It didn’t take me long to figure out Eric and Todd totally “get it” and are going to do more great things. We talked at length about MyBlogLog, the implicit web, TechStars, Yahoo, and bounced ideas off each other.

That night, they hung out with about a dozen of the TechStars founders and drank Guinness (brilliant!) at Conor O’Neills. Having totally “winged it”, they had no hotel reservation so we pointed them at the St. Julien for the night.

The next morning, Eric and Todd showed up bright and early for one-on-one meetings with many of the TechStars teams. Then, we got together and heard the complete MyBlogLog story, including how the guys self-funded on about $15k (plus lots of sweat and tears) up to the point of acquisition by Yahoo.

Eric and Todd realized that they had never really sat down and just remembered the whole story since the acquisition before. I think it was just as exciting for them to recount everything as it was for all of us.

The guys told a great story about how to be frugal, listen to your customers, and maximize your “hidden” assets. Video of the visit will be here on the blog soon.

We’re clearly driving them crazy

This week is a bit “unusual” around TechStars. Usually we try to keep things quiet most of the time for the founders to work on their companies, but once in a while we have a bit of a crazy week. This is one of those weeks.

Don Loeb is in town from FeedBurner (ok, damnit again, Google), meeting with individual teams and participating on our “Transparency: Blog or Die?” panel tonight, along with Brad Feld, Alex King, and Dave Taylor.

MyBlogLog (argh, Yahoo!) founders Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson are around this week to hang out with our teams and will participate in our sessions on Thursday, including the one that’s called “Funding your startup” and is open to the public. Other panelists for that event are Brad Feld, Gary Held, Chris Scoggins, Dan King, Kimbal Musk, and Lisa Rutherford. There are still a few seats left if you’d like to come.

Noah Kagan is also here this week. Noah was a product manager at Facebook and is obviously good at building strong online communities. He also coordinates the Community Next conference on viral marketing. Noah will be giving a special talk to the TechStars teams this week about their (hopefully, future) online communities.

Finally, we’ll end the week by having a special dinner with Jared Polis, founder of Blue Mountain Arts, Pro Flowers, and Confluence Commons, among zillions of other things. Jared will share his experiences in creating companies worth billions.

So it’s a special, but busy, week around here at TechStars. We’ll try to crank out the podcasts of these events as quickly as possible, so stay tuned.

Next week, we’ll give the TechStars teams a break and let them get back to more pressing matters, such as those you see below.

TechStars on Me.dium this week

Me.dium (first covered last October) just announced a $15M Series B round this morning. I couldn’t have been more excited for Robert, Kimbal, David and the gang. Their progress lately has been fantastic, and they’ve gotten tons of buzz. This should just full the next generations of what Me.dium can become. Me.dium is already really cool, because it lets you see the activity going on behind your browser. You can interact with others as you surf together as well as discover interesting stuff going on on the web. It’s neat to see crowds rushing to a web site in much the same way as you see crowds around awesome street performers like the Zip Code man here on Pearl Street in Boulder.

Coincidentally, I’ve been selected as the “Me of the Week” on Me.dium. For some reason, those guys seem to think I might have some interesting stuff to talk about this week. Hopefully I’ll dig up some cool stuff to share about TechStars this week.

If you’re not already signed up for Me.dium, here’s my invite link which also automatically “friends” me with you if you use it. Then you can see everything I surf, which will just be immensely interesting, I’m sure! Check it out!

Starting your startup (session video)

On day 4 at TechStars this summer, we held a session called “Starting your startup”. Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group, Greg Reinacker of Newsgator, and Andrew Currie of Email Publishing (and more) talked with our 26 new founders about startup ideas, the evolution and cycles they go through, consumer web vs. B2B, products, leveraging technology, people, what kills most startups, and much more. The session lasted a few hours including Q&A. The panel discussion is below. We’re planning to release many of our 40 or session sessions this summer on startups – we hope you enjoy this first one.

Sorry about the occasional fan noise in the room – we’ll try to get that fixed for next time. Also, as a tip – if you turn the sound down, it’s a great way to watch some guys eating for 10-15 minutes. Be sure to subscribe to the TechStars blog for all the future session videos we’ll be releasing this summer. Oh, and yes, we know our permalinks have no subscription link – we’ll fix it soon – we’re a startup too.

Starting your startup from TechStars.

Acquisition is not a business model, is it?

We’ve got 6 or 7 (depending upon how you count them) would-be consumer internet companies at TechStars this summer. Some will morph and become something else, so who knows what the final count will be. The others are making on-demand applications for businesses. The latter often get made fun of by the former. I defend the B2B guys, of course, having come mostly from that ilk.

With the consumer web startups, most of them started the summer thinking about advertising (selling, hosting, or building inventory) as their business model. And they got called out on it, perhaps correctly, right away. Especially those for whom this was a default answer more than a real answer. Then again, perhaps some of them were thinking about the 16 billion dollars spent for online advertising last year. That money is going somewhere.

Now before we get too deep into the whole business model discussion, let me be clear. By this, I mean simply “how they will make money.”

In week one at TechStars, Brad Feld explained that there really are no new business models on the internet. He cited “advertising” and “getting paid for your software one way or another” as the only business models that have ever existed on the internet, and the only ones that ever will. Keep in mind that we’re talking here about companies that have only internet based products, not those that really sell “goods” via e-commerce or simply exist to extend their brand onto the Internet.

A few hands went up to ask about the fact that many companies that don’t have “business models” (and/or have never made much money) have recently been acquired. Just build something people will like, and you’re all set, right? The rest will take care of itself. I suppose – but you had better build something people love instead. Either lots and lots of people, or at least one acquisition hungry company.

After being pressed on this some in the past, I now like to say that you better build something people will love and flock to in droves, or you had better build something people will pay for. It’s best if you can do both, of course.

It’s completely possible that some of these startups will build something really compelling, never make any money beyond a trickle of advertising dollars, and yet still have a successful exit in a strategic acquisition.

But I’m not counting on it. Hopefully, neither are they.

While “attempted acquisition” technically fits my description of a business model (”make money”), the problems with this approach are apparent. First, people are overly influenced by a combination of The Law of Truly Large Numbers and the massive publicity associated with notable exits that match their ideal scenario. Put another way, you are in reality much more likely to actually be acquired if you are building value (i.e. “making money”) because it’s simpler math for a larger company with a strategic stake in what you’re doing. As nice as it looks, in the universe of exits viewed one at a time, YouTube is statistically insignificant.

So, maybe you could argue that “attempted acquisition” is a business model, especially if you understand the risks. It’s not an impossible feat, certainly. I have friends and acquaintances that have done it with enormous success. But almost none of them set out with this plan and instead were just trying to make something hugely popular. And they did it. But armies of entrepreneurs who you’ve never heard of and some you have, many of whom are just as smart as you, tried and failed.

So no, acquisition isn’t a sensible business model. More accurately, it’s a wish.

TechStars Video Update #1

Brad Feld and I got together on Thursday to shoot a quick ten minute video update on TechStars. We’ll try to get one of these short form updates out every week or two. We were joined by Stan James, the founder of Lijit.com and we got his impressions of the first two weeks at TechStars. Stan’s been a regular around TechStars and is actively helping out several of the founders on a regular basis. Brad also gives his impressions of the first weeks and talks about the implicit web as well as the Defrag conference happening here in Colorado this November.

TechStars Weekly Update #1 from TechStars.