What we learned by moving to Boulder

In a follow up to our Who We Are post, Ryan and I thought we would compare VC life in Boulder, CO to that of the Silicon Valley. In some ways it’s remarkably similar and in some ways wonderfully different.

For those of you who don’t know, Ryan and I met in 2000 while at the California offices of Mobius Venture Capital, became quick friends and even started a band or two. (Shameless Plug Alert: Our band Soul Patch has recently released a new album. Check out the web site and buy on CDBaby, iTunes and Amazon. Become a fan on Facebook!). When the concept of the Foundry Group was born, one thing that the five of us agreed on was the need for one (and only one) office.

It didn’t take us long to decide that both the Boulder and Foundry Group opportunities were what we wanted to pursue with our careers, so, after a combined 27 years in Northern California, we sold our homes in the Bay Area and moved to Boulder in mid 2006. We’ve now been here almost 2 years. What have we learned?

Boulder is an entrepreneurially vibrant community. We were both surprised and encouraged by the sheer amount of startup activity there is in Boulder. It’s not just a by-product of having several good universities nearby; rather it’s really part of the culture and fabric of the community. I’d compare this to Ann Arbor, MI, where I went to school. Many people compare Ann Arbor to Boulder (without the mountains). While I see plenty of similarities, Ann Arbor is missing the ingrained culture of entrepreneurship (and associated risk profile) although it may have similar engineering and management talent.

Boulder is a supportive community. There really is a sense of community here. While there is a ton of activity, I don’t know if we’ve ever been to place that is as supportive in each other’s efforts. Instead of competition, there is collaboration. Whether it’s the Boulder NewTech Meetup, the Boulder OpenCoffee Club, Boulder Software Club, or TechStars, there is a general sense of community and responsibility to help the entrepreneurial community grow. I can’t say that I ever felt that sense of responsibility and “giving back” in the Silicon Valley that I feel here.

Boulder makes nationwide travel much easier. As national investors, it’s much easier for us to travel anywhere in the US from a central location like Denver. We’ve even been able to take day trips to New York, an impossible feat from the Bay Area, at least without a private jet. While an East Coast day trip is not the most fun one can have, our families appreciate us being home at night. And getting back and forth to Los Angeles and San Francisco, where we travel most frequently, is a relatively painless and efficient experience.

Speaking of travel, both Ryan and I (coincidentally) live on the same block in a neighborhood a few blocks away from our office. Our “commute” to the office is infinitely easier than our prior commutes in the Bay Area. The time saved can be spent on work or play, but either way, it’s not spent in the car. (For those voyeurs among you, you can check out our neighborhood by going to Google Maps and clicking “Street View”.

Being in Boulder helps focus our West Coast activities. There is no doubt that the volume of startup activity in the Bay Area dwarfs that of Boulder, and we have often been asked if we are concerned that we are missing out on opportunities by not having an office in the Valley. On the contrary, we consider being outside of the (sometimes provincial) echo-chamber of Silicon Valley to be genuinely useful. After experiencing life as VCs in the Valley for several years, we experienced a very real “time tax”, which resulted from taking meetings with entrepreneurs and executives we knew we were unlikely to invest in, but we felt were ultimately necessary to participate in in order to maintain our relationships with friends and colleagues in the area. Not being in California every day means we can opt out of that process. With our new location in Boulder, we still have our great networks and deal flow in California, but we have removed the Sand Hill Road friction from our day-to-day lives. When we do go to California to look at deals, meet with entrepreneurs or attend board meetings, we are better focused at the matters at hand and tend to have higher quality meetings, since those meetings have passed the “is it worth hopping on an airplane to meet face to face?” test.

Boulder’s culture encourages a healthy work-life balance. Boulder has an incredible amount to offer with easy access to mountains, hiking trails and natural beauty. People actually have time and focus to concentrate on things outside of work. It’s definitely a slightly saner pace. It’s not that people don’t work hard – they do – but there is a certain amount of balance that isn’t completely explainable unless you live here. For us, it’s meant that the hours we do work are more efficient and our brains are sharper.

So is Boulder utopia? No, nothing is. Ryan and I will “forever” tease our partners who told us that winters were mild in Boulder. Upon our arrival, we had the “opportunity” to experience the worst winter “ever” in 2006-2007. We’re also being told this winter is “below average,” which means that we’ve clearly brought bad luck with us. Either that or we were sold a bill of goods. More on that next year, I suppose. Also, we both miss some of the culinary options of the Bay Area, but we’d be in the same situation if we lived anywhere else but New York or Los Angeles (with apologies to Chicago). Finally, we must mention that the Denver Airport has the worst parking facilities in the world. They are regularly full, making for some tense moments pre-departure.

But in general, Boulder is a great place to live, work, play and (in Ryan’s case) raise kids. We’ve embraced our new hometown, and we look forward to continuing our integration into the community, both from professional and personal standpoints.

I have a very patterned daily information consumption routine. The left-most tab in my browser is called “Daily” and contains a set of web sites that I open up each morning and look at as part of my routine. Recently, Filtrbox - one of the TechStars companies - graduated to be part of this tab.

I try virtually every news alerting system that I come across. I have a set of about 100 keywords that I track daily - all of the companies we’ve invested in, a number of people that I follow, and a handful of random things I care about. My current staples are Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts, and Technorati. I can only seem to get Google and Yahoo via email, so they show up in my inbox and get moved to my “Daily” email folder (which I read - er - daily.) Technorati comes via RSS so I read it each morning in FeedDemon.

The vision for Filtrbox when they started at TechStars last summer was to create an integrated single dashboard of all this keyword alert information. The tagline “more knowledge, less noise” says it all. My partner Seth Levine and I totally resonated with this - Seth has a great post about Filtrbox up titled Know what you don’t know which addresses how he thinks about the problem and how Filtrbox solves it for him.

For a while I found the Filtrbox data interesting, but not really that additive. In addition, the UI was “ok” but there where lots of little things that slowed me down. About three months ago I noticed I was finding new information from it that wasn’t appearing in my other keyword searches and that it was streamlining this information in ways that I hadn’t expected, such as eliminating duplicates (e.g. the same alert coming from Google, Yahoo, and Technorati - which happens many times each day - only appeared one in Filtrbox) and allowing me to filter based on thresholds for each keyword. In addition, as the UI evolved, I found I was spending less time scanning the alerts and more time clicking through onto the interesting ones.

I hit a tipping point about a month ago where Filtrbox became more useful to me than Google+Yahoo+Technorati. I haven’t turned off the other alerts yet, but I find that I’m not getting much additional info from them anymore now that I use Filtrbox as my top level sort.

Filtrbox is still in private beta, but if you are interested in playing around with it you can get a golden ticket by clicking on the special magic Brad Feld Filtrbox link. I’m really proud of Ari Newman, Tom Chikoore, and team. They have reached the point where their service is very valuable to me and gets noticeably better every single week.

Wanna have some fun? Many TechStars 2007 companies are still hiring.

Brightkite (location based social networking) which recently raised a little over $1M in funding is hiring Rails developers and Flash/Flex developers. Their office is in downtown Denver.

J-Squared Media (social communication services) in Philadelphia is hiring a UI designer.

Filtrbox (content monitoring service) is looking for a Java developer and is located in Boulder.

Intense Debate (blog/media comment replacement) is looking for a technology evangelist, a systems administrator, and a Javascript & PHP developer. Intense Debate is located in Boulder.

First, I’d like to say thank you to those of you that have made this community so strong. It is an honor to join the team.

TechStars has a special place in my heart. I was lucky enough to sit in on last year’s session, observe how the program worked and what made the teams tick. I am excited to help out the teams, the program, and the greater community.

Though TechStars is primarily about fostering the success of the 10 companies, in the end, it is all about community. A large part of my participation here is to build upon that by connecting with these groups:

Local Community

Boulder is an amazing place; in all my travels, I would argue that it is the best place to start a startup. I love it here, and the local community is both helpful and humble. One of the challenges I face is ‘how I can help the founders integrate into the community?’

Founder Community

How do we make the program better for the founders? What additions can be made to last year’s program?

Startup Community

Although there are 10 teams every summer, thousands watch their progress. I think it would be great to create easy ways for the founders to interact with the community via blogging, podcasting, vlogging, live streaming and anything else that would be contribute to interaction between the founders and the greater community.

I am very excited for this chance to work with an incredibly driven, bright and talented group of startups this summer. To start it off right, here is a podcast with David Cohen and I talking about choosing the companies for TechStars.

I’ve known Andrew Hyde for a little over a year now. He hung out at TechStars last summer filming many of our sessions, interacting with our companies, and helping out any way he could. For Andrew is wasn’t a job, it was just fun.

Sometime last summer, Andrew plopped down in my office and explained that he wanted to do an event where people would get together and launch a startup in a weekend. I encouraged him to do it, and Andrew quickly made Startup Weekend a reality. Since then there have been 16 Startup Weekends around the world and it’s now an ongoing phenomenon and a huge benefit to the local tech communities that participate.

Since then, Andrew and a friend also conceived of the attention grabbing startup VCWear.com. I’d imagine most of you have heard of VCWear by now, but if you haven’t - here’s a great writeup of what this is all about.

So it only took me a year (oops) to figure out that Andrew Hyde is fantastic at building community, being unbelievably creative, and spreading a worthwhile message. It suddenly dawned on me that TechStars would be a great place for his skills.

Luckily, Andrew agrees wholeheartedly. I spoke to him about this just a few weeks ago, and he’s jumped on the opportunity. He’s put a new CEO in place at Startup Weekend and has recently joined TechStars full time. We’re pleased to announce that Andrew is now our Community Director. It’s Andrew’s job to set up the mechanisms to engage the growing TechStars community. Sure - this will include lots of video, audio, blogging, tweeting, and more. But it will also mean setting up ways to ensure the feedback loop is wide open.

As we launch into our second summer, we now have a very established community of past and present founders, investors, mentors, and other entrepreneurs. We’re glad you’re a part of it. Please join me in welcoming Andrew Hyde to TechStars. If you’re like me, you expect great things from him.

By the end of the day this Thursday, we’ve promised to narrow our pool of 393 applications down to about 30 finalists for 10 spots this summer. About 80 applications were received on the very last day of the application period, just a week ago.

Obviously, we can’t do a ton of due diligence on each of the companies that applied. Between April 1 and the April 10 deadline, mathematically we have about 35 minutes to consider each company. And that’s if we don’t sleep, eat or do anything else. It’s of course true that earlier applications have received additional consideration, but you get the point. We have to make some pretty quick decisions around here.

Letting 363 companies know that they haven’t made the first cut will not be fun. It’s tough telling entrepreneurs “no”, especially so many interesting ones all at once. For all practical purposes, those 363 companies will perceive that they have been “rejected” by TechStars. Last year, once we notified the non-finalists, many of them wrote asking for specific feedback on why their application was rejected. We try to give some very high level feedback to those who ask, but it’s not practical for us to get into a prolonged discussion with each company.

Because of this, I wanted to shed some light on the common reasons that we don’t select certain applications as finalists.

We didn’t think the team had the right ingredients. There’s no exact formula for what we’re looking for, but if something jumps out at us as an obvious issue in the team, then we’ll likely pass.

The team looks interesting, but we are not interested in your general idea/market. As investors we reserve the right to invest in things that are interesting to us personally. After all, it’s our money, time, energy and effort. We’ve all had our own good and bad experiences, and this affects that types of ideas and markets we’re interested in exploring.

We aren’t the right group of people to help your company. Sometimes we receive applications for ideas that we honestly don’t think we can help with all that much. If it’s not software, web, or some form of information technology, it’s probably just not up our alley.

The application was sparse, lazy, or incomplete. This one is pretty self explanatory. If it’s not important enough to you to provide a reasonable amount of detail, then it’s not important enough for us to consider seriously.

We emailed and/or called you and you didn’t respond. 100% follow-up is an important trait for an entrepreneur. For us it’s a simple litmus test.

We emailed you, spoke to you, or met you and it just didn’t feel “right” to us. This is obviously totally subjective, but we tend to trust our gut after our interactions with you.

Lack of demonstrated talent. This one is tricky, but we do look for signs of talent and ability to execute. If your company is purely idea stage, and you have not supplied any compelling history of execution, we’re likely to pass. We realize that this could simply be “bad timing” and that your team just hasn’t gotten up and running yet.

Other stuff was even more interesting. Even if we like your team and your idea, it’s possible that we just like other stuff more.

It’s important to realize that non-selection is not really rejection. It’s just non-selection. If you look at this list of reasons, you should start to realize that there is no crystal ball. Much of this is purely subjective and the balance goes to our preferences as investors. Further, many of our decisions are based upon limited information in a highly compressed timeframe.

If you’ve applied this year and receive notification of non-selection on Thursday, we sincerely hope that you will go on to do great things. It will not surprise us one bit.