Bootup Labs Blog

Danny and I are down in Boulder, CO, attending the investor demo days that TechStars is having for their 2009 cohort of companies. Danny went to the presentations in SF last year, and we figured it was time to head to Boulder directly to check out the organization, talk to the companies, and compare notes.

Bootup Labs is highly inspired by the structure and feel of the TechStars program, and it is *the* early stage accelerator program that we feel most “spiritually” aligned with. Everything we’ve heard on this trip — from founders taking part in the program, to investors, to the staff and mentors — convinces us that it’s a great starting point for the right model. As Brad Feld and others have said many times, rebuilding a Silicon Valley should not be the goal for any region or local community. Each place has its own strengths and weaknesses and will find its own path for “what works”.

The vibe here is definitely about building businesses. As we suspected, teams that come to Boulder aren’t just at the “idea” stage – the founders have come some distance on their own (in many cases a considerable distance with a medium sized team of 4 – 6 people+) ; they are taking part in the TechStars program because they are fully committed to building fundable *businesses*.

I took the time to meet with many of the teams after the presentations and dig for a little more info on how and why they came here, and what they think of other programs around the company. Some of them we have further connections for, and some might even swing through Vancouver at some point – the reaction to Vancouver was of general interest or saying that it’s on the list of places they’d like to visit. The tech community in Vancouver isn’t readily known here, and things like Flickr’s early genesis here are forgotten or not known. And that’s something we all need to work on, to carry the flag abroad that we’ve got great stuff going on. This is something that the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society is actively working on with other local organizations – a PR campaign to get Vancouver on people’s mental map when the subject of tech hubs comes up.

In any case, below are some short “Tweet-length” observations about the companies that presented today, that got eaten by the SMS gateway.

I also have a rough 4 axis point scale that I used to try and rate my feelings about each company, but I actually don’t think I’ll publish that since it’s very contextual and subjective based on my own experience and feelings. There were companies that were great and there were companies whose *presentations* weren’t perfect, but they all presented well and generated lots of discussions and follow ups.

• First @techstars pitch is ReTel – video monitoring for retail & chain restaurants to do reporting on employees – feels a bit like @odesk screen caps
• Everlater next up @techstars – I’m seeing lots of travel related apps lately – v. high energy presenters
• TimZon is run by a Frenchman from Huntsville, Alabama – visual communications – mainly support / helpdesk focused to deliver email responses as screencast + recorded video messages
• TakeComics is making me want to buy comics again w iTunes-style interface for reading/browsing/buying comics – even ‘DVD-style’ extra features
• Next Big Sound is analytics for music industry – very slick presentation incl. live numbers of new bands being found/added in real time; *many* industries could use better analytics
• Vanilla is open source forums – moving to offer hosted version and commercialize – hey @apeatling, BuddyPress should ditch bbPress and use this
• SendGrid is up – email delivery for “transactional” emails (e.g. notifications, registration confirmation, etc.) — not like MailChimp, which is promotional emails
• Spry integrates on top of dev tools to do reporting – interesting to hear they are talking about bundling out of the box with existing web services, which is an interesting angle; feels like an enterprise need, but I don’t see enterprise targeting
• Mailana visualizes strong relationships in networks (FB, Twitter, email, etc.) – a bit like Zoe (old school IMAP email scanning Java app that I can’t find a link for other than my own post from 2004) and a bit like Gist
• Rezora is the final presentation – email marketing specifically for real estate, currently targeting brokerages, lots of domain-specific tools and analytics

Congrats to all the companies for getting to presentation day, and thanks to the TechStars team for welcoming us and putting on a great event. We’ve got lots of ideas to take back to Vancouver – look us up when you’re in town.

I’ll go ahead and use the same title as Mark Maynard’s original post: What can we learn from Boulder?

His write up is notes on the talk by Foundry Group’s Jason Mendelson in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

[Jason] outlines the necessary traits of a successful entrepreneurial community. They include; a dense concentration of technical, creative people, a strong research community / university (or, in the case of Seattle, Microsoft), an engaged community with desire to see their ecosystem succeed, a supportive legal environment, a culture of risk and respect for failure, and a history of success (which, he points out, is self-perpetuating). All communities have some of these, and lack others. For instance, he sees an erosion in Silicon Valley of folks wanting to see others succeed. In the case of Boulder, they are still young in their development and are still importing management talent from other areas (which he notes is a relatively easy thing to do given the quality of life in Boulder).

I think Vancouver has many of these attributes, but definitely has a lot still to work on. The strong research community / university is an interesting topic. While we have a great concentration of academic institutions in and around Vancouver, my gut says that a lot of research / experimentation actually comes from individuals. I only have to think of the Phone Gap project kicked off by Nitobi, or reaching farther back, Dave Shea’s unveiling of modern CSS web design, CSS Zen Garden. These happened in Vancouver – as in, the individuals were located here when they worked on these items – but very few people looking in from the outside associate “Vancouver” with either of them. These are people that live on the Internet that just happen to be in Vancouver.

And maybe that is one of Vancouver’s strengths. We have many people that “live on the Internet” – and just happen to live here. What I want / need from those people is more flag carrying for Vancouver … assuming that they don’t want to have to move somewhere else.

Another snippet I found interesting was the discussion on Tiers of VC communities:

I his opinion, there are two Tier 1 VC communities. They are the Silicon Valley and Boston. There are two Tier 1.5 communities. They are New York and Los Angeles. And there are a number of Tier 2 regions. They include Austin, Boulder, the Research Triangle area of North Carolina and others.

Vancouver is *very* similiar to Los Angeles in many ways. I would hope that we can grow into at least a Tier 1.5 community. That has always been one of the core goals that Danny and I share: let’s make Vancouver a fantastic place to start and grow companies, so that we don’t have to move to Silicon Valley.

I’m looking forward to having Brad Feld from Foundry Group / TechStars come to town on April 22nd and speak to us on these same topics (have you registered yet?).

Remember, a lot of his talk will be Q&A – we’ve set up a little experimental Google Moderator site where you can submit and vote on questions.

We’re in the prepping stages for the next Launch Party on May 28th and a few other upcoming events and educational workshops. Anecdotal feedback has been really positive about our events, but as we’re gearing up to plan some more through out the year, we’d like to get some direct responses on what you like, what you don’t like, and anything else you’d like to tell us.

We’ve put together a survey to get your responses – the survey is embedded after the jump, or go fill it out directly.

Save the date for our next event, Beers and Boulder with Brad Feld, which will take place April 22nd. We’ll be opening tickets in the next day or so.

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TechStars is the incubator that we feel philosophically most aligned with. Their successes don’t hurt, either Danny is down in the Valley right now, and attended their Demo Day. Here’s Vator.TV interviewing Brad Feld about the TechStars model.

Danny actually spoke with David Cohen of TechStars a couple of weeks ago. One of the really interesting pieces of information was that 50% of founders / companies decide to stay in Boulder after the program is over. 50% of companies staying and running companies in a city?! Sounds like pretty fantastic numbers.

In other news, we’re putting together the details around a Canadians in the Valley event — if you’re interested, sign up for that Upcoming link and we’ll update the details as we figure it out. Dana Oshiro and Rebecca Reeve are Canadian ex-pats that were going to take Danny and I for beer when we went down for the Plug & Play event, and of course we decided to turn that into something a little bigger. Thanks Dana and Rebecca for playing along so far.