Fort Collins Startup Week Sees US Innovation Hubs Register for #FCSW14 States Launch Haus LLC

Cash Giveaways, Two-minute Trolley Pitches and Hot Topic Panels Drives Registration, Community Funding, Grammy Nominated Talent

A Street Care Named Inspire...Ever Pitched Your Innovation on a Trolly?

A new twist on the elevator speech...Competitors have two minutes, the time it takes for the trolley to drive from one stop to the next, to convince the four judges that their young company has the most promise.

Fort Collins, CO (PRWEB) April 28, 2014

Startup Communities nationwide are locking in their Fort Collins Startup Week plans in effort to stay in lockstep with the Northern Colorado innovation ecosystem. As a result of Fort Collins Startup Week’s itinerary, more than 1/4 of the United States has planned efforts in Fort Collins, Colorado. 
The event takes place in just under a month. Register for no charge at: http://www.ftcstartupweek.co/.

The Fort Collins Startup Week, using a crowdfunding campaign from local startup Community Funded (http://bit.ly/FCSWcommunityfunded) has launched with tremendous success providing more than 50% of the needed budget in the first 3 days from 16 supporters.

"Colorado is a hub for innovation due to its world-class universities, leading entrepreneurial community, and pioneering spirit," said Chris J Snook, Organizing Chair for Fort Collins Startup Week. “It's all about local community and supporting the global startup community which expands beyond Colorado - we’re seeing heavy registrations in from Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Texas, San Diego, and even as far as Puerto Rico.”

PrintSushi.com (http://www.printsushi.com) represents the typical profile of a nationally driven business showing support of the effort. The Texas-based company echoed the importance of the Northern Colorado ecosystem to their bottom-line. The executive leadership strongly believes in supporting the entrepreneur eco-systems - so much so that President, Paul Fleming, will dedicate his time mentoring, an option that’s open to other executives, visit http://www.ftcstartupweek.co/mentors

Innovative Pitches and Prizes: 
The CSU Blue Ocean Enterprises Challenge is the richest business pitch competition in Colorado, with a grand prize of $250,000 plus a year’s worth of business mentoring. Presented by the Colorado State University College of Business and Blue Ocean Enterprises, the competition is a celebration of innovation, leadership development, and job creation.

FCSW is rolling out the perfect welcome party for Blue Ocean finalists coming from across the country who exemplify the entrepreneurial passions and game-changing ideas that are driving our growing economy.

A Streetcar Named INSPIRE, Presented by OtterBox: 
History meets innovation as 15 CSU Blue Ocean Enterprises Challenge collegiate competitors board the 95-year-old Birney Car 21 — the Fort Collins Municipal Railway’s historic trolley – to pitch their entrepreneurial ventures in a new twist on the elevator speech. Competitors have two minutes, the time it takes for the trolley to drive from one stop to the next, to convince the four judges on the trolley that their young company has the most promise.

The public is welcome to watch and cheer as competitors pitch along the rocking railway through Old Town Fort Collins on May 23, beginning at 1 p.m. at Blue Ocean Enterprises offices, 401 W. Mountain Ave. Prizes are $3,000 for first place, $2,000 for second and $1,000 for third.

Talent Line-up Expands: 
Grammy Nominated Maxwell Hughes (http://www.maxwellhughesmusic.com/) will open the kickoff keynote with a concert around Gerd Leonhard's keynote on day one.

Shatterproof (a recently incubated http://spokesbuzz.org/band/shatterproof/) will headline the opening night concert in historic Old Town Square right in the heart of downtown Fort Collins.

23rdstudios.com (http://www.23rdstudios.com/) has also joined the list of Community Sponsors out of Boulder, CO to provide daily photo feeds and video coverage of the entire event

Fort Collins Startup Week Overview:

Presenting Sponsors Include: 
Launch Haus and Anchor Point Fund

Community Sponsor Level: 
Stevaker, Henley Development, Cooley, Social Global Mobile, LLC (SoGloMo) The City of Fort Collins, Downtown Business Association, Zayo, BausTech, Art Incubator of the Rockies-A.I.R. Dorsey & Whitney, CSU Powerhouse Energy Institute, Everyday Joes and Luscious Nectar which will be the home of FCSW’s "Launch Pad". Print Sushi, 23rd Studios, Cooley LLP and Homestate Bank

Brad Feld's Startup Community Catalysts: 
VHG, NetGenerative, LLC, P2BInvestor, SendGrid, Jobzology, CommunityFunded, Rocky Mountain Innosphere, Startup Colorado, Mugs Coffee Lounge, Semporal, StickerGiant, SpokesBuzz, Creative Alignments, TriNet, Everyday Joes, Phillip Hernandez of New York Life, Entrepreneurial Foundation of Colorado, and The Armstrong Hotel, the Official Hotel for FCSW14.

Keynote: Gerd Leonhard: Keynote: The Future of Business/Capitalism: 
12:00pm to 1:30pm Tue May 20, 2014

The State of Capital Access in CO Panel Moderated by Cooley LLP 
Inside the Beltway-A Federal Perspective on Innovation: Monisha Merchant Sr Business Advisor to Colorado Senator Bennet

Find a Job that Doesn’t Suck: Get connected to NoCo Tech Jobs and funded startup hiring managers throughout the week using the complimentary jobzology VIP assessment tool

Mentor Sessions brought to you by EFCO and Launch Haus where domain experts from I.P, Legal, Lean Startup, Growth Management, Product Lifecycle, Design Thinking, HR/Talent acquisition and more offer complimentary 20 minute sessions throughout the week each morning at the “Launch Pad”

Lean In to Funding? #WTFF Where're The Female Founders? Moderated by Cheryl K. Goodman, Founder ofhttp://www.SoGloMo.com. Panelists: Nadia Auch, Director of Social Innovation Challenge at University San Diego Center of Peace and Commerce, Kim Capounas, founder of GoLite & now head of the B Corp organization in Boulder/Denver.

How FoCo solves Big Problems Tour: V.I.P. R & D and Incubation tour of key local assets such as The National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, CSU Research Innovation Center (BioScience Incubator) Rocky Mountain Innosphere (Capital Access Incubator) and Colorado Water Innovation Cluster, the CSU Idea2Product Lab, and the world-leading CSU Flint Animal Cancer Center.

The Future of Life: Internet of Things and Agriculture conference on Friday a.m. presented by The Van Heyst Group (VHG): Internet of Things and Agriculture is an immersive three hour workshop on the opportunities where IoT and the food supply collide.

The “LaunchPad” will be the hub of complimentary mentor sessions, registration, and serendipitous collisions. The event will explore and celebrate success from local leading companies, provide inspiring speakers, uncover real innovation and share game-changing ideas happening at the City, State and National level.

And, of course, it wouldn't be Fort Collins without a "Startup Crawl" brought to you by Built In Colorado.

Interested last minute sponsors for Fort Collins Startup Week should contact Chris J. Snook at c (at) ftcStartupweek (dot) co.

ABOUT THE CSU BLUE OCEAN ENTERPRISES CHALLENGE

The CSU Blue Ocean Enterprises Challenge is the richest business pitch competition in Colorado, with a grand prize of $250,000 plus a year’s worth of business mentoring. Presented by the Colorado State University College of Business and Blue Ocean Enterprises, the competition is a celebration of innovation, leadership development, and job creation. The Blue Ocean Enterprises Challenge is open to collegiate entrepreneurs throughout Colorado – who compete for a top prize of $20,000 -- as well as startups and existing companies anywhere in the world seeking funding and business mentoring. More information is available at http://www.blueoceanchallenge.com.

ABOUT LAUNCH HAUS

Launch Haus, LLC catalyzes entrepreneurship and channels innovation through their global network of leaders and mentors and venture catalysts. Launch Haus is the developer of Launch Haus Manor-the Innovators BNB, and operator of Launch Haus Labs-a Private Tech Transfer and Go-to-Market Accelerator whose programmatic community offerings include the LaunchNoCo Meetups and Fort Collins Startup Week. http://www.launchha.us

Blackstone grants $4 million to create Colorado entrepreneurs network

By Andy Vuong

The Denver Post

POSTED:   04/20/2014 12:01:00 AM MDT2 COMMENTS

J.B. Holston, director of a new $4 million entrepreneurs network that will be based in Denver, says: "You create and keep much more wealth within the state" by keeping company headquarters in Colorado. (RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)

While Colorado is recognized as a top hub for entrepreneurship and innovation, the state's startup ecosystem still struggles to keep potential large-scale successes from uprooting in search of capital, engineering talent or other resources.

The Blackstone Group, one of the nation's premier private-equity firms, will announce this week the launch of a $4 million program in Colorado to help address that shortcoming.

The Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network will also aim to strengthen Colorado's startup community by encouraging greater collaboration among local businesses, which are generally siloed by geography and industry.

"This is really a different and new and additive effort to everything else that is going on in the state," said serial entrepreneur J.B. Holston, who will serve as the network's executive director.

The network will identify so-called gazelles — high-growth companies that may be on the cusp of Google-like success — and connect them with resources to reach the next level without defecting to another state.

"We've got a lot of great conditions for fostering entrepreneurship and innovation ... but we have too many companies that get to a certain stage, then either stall out or sell out rather than scaling up," said Holston, chairman and founder of Denver-based enterprise software maker NewsGator, now called Sitrion.

The Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network, or BEN, has attracted 20 advisers that include the likes of Foundry Group's Brad Feld, Zayo Group's Dan Caruso, Wild Oats Markets' co-founder Libby Cook and iTriage CEO Peter Hudson.

Advisers will help find gazelles and the support they may need, which will include identifying prospective mentors, or "master entrepreneurs."

BEN will focus on five industry segments: technology and broadband, biotech and health, aerospace, natural foods and energy.

Companies that fit certain criteria, which will vary by industry, can apply to join the network. For digital technology companies, the requirement will be $5 million in revenue, 50 employees and 25 percent top-line growth.

The Blackstone Charitable Foundation will fund the program with a three-year, $4 million grant to be overseen by the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"It's a program that's been designed to create a deep network of experienced entrepreneurs in a variety of industries to help mentor high-growth companies," said Jonathan Gray, global head of real estate for Blackstone.

Gray said the idea to create the program in the state started with conversations Blackstone officials had with Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., a little over a year ago. Blackstone has a similar network in North Carolina, but that initiative is primarily focused on identifying and supporting innovations from area universities.

Blackstone's presence in Colorado is set to surge with its pending $5.4 billion buyout of Denver's Gates Corp. The deal will take the number of employees who work for Blackstone-backed companies in Colorado to 4,000.

Bennet said the company's entrepreneurs network will help grow jobs in Colorado.

"What we've seen is there are companies that are founded in Colorado, but then they move, they go to California, or they go to Boston, or they go to Austin," Bennet said. "We want this to be a place where they stay, and where they can generate those jobs."

The benefits of keeping the headquarters of a highly successful startup would stretch beyond jobs.

"You get a lot more management experience," said Holston, who co-founded six Colorado enterprises over 16 years. "You create and keep much more wealth within the state. And typically you also then start to create a micro-ecosystem of companies around those really big successful companies."

Holston will be based at the Galvanize tech campus in Denver's Golden Triangle neighborhood. The network will also operate out of Galvanize's Boulder office.

Amy Stursberg, executive director of the Blackstone Charitable Foundation, said the goal of the foundation is to strengthen entrepreneurial ecosystems across the country. She said Colorado will serve as the steppingstone for the creation of similar networks in other states, helping Blackstone establish a "tool kit" for such programs.

The Blackstone foundation is issuing its largest grant to fund the Colorado network.

"This is an incredible inflection point for our entrepreneurial and growth-company community," said Erik Mitisek, CEO of the Colorado Technology Association. "When you think about Blackstone, one of the largest real estate and private equity operations in the world, for them to personally invest in the state of Colorado at this level is a head nod to the activity, to the opportunity and the type of companies that are coming out of our region."

Andy Vuong : 303-954-1209, avuong@denverpost.com or twitter.com/andyvuong

Read more: Blackstone grants $4 million to create Colorado entrepreneurs network - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_25597592/blackstone-grants-4-million-create-colorado-entrepreneurs-network#ixzz2zZ3bUAth 
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50 Sales Pros to Follow on Twitter

50 Sales Pros To Follow On Twitter from Base CRM

Why You Should Pitch Like A Woman

The first week I went to the dark side and chose to sell advertising rather than buy it, a friend had me watch Glengary Glen Ross. Check out the video below where Alec Baldwin assumes fear is the best source of inspiration. He is awful. Needless to say, I spent the next month freaking out not knowing what I had gotten myself into. This is why so many of us fear sales. We don't want to be perceived as ruthless and cutthroat. The thing is, for any entrepreneur, the most important skill they can have is their ability to sell... and there are ways to sell that feel more like serving. And they work.

There are so many latest and greatest ways to pitch. However, I was curious to see if there were new less male (dominate the meeting, own the frame, show your power) ways of selling.  SPIN Selling explains the science behind consultative selling. Pitch Anything explains how to use influence, the right messaging that lands and setting and holding the frame. I'll explain all of these at a later date and how to incorporate different elements into your close.

Tim Fereiss's  Always Be Closing: Y Combinator and The Art of the Pitch is also a great article that touches on many of the things that work and don't and it's specific to the startup experience. 

And, it looks like there really is a case for being more lady like or let's just say considerate when it comes to sales. 

A recent Harvard Business Review article, How Women Decide by Cathy Benko, vice chairman and a managing principal at Deloitte LLP and Bill Pelster, former chief learning officer and a principal at Deloitte Consulting,  shows the benefits of letting go of the dominate or die psychology of sales.  Instead, they focus on utilizing the behaviors that are innate for women. As more and more women become the decision makers, it's best to model the way they show up and present in a way that they're more likely to receive.

Here's what they found, "We also learned that women see a big meeting with a potential service provider as a chance to explore options in collaboration with an expert resource, while men see that event as a near-final step in the process, when they are narrowing down and choosing among options."

"When presenting to men, we find that they look for holes or weaknesses in our arguments. Again, it’s part of the winnowing process. But women continually seek a creative solution—listening for ideas, adjusting their understanding of what is important, and asking for relevant details."

So today, while interacting with prospective clients, we know to keep asking ourselves, “What’s the deciding factor?” And we make this explicit in our presentations. “We understand you are on a journey to find the best partner,” we tell prospects, “and we recognize that your perspective will evolve as you speak with us and our competitors.”

Our world is becoming more collaborative and the sales process can and should feel like the first step in creating a shared story. Always Be Closing does work. Always be a valued partner works best.

Moms go back to startup school

There are countless discussions about why women entrepreneurs don't ask for or raise more money. There are discussions about the lack of women starting technology companies. What's interesting is the average age of entrepreneurs when pitching for funding in in their early thirties and then some. This is exactly when women are thinking about whether or not to have kids. Sheryl Sandberg has had a ridiculous amount of press about Leaning in and staying in the game. That's always easier when you've got mega support at home. Those of us that can hire an extra wife or choose the right husband as Sheryl says are the fortunate few. Interesting to note, she says your partner is the make or break you component of your career strategy.  Hers happens to also be a founder of a massive startup, SurveyMonkey.

I was happy to see that Google is creating environments for the average mom to leverage their creativity and talent to create our next big things...

Saturday, March 1, 2014  By Gwen AcKerman, Bloomberg

Women cradle newborn babies in their arms and dangle soft toys in front of older infants on colourful mattresses, all in a room in a Tel Aviv, Israel, highrise strewn with strollers and oversized bean bags.

It's not a play facility. It's the location of Google Inc.'s first babyfriendly school for startups. Called Campus for Moms, the program involves a series of nine weekly classes designed to give women on maternity leave a boost toward opening their own ventures in a country whose economy is dependent on innovation.

"The course helped me realize that this is who I am," said Nira Sheleg, a 37-year-old mother of two who founded Wizer.me, a teacherresource company, during the program. "I am an entrepreneur, not just a mom with an idea. Now I have a support group, and the mothers around me are amazing."

Since graduation last July, she's recruited a chief executive officer and several advisers and plans to start sales soon. Her targeted market: the U.S. The classes - two series have run so far - are designed to address a dearth of female entrepreneurs in Israel, where technology makes up almost half of industrial exports. That contributes about one-third of economic growth, making staffing such companies a priority for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet only nine per cent of technology startups around Tel Aviv are headed by women - about the same as in Silicon Valley.

"The biggest miss we have on talent in the technology industry is the lack of women entrepreneurs and engineers," said Google Israel's head of research and development, Yossi Matias, the senior company executive working with the Campus for Moms project.

Google is following up with similar programs in London and in Krakow, Poland, he said.

Employees of technology companies in Israel make up less than 10 per cent of the total workforce, according to figures from 2011 posted on the Central Bureau of

Statistics website. About seven per cent of all working women are employed in technology, compared to 12 per cent for men.

As little as four per cent of global venture capital flows into femaleinitiated startups, according to Eva Ventures, a micro-venture capital fund dedicated to the promotion of women entrepreneurship.

Its website uses figures from the Kauffman Foundation, an educational and entrepreneurial grant maker in Kansas City.

Eva Ventures started raising funds a few months ago and hopes to close with about $30 million in a few months before seeking candidates to invest in, said Michal Michaeli, founder and managing partner of the fund. All three managing partners are women.

"We know that having more women as startup founders would enrich the vibrant, innovative and unique scene that is Israeli hightech," the fund's website says.

Orna Berry has lived in the skewed world of Israel's technology industry for more than 25 years.

"It was always clear to me that this was a man's society," said Berry, former chief scientist for the Israeli government and venture partner at Gemini Israel fund. She is now a corporate vice-president at EMC Corp., the world's biggest maker of storage computers.

Along the way, she's reached out to women in the industry. She calls it less an act of mentoring and more the "virtue of the fact that a woman leader was with them so they allowed themselves not to stop at red lights."

Sheleg, who abandoned the first business she started due to the demands of her family life, attests to that. She was able to create Wizer.me in the nurturing environment of Campus for Moms, where conversations ranged from baby-sleeping issues to where to register a business. Wizer.me lets teachers create online worksheets and other educational tools. Her first venture, ShellEgg, was an Internet showcase for architects. She founded it with her sister when they both had infants.

At Campus for Moms, lecturers speak once a week about technology, give how-to lessons on forming a business and share experiences.

© Copyright (c) The Regina Leader-Post

Colorado videos

The Governor, Atomic20, Brand Colorado team and 1 million other designers and residents created the first ever crowd sourced logo to brand the state of Colorado.

Inc. Mag: How Boulder Became America's Startup Capital

An unlikely story of tree-huggers, commies, eggheads, and gold.   BY BURT HELM

We had barely started our tour of the Chautauqua, Boulder's verdant 19th-century park, when my guide for the morning, local historian Carol Taylor, handed me the packet with the "cautionary tales." They were photocopied news articles, all from national publications, all featuring Boulder and all written--in Taylor's mind, anyway--by superficial out-of-towner nincompoops. "Namaste and Pass the Naan," read one's subhead. "You will be hard-pressed to find one person here, including your 85-year-old grandmother, without a six-pack," read another. Over four decades, as Taylor's packet meant to show, writers had missed the town for the lovely trees (and bike paths and mountain views)--unfairly reducing Boulder to a playground where smug eco-liberals puffed legalized marijuana and compared triathlon times.

"We're so much more complex than that," Taylor said. She gave me a gentle, pleading look. "Don't just go back and write that everyone rides their bikes everywhere."

Out from the gleaming sunlight, a Lycra-clad cyclist whizzed majestically by.

Let me just say, it's hard to keep a straight face when touring this idyllic mountain city--and interviewing its start-up founders and venture capitalists, its coffee-shop denizens and microbrew cognoscenti. It's so tempting to linger on the glorious hippie mane of the organic peanut butter CEO, or quote the impossibly outdoorsy venture capitalist ("I only invest in companies I can ride my mountain bike to!"). But I don't want to be unfair or stoop to caricature. It's not as if they were handing out free joints to everybody on Pearl Street, the city's main drag, on the day I arrived. (No, that was two days earlier. The event was called the Boulder Flood Relief Joint Giveaway.)

But easy as Boulder may be to mock, the city is impossible to dismiss. Boulder is an entrepreneurial powerhouse like no other. In 2010, the city had six times more high-tech start-ups per capita than the nation's average, according to an August 2013 study by the Kauffman Foundation--and twice as many per capita as runner-up San Jose-Sunnyvale in California. This vibrant culture has given Boulder a prosperous economy: Without the help of oil, natural gas, or any monolithic industry, Boulder County (population 300,000) ranks among the top 20 most productive metro areas in terms of GDP. Unemployment is 5.4 percent--almost two points below the national average and a full point below the Federal Reserve's goal for the nation. It is the home to a start-up incubator, Techstars, and a healthy venture capitalist community.

Boulder as start-up haven is not a new development, either. Since 1960, it has quietly nurtured nascent industries, including natural foods, computer storage, biotech, and now Internet companies. It's the original home of Ball Aerospace (one of the first NASA contractors), herbal tea pioneer Celestial Seasonings, StorageTek (later acquired by Sun Microsystems for $4.1 billion), and the biochemistry lab that led to Amgen.

But Boulder wasn't always so affluent, so collegiate, so pretty. The history of Boulder, the start-up haven, is a fascinating story of a community that built itself from scratch through a combination of individual effort, shared sacrifice, and counterintuitive choices (not to mention a near-constant urge to skip out of the office and get outdoors). Its success is a very specific, and in some ways limited, way of fostering a local economy. But it offers an unexpected solution to how cities all over the U.S. could make themselves a welcoming spot for start-ups.

When the Wall Street day-trading firm where Kate Maloney worked opened a location in Boulder in 2001, she jumped at the chance to move. “We’d wake up at 5:30 in the morning, tackle the market, and then go hiking up Sanitas, or rock climb in the Chautauqua,” she recalls. In 2007, Maloney founded TherapySites, a website design company that now sells Web templates to a wide variety of health care practices. Maloney has 34 employees, a handful of whom work out of her downtown Boulder loft.

Photographed by Matt Nager

When city fathers first laid out Boulder, the city was dry, barren, and unremarkable--a two-mile stretch of road at the mouth of Boulder Canyon that served as one of several mining-supply depots following the 1859 Colorado gold rush. Wrote Isabella Bird, a British travel writer, in an 1879 book: "Boulder is a hideous collection of framed houses on the burning plain."

But a streak of exceptionalism ran through Boulderites. They displayed a deep commitment to city beautification and education. In 1877, just six years after Boulder officially incorporated, citizens persuaded the state legislature to make it home to Colorado's first public university; 104 families donated land and money to build the campus. In 1889, the citizens voted to issue a $20,000 bond to build the Chautauqua, a place where visiting Texas schoolteachers could hike, picnic, and listen to lectures--a sort of bucolic TED Conference of the time.

In 1908, citizens hired landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (the son of the legendary creator of New York City's Central Park) to consult with them on how best to plan the city--a precocious move for a town of 10,000. His recommendations included putting wires underground and keeping streetlights beneath tree level, and he cautioned them about suburban developers, "dirty industries," and pandering to tourists. Above all, he said, Boulder must be beautiful--a prosperous town where people would spend their lives, not just make their money and get out. "As with the food we eat and the air we breathe, so the sights habitually before our eyes play an immense part of determining whether we feel cheerful, efficient, and fit for life," Olmsted wrote in his report.

Boulder might have remained a sleepy pretty college town, were it not for the communists. In 1949, fearful of a Soviet nuclear attack, President Harry Truman issued an order to stop the clustering of major buildings in Washington, D.C. The nation's basic research labs had to expand elsewhere. Boulder citizens, sensing an opportunity, bought up 217 acres of land and beat out 11 other cities to make that site the home of the National Bureau of Standards's new Radio Propagation Laboratory.

At first, the D.C.-based scientists bristled, considered it an exile. "They would say, 'Where do we go to see the Indians?' " says R.C. ("Merc") Mercure, one of the founding employees of Ball Aerospace, who was a physics graduate student at the University of Colorado at the time.

Alabama native Dale Katechis settled in Boulder in 2004 after he ran out of money on the way to Montana. He knew he was in love when he spotted the Flatirons mountains rising up behind the city, he says. Since then, he has started a brewery, restaurants, and a boutique bike company in Boulder. He has also developed his own take on vertical integration: His brewery’s spent grain feeds the cattle on his ranch, which is located outside the city. The cattle, in turn, provide the beef used in his restaurants’ burgers.

Photographed by Matt Nager

But the move put Boulder on the U.S. government's map. In 1952, the federal government made greater Boulder the site of Rocky Flats, a 27-building nuclear weapons manufacturing facility. After the Department of Defense ordered sophisticated rocket pointing controls from CU's labs, researchers, including Mercure, left to form Ball Aerospace, which filled those contracts and others. Eventually, the government made Boulder the site of theNational Center for Atmospheric Research, and IBM moved its tape drive manufacturing division out there, which later led to the founding of storage start-ups StorageTek, Exabyte, and McData. On the backs of these technology jobs, Boulder's population doubled from 1950 to 1960 and then jumped to 67,000 10 years later.

By the late '60s, scientists weren't the only new people moving in. Across the country, the hippie movement was under way, and as suburban teens and twentysomethings started migrating to beautiful places across the country, many chose Boulder. (In the first half of 1968, drug arrests in the city doubled.) To Mo Siegel, a Colorado boy who had grown up on a ranch 80 miles away in Palmer Lake, the assembled flower children were his kind of people--and, in 1969, a potential market. A health nut already, the 19-year-old began gathering herbs in the foothills surrounding Boulder, filling up gunnysacks with chamomile and red clover blossoms, sewing them into little muslin tea bags, and selling them, in 1969, as Mo's 36 Herb tea. It would become the first year of business of Celestial Seasonings, the brand that became known for teas such as Sleepytime and Red Zinger. (Siegel eventually sold the company to Kraft, bought it back, and then sold it again to Hain Foods for $336 million.)

Celestial Seasonings was among the first of many natural-foods companies, including White Wave, maker of Silk-brand soy milk; Horizon Organic Dairy; and Alfalfa's, a specialty market akin to Whole Foods. For these sorts of entrepreneurs, Boulder was an ideal test market. Given its population of affluent, outdoorsy types, brands could test new ideas with a friendly group of consumers in the local markets, work out the kinks at low risk, and then take the successes to a more general market in Denver and beyond.

"I just got so much support. Everybody believed," says Siegel.

With industry picking up and the population booming, the city could have stoked the growth, welcoming developers in to build out new housing and offices. Instead, it did the opposite. In 1959, the city drew a line across the surrounding mountains, above which it would not provide water or sewer services--purely in order to protect the view. In 1967, residents instituted a special 0.4 percent sales tax to purchase "green space" around the city, stymieing developers, heading off major roadways, and preserving nature. Next, the city limited new housing starts to just 2 percent a year. Now the county manages more than 97,000 acres of open space. Boulder is in a bucolic bubble, with the Rocky Mountains on one side and parkland on the other.

Encircling the city with green space has had several implications for Boulder, some expected and some not. Though never exactly cheap before, the limited space has resulted in sky-high real estate prices--with a median price of $431,200, single family homes are 1.5 times as expensive as in Denver. Meanwhile, as the preserved space flourished, so did the deer population--and the hungry mountain lions, which commuted in to eat the deer and, occasionally, attack citizens of Boulder.

Mo Siegel started Celestial Seasonings in 1969. Back then, he sold his tea in health-food stores in Boulder (at the time, there were only three such shops). “Boulder was really conducive to the natural-foods industry,” says Siegel. “Everybody’s so healthy. If you don’t run or bike or ski--or hike or climb--you really can’t live here.” Now, of course, natural food is as ubiquitous nationwide as Celestial’s Sleepytime tea.

Photographed by Matt Nager

The green border, paired with the city's conservative zoning and development laws, has also meant that national retailers--or any monolithic competitor--have trouble finding good spaces to open in Boulder. Meanwhile, the city's hard line against expansion doesn't really allow its own start-ups to grow much past a certain size. The result? The town has made itself a physical incubator for small businesses. "After companies reach 500 employees, they either have to move out to the other side of the open space or sell," says Kyle Lefkoff, a general partner with Boulder Ventures since 1995.

But for those who can afford the housing, steer clear of the mountain lions, and squeeze into its limited office space, Boulder affords an incredible quality of life--along with a place to do business. The planning strategy, which at first seems antibusiness, simply favors those who are in it for the long haul--those who are thinking about raising families and living in Boulder until old age, and weeds out those that would dive in because of a juicy tax incentive.

There are entrepreneurs like Phil Anson, who came out after graduating from college purely to bum around and climb. A onetime line cook, he started selling premade burritos out of a cooler to support himself. In time, he found he liked scaling that business better than scaling rocks, and Evol Burritos, his 73-employee company, now distributes to supermarkets nationwide and rang up $12.4 million last year.

There were those who arrived in Boulder by accident and fell in love. Matt Larson, founder of Confio Software, moved there because his biggest investor told him he had to as a condition to getting funded (the man lived in Boulder and wanted to be chairman but didn't want to move). Alabama native Dale Katechis ended up in Lyons, the town just north of Boulder, after he and his wife ran out of money on the way to Montana. Katechis started waiting tables. Then he opened his own restaurant, Oskar Blues Brewery, and started brewing beer as a way to get his eatery's name out, and found the beer sold better than the food. (His brewery, which sells Dale's Pale Ale, made $33 million in sales last year.) Little Lyons "was like Mayberry in the mountains," Katechis says, his voice tinged with the last remnants of an Alabama drawl.

There are those entrepreneurs who moved to Boulder when they were older, when they already had money, almost as a reward to themselves. In 2001, the Wall Street day-trading firm where Kate Maloney worked opened an office in Boulder, simply because she and some co-workers thought it would be more fun. Six years later, she started TherapySites, a Web company she runs out of a loft apartment downtown. In 2006, adman Alex Bogusky moved a chunk of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the advertising agency he co-founded, from Miami to offices in Gunbarrel, a town eight miles northeast of Boulder. To Bogusky, outdoor sports lovers and entrepreneurs share a common DNA: "Thrill seekers are drawn to this place," he says. "Once you get out here, you want the ultimate thrill in business, too, and that's start-ups." By the time Bogusky retired from the agency, the Boulder office of Crispin Porter + Bogusky had swelled to more than 700 employees--many of whom had moved from Miami.

After earning three degrees from the University of Colorado in Boulder, R.C. (“Merc”) Mercure became a founding employee at Ball Aerospace in 1956. “Ed Ball took us aside and asked us if we would consider getting into the electronics business,” Mercure recalls. “A few of us said, ‘Why not?’ ” Ball went on to land a contract with NASA and helped put a solar observatory into orbit.

Photographed by Matt Nager

And finally, there are those who came out of the University of Colorado and couldn't imagine going anywhere else. The most famous is probably Marvin Caruthers, who, as a biochemistry professor in 1980, helped start the biotech firm Amgen. His co-founders decided to put company headquarters in Thousand Oaks, California, but Caruthers kept a lab in Boulder. Since then, the University of Colorado has become a destination for DNA and RNA research. Veterans of his department, of Amgen, and of the university's biology departments would go on to start biotech firms, including Applied Biosystems, Dharmacon, Myogen, and Pharmion, companies that sold for more than $6 billion altogether.

I wish I could point to some municipal entrepreneurship program or other business initiative that enticed these people to start companies in Boulder. But the thing is, entrepreneurs claim the city stymies them more than it helps. Mundane parking regulations hindered business early on, says Niel Robertson, CEO of $12.6 million-a-year Internet advertising start-up Trada. The city, in its efforts to reduce congestion, gave Robertson's 17-employee company just three parking permits. (The company, which now has 15 employees, has since moved to a building with a parking garage.)

Anson, the burrito maker, says it took eight weeks just to get a permit to install a new refrigeration unit at his plant. "They're so conditioned to say no to everything," he says. "It's a massive pain in the ass." But leave town? No way. "It's a dual-edged sword," says Anson. "It's harder for me to run my plant, but it's also why people can't build mansions and block each other's views, so we have a balanced city."

Of course, Boulder's not perfect. Many businesses would struggle to exist there, especially those that require heavy equipment or a low-wage work force. Its regulations, and its constricted land area, heavily favor small companies. In fact, several start-ups, including Internet security firm Webroot and StorageTek, grew out of the town, choosing to move out to a sprawling office across the green space in neighboring Broomfield. But many other entrepreneurs decided to sell out and stay--and join Boulder's growing number of angel investors and venture capitalists, the next step in the city's development. Mo Siegel now invests in other natural-foods companies. Caruthers helped start Boulder Ventures, which invests almost exclusively in Boulder entrepreneurs.

All together, venture capital firms invested $587 million in Colorado in 2012--a far cry from major venture hubs such as Silicon Valley and New York City ($11 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively) but significant. They would rather do that than move to some tony retirement place--because in their minds, Boulder beats 'em all. That's the thing. Pretty much every entrepreneur told me he or she started up in Boulder or stayed in Boulder for that same reason: It's a beautiful place to live. And it's beautiful not because the city forefathers had some nifty pro-start-up policy--but because they had the foresight to plant lots of trees, welcome a university and federal science labs, buy up lots of parkland, and then stay disciplined about preserving the beauty they had created. The idea was simple: Make a city a great place to live, and people figure out how to make a living there.

Correction: Internet advertising startup Trada has 15 employees. An earlier version of this article noted its size prior to layoffs that occurred after the magazine went to press.

FROM THE DEC. 2013/JAN. 2014 ISSUE OF INC. MAGAZINE

2 Startup Accelerators later, Ecquire team makes the business of biz dev less busy

Tal Raviv is Ecquire's CTO and he went through DreamIt in 2008 and GrowLab in 2011 and has great stuff to share in his article, After Two Startup Accelerators, What I Wish Someone Had Told Me. 

I had never heard of him or the company.

I admit that I'm like most salespeople. I hate doing the mundane and the menial. I like finding people and I like meeting people.  I do not like putting contact info into CRMs. I do not like putting contact info into spreadsheets. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam I am.

It turns out that Tel's company, Ecquire, has created a way to make all that annoying shit easy so that sales people (or anyone) can focus on the relationship, not the details.  It's freaking cool. 

What's really cool, is that they knew (maybe #2 helped) that feature sets and more lines of code don't produce winners, awareness, adoption, and most importantly, sales do. 

Tel says, "So, decide why you are here. Here are some examples:

• Figuring out if anyone wants this as fast as humanly possible
• Figure out if anyone will pay for this, and how much
• Build a rinse-and-repeat economical marketing machine
• Figuring out if we can resell this idea in X industry
• Double our retention
• Get to X number of daily active users
• Raise paid conversions from 0.5% to 2%
• Prove to investors that your company is not a risk and that their money is pure gasoline to your engine

The last one is probably the most common. This means users/revenue/testimonials/traction long before demo day. To achieve this, your real demo day deadline is 30 days prior to the accelerator’s demo day.

The worst companies don’t have a question they’re trying to answer. They’re just doing what they’ve always done…code a bit more every day, hoping that at some critical mass of features suddenly all their dreams will come true. That approach doesn’t belong in an accelerator.

For Ecquire, Paul and I needed angel funding. We knew that we had the biggest chance to accomplish that if we walked in with users, traction, and revenue."

Thank you for focusing on your ABCs and putting the "find the pain" 101 mandate of startup success central. And, thank you for making that totally not fun piece of relationship building a little less painful. 

How to Pitch, Presentation Hacks

Presentation Hacks from Venture Hacks

2013 Colorado Startup Report: Over $1B Generated through Exits

posted by Elyse Kent

The 2013 startup report, released today by Built In Colorado, includes yearly data proving that Colorado’s digital ecosystem is quickly earning a reputation for itself as a unit. Startups from Denver, Boulder and other Colorado communities altogether raised a total of $461 million in 2013, keeping pace with their performances in 2012.

Denver digital startups led the way in 2013 with 70 companies raising $305 million, stepping up their game from 33 Denver-based companies raising capital in 2012. Boulder’s digital startups, of course, kept their steady, significant contributions with $147 million raised by 43 companies.

The 28 digital companies that exited in 2013, including 27 that were acquired and one that went public, generated more than $1 billion, a drastic increase from the number of exits and the amount generated by exits in 2012.

The biggest player of last year was Ping Identity, the cloud identity security company that raised $44 million. Online interactive learning platform Sympoz and storage solution company SolidFirealso made huge contributions to the community’s funding total with $35 million and $31 million raised, respectively.

And then there is Rally Software, a staple of Colorado’s tech community since 2001 when it began providing cloud-based solutions for Agile development. Rally gave the Colorado digital tech scene its first IPO since 2000.

But it’s not just the big guys that made up 2013’s impressive stats: over 73 companies each did their part and raised $1 million or more in capital.

These companies represent all digital sectors, but it was the software companies that made the biggest local impact with 46 companies raising about $232 million in total. Twenty-one B2B web businesses, which in total raised $103 million, also added hard-earned pieces to the overall puzzle.

And the entire country is taking notice as signified by the 110 different investors backing local companies in 2013. It’s no wonder that Colorado’s digital ecosystem is drawing more attention as a whole: the community’s accomplishments demand it.

“I travel the world and Colorado is always a topic of discussion and inspiration for other great startup communities,” Techstars founder, CEO and Managing Partner David Cohen said. “Everyone wants to know how we top the charts in venture capital with places like the Bay Area, Boston and New York. I always tell them that the secret weapon is Colorado's ‘give first’ attitude and sustained culture of mentorship. It's truly special and sometimes counterintuitive. But we have become known for it, together.”

The Best European Events For Startups In 2014

 by Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher) TechCrunch

Back in 2012 I’d been to enough tech startup conferences in Europe over the previous few years to work out which ones appeared to be most significant. Europe being the disjointed bunch of countries that it is has too many to mention. That ended up being a post about events in 2013.

Now, with 2014 already here, I figured plenty of readers would like an update. So here it is. A huge thanks to Heisenberg Media for helping me put this together. Thanks also to Conferize for their crowd-sourced list of European Tech Events in 2014 which you can find here. That is not our list, it’s theirs, but it’s pretty good. We also recommend the listing over at Lanyrd.

But, simply being listed below does NOT imply that any of these events are endorsed by or ‘partnered’ with TechCrunch, other than TechCrunch branded ones of course. This is a purely editorial list, based on our experience in Europe, the list is designed to help the European tech scene grow and get more organised. Simple.

Why is it important to do this? In the first instance, Europe is a bit of a mess. Every single country seems to have its own major conference on tech startups. And so we need a single overview of what’s going on.

But the main reason is that it’s easier for those of us in the media (hello!) to cover your company if we get to meet you at an event. And it helps if that event does not clash with another. So if we produce a list of the bigger events, the events organisers will – like several planes emerging from above the clouds and realising they are about to crash into each other – HOPEFULLY not clash with each other. It’s also MUCH easier for investors to move between conferences where there are startups to check out and entrepreneurs to meet. It’s also easier for startups to take their show on the road and present to investors or the media if the events DON’T CLASH. See? Everyone wins!

The reason the list below also includes some major events in the US and a few outside Europe is that – especially in the US – TechCrunch Staff will not be around in Europe at those times. For instance, if you want TechCrunch staff to be more likely to turn up at a conference event, don’t schedule it during our Disrupt events in San Francisco or New York or Europe. OK? Simple.

I have not included events in Asia as this is more about U.S./European event traffic. And we HAVE included some in the Middle East and Africa, as they are “near” Europe. Almost all the events lists here are ones where English is the official language of the conference, with rare exceptions (the French ones).

In this listing you will (mostly) not find developer events or hackathons or meet ups. We’d prefer to concentrate on events where startups get pitched and where investors gather. Although all of the events are good some are genuinely ‘Recommended’, or ‘Interesting’. Some are more off the beaten track than others and deserve a mention.

Here’s the list pertaining to the 2014 dates. Some events either haven’t updated their sites yet, or there’s simply no information a 2014 event yet. As they update their information, and I get told, I will update this post.

Please leave your feedback in the comments, and we will take them into consideration. Thanks!

However, this is our (well, my) editorial pick.

JANUARY
___________________________________________

Week 1
Empty

Week 2

CES, Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7-10

Week 3
Empty

Week 4

Hyberlin, Berlin, Germany, January 18 Demo (public), January 19 founders (invite only)

SIGNIFICANT: DLD, Munich, Germany, January 19-21 – Invited / Ticketed

WEF / Davos, Switzerland, January 22-25 – Invite Only (often featuring big tech giants and startups)

FEBRUARY
___________________________________________

Week 6

SIGNIFICANT: MIDEM, Cannes, France, February 1-4 – Midem Lab is a track for music startups

SIGNIFICANT: Seedcamp Week London (+ Sometimes SeedSummit at the same time), London, UK, February 3, Invite only

LIFT, Geneva, Switzerland, February 5-7

Week 7

SIGNIFICANT: The Crunchies – San Francisco, California, February 10, The Annual TechCrunch Awards – Very recommended!

Finovate – London, UK, February 11-12 – Good for Financial / banking tech startups

TechChill Baltics – February 13. Good event for Baltic startups.

Netexplo.org, Paris, France, TBA

Decoded Fashion Tech, NY Fashion Week, New York, New York, TBA

Startup Turkey, Antalya, Turkey, TBA

Week 8

London Fashion Week, London, UK, February 14-18 (big for Fashion tech startups)

Social Media Week (Multiple global cities), February 17-21

Week 9

SIGNIFICANT: Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain, February 24-27

4 Years From NowFebruary 24-27, Barcelona, Spain

MARCH
___________________________________________

Week 9

SIGNIFICANT: London Web Summit, London, UK, TBA

Week 10

MENA ICT Forum – Dead Sea, Jordan, TBA

Week 10-11

CeBit, Hannover, Germany, March 10-14 – Trying hard to include startups more, though not a major focus and too B2B.

SIGNIFICANT: SXSW Interactive, Austin, Texas, March 7-16

Week 12

F.ounders NYC, New York, New York, TBA – Invite Only

Go Youth Conference – 16-17 March, “an event aiming to promote entrepreneurship and creativity” among young people, tech oriented

The Guardian Changing Media Summit, London, UK, March 18-19

FutureEverything Festival, Manchester, UK, March 27-April 1 – Digital culture, innovation

SIGNIFICANT: ArabNet, Beirut, Lebanon, TBA

GDC SF, San Francisco, California, March 17-21,

EU Digital Agenda Assembly, Athens, Greece, March 18-20

Scaling Startups – 26 & 27 March 2014 – London, UK

API Strategy & Practice Conference – March 26-28, Amsterdam – First ever in Europe, useful for any startup with an API.

Economist Technology Frontiers 2014 (London, UK) 27 Mar

NACUE Startup Career Launchpad – London, March 28

APRIL
___________________________________________

Week 14

DEMO U.S., San Francisco, California, April 3

Week 15

FailCon Europe, London, UK, April 8

MiPCube, Cannes, France, April 7-10 (part of MipTV, good for tech startups around TV/entertainment/video)

LOGIN.LT, Vilnius, Lithuania, April 10-11 – Big Baltic states Conference, in English

Webexpo.net, Prague, Czech Republic, April 11-12

Week 17

Startup Day, Stockholm, Sweden – April 26 – general startup pitches but majority tech and growing bigger each year

Railsberry, Krakow, Poland, TBA – Recommended for European Rails developers

SIGNIFICANT: The Next Web, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 24-25

World Economic Forum on Europe, MENA and Eurasia (Istanbul, Turkey) – 27-29 Apr

Latitude 59, Tallinn, Estonia, April 28-29 – Baltics startups pitching & speakers

SIGNIFICANT:

Disrupt NYC, New York, TBA – Very Recommended

MAY
___________________________________________

Week 19

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DigiTalk, Sofia, Bulgaria, May 2014

NEXT Berlin, Berlin, Germany, May 5-6 – Some startups, mostly corporates and digital marketing

Heureka, Berlin, Germany, May 6 – Startups & focused on Berlin’s ecosystem

London Big Data Week events, (crowd-sourced), London – May 5-11

Berlin Web Week, Berlin, Germany, May 6-7 – Range of events

Week 20

Engage Invest Exploit 2014, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 8

CapitalOnStage, Berlin, Germany, TBA

Decoded Fashion Tech, London, UK, May 10-14

Bacon, London, UK, May 16-17 – developer conference liked by starters.

Google Zeitgeist UK (London, UK) – 18-20 May (TBC)

Cannes Film Festival, Cannes, France, May 14-25 – Good for media startups

Week 21

Shift Split – Split, Croatia, TBA

Net Prophet, Cape Town, South Africa – TBA

Thinking Digital, Newcastle, UK, May 20-22 – Interesting

Forum SPB, St. Petersburg, Russia, May 22-24

Week 22

The D Conference, Rancho Palos Verdes, California, TBA

Digital Shoreditch – London, UK A SXSW style event, last week of May

JUNE
___________________________________________

Week 23

Startup Village – Created by Skolkovo, in Moscow, 2-3 Jun 2014

innotechsummit – 4-5 June, London – Tech Policy and big company focused.

Web2day – 4-6 June, Nantes, France (Largely in French)

Kinnernet Europe, Avallon, France – June 5-8 – Israelis hanging out with Euros & others.

DEMO Europe – June 4-5, Moscow, Russia,

Red Innova, Madrid, Spain, TBA – Spanish / LATAM event

Startup 2.0, Bilbao, Spain, IS THIS STILL GOING?

PivotEast, Nairobi, Kenya, TBA, East Africa’s main mobile apps / startup pitch competition for investors

Spain Startup and Investor Summit – Madrid, Spain, TBA – In English

Week 24

SIGNIFICANT: Le Web London, London, UK, June 9-10

>Midnight Pitch Fest, Oulu, Finland, June 12-13

FoundersForum.eu, TBA – Invite Only

Startup Island, Hvar, Croatia, TBA

EU Commission Digital Agenda Assembly – TBA

Week 25

Significant: Cannes Lions 15-21 June 2014, Cannes, France – Relevant for tech companies driven by advertising, big players attend

SparkMe – June 19-20 2014. Budva, Montenegro

Startup Summit, Prague – TBA (21 June in 2013)

SIGNIFICANT: Bitspiration, Krakow, Poland, TBA

WPP Stream, Cannes, France, June 17 – Invite only

Cannes Lions, Cannes, June 15-21 – Good for media/advertising startups

ICT Spring Europe, Luxembourg, TBA

Week 26

MLove Berlin, Berlin, Germany (closer to Halle, Germany), June 25-27 – Interesting

Founders Forum Menorca Tech Talk, Menorca, Spain, TBA

D-Conf, Milan, Italy, TBA

NOAH, San Francisco, California, TBA – Interesting for late-stage startups

JULY
___________________________________________

Week 27

Tech Open Air Berlin – Berlin, Germany, July 4-5

Week 28

DLD Women, Munich, Germany, TBA

Tech4Africa Nairobi – Nairobi, Kenya, TBA

RockPaperStartups.me – July TBA 2014, Croatia

AUGUST
___________________________________________

Week 32

Young Rewired State, UK, August 4-10

Week 33

GDC Europe, Cologne, Germany, August 11 – 13 – Useful for social games developers/startups

Week 34

Rock, Paper, Startups – Rijeka, Croatia – TBA (18-19 July in 2013)

MediaEvolution.se, Malmo, Sweden, TBA – Media/Tech overlap conf.

Turing Tech Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, TBA – Interesting

Week 35 – 36

Burning Man, Black Rock, Nevada, August 25 – Sep 1 – Lots of tech entrepreneurs now attend

SEPTEMBER
___________________________________________

Week 36

Hack Cyprus/ – Cyprus, TBA

DConstruct, Brighton, UK, TBA – “technology and culture”

Significant: IFA, Berlin, Germany, September 5 – 10 – Europe’s main consumer tech/gadget show

SIGNIFICANT: CTIA, Las Vegas, Nevada, September 9-11

Digital Derry, Northern Ireland, TBA

Week 37

SIGNIFICANT: TechCrunch Disrupt SF, San Francisco, California, TBA – Very Recommended (September 7-11, 2013)

Pirate Summit, Cologne, Germany, TBA (1st or 2nd week of September most likely) – Fun, startup event, junkyard atmosphere, good vibe

Campus Party London, London, UK, TBA – Big huge Hackathon and speakers

Startup Lisboa Demo day, Lisboa, Portugal, TBA

Week 38

Fast FWD Conference – tech and startup festival in Belgium – TBA

Kinnernet, Israel – Invite only, mainly Israeli in focus, with some outside guests

DM Ex Co, Cologne, Germany, September 10-11 – Advertising startups / Germany

TechCrunch Italy, Rome, Italy, TBA

“Investor Harvest” – Sep 18-19 Odessa, Ukraine (by by Europe Venture Summit, invitation for European angels and LPs)

Investors AllStars, London, UK, TBA. Not a conference but an interesting gathering of European VCs and founders.

Overtheair.org, London, UK, TBA – Interesting for mobile startups

Week 39

MindTheProduct, London, UK, TBA

TechBBQ.dk, Copenhagen, Denmark, TBA

SIGNIFICANT: Webrazzi Summit, Istanbul, Turkey, TBA. September 25th – Recommended to download Turkey

OCTOBER
___________________________________________

Week 40

The Next Web New York, New York, New York, TBA

TED Global, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 5-10

SIGNIFICANT: White Bull Summit, Barcelona, Spain, TBA – Oct. 6th-8th (2014) – Recommended, esp. for growth or mid-stage firms

Decoded Fashion Tech – Milan Oct 22 2014

MindTrek, Tampere, Finland, TBA

Spain Startup And Investor Summit – Madrid, Spain, TBA

Tech4Africa – Johannesburg, South Africa, TBA

Week 41

Ennovation, Poznan, Poland, TBA

WHU’s Idea-lab.org, Vallendar, Germany, campus of WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Germany,TBA

Week 42

IDCEE (Investor Day CEE), Kiev, Ukraine, October 16-17

Wired UK 14, London, UK, October 16-17

GigaOM Structure:Europe, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, TBA

Week 43

DLD Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel, TBA – Recommended

Venturecamp.mindthebridge.org, Milan, Italy, TBA

Week 44

TECHCRUNCH DISRUPT EUROPE AND HACKATHON TBA DATE OR WEEK NOT YET SET

SIGNIFICANT: Pioneers Festival, Vienna, Austria, 29 & 30 October – Recommended as a broad conference on science, tech and innovation

SIGNIFICANT: Dublin Web Summit and F.ounders, Dublin, Ireland, TBA

Stream Global 2014 (Marathon, Greece) 23-26 Oct

NOVEMBER
___________________________________________

Week 44

HowToWeb, Bucharest, Romania, TBA – Recommended to download Eastern Europe

Week 45

zz9

Explorers Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, TBA

Webit, Istanbul, Turkey, TBA – Recommend, Large trade show and exhibition featuring broadly on digital marketing, commerce and startups, in Turkey and Southern and Central Europe

Silicon Valley Comes to the UK – Nov 6-8 featuring veterans from the Valley touring London and Cambridge

Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford – Featuring veterans from the Valley at the Said Business School – (24-25 November in 2013)

Codebits – Portugal, TBA, Large hackathon style conference, not startup oriented but a pool for talent

Week 46

Noah Conference, London, UK, November 12-13 – Recommended for later stage startups, broadly European but heavily German and Israeli

Apps World, London, UK November 12-13

Global Entrepreneurship Week in Belarus – (Nov 18-21 in 2013) – Minsk, Belarus – Features startups

Slovakia Startup Awards – (22 Nov 2013)

Rise Up Summit – Cairo, Egypt – Recommended a as a major event for tech in the Middle East (Was 24-25 Nov 2013)

Global Entrepreneurship Week (various global events like Internet Week Europe)

SIME, Stockholm, Sweden, TBA

Monaco Media Forum, Monaco, TBA

SVC2UK, London, UK, TBA – Recommended

Slush, Helsinki, Finland, TBA – Recommended as the main Nordics/Scandinavia event

Startup Conference Next – Sofia, Bulgaria (November 30th 2013)

DECEMBER
___________________________________________

Week 49

RECOMMENDED – Startup AddVenture – Kiev, Ukraine, Dec 3-4 (by Europe Venture Summit)

SIME Miami – 3-4 December

Stretch, Budapest – December 5-6 – leadership and management conference for tech comps

TechCrunch Moscow 2014, Moscow, Russia, TBA

LeWeb, Paris, France, TBA – Recommended, big tech event in Europe for some time

API Days, Paris, France, TBA

Week 50
Empty

How the Internet ruined San Francisco (Salon Magazine OCT 28, 1999)

I posted my last piece about my experience living the dream in Pre-Bust SF and happened to find this. Having arrived Jan '96 to what I compared to the Athens of days past, my SF was not only the place that attracted brilliant minds, it attracted the eclectic and the misunderstood and gave them community. 

I too felt the blue shirt khakies (MBAs from Stanford, Wharton, Kellog and Harvard) had taken over. I suppose I was equally responsible. 18 years later, as residents picket the Google and Facebook buses that shuttle employees to the Valley, I wonder how much has changed and how much has stayed the same.

I was there last month and was taken by its magic. All dressed up for the holidays with abnormal 60 degree and sunny days, everything sparked and everything had meaning.  I missed my walks, the views, the water, the food and the conversation. I missed the unbridled creativity, the craze and fervor and the belief that the world could be won with a few more lines of code.  

During my almost 8 years, I chased the sun from Pacific Heights to Cole Valley to Noe and finally decided I needed my 300+ sunny days in CO. After years of distance, time has blurred my frustrations and I'm pining for what are, most likely, idyllic memories.  I'm fortunate for every chance I get to return and thank you SF for gifting me with all your abundances. 

The dot-com invasion -- call them twerps with 'tude -- is destroying everything that made San Francisco weird and wonderful.

I had the misfortune to live in Manhattan during the ’80s, when all conversations turned ineluctably to real estate and the shops and people that made New York interesting were being wiped out by a boom economy. Then, you’d see a slightly faded kosher butcher shop replaced by an Italian fusion restaurant, what was the rehearsal space for a dance troupe become a lawyer loft.

Now in late-’90s San Francisco, you can have all the Manhattan greed-is-good bull-economy moments you like. Freed, Teller and Freed, the oldest coffee and tea seller in the city (established 1899, its handcrank cash register in use until the end) survived all — earthquakes, the Depression, Starbucks — but it couldn’t survive the Internetting of San Francisco: It closed Oct. 15, its building to become condos. You can stand on Sixth Street smack in the middle of SOMA (where Wired got its start) and the flow of traffic now evokes Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Parking is bad all over the city, the gratuitous kindness from strangers and service personnel I always so pleasantly contrasted with New York is fading fast, and it’s beginning to be all too clear that people have no slack in their lives.

Commercial real-estate prices have gone up 42 percent since 1997 in San Francisco’s Mission District, a formerly working-class, affordable, largely Latino neighborhood where in the old days auslanders only ventured to get burritos at Taqueria La Cumbre and sex toys at Good Vibrations. Now it’s the scene of some of the most bitter class struggles in the city, the Yuppie Eradication Project (let’s key those SUVs!) vs. sleek dot-com people, who look like nothing so much as the slickers I cowered from in the ’80s, who lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and commuted to Wall Street. On happening Valencia Street, where druggies and minimum-wage immigrants walk past their economic superiors, a fenced-in parking lot has appeared, where a white-coated valet protects a phalanx of Mercedes and Lexus SUVs from the neighborhood. By 1998 two-thirds of the people living in the Mission were new arrivals — mostly from Wharton or MIT, not Honduras, you may be sure.

The median price of a San Francisco condo was $410,000 in August 1999, more than a 40-percent increase from August 1998. The median rental price for a two-bedroom apartment was $2,000. Avalon Towers, the first high-rise apartment to go up in San Francisco in more than a decade, has had no trouble attracting tenants who pay rents ranging from $2,400 to $4,000 a month. Eighty-five percent of them earn more than $100,000 per year, 60 percent are under 40, and two-thirds are new to the city. Good bet these aren’t the bad poets, malcontents, and fruits and nuts looking for a new start that the city has always attracted.

Evictions, legal or illegal, are at an all-time high — and 70 percent of those evicted leave the city. Ted Gullickson, office manager for the San Francisco Tenants Union, says his nonprofit’s business, that of protecting renters’ rights, more than doubled in 1995-96, and has increased by 25 percent every year since. He has watched the Internet-induced housing crisis (astronomic prices, abysmal vacancy rates, economic exclusion) move north up the Peninsula through Santa Clara and San Mateo counties into San Francisco as the Way New Economy has overtaken the Bay Area. Silicon Valley creates nine new jobs for every new housing unit: What does it mean for San Francisco to become a suburb of Palo Alto?

In San Francisco, he says it’s now the case of “the richer gentrifying the rich,” meaning renters in the most whitebread and affluent neighborhoods in the city — the Marina and Pacific Heights — are also being evicted or forced out.

According to state income-tax returns, the gap between rich and poor in San Francisco increased 40 percent between 1994 and 1996 — just about the time the new parking enclosures started happening and the Net started making investors very, very happy.

So what’s the big deal? Isn’t the dot-com invasion just the latest example of gentrification — a phenomenon that started in the go-go ’80s? In a sense, yes — but the speed, libertarian ethos, irritating hipster pose and chilling finality of this invasion put it in a different league from earlier ones. Sure, San Francisco in the Reagan years also had its share of Jay McInerney types in suits hitting the clubs. But in those days the city had temporarily ceded its status as financial center of the West to L.A., so some of those corporate sharpies had to have been here for at least some reasons beyond revenue and career-enhancement. Now San Francisco has become a city of 22-year-old Barbie-bunny marketing girls who don’t realize the Web is not the Internet, and guys who have come to San Francisco because the dot-com version of Dutch tulip-mania offers better odds of instant wealth than making partner at Merrill Lynch. The result is a city whose unique history and sensibility is being swamped by twerps with ‘tude.

Remembrance of things past: Part 1

When I lived in Potrero Hill in the 1980s, my landlord was my next-door neighbor, the kind of kindly, eccentric bohemian this historically most-lefty-in-the-city nabe had always attracted. The Slovenian union hall is situated here. Traditionally, journalists and low-rent architects and artists were drawn here, in part because of the cheap rents and good light. Joe’s grandparents had owned a cattle ranch on what is now part of the greenbelt surrounding Stanford University; Joe got a degree in theater arts from San Francisco State, had lived in Paris and North Beach in the ’50s, in a loft in the Haight in the ’60s, and for years made his living making architectural models. He also owns a 1949 Ford truck, which he always kept parked near the intersection we lived on — not an issue in a neighborhood where there is lots of on-street parking.

Joe isn’t running a meth lab, nor routinely scheduling raves, nor kenneling yappy dogs, nor, unlike my next-door neighbors in Santa Cruz, running an illegal car repair and refinishing business out of his house. He rides his bike far more than he drives. He’s lived in that sun-drenched flat for close to 20 years, and been a good neighbor to all. Yet someone, starting about three years ago, began phoning into the Department of Parking and Traffic, complaining about his abandoned eyesore truck — and they succeeded in getting it towed if he didn’t move it often. Why live in Potrero Hill — a neighborhood that abuts a light-industrial area, where Anchor Steam beer is still made and until only a few years ago you could smell the Hills Brothers’ coffee roasting that always made the entrance to the Bay Bridge smell like toast — unless you can appreciate the beauty of a museum-quality mid-century truck? We both suspect that if it were an SUV parked in front of his house, and not his trusty steed of 40-plus years, the anonymous informer would never have acted. Joe, whose duplex with smashing views is long paid off, tells me he feels like he’s being forced out by the dot-com people.

Artists and arts organizations have been and continue to be economically harassed out of the city — a trend exacerbated by the new gold rush. With no rent control on commercial property (modest 1,200-square-foot spaces now routinely rent for $3,000 a month), all kinds of rehearsal spaces and performance spaces and exhibition spaces and true live/work spaces (not the slapdash gimcrack monstrosities being thrown up by powerful contractor Joe O’Donoghue’s Residential Builders Association, where chief technology officers live for their work) are in jeopardy. To take just one example: Artists’ Television Access, a Mission District exhibition space where the best and worst of non-commercial films have been shown for years, is in jeopardy.

As Carren Shagley, a San Francisco realtor, asks, “What artist can pay $650,000 for a live-work space?” Still, these tenements of tomorrow would make a techno-libertarian proud: They don’t pay into the city’s public-school taxes, and their developers are not required, as they would be with other kinds of developments, to make any of them affordable housing. Ah, the beauties of the free market and the freedom from despised regulation.

Creating work that you hope might have value beyond a Webweek, or not intended to be monetized on the Web, requires time and space enough to be able to live at least at subsistence level while you rehearse or paint or go against City Hall as a skateboard activist.

But the Internet culture that celebrates all work all the time doesn’t accord value to anything that isn’t easily monetized — or corporatized. The importance of leisure time, of being able to support yourself with a day job to pursue other ends, to rehearse and canvass and organize and noodle and reflect, is totally at odds with the all-connected-all-the-time upside-potential lifestyle of the dot-com people.

Gabriel Metcalf, deputy director of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), says that the newcomers to the city are “much less politically active; don’t join neighborhood associations.”

Well, sure. Unlike traditional émigres to San Francisco, who came for the landscape or to live in a human-scale, cosmopolitan, liberal city or to explore whatever personal desires, strange art forms and political activism they couldn’t in their own hometown, the dot-com people are coming mostly for the money — whatever San Francisco has been historically or culturally is beside the point. San Francisco is a collection of distinctive villages with their own microclimates and strong community feeling, from North Beach to Noe Valley to the Haight to Bernal Heights, but that’s not why it’s become the top destination for graduating MBAs. Dot-com people just need a place to crash after they work 15 hours a day — sleep is for the weak and sickly. They haven’t lived here long enough to know or care about civic issues, for the most part — and for those who subscribe to the prevailing high-tech orthodoxy of libertarianism, there’s not much reason for them to care.

Larry Rothstein, a San Francisco plaintiff’s attorney for 20 years, talks about the “I’ve got mine so screw you” attitude of the dot-com folks he has been running into “in the last couple of years” on San Francisco juries. “They’re just here to make a buck and quickly leapfrog up the corporate ladder,” he says. “They grew up under Reagan-Bush and parrot the line about how frivolous lawsuits are bad for business and how nothing must interfere with profit flow of a company. They’re under- and un-educated — they’ve only ever worked in high tech, can’t imagine what it’s like to not have insurance, not be able to afford a car, not be able to get a job. They have sick pay, they have a safety net, they have money, and can’t understand that there are people who don’t. They have a total lack of spirituality or soul. They’re a new generation of Republicans.”

This in San Francisco, the city that all the world likes to deride for the silliness of its political correctness? Truly, these are end times.

A friend who’s an exec at a high-tech P.R. firm commented to me on what he called “the voracious sense of entitlement” he runs into in the dot-com kids he employs, fickle creatures with no loyalty. Yet we both know that while he and I came of age during the era of guys with Ph.D.s in economics driving cabs and stagflation, the dot-coms have never known anything but a bull market.

I don’t want to demonize the entire dot-com world. Long before the Net boom, many liberal-arts flakes ended up working in computing because in the Bay Area, that’s where the jobs were. And it’s a good thing that former English majors from Cal can go on to become productive members of society working as sys-admins. There are carpetbaggers, yes, but there are also plenty of newcomers who both live and work in the city, and proudly so. Take bike riding, an important measure of good urban citizenship: The Net start-ups are much more bike-friendly (and thus, sensitive to the stressed city infrastructure they are located in) than more established companies. CNet, for example, has space for about one-third of its employees to commute by bike.

But the good dot-com citizens, at least at this point, seem to be in the minority. Take politics. The in-flow of new people into the political process is what a city relies on to keep it vital. But San Francisco’s newest arrivals seem utterly disengaged. Admittedly, the city’s current mayoral race, an embarrassing three-way battle between a corrupt, out of touch, master-of-machine-politics mayor, a scary, slimy political consultant and a well-meaning anti-charismatic former mayor/cop, doesn’t inspire much passion — nor does the who’s-a-bigger-victim identity politics that have dominated much of San Francisco civic discussion for the past decades. But there’s a lot more to politics here than that. Besides, what has San Francisco always been but the place where, if you didn’t like the politics, you could go out and make some of your own? The late Harvey Milk may have been the first out gay supervisor, but he was a supe for all the city. Jello Biafra was a mayoral candidate.

Remembrance of things past: Part 2

Back in 1981, I attended something called the “Bad Attitude in the Woods Picnic,” a get-together in a state-owned redwood grove just north of San Francisco for folks interested in Processed World, a goofball anarcho-situationist publication that was the mother of all zines, focussed on though not limited to critiques of information technology, and whose commentaries on computers, sex, work and play still ring true today. There I met Chris Carlsson, PW’s chief instigator, a sly wit of pastiche and a subversive of the best kind. Chris has gone on to be a ringleader for Critical Mass and of “Shaping San Francisco,” a sort of collaborative people’s multimedia history of San Francisco, and was co-editor for the City Lights anthology “Reclaiming San Francisco,” which contains essays on everything from the lost natural history of the city to the origins of its foodie culture. In other words, Chris is just the sort of home-grown home-brew rebel-creator who embodies the good wackitude of the city.

Anyway, Chris has just gone through the breakup of his long-term relationship (a child and a mortgage are involved) — and not only has he had a hard time finding a place to rent, he has no idea where he might be able to buy. He told me he’s on a list of potential candidates to get in on a true (as opposed to a product marketing manager’s garage with a view) live-work space at Project Artaud, a long-established alternative arts enclave. Only he told me the list of candidates for this affordable space is about 70 people long — and he was worried that his needed credentials for artist-hood weren’t pure enough, never mind how influential his way-early mocking, appropriating, pomo, visual P.W. satires were. Chris made it sound like getting in was about as difficult as getting into one of those co-ops on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (no Jews, entertainers or new money, please). He’s a local hero, and he no longer belongs here.

San Francisco was where California cuisine, which kicked off the entire U.S. craze for the fresh, the regional, the free-range, the organic and the eclectic, got started. But the people who can afford to support this are driving it into the ground. Patricia Unterman, longtime food critic and owner of the long-lived and much-loved Hayes Street Grill, wrote in the Examiner that “cooks who have spent $30,000 and three years on a culinary education can’t afford to make $10 to $15 hour on a cooking line, which is all most restaurants can pay … The pool of labor for traditional restaurant jobs gets smaller and smaller as rents escalate. Newcomers to San Francisco are lucky to find a room, even if they are willing to rough it. But what if a cook, a good cook, has been working 10 years in a good restaurant, and he or she wants to start a family?” The result, Unterman writes, is that “cooks rightfully begin to question their future in the profession. They leave cooking because it doesn’t pay enough, or they move way out of town or they take another job to supplement their income. Pretty soon, the other job … designing Web pages, becomes the main job.” Demoralized by making less money than almost all of the people they serve, Unterman writes, skilled cooks quit and are replaced by beginners — and your food isn’t as good.

Remembrance of things past: Part 3

My best friend who died of AIDS moved to San Francisco in 1976. It was through his then-girlfriend that I met him back in Wisconsin, for he was still living as straight. He moved to San Francisco in part because I was around — and in part, I now realize, because he needed to come out, and San Francisco was where he knew he’d be able to do it. I remember the day we were trying to decide which apartment on Russian Hill he should pick — the studio or the one-bedroom with the views of Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge and the kitchen with the black-and-white tiles, for the slightly more expensive price of $300 per month. We had time to decide; I urged him to go for the beauty one. And until he moved back to Madison to die there he remained, in the place where he could sit in his director’s chair and brood out the window for hours, drink bad white wine and, when the spirit moved him, paint good pictures and make room-enhancing sculptures. All supported through groveling at tables less than 30 hours a week, which gave him the free time to explore San Francisco — which in his case meant both its art worlds (he took me to the first performance piece where I saw people wearing black) and its gay worlds (it was at a diner in the Haight where over dinner he finally came out to me because he had finally toppled for someone).

But the dot-com revolution has threatened to destroy the gay community. As Brian Bouldrey wrote in the Bay Guardian, a local alternative paper, “Young people can no longer move to San Francisco to be queer anymore, not unless they have a college education and know how to design a Web site … The fantasy of San Francisco as a gay paradise is over … How much does the Web affect the vitality of the gay and lesbian community? … Face it, gays and lesbians are abandoning ‘the community.’”

It’s true. A friend who belongs to an organization of gay journalists tells me it can’t seem to engage the interest of the younger writers who have jobs with online publications — they have no political or cultural gay identity and are only interested in their stock options and job-hopping.

It’s worth quoting Bouldrey again, because his observations about the corrosive effect of the dot-com lifestyle apply not just to the gay community but to San Francisco as a whole. “Take a head count of all your queer friends who were struggling artists in the late ’80s and early ’90s. How many of them have adopted the Silicon Valley lifestyle? And have you noticed that the nature of the Silicon Valley lifestyle is perfectly suburban: decentralized, commutable, compartmentalized. Disintermediation … Getting rid of the go-between describes the success of the Internet. It brings the book to your door so you don’t have to walk all the way down the street to search the shelves … and to talk to a real person.

“A guy walks into A Different Light bookstore [a famous gay bookstore] with a big list of high-end books … and asked our clerks to help find them. We were happy to oblige, and when he was finished looking at a dozen or so books, he put them away and the clerk asked, ‘So can I help you with a purchase?’ The guy said no, he just wanted to look at the books before he bought them from Amazon. We’ve got news for you, buster: Keep doing that and you aren’t going to have any bookstores where you can paw the books.”

So what can San Francisco mean, if it’s not a place where you can be arty or subversive or living in genteel socialist poverty? Yes, there have always been rich people in San Francisco — hell, robber barons made San Francisco — but the point is, there was always room for the rest of us. You could have the backyard, suburban pleasures that are possible in a city that’s not built to bulk, a city where well-to-do people lived right next door to people of modest means. Gross class stratifications weren’t there. But not anymore. The San Francisco of Sierra Club founder John Muir and Ambrose Bierce; of Kenneth Rexroth, impresario of the alternative without whom there would have been no Beat scene in San Francisco; of the Tubes and the Jefferson Airplane; of R. Crumb and Bruce Connor; the place where Sam Shepard and Allen Ginsberg arguably created their best work; the great beautiful last-chance saloon, the last best hope for those who can’t fit in anywhere else — gone.

Gentrification is a story that’s been told many times in many locales — but the difference is, it happened so fast in San Francisco. Yes, boomtown Silicon Valley means money is pouring into the city — but the city that remains is not San Francisco.

So that’s what the Internet has done to San Francisco: given it the devil-or-the-deep-blue-sea choice of becoming either Carmel (its architectural heritage and physical beauty preserved like a dollhouse for the exclusive use of the touristic or the rich) or Hong Kong (economic development above all) or most likely, some hellish convergence of the twain. Or maybe, more accurately, it’s becoming the place that seems to be the techno-libertarian idea of the good polis: Singapore with better movies. Business couldn’t be better. And real soon now, there will be nothing troubling on the streets, nothing at all.

Paulina Borsook is the author of "Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-tech."MORE PAULINA BORSOOK.

http://www.salon.com/1999/10/28/internet_2/

Boom Baby

I found something I wrote in 1999 when I was blessed to live the Dot Com dream and experience crazy growth, acquisitions and three IPOs. 

Found myself numb and tired in California. The land of sun and fun that offers the youth spring eternal, silicon/e serenity and all that other go-west greatness had sucked me dry.  Like the desert--although my bones yearned for the end of damp, fog-blanketed days. Sometimes you want to throw off the covers, don a tank and thongs and head to the beach. Not so in sunny California. No.  Such a teaser.  No one warns of the 8 month winter, the dirty charcoal sand and intimidating (to say the least) ocean.  I’ve seen dogs and grown men sucked down in that current.  Tell me, when you came here, what were you looking for?  The gold in them there hills of days past?  You fool.  Those nuggets were mined decades ago and even then they required some superhuman strength to survive the conditions. Yes, there’s still gold here. For those left standing, struggling, surviving their personal Donner pass.  It’s a hard world and California might just be the hardest.  Or maybe it’s the industry. . . or maybe it’s just my weakness. . . 

Now, I’m no teary-eyed little girl grasping her father’s hand for security.  I let go of that hand long ago (or maybe it was never mine to hold).  I grew strong and proud. I laced up my start-up boot-straps, grabbed my shovel and sifter, and went West. 

Nothing has changed. This California dirt is still studied, sifted and sorted. Those of us with grimy, dirty fingers pick through the pieces with precision. Pre-IPO, E-commerce, killer app., gold cow.  Jargon and last week’s antiquated talk. We speculators understand that the task is daunting in its abundance of sheer frustration.

We sift and search. Search and sift. Pillaging the new resource, information, to obtain what in the end, will really be, nothing more than the clump of earth, sand, and silicon we started with.  Only fools base their dreams on the stability of sand castles.

In the end what treasured trinket will mark our diligence? Gold bars, even when positioned as paper weights on the ocean’s floor maintain their value. Stock options, however, like a high school flirt, are fickle—only valuable when someone else wants them.  Paper wealth didn’t buy Columbus’ passage and Cleopatra’s kiss required a heavy pittance of precious metal. 

I remember visiting Carson City, Nevada with my parents when I was 13. The sepia-tone pictures portrayed a rough, gregarious bunch. The sort that exaggerated everything—their stories, voices and women all were loud. But even with their arms gripped round each other in fraternal support, and smiles flashing bravely, their eyes betrayed their postured confidence.  Camaraderie looked more like reverie. Embraces more like death grips.  And their eyes, well I’ve seen those eyes. I see them daily and in various forms. They sit beside me on the N Judah, struggling to focus past the window’s reflective glare.  Those eyes walk my company’s hallways, charting battle wounds while simultaneously counting their personal calendar—or shall I say vesting schedule?  But, most upsetting, I see those eyes reflected in my mirror nightly begging sleep to visit without the help of placebo pills to stop my brain’s mile-a-minute-marathon.

I see a youth that is lost searching. I see someone who is striving to find something, to achieve the next big thing, but not sure when to give up the struggle or even recognize the prize when it’s won. At present, I can devise only one solution.  Search for that next big thing, the one great IPO, collect stock and under-eye circles, and never complain that the mines are too dark and the hours too long.  Sift and sift. Search, and sift some more and make sure those tiny threads of sanity and childhood dreams don’t slip through the grating to join the other remnants of Silicon Valley’s discards.

The New Guard - Boulder's very own, Nicole Glaros, tops the list

I recently lunched with Nicole Glaros from Techstars.  Nicole's whole focus is on Giving First and that's exactly what Techstars does. They provide seed funding from over 75 top venture capital firms and angel investors who are vested in the success of each startup, as well as intense mentorship from hundreds of the best entrepreneurs in the world.

Nicole said, "I was attracted to Techstars because they utilized a unique model - it leveraged mentors, experienced CEOs and entrepreneurs to help guide and counsel entrepreneurs to success.  The mentors are volunteers, they give freely of their time, without expectation of reward or compensation, to help the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

Nicole gives daily. She teaches things like the How to craft the Perfect Elevator Pitch and offers office hours as a board member of EFCO, the Entrepreneurial Foundation of Colorado, which asks entrepreneurs to commit 1% of their early equity or annual profits to the community. EFCO has given more than $2 million to local organizations on the Front Range since 2008.

After 5 years, Nicole has seen Techstars grow into a global brand. I wanted to see what she's been up to. Wow. Just the usual. Nicole's been Managing Director at the Boulder Techstars from its inception and is now making the Big Apple shine. She just spoke at TedXBrooklyn with Spike Lee among others about why giving is the way to go. She also just made NY's list of top women and Marie Claire's New Guard list.

That list is fantastic and the women are incredible. 

MC@Work: The New Guard

What does it take to earn a spot on our New Guard?

Contacts, lots of them. But even that's only half the story. The women on this list are all masters at converting introductions into opportunities. In their respective fields and beyond, they are hugely influential for their valuable ability to connect—startups with financiers, writers with producers, candidates with voters. Got your own grand plans for world domination? Get to know the impressive women of The New Guard and make it happen.

Check out Nicole on Marie Claire as a successful woman in tech and read more: Successful Women in Tech, Entertainment, Business & Politics - The New Guard - Marie Claire 

Denver vs. Silicon Valley: Where we’re better and where we need to grow

When I travel outside the Mile High City, I’m often asked what makes Denver so attractive for startups. While our tech community and the companies it’s home to are gaining traction by the month, the benefits of launching a startup in Denver aren’t necessarily as obvious as those associated with major tech destinations like the Valley and, more recently, New York.

But when we were preparing to launch Convercent into the governance, risk, and compliance market, there was never any doubt where we should set up shop. In fact, I recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal about some of the key reasons why Denver-Boulder is in an exciting time for tech acceleration (and our mayor did, too). Indeed, the tech hub here is actually piping with opportunity — it’s by no coincidence that $280M in funding came through the city alone last year. The perks you’d find in the Valley like daily farm-to-table meals and ping-pong tournaments aren’t the standard, but there are other important and significant advantages to cultivating a tech company here, all unique to our own local culture.

But just like most relatively new, fast-growing developments in the tech sector, we still need to iron out some kinks and improve upon certain areas before Denver truly recognizes its full potential. There are distinct areas where Denver’s tech innovation excels, but also places where we still need to grow to take our own tech scene to the next level.

What we do best

Denver has an ideal work-life balance. The city isn’t just home to slew of high-growth tech startups, it’s also home to very successful awesome food start ups as well as some of the best breweries in the US. The Rocky Mountains are in our backyard for people who love their skis and snowboards in the winter and mountain bikes and hiking boots the rest of the year. In fact, it’s this balance that often attracts top talent from New York and the Valley to Denver — people get burned out and are drawn to Denver’s high quality-of-life. The outdoors are a key part of Denver’s overall culture and everyone makes a point to take pride in these defining factors and enjoy what our city has to offer.

Within our working world, the quality of life is arguably just as high. The tech community in Denver works to foster a cohesive, supportive environment where people have unique access to the resources they need to scale: The Mayor, Erik Mitisek’s band of superstars at the Colorado Technology Association and local incubators like Galvanize all actively find ways to help startups excel and forge a close-knit network. In fact, the city of Denver and Mayor Michael B. Hancock recently helped Convercent open the doors to its new office in Denver’s Golden Triangle district, a vibrant, up and coming neighborhood where it seems a new startup sets up just about every other week.

Even the tech companies themselves work to support each other’s growth, which is a dramatic contrast to the competition you find in other tech hubs where everyone’s concerned about who’s launching what first. Our office is also a communal, shared space for local artists, entrepreneurs, and other startups to come use at no cost, as well as a venue for local networking and tech events. Even as Denver’s tech hub becomes more dense, this supportive nature hasn’t wavered. In fact, the recent and steady successes of the Denver/Boulder region’s companies seem to have only fueled our drive to help each other excel.

This close-knit community also helps give way to focused, thriving corporate cultures. In Silicon Valley, founders and CEOs are constantly concerned with other companies poaching their employees. Being outside of this noisy ecosystem, Denver is less susceptible to this company-hopping routine and, as result, employees are overall more invested in their work, driving greater company morale and productivity. Companies are able to stay focused on their visions and goals without the distractions of passing tech trends and launches.

Where There’s Room to Grow

I’d like to see Denver creating a few juggernauts on the level of Salesforce or Google. We need a few of these behemoth tech companies to help anchor Denver as major hub for technology, and help bring in the top talent and resources needed to propel the smaller surrounding companies forward.

The success of TeleTech, an innovator of customer-experience technolog; Ping Identity’s recent $44 million round; and Rally Software’s recent initial public offering (now up 100 percent) are all steps in the right direction. But we need more.

We need Sympoz, Datalogix, Sendgrid, Newsgator, Full Contact, and Convercent to continue along the path they’re on until they become nationally-recognized businesses that are leading their respective markets. Lastly, we need Governor Hickenlooper and Tom Clark, the CEO of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation, to continue their great work bringing companies like Arrow Electronics to Colorado and land a few other giant, anchor companies for Denver’s tech community to reach new levels of success.

Another development that would help significantly grow our local entrepreneurial community is a bigger market for angel capital. The issue isn’t that money for seed startups is hard to come by — there’s plenty of money if the opportunity is right. The issue is that investors only want to bet on proven technology executives with ample experience in successfully scaling companies.

These “fundable” teams aren’t as prevalent in a newly developed tech scene, and while our early stage companies are often piping with new and innovative ideas, a certain track record is required to attract capital. Incubators like TechStars are helping to usher in more qualified seed startups, but what will really move the needle is recruiting respected founders into Colorado, inspiring our own executives to start their own businesses, and encouraging Denver’s proven entrepreneurs to continue launching new companies rather than simply enjoying Colorado after some initial success.

Lastly, part of what’s hurts Denver’s tech community most is its own reputation. The Rocky Mountain West is known for skiing, hiking, turning Rocky Mountain spring water into Coors beer, and creating the cable industry. Outside Colorado, there’s an underlying sense that a technology company springing out of this unassuming area can’t possibly be ahead of the curve. A shift in this kind of thinking should come organically as Denver’s tech market continues to gain traction, but until it gains more national recognition, some extra effort goes into proving that your company has what it takes.

Despite a few areas to improve upon, I wouldn’t trade Denver’s high quality of the life, supportive tech network and strong company cultures for the advantages that come along with real estate in one of the coastal the tech hubs. With Colorado now claiming four of the top ten most popular cities for startups, I have ambitious hopes and dreams for how the region’s tech community will continue to take shape.

Patrick Quinlan is the chief executive of Denver-based Convercent, an enterprise cloud software company that raised a $10.2M series A in January (check out VentureBeat’s profile of its dynamic office space). He’s been leading Denver tech companies for decades.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/15/denver-vs-silicon-valley/#5JvthLWKkSxi3qMj.99

Startup Phenomenon 2013: How to Create and Sustain a Vibrant Startup Community

Best-Selling Author Jim Collins and TechStars Co-Founder Brad Feld anchor global event for entrepreneurs, policymakers, financiers and academics

By Startup Phenomenon

Published: Thursday, Oct. 3, 2013 - 3:10 am

BOULDER, Colo., Oct. 3, 2013 -- /PRNewswire/ -- The inaugural Startup Phenomenon, which focuses on bringing together the entrepreneurs and investors behind the world's most dynamic startup ecosystems, will be held Nov. 13-15 at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder. Registration is now open at www.startupphenomenon.com.

Rather than acting as yet another startup pitchfest, Startup Phenomenon will dive into how startup communities take root and grow, with the ultimate goal being more and better options for entrepreneurs regardless of where they are.

"We drew the philosophy of Startup Phenomenon from Brad Feld's Startup Revolution books," said Ryan Ferrero, co-founder of the event. "That is, supportive communities are critical for building and sustaining vibrant startup ecosystems." 

Jim Collins and Brad Feld headline a program of nearly 50 startup and finance experts from dozens of cities around the world, including Boulder, Omaha, New York, Jerusalem, Reykjavik, Auckland, and Moscow. Collins has authored or co-authored six business books that have sold more than 10 million copies. Feld is the managing director of the VC firm the Foundry Group; co-founder of TechStars, a mentorship-driven seed stage investment program; and author of several books on startup culture.

The three-day event will feature presentations, discussions and workshops. Other scheduled presenters include:

• Anil Dash, co-founder, Activate; CEO, ThinkUp; director, Stack Exchange.
• Donna Harris, co-founder, 1776; Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Georgetown University;advisory board member of Global Entrepreneurship Week and board member of the National Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
• Brian Meece, co-founder and CEO, RocketHub Inc.
• Vivek Wadhwa, VP, Innovation and Research, Singularity University; fellow, Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University.
• Alan Barrell, Entrepreneur in residence, University of Cambridge; International Advisor, Start Up Generation

Tickets are on sale for $995 until Nov. 7. For a complete list of speakers and sessions, or to register for the event, visit the Startup Phenomenon website.

About Startup Phenomenon

The inaugural Startup Phenomenon, Nov. 13-15 at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder, will bring together more than 300 seasoned investors, policymakers, academics and entrepreneurs to share visions for and experiences from successful startup clusters. For more information, please visitwww.startupphenomenon.com.

SOURCE Startup Phenomenon

• Read more articles by Startup Phenomenon

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/10/03/5790290/startup-phenomenon-2013-how-to.html#storylink=cpy

Boulder's Alex & Ana Bogusky Launch Initiative to Create a Million New American Jobs

August 20th, 2013

 Last night, Alex and Ana Bogusky launched the Million American Jobs Project — a YouTube video that mashes animation with Econ 101 to prime people on the power of the pocketbook, illustrating how buying a larger share of American-made goods can positively impact U.S. job numbers.

Sleeves rolled up, Alex narrates the three-and-a-half-minute video, which moves post-WWII-era utilitarian icons —cogs, workers, factories and consumer commodities like sneakers and big-screen TVs — along a conveyor belt to tell the story of how once-great America lost its competitive edge and fell into the Great Recession. Scott McDonald animated and art directed the “Million American Jobs” project.

Buy American, people (or better yet, buy Colorado). It ain't that hard to make change.

Read more at http://www.thedenveregotist.com/news/local/2013/august/20/boulders-alex-ana-bogusky-launch-initiative-create-million-new-american-jo#pKBwwtXgUp21etWl.99

#Boulderflood, #Coflood

There's no way to describe what Boulder and the rest of our Front Range communities are experiencing. Our residents are resilient because our city is our love. I've never lived anywhere where the people acknowledge how blessed and fortunate they are to get to live here. That's just a given. My neighbors and I express our thankfulness like a mantra daily.  We know we are lucky...even when it feels like our luck has run out.

The sun came out yesterday and the Flatirons stood in all their rugged strength and majesty. It was just long enough to remind me that even under the water and mud and tears, Boulder is still the beautiful, magical place that I am incredibly grateful to call home.

To read more about the flood, go to @nicolecasanova.  I am constantly updating. 

Video - Be in Boulder

Amazing video that will make you want to be here yesterday. This shows why I'm so grateful to live in Boulder. On another note, Jennifer Egbert is super savvy. This is one of the best videos I've seen on Boulder and it makes you want to share it. Power of marketing. Go girl. 

I have to post this even though I have my own favorite Realtor, Jason Meglich, http://jasonmeglich.com/ . Check him out. and watch this sweet video.

Entrepreneur Magazine lists Boulder as the #1 Startup City

The 25 Best U.S. Cities for Tech Startups

BY CATHERINE CLIFFORD | August 14, 2013|

Colorado is gaining steam as a startup haven.

Move over, Silicon Valley. Colorado is building some serious startup swagger.

Four of the top 10 metro regions in the U.S. with the most tech startups are in Colorado: Boulder, Fort Collins-Loveland, Denver and Colorado Springs. That’s according to a report released today by technology policy coalition Engine and entrepreneurship research association the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The research focuses on high-tech startups specifically, defining them as new businesses with a concentration of employees in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

Related: The 5 Rules for Silicon Valley Success That Can Work Anywhere

Here is a rundown of the U.S. metro regions with the highest ratio of tech startups compared to the national average:

1. Boulder, Colo.
2. Fort Collins-Loveland, Colo.
3. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif.
4. Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, Mass.
5. Seattle
6. Denver
7. San Francisco
8. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.
9. Colorado Springs, Colo.
10. Cheyenne, Wyo.
11. Salt Lake City
12. Corvallis, Ore.
13. Raleigh-Cary, N.C.
14. Huntsville, Ala.
15. Provo-Orem, Utah
16. Bend, Ore.
17. Austin-Round Rock, Texas
18. Missoula, Mont.
19. Grand Junction, Colo.
20. Sioux Falls, S.D.
21. Bethesda-Frederick-Rockville, Md.
22. Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C.
23. Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, Ore.-Wash.
24. Wilmington, Del.
25. Ames, Iowa

As an entrepreneur looking for a startup community to launch your business, knowing where other entrepreneurs have planted their seeds may prove fruitful. And for local leaders, encouraging high-tech startup growth in your community could generate jobs. While high-tech startups have an undeniably high failure rate, those that do succeed take off quickly. On the whole, high-tech startups are good for the local job market, according to the research.

Related: Entrepreneurs Take Lead in Building Vibrant Startup Communities

A thriving startup community that's creating jobs typically attracts vitality -- and cash -- to a region. "In the case of Boulder, a startup community whose evolution I've observed and participated in closely over the past many years, the cultural and economic transformation has been extraordinary,” says Brad Feld, co-founder of the Boulder-based Foundry Group and author of numerous books about startup ecosystems, in a statement. “While there isn't one, definitive blueprint to building a technology industry, this research can hopefully inspire communities and policymakers to work together to ensure that the spread of high-tech entrepreneurship isn't just a trend, but a long-term phenomenon.”

Catherine Cliffordis a staff writer at Entrepreneur.com. 

Read more:http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227829#ixzz2cQxWSdnY