foundry Archives - Serious Startups

Brad Feld On “The Boulder Thesis” VIDEO

Author,founder, entrepreneur, investor and all around startup evangelist Brad Feld was on hand in Chicago on Tuesday for the Startup America regions summit. Feld is one of the founders, and Managing Director of Foundry Group and has been enamored in startup culture for over 15 years.

Feld’s latest book “Startup Communities” was published earlier this month, and in addition to speaking Startup America and 1871 hosted an official launch party for Feld’s book which included signing copies and free books for the first 40 in line.

Feld’s book serves as almost a handbook to other entrepreneurs and startup ecosystem leaders looking to build startup ecosystems in their town. Feld feels that most communities can support a startup ecosystem if they follow some basic guidelines. Boulder Colorado is one of the most well known and respected startup communities outside of Silicon Valley. Boulder didn’t grow into the startup community it is today, overnight. Feld points out that its been growing over the past 15 years and continues to grow.

Feld has been working with Startup America since it’s inception, in fact Startup America CEO Scott Case counts Feld as one of his most trusted advisors out in the field, working in the trenches with startups every day.

During his Startup America talk Feld highlighted the foundation, or framework found in his book “Startup Communities” about building startup communities.

The startup communities have to be led by entrepreneurs
These entrepreneurs have to take a very long term view (20 years)
They have to be inclusive of anyone who wants to be inclusive of the startup community in any way
You have to have activities and events that engage the entire entrepreneurial community

Feld prides himself on his genuine accessibility and is anxious to talk with entrepreneurs and startups from everywhere. He’s a top rate connector and if you’re headed to Boulder he will gladly share members of his network with you that he feels you will benefit from. He’s willing to help just about anyone, however before he helps you he often gives out tasks to do, nothing too hard, but rather questions to answer or information to find out, usually helping yourself in the process. These tasks usually separate the serious from the not so serious.

In the same spirit as his email accessibility Feld stuck around most of the day talking with the Startup America champions about just about anything. In fact we talked about startups, tennis and Australia and how they all interconnect for Feld and his family in February.

Check out the video from his talk at the Startup America summit below:

Linkage:

Check out Brad Feld’s site here

Startup America Here

Everywhere Else here

From Brad Feld To CES To Obama The Accelerator Pivot

In Brad Feld’s column in Business Insider this morning he talked about the Orbotix team, Adam Wilson and Ian Bernstein. They’re the two guys behind that crazy little ball we all grew to know and love at Thedroidguy offices as The Sphero. Feld was holding office hours during the 2010 Boulder TechStars program at a pivotal point for the ball. In fact, without Feld’s interaction with Wilson and Bernstein there may have never been a ball.

We first saw the Sphero Ball at Show Stoppers at CES in 2011, a year before almost everyone else saw the ball. You could control the ball with your smartphone and make it dance across the floor. It was right then and there that Russell Holly, a colleague of mine, and I, saw the true potential for the ball. Without any prompting we entered into a conversation with the founders about crazy cat toys, virtual golf, obstacle courses, virtual bowling and a slew of other things that would come to fruition in the following 18 months.

So how did it almost, not happen?

Well Bernstein and Wilson went through what feld called “Mentor Whiplash”. We’ve seen it happen at many accelerators across the country, the accelerator pivot.

From Feld’s account at SAI, Wilson and Bernstein sat down to meet with Feld and looked like whipped puppies. Their fire was gone from Feld’s previous visits with the duo.They had three slides on the table and Feld wanted to hear the ideas. Both Bernstein and WIlson were self-proclaimed robot geeks, and hackers and loved working with robotics all hours of the night.

As Feld tells it in his SAI column, the first idea was a door lock that unlocked with a smartphone. The second idea it seems no one could remember, and the third idea was the robotic ball. Problem is, there was no market for a robotic ball,no way to scale a robotic ball and it just seemed like a fun toy. Feld encouraged Wilson and Bernstein to go for it.

Bernstein, Wilson and heck Feld aren’t alone when it comes to pivoting in the accelerator. In fact, pivoting in the acce

Dave Knox,Brandery,StyleZen

lerator is justpart of the process. Top ranked Cincinnati accelerator, The Brandery, co-founder Dave Knox told us:

“In the early days of a startup, a company is searching to find a business model that resonates with consumers and can scale. This search can lead to subtle changes in their direction or at times a complete course correction that we often call a pivot. It is a process we have seen several times at the accelerator stage at The Brandery. At an accelerator, startups are put into the spotlight with their peer companies, mentors and potential investors. This leads to a quick determination if their startup is going to have what it takes to make it.”

“A great example of a pivot during the accelerator was Michael Wohlschlaeger in 2011. He came into The Brandery with a company called Meruni that was a data aggregation and analytics play. At The Brandery he found that the original business model was flawed but there was a segment of consumers in fashion that were incredibly interested in parts of the plan. He pivoted the company to StyleZen, focusing entirely on that fashion market opportunity. And while the pivot happened only 4 weeks before Demo Day, it ultimately led Michael and his team to raise a seed round from the venture firm CincyTech.”

Wohlschlaeger added:

“StyleZen started as Shoptimize, an automated, smart grocery list solution. The link between Shoptimize and StyleZen was harnessing the power of consumer data to build compelling solutions for the consumer (as opposed to just the brands and retailers). StyleZen is a personalize fashion discovery platform (truly “me-commerce) that learns a consumers preferences and distills the fashion universe down to a personalized, consumable level. ”

In Memphis Tennessee at the Seed Hatchery accelerator, Work For Pie pivoted from a website that was looking to link founders to technical co-founders, to an all out social network for open source developers. In fact, the name Work For Pie came from that idea where they would link founders together who would of course work for equity instead of pay (well at least by design). When the concept changed the name remained the same and they quickly took off getting a $300,000 add on funding round led by Solidus.

As for the little robotic ball. After making it’s debut at CES 2011 it was prominently featured at SXSW 2011 and Google I/O 2011 where the Sphero ball was a main attraction at the Google playground. The balls officially went on sale right before the holidays last year and are still selling like hotcakes, or like must have robotic balls controlled by your smartphone.

Check out the Sphero Ball rocking it at Google IO 2011 (1:30 in or so)

The Sphero ball also caught the attention of one Barrack Obama back in April. The President even got a little snippy with passerbys while he was trying to play with the Sphero Ball telling them “Excuse me- give me some space to drive my ball”.

Linkage:

Here’s Brad Feld’s SAI column

Check out Sphero here

Check out StyleZen here

Check out more startup stories from “everywhere else” here

Denver Startup: Full Contact Gives Employees $7500 For Paid Vacation,Vacation

Could you go completely off the grid and really enjoy vacation time with your friends and family? When we say off the grid we mean off the grid, no checking work emails, taking work phone calls, checking in on work gossip, no VPNing into your work network?

If you said yes, you might want to consider applying for a job at Denver startup FullContact. They have a whole list of openings including Android developer,business development, iOS and Mac developer,Outlook and Exchange .NET developer,platform engineer and web app/front end engineer.

FullContact specializes in an API that keeps your contacts up to date and so much more.

Now for the part about the $7500.

Bart Lorang, co-founder and CEO of FullContact offers his employees $7500 of paid, paid vacation time. This means that when you take vacation time, you get $7500 but you have to totally unplug. Lorang wants his employees to have mind resting, enjoyable vacation time.

That’s not the only reason for the paid, paid vacation though. Lorang feels that knowing that you’re going to go totally off the grid (at least the work grid) employees will be more comfortable creating total redundancy in their positions.

Knowing that employees will go completely off the grid, Lorang wrote in a blog post that they may:

They might empower direct reports to make more decisions.
They might be less likely to create a special script that isn’t checked into GitHub and only lives on their machine.
They might document their code a bit better.
They might contribute to the Company Wiki and share knowledge.

Lorang talks on the FullContact blog about how this idea of his for paid,paid vacation kept invading his brain. For a final blessing on the idea he reached out to TechStars and Founry’s Brad Feld who said:

“I love the Paid Paid Vacation concept and totally agree with it. A lot of people won’t spend the money because they don’t have it or think they’ll be happier if they save it. But they miss the value of disconnecting.

This exchange about paid, paid vacation assured Lorang that Feld would make a great board member and as a result the Foundry Group led the startups Series B round.

At this day and age, from a worker’s perspective this is supposed to sound like a no-brainer but to some it really isn’t. Their brains aren’t programmed for a total disconnect. There’s that inherent feeling of missing something, and then at work there’s the feeling that if someone else can do their job than they aren’t indispensable. The reality is, is that in an employment situation everyone is dispensable and yes the world will be there when you get back from Vacation.

Working at FullContact means you’ll get the time off, and the money to take a good, quality vacation.

Linkage:

Here’s FullContact’s website

Here are their job openings

Here’s their blogpost about “paid,paid vacation”

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

We’re on our own trip, a sneaker-strapped, nationwide startup road trip and really need your support.

Interview With The Co-Founder Of Boulder Startup: MobileDay, Just About Effortless Conference Calling

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I’m not typically about the sexiest apps. I rarely play games, although Songpop has me hooked right now, and I’m not looking for the coolest way to share anything most of the time, because I’m too busy on conference calls.

I could scream at the top of my lungs that email and texting work better for me. I could put an outgoing voicemail message that says email and texting works better for me (and I have) but each and everyday there are three to five people that insist on having conference calls. What irritates me even more is when the conference call, using a bridge, is with just one person… yo dude just call me directly.

So when I came across MobileDay a sigh of relief was let out. You see when nibletz took on the responsibility of being the voice of startups “everywhere else” and then we got some help from a research analyst at Kauffman, we found out that there are hundreds of thousands of startups “everywhere else”. There are a lot of people in the world who want to talk and tell their story, and above everything I really want to listen.

My conference calls aren’t so bad, I’ve actually learned a lot and planned some great things via conference call. But anyone who takes conference calls on a regular basis (Read just about any strartup founder’s daily routine), knows how cumbersome setting the call up can be.

First off there are hundreds of different conference call services, and without a doubt every single person who wants a conference call with me uses a different one.

Next, they typically have some 7-11 digit number that you need to call into to connect to “your party”. Well it doesn’t matter if I’m calling from my iPhone or my Android phone du jour, no smartphone has been able to allow you to dial into a number, press one number than automatically dial in another number, like the conference calls ID.

So whether I’m sitting in the office (yes we have an office), or sitting at home (got one of those too) or on the road (which is 90% of the time) I have to fumble through my calendar, emails or heck even text messages to get all the necessary information to “hop on the call” listen people since the most conventional conference call applications have been out there’s been know such thing as just “hopping on” a conference call… until now (wow 400+ words to get to that part)

Boulder startup MobileDay is that conference call participants dream app. Once the conference call is loaded into the app it reminds you of your call and than voila one touch of the screen and you’re not just on the conference calls service, you’ve dialed the “bridge” number too. They’ve got even more features on the way that will make attending, postponing or notifying conference participants easier too.

This comes in particularly handy on the nibletz sneaker-strapped nationwide startup roadtrip because taking a conference call driving through Indiana (sorry Nick), Arkansas, or even up and down 95 can be a pain in the ass with call drops (and I’m on Verizon). So if you get disconnected it’s the same simple easy process to get back on the call. All you have to do is touch the button, and then wait to “say your name to enter the conference”.

So what’s even better than MobileDay is that we got a few minutes to interview MobileDay co-founder Brad Dupee and I must say Brad with Steve Jobs gone you may be the next person to make my life easier.

Interview below