TechStars

“Skills & Persistence” Episode 4 of The Founders

andrewhyde — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:11:21 +0000

Another episode!

We have quite a few requests for a single place for all the video files, so we created a home for The Founders.

Here is episode 4, which revolves around a trip to Denver to visit KKO to play poker and meet some more of the fantastic mentors.

The three teams ideas are evolving and growing, sharing details about their companies and lives. We hope you enjoy!

You can also view the video at TechStars.tv, Vimeo, iTunes, YouTube or RSS.

Devver starts to lift the covers

davidcohen — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:50:14 +0000

Devver is a company from last summer (TechStars 08) that offers cloud-based testing and code quality tools to agile software teams. By utilizing the power of cloud computing, Devver’s services dramatically enhance developer’s productivity.

One of the things I always loved about they guys from Devver is their ability to figure out what they needed to go build, and then no matter how hard it was they just put their heads down and built it. And they did it well. We’re just now starting to see Devver lift the covers on their first first service, which is a cloud-based Ruby testing service. This product has recently moved into private beta and now supports the Test::Unit and RSpec testing libraries. They are now actively looking for Ruby developers to play around with their private beta.

In addition, they’ve also recently announced the fact they raised a $500,000 round from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

If you’re a Ruby shop and you want to run your test 4 times faster, get signed up for Devver’s beta and offer them some feedback.

Episode 3 of The Founders: A Community Party

andrewhyde — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:57:42 +0000

Another exciting episode of The Founders is launched! This week is A Community Party.

You can also view the video at TechStars.tv, Vimeo, iTunes, YouTube or RSS.

Jeffrey Kalmikoff

davidcohen — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:31:54 +0000

Jeffrey Kalmikoff is a Partner and Chief Creative Officer of skinnyCorp, the company behind Threadless. He’s also a TechStars mentor.

Threadless is about their community, and Jeffrey has worked with many TechStars companies such as Foodzie and some of the new 2009 companies to help them work effectively with their own communities. As he’s fond of saying, “If you treat your customers as your friends, they will respond in kind.”

Jeffrey recently shared his thoughts on being a TechStars mentor in his thoughtful post “What’s in it for me?” saying “While I may have expertise to offer this class of TechStars, they also have a lot to offer me by way of inspiration.”

We’re psyched to have Jeffrey helping out at TechStars, along with so many other fantastic mentors.

“The Founders” Episode 2- Orientation

andrewhyde — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:21:40 +0000

Our weekly video series is creating some buzz. Thanks to everyone that has shared this with their friends and colleagues.

This weeks episode is all about the initial orientation after the teams move to Boulder. The first day is called the longest day of the year by founders, and David shows why. They meet Brad Feld, the mentor network, and are introduced to the term ‘coopertition.’

Anand Iyer and Dave Drach from Microsoft (BizSpark!) comes for a visit to meet with the teams and talk about Boulder being a hot spot for tech.

The teams wrap up the next day, and enjoy some Boulder flavor with the ‘Happy Thursday Cruiser Bike Ride.’ Enjoy!

You can also view the video at TechStars.tv, Vimeo, iTunes or YouTube.

The Founders Launches

andrewhyde — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:01:29 +0000

We are proud to announce “The Founders” a weekly video series detailing the founders, mentors and events throughout the summer.

Every Tuesday at noon you can see the a new episode following three of our Boulder teams as they progress through the program. We are going to do 14 episodes showing what the experience is like as the teams build their companies.

We will be following around The Next Big Sound, Everlater and ReTel through their founders Alex White, David Hoffman, Samir Rayani, Natty Zola, Nate Abbott, Adam Rodnitzky, Scott Roberts and George Aspland.

This first episode “The Selected Few” covers the teams as they move and get set up in Boulder.

You can view the video at techstars.tv, vimeo, iTunes or youtube.

Boulder Kicks Off

andrewhyde — Mon, 25 May 2009 07:08:26 +0000

It has been an amazing first two weeks of activity at TechStars Boulder (TechStars Boston starts this Tuesday).

We kicked off TechStars.tv as a holding place for all the video content from what we create and from our mentor network. We are doing some really cool things with video this year.

The teams moved to Boulder from all around the world to live in Boulder until August. They moved into the office, met the other teams and checked out out the busy schedule.

The day meetings with mentors and evening sessions have been happening at an incredible pace. Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook have spent time meeting and offering tips to the teams as well as hosting sessions in the evenings talking about their technical solutions and offering advice.

We hosted a community party for all those in Boulder that wanted to meet the teams and hang out with the greater startup enthusiasts in the area. The Autumn Film played a fantastic set to a packed room. We had over 280 in attendance throughout the night (not bad for a Tuesday).

TechStars Community Party

From feedback from the past years we have organized quite a few social events for the teams to get to know each other. There has been to a rooftop bar crawl, hiking up a Flatiron and a poker party in Denver. The teams from the first two years came out to offer their insight as well as get to know the teams.

Hiking a Flatiron on a spring day

Finally we hosted a FaceBook Developer Garage with over 100 in attendance to listen to Dave Morin talk about the future of the platform. The development community in Boulder has an amazing energy.

Dave Morin FaceBook Developer Garage Boulder

With Boston starting shortly, expect updates from back east on the new offices and teams.

Where our applications come from

davidcohen — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:07:14 +0000

Because TechStars gets so many applications, we’re often asked what the trends are. This year, we decided to try to blog a bit more statistical data from the application process. Thanks to Josh Whitney for spending some time cleaning up and helping us visualize this data.

First, here are the counties from which we received applications for 2009. About 10% of our applications came from outside the US this year. The darker the country, the more applications we received.

Within the US, here’s an idea of where the applications are coming from.

Obviously, we see more applications from Boulder/Denver and Boston than is generally representative. It’s easier for companies living there to apply, so those areas should be discounted somewhat if you’re trying to get a sense of where the action is.

Here’s one last view. The numbers within each state are the not the number of applications, rather, they represent the number of unique cities in that state that we saw applications from.

You can click on any of the above images to see a larger resolution image. More to come as we get some time…

TechStars Boulder Community Party

andrewhyde — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:08:46 +0000

We are pleased to announce the first annual TechStars Boulder Community Party happening May 19th 2009 at The B-Side. Beers, startups and as an added kicker, one of the most up and coming bands I know, The Autumn Film.

The Autumn Film

If you are curious about The Autumn Film, you can download three EP’s here. They are really an amazing band.

Back to the community party. We are doing this for the great Boulder community, to say thank you for the support and encouragement. We will have ten new TechStars teams in attendance, who are excited to meet everyone. The teams will be looking for feedback on their products down the road, and to do this, we need your help.

We need you to come and drink a pint, meet the teams and keep building up the Boulder tech scene with your amazing startups, projects and energy.

We will be hosting the finest in local microbrews all night. To avoid a sell out of the event in 5 minutes (like the last Ignite Boulder) we are doing a small charge of $5 that will go to nothing but better beer and gifts if we can get them in time.

Get your ticket here!

Look forward to seeing everyone!

BusinessWeek Names BrightKite and Foodzie Among Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs

andrewhyde — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:51:07 +0000

This morning BusinessWeek published a list of the top 22 “Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2009.” On that list were 2007 TechStars alumni BrightKite and 2008 alumni Foodzie.

They write about BrightKite and founder Martin May:

Dozens of startups offer mobile location-based applications, but few have gained wide traction. Brightkite amassed a big enough following that by April it was bought by Limbo. Now, Brightkite founder Martin May is charged with merging the two products, both of which let users add notes and see others’ posts on such locales as restaurants or music festivals.

Not on the list was cofounder Brady Becker who missed the age cutoff by just a year. Here are both founder pictured last year at the TechStars Boulder office:

Also highlighted was Foodzie:

Friends since their first year at Virginia Tech, the founders of Foodzie reconvened after college to build an online outlet for artisan food. Chief Marketing Officer Olson had worked at a specialty food retailer and saw how tough it was for local producers to get shelf space.

Here is the Foodzie team after their presentation at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup in 2008:

Congratulations to the teams!