Boulder OpenCoffee Club

July 8th Update

ross@jasbone.com — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:01:30 -0700

(Lance here, filling in for a vacationing Jason...) Thanks to everyone who dropped in this morning at the Boulder Open Coffee Club. Where else can you geek out with 30 other people discussing the complexities of inter-community exchanges of trust management and reputation systems? A consistent theme I hear from newcomers is their surprise at how great the startup scene is in Boulder. How great is it? We got to hear about four new startups in four minutes: eSwarm, eBookPie, TravelFli and Verving. Also, plan on attending the Thin Air Summit, a New Media conference hosted here in Denver this November. We'll be back at The Cup in two weeks (July 22nd) , see you there!

May 27th Update

jason@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:35:53 -0700

A good time, as usual. The TechStars are coming! The TechStars are coming! The guys from Ignighter were there and present and it was nice to see some new folks.

Nothing earth shattering to report. It was cold today.

See y'all in two weeks.

April 1 Boulder OpenCoffee Club Meeting

jason@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:29:45 -0700

Today's guest writer is Lance Weber. Lance, take it away!
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Thanks to Jason for letting me guest host today and not sharing his cold with the rest of us; I know it caused a little confusion at first since we look so much alike!

More importantly, I'd like to thank the great folks who dropped in for some coffee and camaraderie this morning. I think we ended up with somewhere near 25-30 people, with about a 50/50 mix of old hands and newcomers. Some quick highlights:

Several people who made it to Startup Weekend Boulder II talked about the experience. I'm a huge fan of Startup Weekends, I like to think of them as Amish barn raising for the digital age. I highly recommend adding "Live through a Startup Weekend" to your Life Experiences TODO list.

Goldie gave us a shout out about the Colorado Podcamp event scheduled for this fall. Anyone with an interest in new social media should definitely check this out.

We also tried out a second iteration of Cluster Discussions, where you are encouraged to present a problem to the entire group, then as we break up into networking anyone with input/interest in the topic can gather and discuss. Feedback on this has been good, and I think it makes for a great ice breaker and segue point into the networking part of the meeting.

That's all the updates I have from the meeting this week. On a personal note, I like to measure the success of events like these by how energized I am afterwards. I'm always pleasantly surprised at how pumped I am throughout the rest of my Tuesdays when I've made the time to drop in and spend some time with everyone here. Thanks and see you in two weeks!
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* Luckily for the rest of you I only had about 5 minutes notice which left no time to prepare a highly elaborate yet extremely sophomoric April Fools Open Coffee Meeting event. *sigh*

Wow! Did we really have close to 50 people today?????

jason@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:00:30 -0700

Yes! Wow.

New this time was a “show and tell” portion of the meeting where members asked the group their collective wisdom about challenges their businesses are facing. It was very well received. And don’t worry, there was still plenty of networking, coffee and gab time.

As we continue to grow in size and seek to make our club vibrant and interesting, member Matt Emmi came up with an interesting idea: Next time, members can pitch an idea that they want help with and we can form into smaller groups and contribute to the idea that excites each of us the most. Sounds like a neat experiment, so if you have something that you’d like help with, come with your idea!

As usual, we’ll make sure that we don’t over “agenda-ize” and I still anticipate that our formats will change each time we meet. Maybe that’s what makes us interesting.

Thank you all for your participation and all of the graciousness you’ve shown the new guy to Boulder.

Best,

Jason

Boulder Open Coffee Club March 4th Update

jason@foundrygroup.com — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:27:47 -0700

From the typewriter of Lance Weber....

I think it's safe to say we've anointed The Cup as our new home. Many thanks to the great folks there for making us feel welcome! Our group continues to be a great mix of core folks and new folks; this week we had several out of town guests including some of the startups in town for the TechStars For a Day event.

Today's session kicked off with a round of announcements from attendees and then promptly jumped into a special presentation from Andrew Hyde and Matt Emmi, proud founders of the new startup VC Wear (Moderately NSFW - language).

Their perfectly delivered deadpan pitch (again, moderately NSFW - language) was hilarious. The background story on VCWear is great: Andrew and Matt were on the plane home from the Bloomington StartupWeekend when they decided to do "StartupPlaneride" and launch a site in three hours. How shocked were they to actually get orders for shirts at $100 each? "We realized we actually had to go get some printed!" said Andrew.

Looking forward to our March 18th gathering, we're going to test-drive a new feature. One attendee will present a problem or challenge they are experiencing and the group will take 10-15 minutes to discuss, suggest and recommend. If you'd like to be a "presenter", please send me an email letting me know what you'd like to have the group discuss.

February 19th BOCC Redux

jason@foundrygroup.com — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:15:25 -0700

Although not asking for any credit, Gwen Bell gets all the credit for the following write-up. Gwen, you have the floor... (nice picture on your blog, Gwen).

Another excellent yesterday morning. I walked in to find about thirty people seated in the back area of The Cup. Jenn announced that Yallery.com Yallery.com, a social site for artists, collectors and galleries, has launched!

Yallery, according to Jenn, exists to "socialize art, by contextualizing the connections formed through art creation, sale and possession." She also told us she hopes to attend http://bilconference.pbwiki.com/, an "unconference" alternative to TED, both of which will take place in March.

There's a new Mac user meetup happening at the Highland City Club on February 27th at 7pm. Matt Emmi, CEO and CTO of One Button Life, along with Michael Izatt, are hosting a Mac Users Night: Better than the Genius Bar. Michael and Matt will help people with things like setting up a blog, video chatting and more.

On my way out, I met with Aaron Sagray, co-founder of TerraFrame, Inc., "a startup that is building a full stack framework for the Java platform. The product is perfect for building any web application that requires complex business rules, like ERP apps and collaborative Web 2.0 software." Aaron talked with me some about the timeline for TerraFrame and his enthusiasm for it is contagious. I look forward to hearing more from them in 2008.

Overall, another great meetup with talented people getting things done. Please join us in two weeks at the next Boulder Open Coffee Club meeting.

BOCC update for Feb 5th, 2007

jason@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:00:54 -0700

A great turnout today - thanks to everyone who came. Gwen Bell has a good summary of the day. Yes, that is a direct quote of mine. Guilty as charged.

To highlight, Jennifer Ross and Patti Miller really might be onto something:

Boulder TechBootstrap was launched today by Patti Miller a "serial sales person" and the VP of Sales at Test Common and Jennifer Ross the founder of Yallery, exactly two weeks after first discussing the idea at the previous Boulder Coffee Club meeting.

Boulder TechBootstrap is meant to bridge the gap between networking events and online resources that bring together the community, but aren't optimized for the identification and exchange of locally available information and resources.

There are two components to the site. The first is a Wiki, that should evolve into a living directory of information, people, skills and resources. The second is a forum for more spontaneous exchange of information.

If they get the traction that they need and the community supports this with content, this will be a great resource for everyone. I encourage everyone to go check it out.

BOCC Update for Jan 22

jason@foundrygroup.com — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:30:23 -0700

We had a huge turnout with a lot of new faces. Gwen Bell serves up the details here.

Our new location of the The Cup is working out perfectly.

January 8th - a new BOCC

jason@foundrygroup.com — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 09:58:02 -0700

Great turnout yesterday and fun topics: everything from economic forecasting, to CES preview to one of our members having the most interesting holiday vacation stories. The CUP was a great find and from now on we'll meet in the back room.

Hope to see everyone there in two weeks.

November 13th, 2007 Recap

jason@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 09:33:08 -0700

So once again, the topic of monetizing music 2.0 came to our attention. It's a fascinating topic and I welcome as much debate as possible. Also, we learned today that Jenn wants to be paid in Canadian dollars.

October 2, 2007 Recap

jason@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:53:09 -0700

Today we had two topics at the BOCC. First, Lance Weber presented his "summer book report" on the book that I recommended to him: The Entrepreneurs Guide to Business Law. Lance is a rock-star techie and he said the book was among the best, if not the best book on the subject that he's read. I've read cover to cover both of the earlier versions of the book and think it's mandatory reading for any entrepreneur starting a company. It's a great read, well written and actually fun.

Our second topic revolved around the NVCA model document task force. In case you are curious, you can find all the documents you need to finance your company in NVCA form. Yes, "yours truly" was one of the draftspersons. (There were about a 100).

Sept 18: Andrew Hyde on StartupWeekend Toronto

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 09:43:44 -0700

We had a terrific OpenCoffee this morning at Vic's. Andrew Hyde gave us a report from Startup Weekend Toronto that happened this past weekend. Amidst numerous challenges (including torrential rain, ferry boat schedules, and international travel), it looks like the Toronto team was able to pull of a successful product and startup experience, and Andrew is taking the lessons to heart to make future Startup Weekends as strong and beneficial as possible.

As background, you can learn more about the concept behind Startup Weekend at Andrew's Startup Weekend website:

Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion?

Startup Weekend answers that question and more. A unique three-day experience, Startup Weekend brings the best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams, and develop the product, marketing and revenue model.

As he puts it, Startup Weekend is about taking the 20% of the people (that do 80% of the work) and putting them all together in one room for a weekend. As a result, "The people who come to Startup Weekend are a dangerous group." When planned and managed effectively, the results can be astounding.

Which is a perfect lead-in to Joe Scharf, who gave us an update on VoSnap, which was the product of the Boulder Startup Weekend that was held the weekend of July 6-8th, 2007. VoSnap is alive and well, and a core team is continuing to move it forward, and it is now open as a public beta. In fact, in a beautiful twist of serendipity, or perhaps pure genius, VoSnap was used at the Startup Weekend Toronto to vote and decide on issues, and will likely be used in future Startup Weekends as well.

Props to Andrew and Joe and all the Startup Weekend-ians (Weekend-erians?) for all their hard work, and for turning out at the OpenCoffee to fill the rest of us in.

UPDATE 19-SEP-2007: A couple of other folks have weighed in on the Startup Weekend Toronto event. Brill Pappin was one of the Toronto organizers and blogged about it here. Steve Poland was one of the visitors from out of town and wrote about it on his blog here.

August 21 BOCC Recap

jason@foundrygroup.com — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:38:44 -0700

Thanks to everyone who came. We had a large and engaged group this past week with several new folks attending. The network continues to expand.

For those of you who missed the session, Ari Newman of Newman Venture Advisors, TechStars and Filtrbox fame (yeah, busy guy) gave a very interesting presentation on the world of Web hosting.

In his words: "The world of web hosting has been evolving rapidly in the last few years and there are new options available to web site and web application operators. It would take ages to cover all of the options and give everyone equal billing, so for the sake of an "update", lets focus on what I think is one of the most compelling advancements which is grid-based virtual hosting. These solutions are a major step forward from standard virtual hosting where you have an account on a single server along with hundreds of other users. Every element of the system is redundant and distributed and your site is able to consume more resources (memory/cpu/storage) on-demand. The two services we'll look at are Media Temple's grid service (gs), and Mosso from Rackspace."

Check out the following link for Ari's analysis on the two services.

Also, BOCC regular Jason Haislmaier of HRO is up to his old tricks again hosting another helpful Open Source Webinar. He's a pro at all of these things, so definitely check it out.

Boulder OpenCoffee Beer Outing

jason@foundrygroup.com — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 07:22:09 -0700

Thanks to all of those who came out to the Foundry roof deck. Despite a little weird weather, a good time was had by all.

We are back to Vic's at 8am on August 7th. See y'all there.

July 17th Meeting

jason@foundrygroup.com — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:04:03 -0700

No morning Vics, it's all about the beer at the Foundry roof deck at 4pm. See y'all there.