Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Foundry Group

Startups: Apply for Your Free #Gluecon Demo Pod (Deadline March 24)

March 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Can the Glue Conference get any better? This will be the third annual, and I can honestly say this year's event will blow the roof off. Listen: if you're a developer or tech startup founder, get your ass to Denver, May 24-26. You will kick yourself over and over in said ass if you don't! The quality of the programming and attendees is the best of any cloud/developer/big data/mobile conference out there. Trust me — I go to a lot of conferences. I know these things. And the #Gluecon crew is making it even easier for a bunch of startups to get visibility there this year…

Glue-DemoPavilion-banner How? Thanks to the main event underwriter, Alcatel-Lucent (and its OpenAPIservice), the Glue Conference is awarding 15 startups with a free demo pod at the event. Here's the post on the great Gluecon Blog that will tell you all about this oportunity.  You have till March 24th to apply, so go for it!

What will the conference program offer?  Well, that's taking even more shape as we speak, but check out this post on the Gluecon blog for juicy details about just some of the Gluecon sessions.

A quote from event organizer Eric Norlin: "We're working our butts off to make sure that Gluecon is the single most impact-filled conference for cloud/API developers this year. I hope you'll choose to join us."

[UPDATE: In a previous post, I wrote this: 'Glue' is a Cloud Conference That's Different – It's for *Developers* (and some interesting new twists on the next one)]

For basic details on this year's event, hit this register page and read the summary. Omni-BroomfieldThen register while the price is the lowest! (Try this code and see if it still gets you an even lower discount: alu12.)  And make your hotel reservation. The venue is a very cool place called the Omni Resort in Broomfield, and the rate is quite reasonable. Gonna be tons of great learning, killer networking, and it's always lots of fun, too!  See you there.

 

Gist Gives You the Context You Need for Meaningful Engagements

May 13, 2010 / / 0 Comments


Gist-diagram Today, I had an opportunity to meet with a couple of the good folks
from Gist, a startup based in Seattle that helps you "Know More about
Who You Know."  It's a neat app that I've been using for some time, and
that includes their native iPhone app — which is a great way
to stay in touch when I'm on the go with what my network is up to.  I
also love the daily email updates I get from Gist that give me all the
latest content from my most important contacts. 

I sat down for breakfast with Robert Pease, VP of Marketing, and Jenn Pitts, Marketing Operations Manager, who were in town for a conference. My friend Buzz Bruggeman in Seattle was nice enough to give me a heads-up that Robert and Jenn were coming to Minneapolis, and I thought it would be a great
Jenn+Robert-Gist opportunity to get an update on the company.  I had previously met the CEO, T.A. McCann, last year at a couple of conferences I attend in Denver, Defrag and Glue, where I had first learned about the company's app.

Here's the audio interview I recorded of our conversation, which is about 22 minutes long. Excuse the sound quality, because we were in the very large lobby restaurant in the Hyatt downtown, and there was a fair amount of background noise. At one point, there was even a loud clap of thunder outside that interrupted our chat! But it was good to hear about how this startup is doing in advancing its mission of helping people improve their relationships with the people and companies that matter most to them.

• Download or listen to Graeme's interview with Gist (MP3)"

GlueCon 09: My Interviews with VCs Brad Feld and Seth Levine

May 14, 2009 / / 0 Comments

While I was reporting from the first-year Glue Conference the past few days in Denver, I had the opportunity to interview two of the guys behind the scenes in launching and planning this great event: Brad Feld and Seth Levine, partners in VC firm Foundry Group, which is based in nearby Boulder, CO. (Actually, of the two, Seth was more involved in Glue, while Brad was the main guy behind launching a sister event called Defrag, which is held in the fall in Denver, the first one being in November 2007.) 

I had noticed in the days leading up to Glue that Foundry Group had announced a new investment (Gist, whose founder was at Glue), then I saw two more investments they announced on their blogs while the event was going on (Medialets and CloudEngines). So, I decided to see if I could interview both Brad and Seth during breaks on Day 2 of Glue to learn about these latest new portfolio companies of theirs.

Brad (left photo) and Seth typify what I’ve called before The New Face of Venture Investing — a post I actually did in December 2007, which specifically called out Brad. BradFeld   I’ve also written previously about Seth, in a post from June 2008 called The Best Advice I’ve Seen Lately on Using Startup Advisors. They are both really nice guys, wicked smart, and doing great work helping many entrepreneurs build successful startups in a place that…well, is not Silicon Valley.  Yes, they’ve proved in spades that it can be done. SethLevine And, unlike your typical VCs, they do believe in investing outside their own backyard — as is the case with all three of their latest investments.  Sure, many of their portfolio companies are in Colorado, where a lot of innovation is going on (which they’re involved in on a day-to-day basis — including the TechStars program, which they helped launch).  But they’re also smart enough to know great ideas and great teams can live anywhere. I love the way they get involved in these events of theirs — they’re right in the middle of it all, very much a part of the “community” that each of these events they’ve launched really has become. It doesn’t take long to realize that both these guys are “people persons” through and through.

I spoke with Brad first, about the Gist investment, which had been announced the week before, and in particular about the investment they had just announced early that morning, on Day 2 of Glue: CloudEngines.

• Download the MP3 of my interview with Brad Feld.

Later the same morning, I spoke at greater length with Seth, primarily about Foundry Group leading a $4M Series A investment in Medialets, which had been announced on Day 1 of Glue.  We also spoke a bit about an earlier investment of Seth’s in the advertising space, AdMeld.

• Download the MP3 of my interview with Seth Levine.

For more about the Glue Conference, see my Twitterstream for the past three days.  I must have tweeted darn-near a couple hundred times!  And I saw this morning after I was back in Minneapolis that conference organizer Eric Norlin said he’d just read through all the tweets on the event — 62 pages total!  You can find the whole shebang by going to search.twitter.com and entering “gluecon” in the search box. It was a very successful event by all accounts.  I’m really happy I was part of it, and have already said I’ll sign up for next year! 

The Best Advice I’ve Seen Lately On Using Startup Advisors

June 8, 2008 / / 3 Comments

Seth Levine is a VC in Boulder, CO, a partner with Foundry Group. I kinda know Seth, through his connections to the Twin Cities (he’s a graduate of Macalester in St. Paul), though we’ve never actually met.  We’ve emailed quite a bit about goings-on here in Minnesota, after having just missed each other at the Defrag conference in Denver last November.  Seth and his fellow partners are quite the bloggers. One of his sidekicks, Brad Feld (whom I did meet at Defrag), has a very popular blog called Feld Thoughts. And they also run another blog that has high readership in the entrepreneurial community called Ask the VC.

Seth’s blog is called Seth Levine’s VC Adventure. And, recently, he began a series of posts on startup advisors, a topic near and dear to my heart. Advicedefinition
In a departure for Seth, the posts are actually written by a guest poster, Gerald Joseph.  Part I was good, but Part II is even better: The role of company advisors (Part II).

Here’s how Seth explained how these posts came about:

“One of the things I enjoy the most about writing this blog is the discussion I engage in with readers – both through blog comments and in direct emails.  Over the past month I’ve had a particularly enjoyable exchange with Gerald Joseph.  One of the topics we’ve discussed is the role of advisors in the life of a start-up.  I generally think of advisors as non-paid ‘friends of the company’ and as you’d probably guess, advocate a pretty deliberate organization and use of advisors.  Gerald’s view is a little more expansive as he thinks of ‘advisors’ as the larger ecosystem that surrounds (or should surround) a start up company – one that includes people you pay (attorneys, CPAs, etc) and the people who pay you (your angel investors) in addition to the business and industry experts that are the typical ‘advisors’ to young companies.  I like this line of thinking and offered Gerald the chance to put his thoughts into a post.  He took me up on that idea and came up with a four part series on the topic that I’ll put up over the next few weeks.  After the final post I’ll summarize some of my thoughts as well as comments from readers.”

For entrepreneurs at any stage, I think these posts are excellent. I encourage anyone who could use some…uh…advice on how to use advisors to read them all, including Parts III and IV yet to come.

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