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: venture capital (Page 7 of 14)

Minnebar Rocked!

April 22, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Excellent speakers and panels, and a great crowd yesterday at our local BarCamp event. More proof that we have a vibrant tech community here in Minnesota! Major expertise, lots of energized developers and entrepreneurs, and some exciting, budding startups in the works.
Also more proof that online and offline community can be mashed up successfully…. Minnebarlogo

It was great to see a top VC firm in state, Split Rock Partners, as one of seven sponsors of Minnebar. I told partner Michael Gorman he blended right in wearing a tee shirt and shorts — love that! 🙂 And I saw him in the Ruby on Rails session that I also attended. (We have an outstanding group of “RonR” developers here, by the way.)

The turnout for the GetGoMN session was fantastic, with Scott Littman and George Reese telling the story behind the recently launched site to support entrepreneurs. Getgologo175w Lots of great questions and input from several people. I’m convinced that promoting Minnebar on the GetGo site contributed to the record attendance. The biggest turnout yet for a BarCamp in this country! Yeeeee-haww!!!

Minnebarrooftop_2 Photo: Beers on the roof with event sponsors John Roberts (left) and Harold Slawik (right) of New Counsel plc, and Bill McLeslie of ipHouse. The event wi-fi was awesome — Bill hooked us up with 7 megabits of bandwidth. Gorgeous day in the Twin Cities — the high hit 83 F!

Minnebarintraining My favorite photo at the event: We start ’em young here in MN. Matt Bauer, ace developer just recruited to MotionBox in NYC (but he didn’t have to move!), shows a developer-in-training how it’s done. Matt had just finished his session on Adobe Flex.

Lots more photos on my Minnebar Flickr set. Other photo sets are linked on the Minnebar site. I suspect you’ll also be able to read some more about the event at the Star-Tribune’s Vita.MN site and in the Pioneer Press, because they both had people covering the event.

Coolest thing I learned at Minnebar? I met a former Google employee (an early employee), who moved back here from the Valley his wife, who was also a Google employee, and he’s about to launch a cool new web app online. Stay tuned….

Kudos again to the three hardest working event organizers on the planet (volunteers, yet!): Dan Grigsby, Ben Edwards, and Luke Francl…and, especially, a great big thank you to the sponsors. This all-day event is an annual thing, but evening events are held throughout the year, too. So, watch for the next “MinneDemo” and come learn and celebrate Minnesota innovation with us!

GetGoMN Gets Goin’ – and I’m In!

March 4, 2007 / / 2 Comments

A new web site for Minnesota entrepreneurs, investors, and the people who support them was unveiled this week at a press conference hosted by Governor Tim Pawlenty at the Capitol. I was invited, and did manage to get one good photo of the festivites in the very grand and impressive Governor’s Reception Room. [It was an interesting juxtaposition, talking about a new web site in the midst of all the historic surroundings.] I also got to meet the Gov, and I’ll tell you why I was there in a bit.

Govatpodium499w

GetGoMN is a free service and aims to be nothing less than a MySpace for the state’s entrepreneurs and angel investors. It’s been in the planning stages for more than a year and is a unique collaboration of nine of Minnesota’s leading institutions in education, government, and business. I like the goal of GetGo — it’s simply this: “To make Minnesota a better place to conceive, build, launch, and grow new businesses.”

See how the Star-Tribune covered the news: Website Calling Business Angels. Other local media outlets ran items as well, including The Business Journal. And here’s how my friend and fellow MN blogger, Garrick Van Buren, wrote about it at MNteractive.

GetGo is a great new tool that will help Minnesota entrepreneurs, investors, and supporting organizations find and keep track of one another. But it goes beyond just connecting — it provides a way to share and manage all the documents and information relating to those connections (securely!).

The one-liner is this: “GetGo is where Minnesota’s entrepreneurs get connected, get resources, and get going.” Love that!

Now, more about why I was at the press event, and what this has to do with me: I’m very proud to say I’ve been tapped to be GetGo’s “chief evangelist”! [I’ve always wanted to have a title like that — thank you, Guy Kawasaki, for inventing it… 🙂 ] What does it mean? What will I be doing? Well, I’ll be launching a blog at GetGoMN.org, for one thing — where I’ll now do all my Minnesota-related blog posts. [I’ll reserve Tech-Surf-Blog for things of a more general, national, or global interest. Well, maybe an occasional Minnesota item…] I’ll still be doing my consulting, or course, since this is only a part-time gig. But I’m extremely excited about the potential of GetGo, and really look forward to working with the three founders of this great new site: Tom Kieffer, Scott Litman, and Dan Mallin. They’re really the “chiefs”… 🙂 But I very much share their vision for the site, and I look forward now to working even closer with Minnesota entrepreneurs (if that’s possible!)….

I ask all of you for your support, and keep in mind that the site is just out of beta, so there are still kinks to work out, and lots more good things are yet to come. I’m excited, too, that membership at GetGo, after only a few days, is already exceeding expectations. In the last few days, I’ve invited several of you into my first network at GetGo (which is for my consulting company, GT&A Strategic Marketing), and will be happy to get more of you into that as we get started on GetGo. I’ll have a blog there, too! Many networks are being created as we speak. Start one of your own!

It’s official: entrepreneurship in Minnesota just took one great, big step forward.

Entrepreneurs: Work on Your Conceptual Metaphors!

February 28, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Being smack in the middle of Entrepreneurship Week, I can’t think of a better link to point my startup readers to today than this blog post by Will Price, which he published yesterday. Will is a VC at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. In this very thoughtful piece, he nails one of the most important, yet little talked about, aspects of preparing to pitch VCs. Okay, it’s somewhat academic — yes, we’re talking here about “conceptual metaphors,” people. But this is great stuff! And, after all, conceptual metaphors is really what mathematics is all about, right? So, startup founders out there who are programmers and engineers can especially relate. [There’s a reason, I’ve come to learn, that so many successful entrepreneurs and VCs were math majors, or had a heavy dose of it in engineering school. This piece kind of brings this reality home.]

I now have this post on my Recommended Must-Read List for anyone even thinking about ever approaching VCs for money. Save this link, friends, and learn and practice what it’s telling you. You will need it!

While we’re at it, there’s another great piece you should check out today on Startup Journal: Young Entrepreneurs Face Higher Hurdles — worth reading even if you’re not so young.

Split Rock Coughs Up Big Bucks for Local Firm (Do Tell)

February 23, 2007 / / 2 Comments

But don’t get too excited — it’s just another late-stage deal. Why are we not surprised? Gearworks, as reported by the Pioneer Press, just closed on yet another $21 million in VC, of which our local Split Rock Partners contributed $7.5 million. Pilesofcash The partner on the deal is, of course, Michael Gorman. Yes, that’s a lot of money in a single round for a MN tech firm. And it now means that Gearworks has raised — are you ready? — a total of $59 million since its founding back in 1999. Of course, they blew threw a lot of that cash in a model since adandoned, but they seem to be onto a real market now for location-based services. Gearworkslogo It must be a good market, because for this much money to be invested, and now the conservative late-stage guys coming in, there has to be a big payback seen just over the horizon. [IPO?] Well, less so of a payback for the late-stage money, I guess…

But all this big-bucks stuff has little meaning to people in the early-stage investment world, where I know most of us live. For a strange juxtaposition to the above news, check out this video of the latest panel that Guy Kawasaki moderated. It’s amazing how companies today can get launched with so little capital — at least when the Internet is central to what they do. Many of ’em all but thumb their noses at VCs — I hear it all the time. One guy I heard it from recently was Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme, chatting with him last month at CES/Bloghaus. What some of these guys are able to do, with such minimal startup funding, is amazing. More power to ’em!

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