A few weeks ago Dusty Davidson and I landed in the state of Colorado to connect with many of the individuals building that region’s entrepreneurial class.
We had the opportunity to meet many of them through their attendance at last year’s Big Omaha event, and have been talking about heading out there for some time, and finally pulled the trigger.
First stop was in Denver to see a friend of mine, James Eberhard. Eberhard is a serial entrepreneur who sold his first company in his mid-twenties and is now working heavily in the mobile space related to the deployment of SMS / text message technology in both the public and private sector through his company, Mobile Accord. This is just of the many projects he’s working on and we hope to follow up with James in a few months when he’s able to share more on other ventures. It is always motivating to reconnect with Eberhard as I’ve often found him to be on top of what’s coming down the pipe in many arenas.
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From there it was onward to Boulder where we connected with a whole host of Boulder’s entrepreneurs who are pushing the envelope…
Friday we connected with Rob Johnson, one of the alumni of the first TechStars class with a company he built called EventVue. EventVue is a slick application with social networking tools that help conference and event attendees get the most out of their networking experience both before and after an event. It’s an amazing tool that builds the community around what might have traditionally been though of a “date specific” event and turns it into something that spans lasting connections. We’re more than likely on board for using it during next year’s Big Omaha event, as well!
From there we stopped in to the headquarters of Matt Galligan’s new company, SimpleGeo. I met Galligan while at Big Omaha and he was one of the inaugural members of TechStars as well, who sold his first company, Socialthing, to AOL last year. You can tell Galligan is another one of those guys that always has ideas spinning through his head and we’re anxiously awaiting the opportunity to bring you more news on his new projects with SimpleGeo.
Later on, we connected with with Jeremy Tanner, who’s very active in all things “Boulder Entrepreneurial Community,” for a discussion around what he’s seen through his travels as well as what makes the Boulder community special. Tanner, along with Rick Turoczy of Portland and Jessica Rohloff of New Orleans joined SPN in submitting a panel to present at next year’s SXSW Interactive conference!
Rounding out the day Friday was a meeting with Alex White, co-founder of Next Big Sound, to talk about what they’re doing with their startup as well as what benefits they’ve realized from being a part of the Boulder/ TechStars community.
Lastly, on Saturday we had a wonderful breakfast with Micah Baldwin and Brad Feld. Many of you know Micah from his talk at this year’s Big Omaha event and he’s up to some big things as always. Very encouraging and motivating to talk with him about what it takes to build a culture and supportive ecosystem and he always has time and new insights to share.
Brad Feld is a managing director at the Foundry Group and truly one of the nation’s leading visionaries and VC’s in the entrepreneurial space. The Foundry Group is a venture capital firm focused on making investments in early-stage information technology, Internet and software startups. Their one passion is working alongside entrepreneurs to give birth to new technologies and to build those technologies into industry-leading companies. They are located in Boulder, but invest in companies across North America. The Foundry Group’s current venture fund of $225M was launched in 2007 and has seen some successful returns over time.
Feld also has a very informative blog, which I’d encourage you to follow if you aren’t already.
My main takeaways from the visit to Boulder was the fact that this infrastructure and culture has been created in a relatively short amount of time with an extraordinary amount of hard work and time put in by a relatively small group of people.
Take a look through just a few of the interviews we shot and we’re planning on heading out to Boulder more often in the future to learn from what they’re doing and discover new projects.
