fluxcapacity

It's been a crazy busy couple of days at TechStars. First, we had three of the heavy weights of the tech world, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft come talk to us.

Monday was "Google Day", we:

• Learned about OpenSocial, and AppEngine from Kevin Marks and Dion Almaer.
• Got to hear the story of FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google in 2007, first hand from founder Dick Costello. It was interesting to hear from him how the rallying cry for the company was "get all the feeds." Dick told us how people would come in with a bunch of feeds they got and other stuff that he called "rabbits". He said he would throw the rabbits away and then ask "Do we have all the feeds yet? No? Then go get all the feeds!" It's a very simple, measurable goal and it probably helped FeedBurner stay focused. Here's Devver's take on it.

Tuesday was "Amazon Day", we:

• Got excited about Amazon Web Services after hearing from Mike Culver. Amazon is building some ridiculously cool services for developers to use. We've already built some infrastructure around S3, but we'll be looking into other services like EC2 as well.
• Heard about Shelfari (Amazon invested in them) from founder Josh Hug at Colorado University. We got to hang out with him right before he presented at the Boulder New Tech Meetup. Josh did a great job showing off Shelfari, especially because he simply showed a compelling demo rather than a bunch of slides. He also had great answers, mostly "yes we already do that", for all of the questions he got asked. The presentation I enjoyed the most was Watching Grass Grow. The creator of the site uses webcams to keep track of and display seemingly mundane things like his lawn growing and paint drying. Apparently the site gets about 500,000 unique visitors a year!

Wednesday was "Microsoft Day", we:

• Learned about what Microsoft can do for startups from Don Dodge, Dave Drach, and Anand "A.I." Iyer. We actually met Don and Anand at MIX 08 in Las Vegas back in March and it was great seeing them again.
• Got to hear the story of NewsGator from founder/CTO Greg Reinacker. Greg was the only founder, and it was interesting hearing his perspective on getting started, his interactions with Brad Feld, bringing on a CEO, and building a site to scale.

But wait, there's more! Over the past couple of days we also:

• Worked hard to get a demo ready for a meeting with David Cohen.
• Rewrote our pitch 3 times.
• Horribly messed up App-X's pitch. At one of the sessions each of the teams had to give another team's pitch. I was chosen to give App-X's pitch, and I think I said something to the effect of, "App-X uses Salesforce and builds stuff on top of it to do stuff." Instead of quitting while I was only slightly behind, I proceeded to say another sentence which also made no sense. Sorry guys! I'll try to get better at it!
• Found out that UPS lost a 148 pound server we shipped. How do you lose a box that's 4' by 3' by 3' and weights 148 pounds!!? Luckily we had insurance on it.
• Watched the Wings win the Stanley Cup! We were at Conor O' Neills here in Boulder. Interestingly, there are two Conor O' Neills, one here and one in Ann Arbor where me and Jeff went to school.

Although it's been busy, we've had a lot of fun. I'm definitely looking forward to drinking a few beers on Friday night though!