fluxcapacity

My birthday just ended (thanks for the beers Vikas, and the 'Say It Ain't So' Rock Band production), and I really lucked out because it coincided with the TechStars collective "exhale" day, which began last night at St Julien (thanks David and Howard for drinks), and continued with a poker tournament (congrats Austin, Aziz), and a little party with Sidney's and friends (nice handstand, Kayla). I don't know about everyone else, but I think relaxing feels a lot better when it follows several days of no-letting-up intense hyper-productivity (we haz buzzwords, as PSC would say).

Andrew Hyde recently put up a clip commemorating the first 30 days for the 2008 TechStars companies in Boulder. The ten companies have come a long way in a short time. In fact, so has TechStars itself: Check out David's post detailing the inception of TechStars. Here's my summary of how well he had it figured out:

"Hey d00d [David Brown], let's lure entrepreneurs to Boulder with couches and shit."

Just kidding, sort of. We love you David.

Here's Andrew's masterpiece, but check out more on the community site:

Three weeks in and Andrew Hyde is starting to sneak up on TechStars companies and record them in their natural environments.  Last night he caught us at around 9pm and captured this brief podcast.  Listen in to hear about our first three weeks.

Here's an old video of the rear-projection physics whiteboard referenced in the podcast. Maybe one of these days we'll set it up in the Bunker and record the creative madness that ensues.

We are two weeks into Techstars, in the beautiful city of Boulder, Colorado, and it has been wonderful. There is so much to experience when you are surrounded by a group of cool people you haven’t met before, away from home, being a part of something fresh and new. Talking about experiences, here is a list of things I did for the first time ever, after coming to Boulder...

The First ‘Startup Experience’

How is being a part of a startup, different from working for an established behemoth of a firm? Well, frankly, I think of an established company as a 100 page book of ‘connect the dots’, and think of startup as play-dough. One is a monotonous, rarely intriguing, to be repeated over and over again, with a high success rate. Play-Dough on the other hand, well, it’s so much more fun, so much more creative, and you may not end up with what you thought you were making! (not hinting at any Techstars startups… ).

The First Ice Hockey Match

So many of our interests are programmed into us subconsciously. Sports is certainly one of them.

We may find a zillion reasons for why your favorite sport is supposed to be the best, but in the end, it’s the common passion that our people have for it, that sucks us into it. And, it can happen at any age. Vikas and Jeff, being from Michigan, are hard core Red Wing fans, and asked me and Shun to watch the Stanley cup finals with them, and it was great. (Actually, if you count the ‘Bart Vs Lisa’ episode from The Simpsons, it was my second ice hockey match). I now find Ice Hockey cool...

The First Waffle

Most of the western food that has influenced the east, is fast-food from USA, pastas and Co. from Italy and Mexican food from, well, USA (it’s more like “Mexican” food). So I can safely claim that you won’t find waffles anywhere in India. I had one with pecans the other day, and it was awesome.

The First Martini

(I am being forced to write this….)

I have been above the age limit for some time, and the other day, I decided to take the plunge by getting a vodka+wine mixture, called, The Strawberry Confusion. It contained strawberries, and well, couldn’t figure anything else out. Maybe that’s the confusion part of it. A drink, so true to it’s name. The exclusiveness of the moment called for a picture to be taken using Jeff's ever-handy camera phone.

And this concludes my First Blog at Fluxcapacity…cheers to that!

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!

In fact, our own Vikas Reddy was the first TechStars founder to pull out the moves last night on one of the locals.  This left me in a circle of (mostly) guys, sipping a Tahona Margarita, and pondering how the team from Ignighter, a group-focused dating system, could have been shown up by a solo lanky guy in a Simpson’s T-shirt.  Just a few hours later, Ignighter beat me to it, and is already analyzing the replay footage.

Another reason we hopefully don’t suck is that we’re one of the TechStars’ Ten companies of 2008.  TechStars is the creation of David Cohen, Brad Feld and co.  In one of the first sessions this past week, David had everyone in the room give an example of what they suck at, and Brad shared his experiences with the concept of sucking (or sucking less than the competition).

I think that if we expand on this concept both individually and as a team, and we suck less every day, then we’ll have something to be happy about.  So “sucking less every day” is our new tagline for now.

I’ll close by mentioning that Shun currently sucks at identifying beer in the fridge.  On Thursday he sat down at his desk after migrating around the office looking for something to drink and cracked open a can of Dale’s Pale Ale.  I think he thought it was a new kind of cola, because you should have seen the expression on his face when he said “Is this beer?”

Yep, sure is.