David Cohen

I just finished reading Ben Casnocha’s new book My Startup Life, and it was terrific. I had expected it to be great. But I got terrific.

This book combines general tips, thoughts, and hints for entrepreneurs with the story of Ben’s company that he founded at the age of 14, Comcate. Ben weaves this all together very nicely, with the same crisp, clean and intellectual style that I’ve come to enjoy on his blog.

I enjoyed the entire book, but I especially liked (and found myself re-reading) the segments on building your own personal brand, networking, and the special challenges of “work/life balance” through the lens of a high school sophomore.

I had the pleasure of getting to know Ben in the first three months of this year. Ben hung out in Colorado doing some work for the Mobius gang, and during that time Ben took an interest in TechStars. We bounced ideas off each other for getting the word out and he helped me a great deal in screening applications. We took turns beating each other up in ping-pong (hint: he’s good).

So Ben has become a friend and I hope that I can one day add some value for him in order to balance what I’ve already learned from him. I hope the fact that he’s a friend won’t make you think I’m biased when I tell you to get yourself a copy of My Startup Life. You’ll enjoy it. Hell, you’re still reading this blog, so this should be a no-brainer.

David Cohen

TechStars is already teaching me. That isn’t a surprise. What is a surprise is just how much it’s teaching me, and how fast. Here’s just one example.

On the first day of TechStars, I went for a little shock and awe. I announced to our 26 new founders “You’re not here because of your idea.” I then gave them all a license to just change it.

I’ve now watched a couple of them do just that.

It’s great that a startup can turn on a dime. You have no customers, no promises, no technology to speak of. You can just go where you want to go. There’s no reason not to.

Except that talking about what you’re going to do is really different from doing it. So you have to harbor a bias towards action, and you have to start doing. That starts the clock. That starts the learning.

The hardest thing about doing a startup is simply starting. Leaving idea stage. Leaving the details until later, and shoving off in search of the destination. Taking action. And it doesn’t get any easier just because you’ve committed yourself to do it. This does not equal doing it.

Blueprint to a Billion opens with the obviously made-up assertion that only 1 in 50 ideas ever becomes a business. But it’s probably about right. It’s certain that almost all “ideas for a business” are simply not acted upon.

Yet we know it’s not even about the original idea - it’s about the dedication and the ability to listen, react, and adapt.

Shutting up and starting stops most people dead in their tracks. Congrats if you’ve gotten past that. You’re a rare breed indeed.

David Cohen

• Scott’s post on TechStars and the evolution of angel investing. I love it, but maybe I’m a little biased.
• CTEK is doing good stuff, helping fund 4 Colorado startups recently. Let me translate. As an investor in one of those deals, I’m pretty confident that “undisclosed sum” means “less than you might imagine.”
• Is this guy the next internet millionaire? well, 1/40th of a millionaire anyway…it’s a start. And it’s in northern Colorado!
• Dave Taylor on advertising as a business model. While I agree with his point that it’s often a mistake for many startups to depend on this so heavily, I have to say that it’s certainly OK not to know all the answers just yet. A great number (I’d say most) successful internet businesses that I’ve come across had no clue how they’d really end up making money when they started out.

David Cohen

TechStars is providing seed funding and mentorship for ten new web/software companies this summer in Boulder, Colorado. These ten teams of entrepreneurs have arrived from all over the country (and beyond) to spend the summer in Boulder working on their ideas, learning about startups, and refining their strategies.

As a part of TechStars, these ten companies participate in about 40 educational opportunities. Most of the sessions are not open to the public. However our June 14th session - “Funding your startup” is open to the general public. Come and see what TechStars is all about and participate in this informative session right alongside our 26 new founders.

Our panel (subject to change) consists of Brad Feld, Gary Held, Chris Scoggins, Lisa Rutherford, Dan King, and Kimbal Musk.

You must register to attend (and soon!) as there is limited seating at the venue. You’ll need your ticket for entry.

We hope to see you there.

David Cohen

Colorado has 4 Webware 100 finalists (unless I missed any) this year:

• Me.dium
• Jabber
• Newsgator
• Photobucket

Congrats to all of these companies.

This award is voted on by the public. Why not take a second and vote for your favorite Colorado (or other) company?

David Cohen

Believe it or not, I try not to be obviously self-promoting on this blog (the key word being obviously, otherwise you could rightly call me a liar).

However, I wanted to let you know that TechStars is kicking off here in Boulder this week. If you haven’t been following the story, the Denver Post had a nice article this morning, complete with embarrassing photos of Brad, Jared, and me. David Brown was smart enough not to make it for these photos.

TechStars has 26 new founders representing ten startups coming in from Missouri, Florida, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, California, Seattle, Colorado and Sweden. They’ll all be in Boulder this summer going through the program which includes mentorship from 40 or so of the regions top entrepreneurs and advisors. They’ll experience about 40 “sessions” this summer in order to interact with and learn from these mentors. A few of these sessions will be open to the public so that everyone can get a feel for what TechStars is all about. You’ll have to follow along on the TechStars blog to learn about these open sessions - we’ll be announcing one there later this week. If you prefer, you can subscribe to the TechStars network feed instead, which consolidates the TechStars blog with the blogs of some of the companies that are in the program this summer (with more coming online as they’re ready).

I couldn’t be more jazzed about getting going this week. Most of the founders are already in town and raring to go. I think we’re as excited as they are. We hope you’ll keep watching and see what these folks can do.

David Cohen

I met Jim Pollock a little over a year ago when I first got involved with CTEK. At that time, Jim was fairly new at the job here in Boulder as Executive Director of the CTEK Boulder Venture Center. Jim started introducing me to everyone in town, including a few investments I made in companies that he was helping such as Hypersites and Solidware. I quickly formed a friendship with Jim, and offered him some office space to work out of in downtown Boulder. This proved to be a really neat setup because we regularly had on-the-fly one hour brainstorms about companies we were involved with, how Boulder was doing as a startup town, and just life in general. Jim was also meeting with every startup under the sun in Boulder and would invite me to sit in on the most interesting ones. All of this helped me come up with thoughts and topics for this blog on a regular basis.

My favorite phrase that Jim uses all the time is (paraphrasing) “get up in the morning and tell everybody you know everything you know.” I used to joke that should only take him five minutes. But Jim is a master networker, and much of what I learned about networking came from observing him.

One of the companies that he was helping is AWhere (formerly Mud Springs), which I covered back in November. Jim helped the company raise funding from a terrific group of investors, and recently signed on as President. We’ll miss Jim’s smiling face all over Boulder as he hunkers down with AWhere in Golden. But if I know Jim he will not vanish from the Boulder startup community. He’s still helping out with TechStars this summer, and something tells me he’ll still be offering to help out any entrepreneur he meets for years to come. Jim visibly improved the startup scene in Boulder during his two years with CTEK, and we’re lucky to have had him.

Now Marc Silverman (pictured, right) has stepped in to fill Jim’s rather large sandals at CTEK Boulder. I just met Marc for the first time the other day, and he’s very excited about his new role. Marc was the co-founder, President, CEO, and Director of Performance Health Technologies which makes software and hardware systems to help individuals recover neuro-motor function resulting from injury or disease. The company’s first customer and partner was Major League Baseball. Marc is bringing 25+ years of technology product design, development, manufacturing, distribution, corporate management, investor relations, and early stage financing experience to the table. I think he’ll be a great addition to the Boulder and Colorado entrepreneurial ecosystem in his new role. Marc really wants to hear from you if you’re a startup looking for help in Boulder or if you’ve got a little extra space that you might let him to work out of for a while (CTEK is a non-profit, so everything helps). Drop him a note at Marc dot Silverman at CTEK dot biz and say hello.

It will be interesting to watch how the relationship between the city of Boulder, CTEK, the Boulder Innovation Center, and now Keiretsu evolves. There is so much support for entrepreneurs here in Boulder that the challenge is now in finding productive ways to work together to continue to attract, encourage, help, and retain the amazing entrepreneurs who are drawn to the area.

Here’s to Jim for putting a pretty big dent in that puppy.

David Cohen

I’m doing a talk on “IT Startup Funding and Support” at the Denver IT Summit on May 30th at 1pm in Suite 707. Yep, this is pretty much about what everyone is calling “incubator 2.0″ (I hate that term of course, since TechStars is not an incubator). We’ll also have a booth in the exhibit hall where you can come to learn more about TechStars.

I know you won’t come for me, but you might want to check out the agenda for other (some?) interesting stuff in this annual one day Denver IT conference.

I hope you can join us. If there is nobody in the room, I swear I’m not going to say a word.

David Cohen

Six months ago, I started my Kiva portfolio and it’s been fun to watch. I made 4 micro-loans and the first (an auto repair shop in Brinza, Moldova) was just repaid in full. Twenty-three (hmm) lenders participated in this and helped this hard working and honest looking gentleman’s business get to another level.

The other three loans have all been partially repaid on schedule, and it looks like they’ll be paid in full as promised. Kiva is really helping and has now managed over six million bucks in microloans. Imagine the impact of that at no cost to you.

If I had one tiny complaint, it’s that there are never any blog updates about how the loan has helped the business. They have the infrastructure to do this, but the blog area for the loan never says much more beyond the fact that the loan was distributed. It would be neat to get some stories of how it helped or perhaps a photo in return.

Here’s what’s so cool about fast companies. I dropped an email to them and within about 5 minutes I was on the phone with Fiona, their communications manager. She explained to me that Kiva really wants to help facilitate better feedback and reports from the field, but they’re just not quite there yet. Right now there are more lenders than there are businesses to fund. But as Kiva grows and as the partners begin to see some competition for lenders, Kiva thinks the lenders will select the partners who share more stories of the social good created by their loans. Thanks Fiona!

Go check out Kiva and consider getting involved.

David Cohen

Continuing on from widgets in our Big or Bullshit series, Brad and I decided that we wanted to cover vertical social networks next. First we need a little definition. I define vertical social networks as those that target a very specific set of users, rather than mass audience. The litmus test is that the users are connecting about something, and that something is not so broad that it would appeal to most of a particular demographic. Some great Colorado examples are YourRunning (running enthusiasts), YourCycling (cycling enthusiasts), and Thoos (running enthusiasts). Other examples include Dogster (dog lovers), LibraryThing (book lovers), Boompa (auto enthusiasts), etc. I would not consider sites like LinkedIn (business), Last.FM (music), or even Colorado’s own Godspace (religion) to be vertical in nature - they’re targeting very broad audiences that could almost be considered generic.

Success in social networking so far has been driven by advertising (and acquisitions) and the classic “go horizontal, get lots of eyeballs” approach. The business motivations of moving away from general user bases to highly focused ones that the vertical networks target are seemingly obvious. In advertising, the promised land is knowing exactly who you’re talking to and what they care about, not just talking to the masses. While this seems to apply to vertical social networks on the surface, I believe that this thinking is somewhat flawed. Bear with me.

I’m pretty sure that vertical social networks will continue to proliferate. Users like them, and there are advertising, sponsorship, and affiliate dollars to be had. I just don’t think many niche social networks will have enormous exits - but I think many will be sustainable. So I think the future is one in which many people won’t belong to one or two social sites, they’ll belong to more based upon their various passions (mine might be tennis, early stage technology investing, Ruby on Rails, books, building companies, space exploration, travel, and so on).

So what happens when there are just too many social sites for a regular guy deal with? Perhaps we’ll see the emergence of social aggregators and the centralization of identity and trust (these last things need to happen anyway). You see some examples already. Sites like Profilactic, SocialURL and soon, we hear, the much anticipated product from Jared Polis’s new company Confluence Commons are trying to help by aggregating existing social content. But as these social networks proliferate, one thing that would be incredibly helpful would be a “write once, use many” centralized user profile. I would love to see OpenID go in this direction (or someone leveraging OpenID) by allowing users to create their base profile in one place rather than having to constantly enter it into every network they want to check out. Tools like these will abound, and the key is that these tools should be in a unique position to truly understand each users preferences, affinities, and social webs. This may even be the way that the attention economy initially develops: rather than getting users to volunteer their click-streams, it’s far easier to simply study what they’re already telling you.

I don’t believe that MySpace, Bebo, and FaceBook have yet fully harnessed the profile information freely offered by their users for laser targeted advertising, but they will. If you believe that, just imagine for a second what the aggregators can do! Of course, they’ll need the users, but I believe that there are enough benefits to users in this scenario that they’ll flock to the aggregators.

When I think about what’s likely to happen, I think that the vertical social networks will proliferate and become a useful part of the web. But in terms of their potential as an investment - I guess I’ll have to call Bullshit. Look to the aggregators and the toolsets that emerge around identity - I think that will be Big.

We’ll know what Brad thinks soon. But pick a limb and come hang out with me. What do you think about vertical social networks?