Archive for Boulder Startups

Free tickets: Simply Crowdfunding event in Boulder

August 7, 2012 Boulder Startups, Events

Attention all fans of crowdfunding and last-minute making of plans…

 

This Wednesday and Thursday (yes, tomorrow; I need to up my blogging game!) in Boulder, Vim Events will be holding an exciting informational event on Crowdfunding.

Speakers include Sherwood Neiss who helped author the model crowdfunding exemption, Brian Meece the co-founder of RocketHub, and Richard Stewart the Executive VP of Grow America.

This is a paid event but I have some free tickets for friends and friends of friends… contact me if you’re interested in attending! Would love to see you there.

-steve

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Funding Launchpad on the big stage at i4c

July 14, 2012 Boulder Startups, Events, Startup Life

For all those that missed it, the i4c event in Denver last night was awesome.

The Ellie Caulkins Opera House was  packed with entrepreneurs and others in the startup community… lots of friends and folks I hope to become better friends with.

Very well-organized and dynamic event put on by Galvanize — and apparently they pulled the whole thing together in just 7 weeks. Wow.

Next time Galvanize puts on an event? Seriously, go.

Funding Launchpad was one of the 10 finalists (video), out of a field of 100 or 150… vying for a top prize of $50k, space in the Galvanize co-working incubator, and more.

Dave Milliken, co-founder of Funding Launchpad, took the stage before a thousand people or so and delivered a 5-minute TED-style presentation on what we’re building, and why it will make a difference…

Check out the view from stage — a bit intimidating, no?

And he crushed it. Serious A-level performance.

It’s awesome to work with people like this… building a company from nothing is a pain in the ass; but with the right team it is also a blast.

I feel like we have graduated to the next level recently.

We are going live with our first customers (as soon as they are ready) and are actively taking on more… We’ve built the platform, documentation, educational pieces for customers, presentations for the general public, and of course internal processes… Starting to get more press, both good and bad… and lots more of that to come over the next month as we start raising money for clients. (Wow it takes a lot to build a company from scratch.)

And now we’re one of 10 companies on stage in front of a thousand people — we’re here and we’re showing off our little company with the world. (I feel just like a proud parent — seriously.)

So what’s next? Just gotta keep the momentum up, and parlay our recent progress into a market-leading position.

Everything we’ve done so far, times 100.

We’re looking for the right partners (of all types) to be a part of this journey and help us take things to the next level.

Won’t you join us?

(By the way, if you haven’t done so yet — why not sign up for our beta to be notified when our first clients launch their campaigns!)

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Promoboxx Investment

December 2, 2011 Boulder Startups, Investing

Promoboxx Logo

I’ve been meaning to write about the startup investments I’ve made to date; somehow I keep putting that off. Anyway…

Investment #3 for me, PromoBoxx, just popped up on TechCrunch today, so I thought now would be a good time to mention it.

As Sarah Perez nicely summarizes:

Today, brands spend nearly $30 billion each year supporting retailers with offline materials, including in-store signage, yellow page ads and newspaper ads. But almost none of that marketing money is spent online, even though 90% of all products are still sold through physical stores.

That’s where Promoboxx comes in. Using its online service, stores can set up retail promotions in minutes, with sweepstakes, coupons, giveaways and other promotions that aim to drive foot traffic to stores.

It’s a great niche, and a great team. These guys are doing it right — it isn’t about marketing gimmicks; rather it’s about engaging customers with brands they already like, and in many cases giving them a great reason them to shop in their local store rather than just order online.

Very excited to see how they grow this company. I know they’d love it if you’d take a minute to send them a “congrats” on closing their big seed financing round by stopping by their blog or via twitter.

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So… Yup, I’m Starting a Company

November 23, 2011 Boulder Startups, SCR News

Vim Funding logo

Big news, everyone!

It’s official, I’m starting a company. Lots of work to do on the website, logo, and other various pieces… but we do have a website live at VimFunding.com

Vim Funding will be one of the first companies to offer an honest-to-goodness crowd-investing platform, so that small business owners and entrepreneurs who are looking to raise funds for growth can offer their tribe a chance to participate.

Think Kickstarter, but not donation-based.

We will be offering several different investment models, and we believe we will be the only ones who will offer the complete package:

  • Educating entrepreneurs and SMB owners on all their funding options
  • Assisting them in determining which funding path is right for them
  • Helping them prepare for and manage a stellar crowd-funding campaign
  • Minimizing the hassle of investor management after the campaign

At the moment, crowd-investing is not legal in the US, but that is about to change — I’ll write more about that on the Vim Funding blog soon. Please subscribe there (or follow @vimfunding) to learn more about funding-related issues. I intend to share everything I can find that will be helpful to those seeking funding.

I could really use your help with two things:

1. I’m looking for a technical co-founder to build this platform. Founders equity share, of course, plus salary as soon as we get a small funding round pulled together. I’m more than happy to have someone involved “spare time” until we figure out if (a) we work well together and (b) we have funding. Know anyone? Please let them know!

2. What should this platform be called? Right now my front-runner is FundingSwarm.com Thoughts on that name? Any suggestions for better names? Please let me know in the comments!

Thanks, and do hit me up if you want any more details!

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Impressive 2011 Boulder TechStars Demo Day

August 9, 2011 Boulder Startups, Events, Investing

On 8-4-2011 I was fortunate enough to attend the 2011 Boulder TechStars Demo Day. This was my first time attending, and while I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, I was still blown away.

I won’t try to describe all 12 companies in detail here, though if anyone is interested in my notes on any of these companies just hit me up.

Instead here are 3 brief summaries of each company:

… and here is a livestream transcript[launch.is] of the event from Launch which fills in more of the important nuts and bolts (size of markets) that the other brief write-ups left out.

These write-ups capture the basic idea of each company, but of course miss the essence of the presentations — these entrepreneurs know their stuff and put it all on display that night… if you ever have the opportunity to attend one of these, GO. You will either be madly inspired by what these teams are doing or utterly depressed by your “competition”; or perhaps both.

A couple of things I keep thinking about since this event:

The depth of talent in that room was something special. Most of these teams had spent many years immersed in the problem area they are disrupting, and many of these entrepreneurs have had successful exits in the past — clearly not in it for a quick buck, these guys and gals are passionate about building things and improving the world.

What David, Brad, and others have created with TechStars is truly amazing. It’s almost like they took a reality-TV formula “let’s put a bunch of people into intense competition with each other and see what happens” and twisted it into “let’s put amazing people together into an intense situation where they build upon, inspire, support, and mentor each other” — when you do that, amazing things happen. It must feel wonderful to see this thing they have created blossom into what it is today; there’s clearly a reason they are a top-ranked[techcoctail.com] program. Congrats.
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