Photo by Andrew Hyde

It turns out that my Cheap Seat for yesterday’s TechStars Demo Day was more expensive than the investors’ seats (free), but I’d happily make another donation to the Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado for a spot next year.

Just about every seat reserved in the balcony of the Boulder Theater for the community at large was filled – more people were there yesterday than last year, if memory serves.   It looks like the word is getting out that this is a great event to attend.  Deservedly so.

The entire first floor was reserved for investors, with many from out of town already in attendance at Boulder’s second Open Angel Forum the previous night.  Laptops and smartphones were everywhere to be seen.  A busy couple of days in Boulder for the investor community.

TechStars co-founders David Cohen, Congressman Jared Polis, and Brad Feld kicked things off with a few updates on TechStars’ alumni, the TechStars Global Affiliate program (expect 5-10 more Global Affiliates to pop up in the next year or so) and the Startup Visa Movement, among other things.  The co-founders continue to have their hands full with developing the startup ecosystem here and abroad.

Once the presentations got going, it was slide deck after slide deck of polished pitches (in this order):

ScriptPad lets doctors write prescriptions safer and easier than traditional handwritten notes, saving lives and saving money.  ScriptPad offers a freemium app to doctors and receives a per prescription fee from pharmacies.

Omniar wants to make the real world clickable, Terminator style.  Find information attached to an object by taking a picture of it with a smartphone, allowing Omniar’s mobile app or apps developed on Omniar’s API to visually recognize it and retrieve any data attached.

StatsMix creates custom dashboards to help businesses aggregate, visualize, and draw insights from a variety of metrics.  Drag-and-drop what you want from Google Analytics, WordPress, MailChimp, and more into a single place.  StatsMix even helps analyze your data for you.

RoundPegg helps companies hire for cultural fit, evaluating job candidates on a variety of traits, comparing them to current employees, and measuring for an overall match.  RoundPegg is built on a process developed by Chief Psychologist Dr. Natalie Baumgartner, putting “The Doc in a box”.

RentMonitor aims to make being a landlord easy by streamlining their Circle of Pain – marketing, tenant screening, rent collection, and property maintenance – into a Circle of Profit, especially for owners of multiple rentals.  RentMonitor also helps come tax time.

GearBox has developed a robotic ball controlled by a smartphone as it rolls across the floor, entering the new “smart toy” market.  GearBox plans to sell the ball and allow developers to create a myriad of games and other apps on its API.

Vacation Rental Partner takes the work out of renting out a second home.  Vacation Rental Partner goes beyond marketing, allowing renters to book your property as easily as they would a hotel room, with online payment processing, booking management, and more.

BlipSnips lets you share a moment of time.  Rather than sending a link to a video with a note “the clip I want you to see starts at 10:24″, BlipSnips lets you tag a particular clip from a longer video and share it with others.

Spot Influence find key influencers across the web based on your keyword search.  Spot Influence grabs data from a variety of sources to calculate the Reach, Relevance, and Impact of individuals, resulting in their overall Influence score for a particular keyword.

ADstruc has created a marketplace for outdoor advertising to make selecting and bidding on billboards as easy as PPC.  ADstruc allows advertisers to view available locations on Google Maps, retrieve valuable data, see their own ads superimposed on a street view of the billboard, and to bid accordingly.

Kapost is a content marketplace connecting writers with publishers.  Kapost lets publishers find strong writing, facilitate payments, manage rights, and plug that content into a variety of popular content management systems.

One of the first things that jumped out at me was that many of the “asks” were for more money this year than last (again, if memory serves).  Four of this year’s 11 teams were raising $500k or more, while none were in 2009.  What didn’t change from last year, however, was the quality of the pitches.

The presentations were strong across the board, with each team refining and rehearsing throughout the TechStars program this summer – an entire summer’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears, distilled into 5 minutes on stage (if you haven’t seen their level of commitment in The Founders yet, you should).  For anybody wanting to learn how a pitch is done, TechStars Demo Day is a great classroom.  I’ll be there again in 2011.

Congratulations to all the TechStars Boulder 2010 teams for surviving the summer – I can’t wait to see what you all do next.  Which of you will be the first to earn a gold shirt for being acquired?

When Andrew wrote that post, I agreed – it felt like Ignite Boulder was leveling off.  I wrote a lengthly comment, carefully outlining all of the things from prior Ignites that were now missing from the last two and suggesting ways to recreate them.  I never did publish it.  At the end of the day, I just couldn’t write anything that didn’t sound like a “I knew the band before they became popular” kind of a thing.

Tonight’s event wasn’t awesome because it was like the early Ignites (nor was it awesome because the presenters use the word “awesome” so many times), it had an awesomeness (it’s contagious) all its own.

First of all, there’s the change in venue.  Chautauqua and what it offered was amazing.  There was the pre-show barbecue next to the auditorium and the families picnicking out on the grass.  My wife and I chose to sit on the porch of the Dining Hall, which is always a treat.  Throw in a little sunshine, free beer, and the Flatirons as a backdrop, and you’ve already got yourself a winner.  The auditorium itself was beautiful, an all-wood building with giant doors opened to a nice breeze.  When it got darker, a bit of light peaked through the slats in the walls.  I really look forward to TEDxBoulder, if for no other reason than to be in that building again.

The speakers…yes, the speakers – the best bunch from top to bottom that I’ve seen.  Ef Rodriguez warmed things up with his usual charm, and Anna Sawyer immediately followed with the crowd pleasing How to Marry the Rich, a practical guide to marrying up.  My personal favorite Spark of the night was Josh Fraser’s Snakes and Staircases, which taught me that vending machine deaths are a very real risk and that Scottish accents are very persuasive.  The 14th and final slide deck of the evening, Justin Crowe‘s Modulate Your Life: High Fives & Livin’ On A Prayer, had 1,300+ of us high fiving and belting out the Bon Jovi chorus together to end things just so.

Andrew and I were wrong.  Ignite Boulder just keeps getting better, and there’s plenty of room to grow from here.

Check it out and comment if you have any updates/changes or additions. Also, if you feel compelled to style this to look a little bit better, let us know that as well!

This is the only community I’ve come to know in which inclusive and tight-knit aren’t characteristics that are at odds with each other. There is something inherent in the Boulder culture that says “join us in the fun”. There is also a conscious effort by a handful of people to ensure that Boulder’s most valuable resources are available to the rest of us, by the way.

Though I’ve lived here since moving from the Boston area in 2001, I’ve just begun to discover what the Boulder tech community has to offer in the past few months. In that short time, I’ve gone from a quiet wallflower to an active (though still quiet) participant:

• Boulder Lean Startup Circle: Just a week after asking to join this group, I had the good fortune to hear Eric Ries, one of the leading thinkers in this field, present and lead a discussion on the methodology while he was in town.
• Snap Impact: I was welcomed by the group, volunteers with the motto “Making doing good easy”, for a weekend event to help lay groundwork for the development of the backend for Serve.gov, despite having little more to offer than a willingness to contribute.
• Blogging for boulder.me: After expressing interest in writing for this blog, I was offered a spot in the weekly rotation after a brief e-mail exchange to work out a few details.
• Presenting at Ignite Boulder: I received an enthusiastic “hell yeah” after e-mailing one of the event organizers with a short pitch for a presentation I had in mind and was added to the next event.
• TechStars’ Investor Day: Sitting in free seats set aside for the public, I had an invaluable chance to watch and learn as the TechStars 2009 companies pitched to a theater full of potential investors.

The upshot to all this is that there are plenty of opportunities to get involved in the Boulder tech community above and beyond just showing up, even for a guy like me who cringes at the thought of traditional networking (I have an allergic reaction to making small talk with strangers in the hope of exchanging business cards).  In every instance I’ve been both welcomed in and encouraged to participate, a nice change from what I’m used to in the Northeast.

I’ve been given the opportunity to dive in, stretch my comfort zone a bit, and figure out where I fit in, and for that I am very thankful. Go ahead, give it a try yourself. You might just like it.

Immediately, in many of our preliminary conversations to suss out the viability of our business, a few names who have been pivotal to creating the startup community I’m writing about came up which include Brad Feld, Andrew Hyde, and David Cohen to name just a few.  Through these contacts, we were quickly welcomed and assimilated into the diverse community of experienced entrepreneurs who approach business in a “pay it forward” sort of attitude. Each of the contacts we met with felt the need to help others as they had been helped early in their growing careers.  These sort of interactions happened multiple times a day and has resulted in success at a pace that would have otherwise taken many more months if not years to arrive at had the community not lent the support to Napkin Labs as it has.

For the support received to date, thanks goes out to all!  I look forward to the day that I too can pay it forward.

So what does all that mean.  If you are considering taking the entrepreneurial plunge or have just done so never hesitate to reach out.  Schedule as many meetings as you can to learn from those around you.  Don’t be afraid to reach out to those you’ve never met.  You will quickly find a welcome committee in response to your requests.

No longer should it be difficult to get time with VCs or advisors; remember it is you the entrepreneur that offers upside potential.  It’s VCs like Brad Feld who get this and know that with some advising they can help.  Thus programs like http://winterinthebunker.com/ where world class advising is offered for free and Entrepreneurs Unplugged where slice of life interviews are open to the public are popping up more and more across the entrepreneurial centers spread throughout the states.

The approach to entrepreneurism has been redefined and the barriers that have once prevented it have now dissolved due to the support of startups.  How do you support startups?

More about the author:  Warren Ng is the co-founder of Napkin Labs, a product innovation consultancy that utilizes a crowdsourced approach to innovation to enable breakthrough ideas to bubble up at the intersection of diverse thinking as consumers and experts in all fields.  For more information about the author or Napkin Labs visit www.napkinlabs.com or follow on Twitter: @warrenng or @napkinlabs.

Rally Software
4001 Discovery Drive, Suite 220
Boulder, CO  [map]

Coming tonight? We want to make sure we have enough pizza and beer so please RSVP here.

Follow us at http://www.twitter.com/ivolunteer and http://www.actionfeed.org.

ActionFeed.org is putting together an free iPhone app called iVolunteer that will show you volunteer and community involvement opportunities in your area.  It’s about mobilizing people to get their #$#@#$ off the couch and helping out, especially in a year when we’ll see many valuable non-profits go under from the rapid decline of donations.

So if you find yourself watching more than 30 minutes of TV on Tuesday nights, consider doing something more constructive and help us out.    No excuses!  (we thought of using that for the tag line, but seem to remember some t-shirt slogan somewhere…)

iVolunteer has no employees and is entirely a not-for-profit endeavor. We see the project as a way to support community organizations across the country and also as a showcase for Boulder’s incredible depth of startup talent. We’ll have our laptops out hacking on code for the iPhone app and website, working on marketing plans, writing blog posts, and doing whatever needs doing to make iVolunteer successful.

Equal parts social and working, this is a great opportunity to meet interesting people in the Boulder community and work on something big. Bring your friends and anyone else who might be good to have along for the ride.

RSVP here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=46562643122

Thanks!

Dave Angulo (@daveangulo)
Rich Grote (@heyrich)

iVolunteer Meetup
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
5:00pm – 9:00pm
Van Heyst Group Office
719 Walnut St
Boulder, CO  [map]