Last week Dan'l Lewin and Don Dodge joined me for a tour of cool ISV's in the Boulder/Denver area, a visit with the tech startup incubation initiative, called TechStars, and a VC Roundtable which included many of the influential tech VC's in the Colorado area. A big thanks to Brad Feld for helping coordinate, find the right people to meet and coaching us through the meetings and events – here is Brad's post, http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2007/07/microsoft_visit.html.
The cool ISV's we visited were, Electric Rain ( www.erain.com ), Newmerix ( www.newmerix.com ), Lijit ( www.lijit.com ), Gold Systems ( www.goldsys.com ), Rally Software ( www.rallydev.com ), Me.dium ( me.dium.com ), IP Commerce ( www.ipcommerce.com ), Accellos ( www.accellos.com ), and Newsgator ( www.newsgator.com ). There were a few standouts, Don Dodge fans, and plenty of follow-ups from the visits. But, consistently high quality companies with very interesting solutions.
We stopped by TechStars ( www.techstars.org ), and had a great chat with some budding entrepreneurs. Fortunately, we were able to help one of the companies, SearchToPhone , resolve some issues with Tellme, so they could get their demo live. Only one of the companies is using the Microsoft stack – largely because their lead developer is a veteran Microsoft developer. SearchToPhone is using a mixed platform + Tellme. We had a great conversation concerning why – mostly because of perceptions around cost and control. David Cohen posted a good summary on the TechStars blog ( http://techstarsblog.com/2007/07/13/microsoft-visits-and-goes-deep ).
Don Dodge had a chance to join Brad Feld and 100 other Boulder technology entrepreneurs at the Boulder New Tech Meetup on the University of Colorado campus. Here is some of the blog coverage from that event http://www.rubiconventures.com/2007/07/boulder-denver-.html . Don had a chance to pitch the EBT to the group and had a few fans in the audience. Dan'l and I headed to Denver for a darn good meal and greeted the ISV of the year and ISV innovator of the year award nominees. Since WWPC was in Denver we were able to fit in the ISV nominee event. Digipede, one of our EBT sponsored companies, won the ISV innovator of the year award – which is a pretty big deal. I met with John Powers, the CEO of Digipdede the next day at WWPC and he couldn't be more pleased.
The Colorado VC Roundtable was a good re-introduction of the EBT to the Colorado VC's. Most of their activity is early stage and the startup community is not slowing down, so this was a good opportunity to make sure Microsoft was in the platform selection process for their companies. I now have a few Microsoft startup day's scheduled at the local firms. Thank you to Sanjiv and Nav – for creating much of the materials that I copied. Thank you Nicolas for coaching me through Silverlight, Live and Popfly.
Thank you Dan'l and Don for coming out and bringing the crowds.
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