775_ An opportunity for angel investors and startups
Part 2 of 2 Tim said, "There are two elements of the financial picture. One is how do we get funded and the second one is what do we do to help the companies we work with get funded." Kate Tallman, Director of Tech Transfer for CU Boulder and Tim Bour, Executive Director, Boulder Innovation Center continued their discussion about commercialization of innovative ideas and inventions. He continued, "Our operating budget is around $350k a year, I'm happy to report we are in the black for 2009 and we project we'll be in the black for 2010. It's been a very difficult year, we've been able to inspire the people who sponsor us to continue to do so, because of the work we're doing trying to create more jobs and start new companies. Of the $350k we get about $150k from CU, different sections of CU that have an interest in clean tech, the Tech Transfer Office, bioscience, but all together $150k. The City of Boulder is also a funder of the BIC, the Boulder Chamber of Commerce and the Boulder Economic Council. Now with public sector, the University has a very clear goal which is to commercialize research. Kate continued with the 'angel investors'. Tim explained, "We've taken on investment into our companies as a strategic goal for 2010. We started our effort back in November. We have about 100 investor types, mostly angels, some others, in our network right now. We took a look at them and realized a lot of the investors had an affinity to one of our segments. So in November we put together what we called an Angel Showcase where we had about 20 angel investors in clean tech, we brought them into a showcase with three companies two of which were from CU and happy to report that those companies are in talks with some of the investors." Listen for more...
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770_ A valuable resource for commercializing - Part 1 of 2
Kate Tallman, Director of Tech Transfer for CU Boulder and Tim Bour, Executive Director, Boulder Innovation Center discussed commercialization of innovative ideas and inventions as well as support offered entrepreneurs. Kate introduced him, "Tim's been with the Boulder Innovation Center for a little over 3 years, and he has built the program from one focus mainly on software and organics and natural into one that now works with all kinds and sectors of technology including clean tech and the biosciences space. So the BIC has become a valuable resource for commercializing university technology. Can you give us some background on what the BIC is?" Time replied, "First of all, most traditionally, people think of the BIC as an incubator, but with some important differences. We're structured as a nonprofit, as a 501c6 nonprofit. We don't have any incubator space, we don't take any equity in our clients and we don't charge any success fees. This is different than many incubators you'd find around the country. But we find that it's really dealt well in terms of working with universities and it also does well in terms of growing jobs in the community, and that's one of our key outcomes. We currently have six market segments; we work in the area of clean tech which includes bio fuels, solar, software, building materials, anything that has a reduction in energy and efficiency in energy. Currently we have 750 advisors in our network and they're pretty evenly divided in those six segments. We currently have 35 outside clients and we work with between 70 and 100 companies a year that become BIC clients. Now of those 35, today right now, 24 of the 35 are based on CU research." Listen for more entrepreneurial support systems...
Related Links: Boulder Innovation Center || Tech Transfer Channel || CU Technology Transfer Office || CU TTO News || Keywords: Tim Bour, Kate Tallman, Boulder Innovation Center, CU TTO, Tech Transfer, Commercializing, Clean Tech, BioScience, Engineering, IT, Natural, Organic, Space. Channel: CU TTO 8969899 bytes 1/11/10 LISTEN to Tim Bour & Kate Tallman

771_ Put money into advertising your product, your position
The keynote speaker at the January ACG Denver meeting was Alan Beaulieu, president of the Institute for TrendResearch Larry was anxious to hear Alan's opinions regarding the economic recovery and asked about some of the business trends coming. Alan replied, "Let's start out with the largest 'sustainable recovery', two words that everyone wants to hear. This is not a sugar high, this is a sustainable, cyclical recovery. But it will be mild. It will be a slow turn. Unemployment is problematic; the banking crisis isn't going away over night." Larry went on, "What are some of the things organizations can do to deal with the recovery?" Alan emphasized, "The first thing I would do is to make sure they know what their competitive advantages are. They have to be sharp, clear, known throughout the company and then spend money promoting them so that the few customers that are out there have a compelling reason to buy your service or buy your product. So that you're not lost in the herd. Start spending money promoting yourself and what you do. Get ready for an improvement. A lot of firms have been hunkered down for so long that they're slow to start thinking. Get over yesterday, start thinking about what we're going to need to bring people in; the competitive advantages; and how we're going to meet the need; quick delivery, quality delivery, well trained people. Put money into advertising the product, the position; put money into everything you need to do get ready for even marginally busier times because that will flow right to your bottom line." They went onto discuss challenges, the timing of M&As and advice for entrepreneurs...
Related Links: Institute for TrendResearch || ACG Denver || M&A Channel || Rocky Mountain Corporate Growth Conference || Keywords: Alan Beaulieu, Institute for TrendResearch, ACG Denver, Association for Corporate Growth, Trends, Economic Recovery, M&A, Entrepreneurs > Channel: ACG 4910140 bytes 1/11/10 LISTEN to Alan Beaulieu

769_ When you're looking to create and build a business
Currently, Brian Tsuchiya known as the Startup Guru, has a Founders and Startup Meetup, and has 800+ people involved. He also has a Social Meetup where they focus more on the giving back component, that's a new Meetup and growing as well. In addition Brian also does webinars on funding... for the people who participate, it's really about, are you fundable, what's the ecosystem of funding. Larry had heard about a new project Brian is launching 4/1/10 called, 'Startup Factory'. Larry went to the new 'incubator' to interview Brian and he detailed his ideas, "When you're looking to create and build a business there are some people, will call this an incubator, that have been very successful. If you look at TechStars they have a very specific model with a focus on technology, that's mentor driven. If you look at Boulder Innovation Center, you know, theirs is more advisors driven. Those are excellent programs for the types of clients they're attracting. What we've done is taken on their great ideas and we've added but we have more of an integrated 12 month program, we also do coaching and help them understand how their lives impact their businesses. So there is this very specific process that we use based on this eQuest process. We give them resources and the ability to work on their strengths. Entrepreneurs have a hard time doing what they really do well because they're bogged down by minutia - we try to free them up by designing this incubator in a way to support them." Brian talked about funding also. Listen, there's more...
Related Links: Startup Guru || Startup Factory || Startup and Founder Meetup || Entrepreneurs Channel || Keywords: Brian Tsuchiya, Entrepreneurs, Startup Factory, Startup Guru, Incubator, Startup and Founder Meetup, Funding > Channel: Entrepreneurs 9208756 bytes 1/11/10 LISTEN to Brian Tsuchiya

January Event Photo Albums - Check 'em out...
ACG Denver: Alan Beaulieu Institute for TrendResearch
Rockies Venture Club: A Conversation with Colorado's Inc. 500
CU New Venture Challenge: Crash Course with Jason Mendelson

776_ Biggest social and cultural change on the Internet
Part 2 of 2 "What the Internet has done at a very fundamental level and it's doing this in so many areas, including of course for society and democracy, is it creates transparency and it fundamentally makes more information available to more people. In enabling those forces it gives more power to the end user for whatever purpose that might be," said Liberty Media, Sr. Vice President, Michael Zeisser. Sue Wyman joins Larry in this interview with Michael Zeisser. He continuous, "So the Internet is, I believe, fundamentally important for democracy, I think it's changing nations, it's giving people more power because they have more information. I am really excited to live right now because I equate what's happening with the Internet to the invention of the printing press." Larry asked, "Many have concerns about transparency, with your background at Mackenzie, what are some of the things the Internet has changed fundamentally as it relates to business?' Michael points out, "The Internet creates markets where there were no markets. If you have a business that is built on scarcity or inefficiencies then the Internet is very bad news for you because the Internet is going to create efficiency where there was none or transparency where there was none. The music industry, for a long time, music companies were able to force the buyer to buy 12 songs at a time on this format called a DVD. If you only liked three of the twelve songs, too bad. The Internet created the opportunity for single songs, the Internet created the opportunity for people to buy the one song that they wanted, that's been a transformational change for the music industry. The biggest threat in my mind is that the Internet becomes a cesspool as we've already experienced, there is a lot of bad stuff on the Internet. For some people it brings out really bad human traits." There's much more...
Related Links: Liberty Media || Communications Technology Professionals || CTP Channel || Mastering Change || Silicon Flatirons || Keywords: Michael Zeisser, Liberty Media, CTP, Communications Technology Professionals, Sue Wyman, Digital Media, Ecommerce Companies, Internet, Innovation > Channel: CTP 13960028 bytes
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772_ Internet change is dramatic - Part 1 of 2
Sue Wyman joins Larry in this interview with Liberty Media, Sr. Vice President, Michael Zeisser. Michael is European, half French and half German. He has spent the last 23 years here in the US, most of his professional career. He came to Liberty Media six years ago and is responsible for Liberty's Internet, digital media, ecommerce companies and initiatives. Michael was asked, "What do you consider the most far reaching technological innovation today?" He has much to point out, but here is part of it. "I think the biggest innovation is the Internet itself. I think is very important for people building businesses on the Internet to recognize that in spite of its frankly short life, it has gone through three or four dramatic shifts itself, and I think it is very important to be mindful of the degree and the ferociousness with which these innovation shifts occur on the Internet because they have tended to destroy businesses that haven't been able to adapt to them. And they've created opportunities for others to come into the market. There is a lot of discussion about what the Internet companies are doing to newspapers or the music industry - yet one that is discussed less frequently is the change that occurs within the Internet industry itself. The second shift occurs a few years later when we went from directory based navigation to search based navigation. If you recall, big portals like Excite and Yahoo were primarily directory based. Then Google emerged. The rate of change in the Internet environment is so much higher and for this reason Internet companies need to be organized differently." There's much more...
Keywords: Michael Zeisser, Liberty Media, CTP, Communications Technology Professionals, Sue Wyman, Digital Media, Ecommerce Companies, Internet, Innovation > Channel: CTP 13283932 bytes 1/11/10 LISTEN to Michael Zeisser

763_ Talking to Benjamin Franklin about History
Benjamin Franklin, one of the most important people in American history has a My 21st Century guide, Christopher Lowell is acting as his agent and he has booked him to speak all over the country and even, indeed, Europe. In this Profile of a Leader Series, Larry asked Ben, "What was the turning point in your life?" Ben replied, "A major influence in my younger life was an author I read when I was 16 years old - the famed Puritan and theologian and former judge of Salem Witch Trials, Cotton Mather, with whom I'd had some theological differences later. But when I was a lad, he wrote a series of essays on doing good. In that book I learned, for the first time, and considered the importance of collaboration, and working together collaboratively to get things done effectively. When I was a young 21 year old businessman, I took these lessons to heart and formed my first networking group, I called it the Junta. A group of young businessmen and I met weekly. We wanted to get ahead and make our businesses profitable in an aggressive but ethical way. We learned a lot from each other." Another lesson came from his half brother James, to whom Ben was apprenticed. James treated Benjamin ill, in fact he beat him regularly. He was actually teaching Ben a love of liberty and a hatred of arbitrary power improperly or unjustly applied. "This certainly affected me much later as I worked with young Tom Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and still further on the Constitution." His advice continued as he references Poor Richard's Almanac...
Related Links: Ben Franklin Live || Profile of a Leader Channel || Angel Capital Summit || Blog || Find It || Keywords: Benjamin Franklin, Christopher Lowell, Thomas Jefferson, Poor Richard's Almanac, Constitution, > Channel: Profiles 13343912 bytes - 1/18/10 LISTEN to Benjamin Franklin / Christopher Lowell

773_ Age old integration and cloud app solution
Larry met Rick Nucci at the Defrag conference in Denver this past November. Rick is the Co-founder and CTO of Boomi where he is responsible for product management and engineering. He is considered an industry expert on SaaS & Cloud integration, multi-tenant architecture, and API design and best practices. Rick offered some important information about cloud computing, "Cloud computing is an umbrella and very general term to describe the act or notion of delivering compute capacity in the nebulous thing called the Web, not something you have control over - nuts and bolts, racks, security. You know, you don't have control over it. You can use it and consume it as you see fit. There are tons of products that address the individual areas, there's marketing automation, CRM, finance systems. Generally speaking, particularly in SaaS and cloud, people are trending towards not buying a suite that encompasses all those capabilities but rather buy those solutions from vendors who specialize in being the best marketing automation guy out there; the best CRM guy out there. And while that's great, and that's definitely the preferred solution. You're creating without integration silos of information across those systems. Integration is a horizontal problem, a huge problem that existed ever since there was more than one software program out there and it's a problem nobody likes to talk about. We partner with the SaaS so now you can buy an application on demand service and now you can also buy the integration on demand as a service as well." Listen, there's more...
Related Links: Boomi || In the News || Software Channel || Mastering Change Blog || Keywords: Rick Nucci, Boomi, Defrag, Cloud Computing, SaaS, Software as a Service, CRM, Cloud Integration. Channel: News
6456103 bytes - 1/18/10 LISTEN to Rick Nucci