2009.04.22 Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Sam Zell

On Wednesday 2009.04.22 Entrepreneurs Unplugged hosted Sam Zell with Scott Peppet "leading" the discussion.

2009.04.17 CU New Venture Challenge Finals!

On Friday 2009.04.17 CU hosted the Finals for its first cross campus new venture challenge. Of the 8 semi-finalists, the 4 best teams were selected with 2 social-networking ventures (TechoShark and fetcht) , a biomedical venture (3Q Matrix), and a new charter school venture (Knova Learning)!

Full Competition
1st place: Knova Learning
2nd place: 3Q Matrix
3rd place: Fetcht

CS Prizes:
Cash: TechoShark
TechStars Space: Api.gy

Most Innovative Award: Conifer Quantum Technology

Congrats to everyone and Good luck with your ventures!

2009.04.17 CU New Venture Challenge Semi-Finals

On Friday 2009.04.17 CU hosted the semi-finals for its first cross campus new venture challenge. Plans were submitted for all types of ventures from Social Entrepreneurship, to non-profits, to high-tech ventures and all disciplines from education, medicine, to information and communication technologies. From the 18 submitted plans, 8 were selected for the Semi-Finals. Below are some of the pictures that I took; I was only able to take pictures of 4 teams as the semi-finals were run in a twin track format with 2 different panels of judges.

Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Glenn Jones

On Wednesday 2009.04.15 Entrepreneurs Unplugged hosted Glenn Jones with Phil Weiser and Brad Bernthal "leading" the discussion. Glenn's delivered a wonderful set of stories about his entrepreneurial past with an emphasis on his beginnings.

Feld-Weiser One-on-One: Feld on The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

On Wednesday 2009.04.15, Brad Feld and Phil Weiser had a one-on-one discussion on the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Colorado.

Entrepreneurial Mashup 2009

Last tuesday night (2009.04.14) CU hosted our first Entrepreneurial Mashup to recognize and honor both individuals and companies in the community that have helped make our entrepreneurial community so vibrant. We had an amazing turnout of approximately 270 people joining in the celebration!

Below are select pictures that I took of the event

CUNVC Workshop: Presenting and Selling your Business Plan

On April 2nd, Frank Moyes led the final CU NVC workshop of the 08-09AY in preparation for the competition on April 17th on what else? How to pitch your business plan to different audiences. :)

Ink

(Update: Ink's Denver run has been extended through April 9th!!!)

For those who haven't seen it... go see Ink. Currently playing in Denver, CO through April 9th as part of the Starz Denver Film Festival. Hopefully this will make it to other theaters!

USA, 2008, 105 Minute Running Time
Genre/Subjects: Action/Adventure, Colorado, Drama, Fantasy
Language: English

Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Andrew MacFarlane

Last week's Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Andrew MacFarlane.

Below are some of the pictures that I took during the event.

Recent photo shoot of dry ice vapor

The pictures from Alinea, especially the rolling vapors of dry ice, inspired me to experiment with dry ice and see what kind of pictures I could take in a controlled environment :) So I raided my closets for random objects that would make good receptacles for dry ice and water then went ice box in hand to my local king soopers and purchased a bunch of dry ice which totally confused the service counter employees ;)

And after all that, these are the best pictures that resulted!

CUNVC Workshop: Financing your Startup

On March 5th, Frank Moyes led an excellent workshop on different methods to finance your startup. The crowd asked a long series of interesting questions relating to every imaginable type of startup.

Crash Course on Venture Capital with Jason Mendelson of the Foundry Group

Last night Jason Mendelson of the Foundry Group taught a great crash course on venture capital dispelling many and revealing many of the "secrets" of venture capitalists. After the course, Jason answered an hour or more of good questions from the audience.

Below are some of the pictures that I took during the event.

Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Sue Kunz

Last week's Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Sue Kunz.

Robert Reich and Brad Bernthal led a lively discussion in which Sue gave an informative and lively discussion on her experiences with entrepreneurship detailing her cycles between working for small startup and large enterprises like IBM and Sun.

Below are some of the pictures that I took during the event.

Alinea Redux: 2009.02.22

Photos from my visit with Christina to Alinea on 2009.02.22!

First let me start by saying that my heart these days runs in cycles between "home style", "traditional style", and "new style" presentations and recipes. Right now I am in in a definite "home style" phase where my cooking at tastes reflect simplicity and the earth.

I have been trying to plot to make it to Alinea since the restaurant opened and have never been able to make my time in chicago work with a visit (family duty and what not). This time I made time to celebrate both Christina's birthday and Valentine's day :)

The service was impeccable. The dance they performed was what I have always imagined proper fine dining service to be and had not previously experienced.

The dishes hit the full spectrum of reactions from myself and Christina. Some dishes were sublime, some were intriguing, and some were not to our liking at all. Since everyone tastes food differently, I will limit myself to two comments about the dishes: first, the dishes that were not to my liking all seemed over done and did not celebrate the essence of the core ingredient; second, I feel that something is wrong if instructions are needed on how to combine the different elements on my plate.

That being said Alinea was an experience well worth the wait and the expense.

David Patterson: The Trouble with Multicore Software

David Patterson has an excellent short video outlining why writing general purpose applications (desktop,  workstation, and server) on multicore software is hard.  LineRate Systems in contrast has a networking specific approach that makes life easier :)

CUNVC Workshop: Writing a Business Plan: Promoting your Business

On February 5th, Frank Moyes (CU Boulder Leeds School of Business) led the CU New Venture Challenge workshop on writing a business plan. In this workshop Frank condensed his semester long course into a single engaging hour.

On February 24, Jason Mendelson (Managing Director at the Foundry Group) will be teaching us how to raise venture capital in the Silicon Flatirons Crash Course on Raising Venture CapitalPublish Post

Compensation? US Airways Flight 1522 on 1/14

So on January 14th I was traveling to Boston MA from Denver via Charlotte and we prematurely had to land in Nashville due to mechanical issues.

Yesterday, I got an email from US Airways' customer service department apologizing for the inconvenience.

The inconvenience was not trivial though I did make it to Boston some 5 hours or so late...

I ended up with a 4-5 hour layover in Nashville before hopping a plane to Philadelphia and then onto Boston.

Luckily I was one of the first people off the flight and was one of the first people into the reroute line... it still took an hour to get my new flights booked...  by the time I left 4 hours later the line still hadn't been fully processed!!!

When I got to Boston I found out that my luggage never made it out of Philadelphia!  WTF!

I found out a week later that Philadelphia is a luggage black hole and to never let one's luggage out of sight *sigh*  I could have easily picked up my luggage in Nashville had someone bothered to tell me.  The luggage finally made it around 10:30 the next morning.

(yes I am still grumpy)

For all of this, I get $75.  Worth it?  I dunno.

Luckily I was staying with family and my meeting wasn't until the afternoon, so I suffered no real harm other than an extra helping of annoyance at the general lack of preparedness of the customer service team and lame food at the Nashville airport.  I think feeding everyone lunch would have gone a long way towards smoothing over the annoyances.

Two bright points... They did go get my headphones from the seat back pocket when I realized that I'd forgotten them there...

And they did a remarkable job the following day with the successful ditching of flight 1549 into the river.

Performance via Optimization or Design?

Manish my co-founder at LineRate Systems and have been having discussions that boil down to the following question:

Should one get performance by iterative optimization or through clean design?

It goes without saying that there are strong arguments for both approaches as one simply has to look at the history or academic research and industrial business strategies.

The part of the question that I find fascinating is the balancing act that is needed when operating on a limited budget.

The iterative optimization philosophy argues that getting a product out the door is the most critical requirement for any endeavor as no product means no consumers.  Then if performance is insufficient, iteratively profile and optimize the system by removing bottlenecks.

The performance by design philosophy argues that the best way to hit a extreme performance, in terms of time and total resource expenditures, is to architect the system correctly the first time and then tweak the product.

Two examples of these approaches from the automotive world are rally cars (e.g., Subaru) in the iterative category and the Bugatti Veyron. (I'm a sube owner so I'll use them as an example).  Subaru's are great cars to drive around every day that can be tuned into exceptional race and overall performance monsters with significant effort.  However the iterative tuning approach simply cannot reach the upper echelons of performance - that takes a directed design.  The Veyron on the other hand has no attachment or history to street cars (though it is street legal) - it was purpose built to be the fastest production car ever.  To hit their top speed they had to shrink the side view mirrors (due to problems with aerodynamic lift) and the car needs to be dropped to hit max speed.  From Top Gear February 2007: James May: Getting close to the maximum, which means the tires will only last for 15 minutes. But that's okay, because the fuel will run out in 12 minutes!  Simply put, if you want the maximum performance, serious architectural design issues need to be factored into the base design.

So what does this have to do with  LineRate Systems?

Simple, our core technology for LineRate Systems allows us to build software based network appliances delivering "Veyron" class performance but in my opinion will require a custom software architecture not currently found in software applications or operating systems.

The question for the reader is, how do you make the decision to follow an iterative or design approach to building a high performance product?

For us the business decision is straightforward - current market conditions make it unlikely that we will raise the capital necessary for the custom solution before we run out of existing capital... that and we have a customer interested in the basic product today.

Paying for Internships?!?

The Wall Street Journal on 2009/01/28 had an article discussing the state of affairs in the world of internships that caught me flat footed and slack-jawed. That people take unpaid internships is nothing new to me. What is new to me is that people are now paying to:

1. Have people find them unpaid internships to the tune of $8,000 !!!!  I'm not sure I would want to hire anyone who had to pay someone to get them an internship that paid no money.  Seriously if you can't find someone to take you on for no money, you're doing something wrong.  Especially if your family has $8,000 laying around.
2. People are buying internships at charity auctions.  I can see how this is great for the charities.  I can see how some people might find this analogous to paying someone to find you an internship.  But notice that the intern-to-be's life is easier as the effort of finding an internship has been reduced and there is NO MERIT COMPETITION.  You pay you play!


3. Christina pointed out (when I mentioned the article) that some vocational disciplines are charging for people to be interns or apprentices (not in the article).  This strikes me as ridiculously dark ages in mindset.  Originally I though this was the most outrageous, but then I realized that that the intern-to-be still need to find the position and prove their worth.  So in a bizarre way, this is the most honest of these 3 options.

Seriously, what has happened to our society?  I am assuming this is spill over from the massive surge that parents are putting on their children to over achieve.  (If you haven't read The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids go read it now - scary stuff!)

Silicon Flatirons Crash Course: Marketing for Web-based Startups

Photos from last night's Silicon Flatirons Crash Course on Marketing for Web-base Startups. This was an informative course and many of the pictures were taken during the "class exercise" in which the attendees were asked to segment and position a web-based startup.

14yo boy manages to impersonate a Cop and got a beat.

Chicago police arrested a 14-year-old boy for allegedly impersonating one of their own Saturday.

From the article:

"The boy, who has been charged as a juvenile for impersonating an officer, walked into the Grand Crossing District station, 7040 S. Cottage Grove Ave., dressed in a Chicago police uniform, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said. The boy, who reported for duty about 1:30 p.m., partnered with another police officer for about five hours."

"The boy identified himself as an officer from another district but was detailed for the day to Grand Crossing and also was savvy enough to sign out a police radio and a ticket book, according to a source. The source also said the boy went on traffic stops with the officer he went on the street with."

Ok seriously folks, what the heck?

I fully agree that impersonating a cop is wrong.

But arresting a 14yo boy for being excited about being a police officer when he grows up?

Let's see:

1. he's 14!
2. had no badge
3. had an empty holster
4. newspaper instead of a ballistic vest

How about you arrest all the police officers who allowed themselves to be socially engineered on such an important matter.  The boy should've never gotten beyond the front door of the police station.

"After his tour was over, a ranking officer became suspicious of the boy. Police said the officer discovered the teen was not a real police officer when he couldn't produce any credentials."

Seriously?  The boy was on the beat with a partner and no one noticed until the shift was over?  And you're still making the kid appear in juvenile court?

Lame.

Rant: Comcast Support: Fail++

Ok so for the past few months I've had connectivity issues in the evenings from home.  I assumed that the culprit was the number of wireless access points in my community or possibly an overload in the shared last mile connection.

A couple of days ago I got fed up and started debugging the problem.  I turned the modem off, disconnected the WiFi, and plugged my laptop directly into the cable modem.  And tada!  the problem was still there.

Then I though to myself, I wonder if the signal is borked so I connected to the cable modem and tried to load the status page... this is the response from the cablemodem's server:

Safari can’t open the page “http://192.168.100.1/signal.html” because the network connection was reset, which sometimes occurs when the server is busy. You might be able to open the page later.

So I did what any frustrated engineer does... I keep trying and tada it worked after about 30 tries.  signal looked good and tried again.  and I got the same reset message.  (Firefox shows the page loading and then being reset prematurely).

Ok, so my cable modem is borked.

I called the Comcast support number and the first thing I hear is not an apology for problems, nor was it the call tree I expected.  No!  I got a bloody advertisement for pay-per-view WWE RAW.  (INSTANT FAIL!)

Ok, so I breath and start working through the call tree and was offered two options:

1) Is your cable modem not working?

2) Is your cable modem slow?

uhhhh...  call tree repeats.

Select #1 - on the basis that I might hit a technically literate person rather than a sales drone.

nope.  I got an automated cable modem reset that took 30 seconds.  Then an automated request to go to comcast.net to make sure the cable modem worked with a 30 second delay while I "did that."

How about an option for intermittent problems folks?  i.e. I had a problem last night but didn't have time to call.

I tell the call tree that my problem was not resolved and get told that the wait time would be about 15 minutes (I don't remember the range) and would I like a call back, so I go through the hoops of setting that up.

3-4 minutes later I get the call back and then after verifying that I am me. I'm told that all representatives are busy.  10 seconds later I get connected.  If someone was ready, don't tell me everyone is busy.  And if no one is ready, don't bloody call me back on the chance that someone will be free shortly, get the person on the line before calling!

Then after I've entered my information, the phone dialer has verified it, I still needed to give it to the customer service rep! Seriously Is this 2009 or 1960?

Tech guy checks the signal strength and fairly quickly conludes that it could be the modem, as I told him, and since I'm renting it, that I should just go to the Comcast store and exchange it.

overall customer service score: fail++

Visit to Sake Zanmai Amu on Thursday 1/22

Thursday night I made my way to Amu in downtown Boulder, CO as has been my modus operandi on Thursday nights for years.  Amu is an izakayai - an after-work drinking establishment that serves food.

Amu is honestly my favorite restaurant and beats out all the san francisco bay area izakaya that I tried in summer of 2007. 

If you haven't been, you should definitely go!  

The key selling point is the authenticity of the menu, recipes, and overall experience - some nights I've entered and been greeted to a packed house of native Japanese speakers who all vouch for the authenticity of the experience.  For years I've mentally binned Amu as The Japanese Cheers for the friendly open atmosphere where everyone knows your name. 

What made this past Thursday worth talking about?

First - the Toro - extra fatty blue fin tuna. I haven't had toro of that quality in a long time.  Nobu, the head chef remarked on the quality of the piece when he took it out of his magic fish box :F  I had to get a glass of sake to complement it and keep my mouth fresh for more

Second, the japanese couple sitting next to me got a wonderful looking hot pot and offered to let me try some (yay friendly restaurant) which I did and it was delicious! They told me that this is a classic salary-man dish in japan and therefore is standard fare at izakaya all over japan.  In fact it is remarkably cheap to make - considering it is made of stewed beef tendon and tofu.  So Good!  Gimmie a pot of that and a bowl of hot rice and I'm sold :F

Now I've gone and made myself hungry.  

What to do with the money?"

Recently folks have begun openly questioning the existing Venture Capital model.

Two examples are Bill Stensrud's post on The Primacy of the New Tool and pehub's interview with Bill Stensrud.

The conclusion of many of these articles is that the Venture Capital model is broken and cannot continue to generate pre 2000 levels of returns. Pehub's article quotes Bill in the title with, "I Couldn't figure our what to do with the money."

As a fundraising entrepreneur my obvious tongue-in-cheek response is, give it to me ;)

In all seriousness.

I agree with Bill and many other people who say that VC practices need to change. Specifically, that investing in companies that provide incremental advances on technologies controlled by incumbents is foolish - always has been and always will be. The only way to take on an incumbent at their own game is: 1) for the incumbent to be asleep at the wheel, 2) to field a disruptive technology, 2) to field a disruptive business model (Innovator's Dilemma).

However I am having trouble swallowing the conclusion that after 50 years we are done with extracting all the value from the "transistor" (Bill). This seems premature and counter to the driving force behind IT innovation and disruption. In my opinion the plateau we are on is temporary and has come into play due to two factors:

1. The computing performance delivered by individual processing cores is no longer increasing exponentially the way it has for decades (Moore's Law/Corollary). In the past one could rely on generational improvements in processor performance to solve application performance problems. This means that programmers in the past could continually increase the complexity of their applications to better fit user needs without developing new algorithms or having to resort to difficult to implement parallel algorithms. For example the human genome project was possible only once sufficient computing power became available. Speech recognition has also become feasible due to advances in computational resources. The end result is that we now have to figure out a way to make parallel programming accessible to the masses.
   
2. Socially we are satisfied with current technology and are in an absorption stage.  Culturally we are trying to figure out what social network and other new technologies mean and how they'll change society so the demand for new technologies has dropped.

What we have is a situation in which we have temporarily plateaued until either we figure out how to change a business process through technological advancement or a driving societal need that needs to be filled manifests (good luck guessing what that is).

Technologically we have reached a "crisis" point (Structure of Scientific Revolutions) with respect to parallel programming.  Theory says that an answer, i.e. a good general purpose programming model, will emerge within a few years.  Alternatively we will figure out how to improve the performance of individual processors again with 3-dimensional chips, optical interconnects, or other technology and thus avoid the nightmare of parallel programming where decades of research has only been able to address a limited subset of the problem space.  Fortunately at LineRate Systems we have already devised a parallel programming model for programming network appliances with general purpose multicore hardware.

My best guess says that the parallel programming problem will be solved first and that there will be a doozy of a revolution in a few years that will make the web revolution look like child's play.  This will coincide with society's absorption of existing technology and resumes its appetite for the next big thing.

Meaning folks are already close to an answer... Invest and Carpe RoI!

Holy Fermenting Kimchi Batman...

First... let me say that I love love love the fermented kimchi I made mid december. The stuff is delicious and makes a mean pot of kimchi chigae (kimchi stew).

However there is a slight lesson that I learned... leave headroom in the jars! During the week of christmas one of the jars managed to blow its lid off and spew kimchi juice all over my fridge. I guess I succeeded in achieving fermentation ;)

no picture since I quickly consumed the entire jar :)

A friend suggested that I vent the jars to prevent future kimchi blowouts. The problem is that I opened a jar and it immediately began forcing juice out and when the lid was removed the mass of cabbage inflated to form a dome over the lip of the jar.

Todate, I've consumed/used 2 jars to date and given one away. At this rate I'll have to make more soon... darn ;)