Startup incubator chooses 10 business teams
By Greg Avery (Contact)
Thursday, April 19, 2007
From left, Jared Polis, David Cohen, David Brown and Brad Feld founded TechStars, an entrepreneurial boot camp that has selected its first 10 teams.
Photo by Sammy Dallal
From left, Jared Polis, David Cohen, David Brown and Brad Feld founded TechStars, an entrepreneurial boot camp that has selected its first 10 teams.
Ten teams of would-be technology company founders have been selected to spend the summer in Boulder pursuing their business ideas as part of the inaugural TechStars boot camp for entrepreneurs.
TechStars — founded by local technology startup and venture-capital veterans David Cohen, David Brown, Brad Feld and Jared Polis — announced its inaugural class Wednesday.
The teams, made up of no more than three people, are scheduled to arrive in Boulder and start working on their ideas in late May.
TechStars chose two in-state startups and eight others from across the country. They'll receive advice from area technology entrepreneurs, up to $15,000 to get their businesses started and then have a shot at funding from national venture capital groups.
More than 300 teams applied, about 90 of them from Colorado. About 10 percent of the applications came from outside the country, said Cohen, TechStars' co-founder.
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What distinguished the applicants that TechStars chose was the quality of their ideas and the fact the winning teams had started pursuing them before they applied to TechStars, Cohen said.
"It says a lot when they're doing stuff already," Cohen said. "They're not waiting for somebody's permission, they just went after something they're passionate about."
Ari Newman, a Boulder entrepreneur, and his business partner Tom Chikoore, a software architect, were the only Boulder applicants to make the cut.
They proposed Tru.vu, a news and blog aggregation service for small businesses.
Newman has a history running local technology startups and founded Newman Venture Advisors to help other nascent companies position themselves to win investors.
He was attracted to TechStars, despite being relatively well-connected and experienced, because the boot camp model short-cuts normal business development while offering instruction from technology gurus, Newman said.
"The value of that is phenomenal," Newman said. "If I was trying to get access to investors and exposure ... that's worth a lot of money, time and energy that we would've been spending otherwise."
The teams hail from New York, Philadelphia, South Carolina, Florida, St. Louis, Texas and Colorado. One of the 26 selected entrepreneurs is coming from Sweden for the chance to live in Boulder and begin developing a business idea.
The teams pay for their own living expenses and find their own way to Boulder. TechStars keeps 5 percent ownership of the original businesses each team starts.
In return, the entrepreneurs get free office space, $5,000 per team member and access to regular instruction and feedback from a roster of more than 40 proven technology entrepreneurs and business experts.
Such entrepreneurial openness persuaded Heather and David Duey, a pair of Tallahassee, Fla., entrepreneurs who applied to TechStars but did not make the final cut, to move to Boulder to be in a better environment to launch their business.
The husband-and-wife team proposed Georneys, a Web site and social networking idea designed to reconnect lost children with their parents and serve as a parental resource.
Their e-mail exchanges with Cohen and TechStars co-founder Feld, a well-known venture capitalist with Mobius Capital Management, gave them insight and support they've found in short supply in northern Florida, Heather Duey said.
"When you're a nobody and you get any kind of acknowledgment from people like that, it makes a huge difference," she said.
Contact Camera Business Writer Greg Avery at 303-473-1307 or averyg@dailycamera.com.
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