Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I went to Beaver Creek Colo. this week for the Rocky Mountain region’s largest and longest running startup conference, VCIR.

Twenty-two early-stage tech startups had less than five minutes to impress a panel of venture capitalists and judges. Many of them had already secured high-profile customers, a team of engineers, and close to $1 million in seed funding. The calibre of the startups was unusually high.

Most of the founders said their major obstacle to growth is cash. In Colorado and the surrounding states, it’s not easy to procure a first round of institutional funding. As Democratic Gov. Hickenlooper admitted in a conversation with the media, “better access to venture capital came up all over the state,” when his team conducted research for their Economic Development Project.

In an impressive pack, here are a few that stood out.

RoundPegg

What do they do? Don’t underestimate company culture — it can mean the difference between success and failure. Just take a look at Microsoft‘s morale-killing ranking system, which was recently chronicled in Vanity Fair. RoundPegg says its software can replace those expensive consultants who are routinely brought in to make recommendations, like firing a bad egg in senior management. The cloud-based software can also help recruiters identify candidates who are culture fits and can track employee engagement.

What’s cool about it? Cofounder and chief psychologist Dr. Natalie Baumgartner told me the startup has integrated with Jive to track conversations between teams and make broader assumptions about employee satisfaction.

The verdict: This startup is taking on a genuine pain point. However, the software might work best in collaboration with an external consultant. A few potential issues with a software-only approach: If a high-ranking employee is identified as a negative influence on office culture, would RoundPegg’s results be enough to root him or her out? Sentiment analysis, which tracks how employees really feel, is a tricky technology problem. It’s darn near impossible for a machine to tell the difference between neutral, positive, and negative expression.

Lendio

What do they do? Lendio helps small businesses find the best loan. Simply fill out a survey and answer a few questions, and the company trawls its database for a loan match. The company is not a lender but makes fees on the referrals.

What’s cool about it? It’s free for small businesses to use, and owners may be able to bypass those long and boring negotiations with the local bank.

The verdict: It’s a useful tool for small businesses that aren’t typically denied loans. But how about the “underbanked” population? Startups like Kabbage have raised a pool of equity and debt to lend to online retailers at better rates than traditional banks.

Serious Integrated

What do they do? The founders are on a mission to do away with buttons on machines. Most mechanical systems use an interface that consists of buttons in some sort of control panel with a small monochrome screen. Many manufacturers have tried to replace this with touch, but they have to design the screen and all the hardware behind it, as well as integrate with the existing system. Serious Integrated’s touch screen tech (above) sells via Arrow Electronics, one of the largest Colorado-based companies.

What’s cool about it? Founder and CEO Terry West was the first employee at Blackberry RIM. Revenues are promising — in its first year, the company pulled in a humble $134,000; this quarter, it’s on track to meet a $250,000 revenue goal.

The verdict? One of the judge’s favorites, particularly given the team’s expertise. The company has already raised close to $1 million in seed funding — to scale, it will need some venture funding.

Cloud Elements

What do they do? Once you’ve identified the cloud applications you need, whether it’s SendGrid or Twilio, select from over 20 pre-built integrations in the startup’s Elements Library. The goal is to save developers time by helping them avoid writing custom code for each application. Cloud Elements makes its money by selling its technology and consulting services.

What’s cool about it? If an application you need isn’t in the library, the team will build it at no additional cost. CEO Mark Greene said they are relying on developers to spread the word as “evangelists,” so they cater to their needs.

The verdict? This Denver-based company will ride the open cloud trend all the way to the bank.

photo credit: snowbuzz via photopin cc

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

BEAVER CREEK, Colo. — For technology entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley is no longer the only option. Denver, Seattle, and Austin are hubs of entrepreneurial activity, and these and other cities offer founders a lower cost of living and tax benefits, and access to local venture capital.

Colorado is home to companies like Dish Network, MapQuest, and Arrow Electronics as well as an increasing number of startups. The state is clearly angling to be the destination of choice for rising companies, not a pitstop on the road to Silicon Valley.

At the VCIR conference to showcase the mountain region’s startups, Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) spoke candidly about the state government’s commitment to tech. In a private meeting with the press, he stressed his mission to turn Colorado into the most pro-business state without jeopardizing its natural beauty.

VentureBeat: Is there any legislation on the table that would support tech entrepreneurs? 

John Hickenlooper: We have accelerator legislation under consideration that will give grants for “proof of concept,” meaning an idea that is considered business viable. We want to support “shoot-ups,” a local term for rapid growth companies. I look to [Foundry Group managing director] Brad Feld and the work he has been doing on creating a community and how government can support it. I was an entrepreneur myself and often say that I’m on loan to public service.

VentureBeat: How can you compete with a technology hub like Silicon Valley? 

Hickenlooper: I think every community is competing. We have the Colorado Rockies, a great wonder of the world. We have one of the two or three most progressive public education systems. We have charter schools all over the place. Young people care about lifestyle. We have more music venues in Denver than Nashville or Austin [do].

VentureBeat: But how can you keep entrepreneurs in Colorado? 

Hickenlooper: Mergers and acquisitions [are a problem]. We don’t have aggregators … Oracle and Google and those guys. Generally, what’s interesting is that they don’t necessarily move them [the startups they acquire].  But they do want beachheads in other places. They look at the cost — in California, the tax burden is too great. Our biggest competitors are Portland, Seattle, and Austin. It’s not Silicon Valley.

VentureBeat: One of the biggest problems we face in Silicon Valley is a talent shortage. What are you doing to inspire more kids to pick up computer science skills?

Hickenlooper: We attract for whatever reason a lot of the kids that were nerdy and on the sidelines. The kids that weren’t on the football team. A lot of them became technical nerds and learned how to write software. We have always attracted a lot of free spirits and independent thinkers, although I don’t think it’s a dramatically different percentage than a place like Seattle or Austin. We’re all trying to figure out how to do it.

VentureBeat: Culture is a big draw, certainly. But how about access to venture capital?

Hickenlooper: When I got elected, we looked our our economic development program. People wanted less red tape and better training, and better access to venture capital came up all over the state.

So we have a group of CEOs we are working with. The idea is to be a partner to business. We’re launching a $100 million or $150 million fund, and Colorado is a limited partner. We already have a draft of what the legal organization will look like, and the goal is to launch by the summer.

VentureBeat: Interesting. Has this model been tried elsewhere? What types of companies will you invest in? 

Hickenlooper: A number of states have done variations of it, but nothing exactly like it. Government doesn’t have a high tolerance for failure. We’ll be doing some seed funding, but it could also be mezzanine rounds.

VentureBeat: Is the city planning to go cloud and consolidate its data centers?

Hickenlooper: We have been consolidating the city’s data center, yes. This is a big part of our CIO’s focus. We are also working on moving our entire state government to the cloud. We are taking all the different e-mail systems and doing everything through Google and in the cloud.

With that, handlers ferreted away the governor to address a roomful of the city’s startups that will be demoing today. VentureBeat will be reporting on the best of the bunch.

While San Francisco and New York get a lot of attention for their startup scenes, there are other cities around the U.S. that deserve some attention for the amazing companies they produce. One of the most notable is Boulder, Colo.

Boulder attracts startups and talent because it has a vibrant community that’s enthusiastic about tech, a small-town vibe that some people prefer to big cities, a wealth of outdoor activities, and a lower cost of living relative to some other tech hotspots. On top of that, it’s the home of prestigious accelerator program TechStars and major VC firm Foundry Group.

Foundry Group managing director and TechStars cofounder Brad Feld told VentureBeat that he considers Boulder the home of an “incredibly open and collaborative startup community.”

“[It] is lead by entrepreneurs, who have a long-term view, are inclusive of anyone who wants to engage, and we have a continual set of activities and events that engage the entire entrepreneurial stack,” Feld said via email.

Feld also notes that Boulder has an intense density of talent that makes the city unique.

“Boulder has an incredibly smart population — while small (100,000), it’s got an extraordinary entrepreneurial density (entrepreneurs + people working for startups) / total working population) in a tight geographic area,” Feld said. “As a result, there is a huge amount entrepreneurial activity per capita. Entrepreneurs here use a ‘give before you get’ mentality — we are willing to help anyone without an expectation of what we are going to get back in the short term. This creates a powerful long-term dynamic.”

With so many cool startups doing work in Boulder — and the city not getting enough attention — we decided to spotlight some of our favorites. We had many to choose from, so we focused on startups that are fiercely practical and innovative. So while agile development startup Rally Software and mobile game maker Backflip Studios didn’t make the list, that doesn’t mean they aren’t incredibly smart businesses.

Here are the 10 startups in Boulder we’re most excited about right now. Let us know in the comments what we missed.

Epic Playground

The importance of analytics has increased enormously over the past few years. With more data, you can make better decisions. Media companies and website administrators are especially hungry for data because they want to better understand their customers.

Epic Playground aims to be “the ChartBeat for media analytics.” Its Mediagauge tool can help companies measure the use of video across websites. You can know exactly how many people watched a video embedded on your site and how much of the video they watched.

“We want to be the go-to analytics service for media creators,” Epic Playground CEO Michael Sitarzewski told VentureBeat in October. “It’s important to know how many people on your page actually clicked the video or song on that page and how many times it is clicked.”

On top of measurement, the company wants to help media companies with high-level engagement. Let’s say people usually stop watching your video after two minutes. Soon, the company will let you send a message or advertisement at the perfect time (under two minutes in this case) in order to get people more engaged with your product.

Epic Playground graduated from the TechStars Cloud program in May and followed that by spending time with SoftLayer’s Catalyst program for mentoring startups. It has raised $925,000 to date from investors, including DFJ Mercury.

FlixMaster

FlixMaster wants to make enterprise-focused video creation and editing way easier. It offers a drag-and-drop editing platform that people can use for entertainment, educational, e-commerce, nonprofit, marketing, and customer-support purposes. You simply upload videos, build a project, share it, and then monitor it.

HBO used its technology recently to create an online experience for the new Cinemax series Banshee. And over the summer, USA Network used FlixMaster’s technology to power the web experience for Covert Affairs.

“Brands need to produce interactive video experiences that draw viewers in and keep them there,” FlixMaster CEO Erika Trautman said during its latest funding round. “And companies need to be able to produce those experiences at scale and at a reasonable cost. That’s what FlixMaster offers.”

The company recently raised $1.1 million from Golden Seeds, bringing its total raised to $2.2 million.

Gnip

Does your company need serious social analytics tools to keep track of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms? Gnip knows you do.

Gnip got a big boost in attention when it launched its Historical PowerTrack for Twitter in September. That tool lets developers search, find, analyze, and compare every tweet ever written. While Twitter seems to be its biggest customer demand, Gnip also offers “firehose and filtered streams from dozens of sources,” including LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Google+.

The company has raised $6.6 million to date from Foundry Group, First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, and others.

Mocavo

I would love to know a detailed and (maybe) rich history of my ancestors. When exactly did they come to the United States? How far back can I trace my history? What is the most interesting place my family came from? Mocavo might have the answers.

While Mocavo seems similar to Ancestry.com, it uses a powerful search engine and big data to help people connect the dots about their genealogy. It now claims to have “the largest genealogy search engine,” with names for more than six billion people in its index. On top of helping everyday folks piece together their histories, it also wants to assist genealogists with research.

The service’s promise has attracted $5 million to date from Foundry Group, Dave McClure, and others.

Precog

“Big data” is a term we hear a lot in tech these days, and everyone wants a piece of it. Precog, one of the more interesting startups in the space, wants to make big data simpler and cheaper for app developers. Some folks have compared it to Twilio, a startup known for its love of APIs and enabling cloud-based communications.

“Precog allows companies to ask very deep statistical questions about their data easily, without having to rely on cumbersome big data infrastructures or use complex tools,” Precog CEO John De Goes told VentureBeat recently. “Our vision of redefining how data is captured, stored, and analyzed is a tremendous engineering challenge.”

Precog launched out of beta in September with a cloud-based platform for data warehousing and analysis. It also offers tools like the front-end analysis app LabCoat, and a layer-reporting app called ReportGrid.

The company has now raised more than $2 million from the likes of RTP Ventures, Resonate Venture Partners, and TechStars’ founder David Cohen.

SendGrid

One of the biggest names on this list is SendGrid, one of the fastest-growing startups in Boulder.

SendGrid focuses its efforts on cloud-based email infrastructure and management. It helps big-name customers like Pinterest, Airbnb, Twilio, Spotify, and Pandora send email to their customers. All those important emails like sign-up confirmations, shipping notifications, and “likes” are all handled by SendGrid’s service, making the lives of its clients easier.

“E-mail is not a fun thing to deal with,” SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin told us when it last raised funding. “We alleviate the pain of dealing with e-mail.”

The company has raised more than $27 million in total funding to date from investors like Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups, and Bullet Time Ventures. It also has offices in London, Frankfurt, Denver, and Anaheim, Calif.

SolidFire

Solid-state storage business SolidFire is another big name on this list, mostly because it has raised $37 million in funding since it was founded in 2009.

While SolidFire isn’t quite a cloud company, it often gets thrown in with the category because its ultimate goal is to help cloud providers by giving them killer solid-state drives (SSDs) and software. Using those superfast hard drives in turn can boost the performance and reliability of those services and help them win customers.

“Sometimes people label us a cloud company, but we’re really selling the systems to cloud providers,” CEO Dave Wright told VentureBeat in November. “We’re an infrastructure company at the end of the day.”

SolidFire launched out of beta recently and is seeing a lot of interest from infrastructure-as-a-service providers.

TeamSnap

While trying to come up with solutions to help team sports organize themselves might seem like a small problem, it’s actually quite huge. Countless leagues and coaches around the world need software to track their teams’ schedules, rosters, and give them a place to connect.

Enter TeamSnap, which recently raised $2.75 million in fresh funding on the strength of its premise. It now supports nearly every sport you can think of and even has a large number of nonsports organizations using its tools. TeamSnap has customers in 170 countries.

Trada

Trada offers up what it labels a “crowdsourced online advertising services marketplace.” Basically, it puts more than 2,000 online ad experts to work for companies’ ad campaigns. The experts do the hard work of the campaign setup, buildout, research, and optimization but your company can still track the process.

“These businesses and their budgets require intuition, human ideas,” told AdWeek during its last funding round. “And [we believed] that a group of people working on these campaigns, first starting in the search side of the world, could end up getting better results than anyone individual[ly].”

The company has collected $17 million to date from Foundry Group, Google Ventures, and other investors.

Ubooly

Yes, the name Ubooly sounds a bit silly, and the cute doll it offers looks like a goofball. But Ubooly’s product and the way it’s helping children learn are actually quite smart and serious.

Ubooly offers a toy doll for $30. After you buy it, you place an iPhone or iPod touch into the doll, giving it a “face.” Turn on the Ubooly app and the doll comes to life with interactive games, puzzles, and jokes.

Ubooly seems like a brilliant idea in a world where we increasingly tech our children learn through digital tools. An old iPhone or iPod touch can easily become Ubooly’s brain and help get your child to learn and solve problems. Just think about all those folks who have an old iOS device laying around that could become a platform for their child’s education.

Ubooly graduated from TechStars in August 2011 and has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including SoftTech VC, 500 Startups, and PJM Advisors.

Boulder Downtown photo via DowntownBoulder.com, Ancestry photo via Shutterstock, Green energy image via Shutterstock

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

If so, you’ll want to apply to join a special meetup we are hosting with one of Boulder’s most respected venture capitalists, Foundry Group.

Basically, we’re offering awesome, free feedback about your idea.

Here are the details: We’re inviting 10 companies who plan to launch products soon to pitch their ideas to a few key members at Foundry as well as to me (as DEMO Executive Producer, I select the companies to present at DEMO) on Wednesday, February 8. Ideally, we’re looking for companies contemplating launching products at DEMO Spring (held April 17-19 in the Silicon Valley), or in Fall (date TBA).

Of course, as editor-in-chief of VentureBeat, I’m also on the prowl for great companies to write about too — so either way, I’m interested in meeting ambitious entrepreneurs.

We’ll also be co-hosting a party with AARP at the T-Zero Lounge from 6-8pm that evening, and the drinks will be on us. Register to attend here (AARP is also sponsoring full scholarships for three companies focused on the 50+ year-old market to launch DEMO Spring in April. If interested in that opportunity, apply here).

DEMO has become an incredible launch platform for startups, mid-level companies, and fully developed, publicly traded corporations to show off their new tech products to an audience of media, investors and other ecosystem players tracking innovation (many large Silicon Valley companies send their corporate or business development officers, for example). DEMO alumni recently hitting the news include Fusion-io, which went public this year, and SuccessFactors, which was just acquired by SAP for $3.4 billion. They add to the long list of successes that came out of DEMO, which include companies like Salesforce.com, VMWare, WebEx and Palm.

We’ve made a lot of changes to make DEMO even more compelling. A new scholarship program makes it free to attend for most early stage companies, and more affordable for later stage companies too (and we’re doing even more on that going forward). And we’re keeping the event in Silicon Valley, which we’ve found is helpful for most companies wanting to do deals and meetings while they’re here from out of town.

If you’re interested in presenting your ideas to the DEMO team and the members at Foundry, please fill out this form. If you’re selected, we will get in touch with you immediately to explain the details and provide further explanation.

We look forward to seeing you in Boulder!

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

McNealy’s new startup is called WayIn and the company’s website is essentially barren of information outside of a few job postings. However, it does tell visitors to follow the Twitter accounts of @wayin and @scottmcnealy for updates.

McNealy used Twitter on Wednesday for a “live” Q&A session that included vague information about what WayIn actually does and explained why the startup would be based in Colorado instead of a traditional Silicon Valley locale. The tweets suggested WayIn would have an environmental focus, would sell its services to enterprises, and that they were currently looking to hire engineers, programmers, and mobile developers.

While WayIn’s mission and purpose are unclear, McNealy is doing his best to promote the company through social media and to drive conversations about his new company. If a generic startup tried to work this angle, it probably wouldn’t have a chance of generating buzz. But McNealy has a reputation as an experienced, well-versed businessman, so he’s one of the few people uniquely qualified to leverage the power of social media so it can cut through the noise and attract potential investors and employees.

What do you think of solely using Twitter to launch a new startup?

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---