Hi, I’m David G. Cohen.

I’m really excited that Dave McClure is bringing the popular Silicon Valley event “Startup2Startup” to Boulder this Tuesday night. I’m moderating a discussion called the “Ultimate Platform Hotness Smackdown: iPhone, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and the native web”. We’ll be comparing and contrasting these platforms and others, for the relative benefit and interest from the startup perspective on a variety of platform topics (features, distribution, monetization, etc).

The panel is a really great one, and we’re lucky to have them in town. Dave McClure runs FF Angel (part of the Founders Fund) and we’ll be joined by Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC – he’s a fantastic and very active seed stage investor with more than 50 web 2.0 investments to date. Howard Lindzon (Wallstrip, StockTwits) is also joining us, as is Ryan McIntyre of the Foundry Group. Dave, Jeff, and Howard were all coming to town this week as mentors for TechStars so I’m thrilled that Dave decided tack on this great community event.

This isn’t just another panel discussion. While I think that will be interesting, the real beauty of Startup2Startup is the great job that Dave does of getting people involved in their own discussions. The panel sets the topic, and then each table is pre-arranged so that there is a mix of investors, rookie entrepreneurs, and experienced entrepreneurs. A moderator is appointed for each table whose job it is to make sure everyone gets involved in the conversation. The format of the dinner ensures that you’ll make some new connections and strengthen some existing ones. I’ve been to Startup2Startup in Silicon Valley and they’re always fantastic events.

As I write this, only 18 seats remain. Tickets run from $20-$60 depending on your level of experience and they include dinner. It’s a great deal you’re sure to have a good time. Grab one of those last few tickets right now, before they’re gone. See you Tuesday!

« view less

I’m often approached by entrepreneurs who are looking for mentors.  A common misconception is that mentors are difficult to find. I always tell them that they’re just not trying hard enough. Colorado is full of experienced entrpereneurs and the vast majority of them are happy to help other entrepreneurs when asked. When approaching individuals that you think can help your business, they key is to build a real relationship with them. I’ve talked about this before in my post Find and Engage Great Mentors – it’s one of my personal favorites from this blog.

TechStars is mentorship on steroids, but alas: we only take about ten companies a year. So I’m often asked about other programs that offer a mentorship-based approach here in Colorado. One really great one that I was recently made aware of is TiE-Rockies – they appear to have a good mentorship program of their own.

Here’s a blurb from them:

TiE-Rockies, a chapter of TiE-Global–the largest organization in the world that supports entrepreneurs–has been recognized as having the best Mentoring Program of all the chapters. Membership is only $175 per year and this includes the award-winning one-on-one Mentoring Program. Every entrepreneur should have a Mentor and if you live in Colorado, this is a program you cannot afford to miss. If you don’t live in Colorado, all the national TiE chapters are adopting Colorado’s unique Mentoring Program. If there is a chapter near you, check out their Mentoring Program.

There’s also the Boulder Innovation Center, CTEK, and more that you should check out. Nicole Glaros also has a good list of resources towards the bottom of this page on her blog.

However you do it, finding and engaging great mentors with relevent experience can make a huge difference to you and your company. I wish I had known this when I started my first company – it’s one of those life lessons that most people learn the hard way. Go get a mentor for your business, or better yet, go get several.

« view less

I’ve been lugging my MacBook Pro back and forth on my 5 block daily commute to work for a couple of years now. I finally got sick of it, and decided to set up a second MacBook Pro that was identical, so that I could keep one at the office and one at home.  I used Carbon Copy Cloner, and it took just a few hours and a spare external hard drive, which in typical Mac fashion, worked flawlessly on the first try.

I’m a Mobile Me subscriber, so I tested the multi-machine sync plus iPhone, and everything worked great. I can now update contacts, calendars, etc on either laptop or the iPhone, and they all sync beautifully. I was already using a cloud based IMAP email service so that worked easily too. My Pogoplug connection, my DropBox, my TextExpander snippets – everything was ready to go and worked just like they did on the source machine. A true clone – really easily.

One of the byproducts that I got out of doing the backup/restore with Carbon Copy Cloner was a bootable USB hard drive with the same cloned MacBook image on it. As part of the process, I had booted up the target (new) MacBook Pro from the external hard drive, and I was looking at the source machine exactly. This got me thinking.

There’s really no reason why everyone couldn’t use one of these portable hard drives as their primary computer image, and just boot any machine using that image. You’d just have to carry that around.

Then I started thinking about the iPhone. If only it had a 200 GB hard drive on it. I could dock it at home, at the office, or at my mom’s house, and boot my OS right from it. You can easily see the future heading in that direction. I’ve had a strange feeling that maybe we’ll even see Apple heading in that direction when it makes the much anticipated WWDC announcements on Monday. That would be a great direction. This seems likely to be how things will be done sometime in the next 5 years or so.

This seems like a good interim step between the OS in the cloud and what we have today. Would you like for things to work that way?

« view less

A few nights ago, I had dinner with some special guests who were visiting Boulder and TechStars. They were Joachim and Steven who are with the Singapore government and Ken Zolot, a TechStars mentor and MIT Lecturer from Boston who is also a Senior Fellow with the Kauffman Foundation and is working to understand entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Among many interesting parts of the discussion, one topic stuck out for me. It was about how failure is almost celebrated here in the US in the context of entrepreneurship. Things have changed in Singapore, but apparently Asian culture has historically made it shameful to fail. Of course, in the US it’s not exactly great to fail, but it certainly falls short of shameful. In fact, as the saying goes, if you haven’t failed you haven’t pushed your limits.

This made me think back to a video from Big Omaha that I had seen recently of Jason Fried saying that somehow “failure became cool” and he said that he didn’t get the “fail early, fail often” mantra it at all.  Ever since I watched this the first time, it had bugged me. So I went back and watched it again. Then I read his related post on the 37Signals blog.

Some of this is semantics – I think “fail early, fail often” is usually used in the context of micro-failures and experimentation and not at the macro level of the entire enterprise.

In a post supporting his position that “this industry’s obsession with failure has got to stop“, Jason says “Many investors and entrepreneurs out there believe that you should fail a few times before you succeed.” I’ve never once come across this attitude, but I suppose it could exist. In clear contrast, Brad Feld has said that his favorite entrepreneur to invest in is a successful one coming off a recent failure. This is not just due to the lessons learned, but also because that entrepreneur is going to be very, very hungry. Of course he’d be somewhat less likely to invest in an entrepreneur who has failed and failed and failed with no success.

I think there is some confusion here between “fail early, fail often” and “fail fast.” Failing fast is about the case where you’re on a path that is going to fail and the writing is on the wall. In that context, failing the company fast makes sense.

When people say “Fail early, fail often” I think they generally mean something different. Of course people aren’t encouraging you to go out and start companies that fail just for the experience of it as if it somehow makes you stronger!  Rather, it’s about testing and trying until you get it right – generating an overall success. Think little failures, early and often, and you’ve got the right context for “fail early, fail often.”

That’s what was bugging me. To me the two sayings are used in completely different contexts. Am I right? What does “fail early, fail often” mean to you, vs. “fail fast”?

UPDATE: After writing this, I watched Micah Baldwin’s video from the same event, where he made a similar point about the confusion about the “ending point” of failure in Jason’s talk at about the 11 minute mark.

« view less