Socialthing Invites

I am good friends with the founders of Socialthing as a reader of this blog knows from my posts about Techstars last summer. I have 10 invites available on a first come basis. They were featured on Techcrunch today and are getting a lot of good buzz. Don't post a comment here but email me at Derrick AT doien Dot com if you want one.

Techstars Revisited

Over the last two months or so I have been at great risk of becoming an occasional blogger. Actually I have also toyed with blogging about cooking which has been something I have been spending a lot of time doing around the holidays. In any event, I miss posting and now that I have finally taken a VACATION, I endeavor to get back on track. One of the items that came up while I have been blog absent involves the company my friends started called Social Thing. I had posted before about Tech Stars, which I can't say enough good about. Link to my previous post here.

While I was busy, Matt, Brian and company raised an angel round! Their blog post here. (It's been a month already!). Congrats to them and I wish them the utmost success.

While revisiting my reminders to make this post, I went back to the Techstars site to see how the other teams have fared so far and I was excited to see that so far 4 of the companies I saw that day had raised money. Link to the most recent funding and list of other companies here. I can't wait to see how things play out for them and am very interested to see what the Tech Stars folks do in 2008.

Boulder

Last week I traveled to Boulder, Colorado to see the presentations from the techstars group. It was a great event and I will do a detailed write up today or tomorrow (hopefully) of the different teams products I saw.

An unintended benefit was my first visit to Boulder. What an amazing town! I have a number of friends who attended the University of Colorado and who raved about the city and the school. The setting of the school, adjacent to an amazing rock formation and surrounded by mountains can hardly be described. The town had a great feel as well as one would expect from a college town.

I think that beyond the content and the teams and products presented last week, it was quite a smart move by the folks at techstars to bring talent into Boulder through this vehicle. I believe over half of the teams that presented were from outside of Colorado and they now intend to set up their companies there. Beyond Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and New York, I think that the fight for talent can be tough, even in a city as big as San Diego. I think that a techstars type enterprise in San Diego and other cities would be a great thing to invigorate the local technology industries and give the entrepreneurs something to galvanize around.