Crash Dev is created by Chris DeVore. Seattle-based startup guy + seed-stage investor at Founders' Co-op, Managing Director at Techstars Seattle, Stanford GSB, Yale / Y150
I had a fun, wide-ranging conversation with one of my favorite founders yesterday. (She happens to be a woman, which figures in this story, but I didn’t want to suggest that I was qualifying the previous statement by limiting the set). We connected on a number of issues, but the broad theme was the importance continue…
I love reading Mark Suster’s annual survey of venture capital Limited Partners (the large-scale institutional allocators who actually supply the money that VCs invest), but as the manager of both a regional seed fund (Founders’ Co-op) and regional startup accelerator (Techstars Seattle), I’ve always felt like more of a spectator than a participant in the continue…
Last week we announced our latest Techstars Seattle cohort, nine great companies pursuing important innovations across a wide range of sectors. And while I’m proud and excited about the companies we selected for this year’s class, I’m ashamed of my failure as Managing Director to attract a more diverse mix of founders to the program I continue…
We just announced our Techstars Seattle 2017 cohort — nine companies that represent the best of the Pacific Northwest innovation ecosystem. In both the recruiting effort for the class and in making our final selections, our top-of-mind question is always this one: “What are the most powerful pairings of founder capabilities and ecosystem resources that continue…
Two blog posts from friends stuck out for me this week, Brad Feld’s December Depression and Boris Wertz’ A Year in Review: 2016. Brad’s post was a perfect summary of how I’ve been feeling since the November election, with its unfolding aftermath offering an almost-daily sucker punch to my equilibrium. This gloom has seeped into continue…
Tone at the top is a term of art from corporate governance, now broadly applied to the role of senior leaders in any large, complex organization. Here’s a nice summary from Boise State University’s internal controls page: ”Tone at the Top’ is a term that is used to define management’s leadership and commitment towards openness, honesty, continue…
I’m delighted to announce that Founders’ Co-op has just completed an investment in Komiko, a Redmond-based company that uses machine learning to bridge the structured tables and workflows of Enterprise CRM platforms with the messy, unstructured data that lives in company email, calendars and documents. As a fund we continue to see huge opportunities at continue…
I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve just completed an investment in Reflect, a “data-vizualization-as-a-service” company co-founded by Alex Bilmes and Brad Heller. It’s been a while since I had the chance to post about a new portfolio company (we’ve made a few other investments I can’t talk about yet), but this one is a special pleasure continue…
This is a super-fun investment to be able to announce, because it ties together so many of the threads of our work here at Founders’ Co-op. Giftbit is a Victoria, BC company that helps large-scale issuers of digital gift credits (think brands like Starbucks, Amazon and eBay) and volume buyers of those credits (pretty much any digital continue…
We named our fund Founders’ Co-op for a reason: we believe great companies are built by truly exceptional founders. And world-class founders never stop being founders; win or lose, creating new companies is their superpower and you can count on them to keep doing it for as long as they draw breath. Back in 2009, continue…