A few months ago I was invited to speak to the Bellevue, WA chapter of Rotary International on my favorite topic: how to create a globally competitive early-stage technology ecosystem here in the Pacific Northwest. As I was putting my thoughts together (full deck below + full props to Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, Mark Suster and Marcelo continue…
I spent last Thursday up in Vancouver BC at GrowConf (thanks again to Boris Wertz and Debbie Landa for the kick in the pants) and was incredibly impressed both by the quality of folks who showed up, and by the overall energy of the scene up there. Andy and I created Founders Co-op to help build continue…
TechCrunch’s article on this financing had already hit Techmeme by 10 this morning so pretty much the entire world has already heard the news, but I wanted to take a minute to officially welcome Habit Labs co-founders Jen McCabe and Buster Benson to the Founders Co-op family. We’ve been looking for a way to work continue…
This article originally appeared on Seattle 2.0 Early-stage investors (disclosure: I’m one of them) are famous for saying ‘no’. Entrepreneurs seeking capital will spend hours building PowerPoint decks, crafting emails and asking friends for introductions to prospective investors, only to receive an inbox full of one-line ‘thanks but no thanks’ replies. And that’s when they continue…
I had a great conversation with a friend today (Sree Nagarajan, founder + CEO at social media research platform Colligent) that gave me a new handle on the threat that Facebook poses to Google. We were talking about what Colligent does, which is to allow any brand to measure and track their relative affinity with continue…
Mike Arrington got wind of this one last night so we’re making it official as well: we’re delighted to announce that Thinkfuse (TechStars Seattle 2010) is a recent addition to the Founders Co-op family of companies. The company is still in private beta so they aren’t saying much about what they’re up to yet, but continue…
One of Seattle’s best (and least-known) entrepreneurs isn’t in the software business. Dave Lahaie is the President and founder of Evergreen Recycling, a global company that matches industrial waste products from one industry with raw materials supply chains in another. By matching waste outputs with manufacturing inputs, Dave’s company saves millions of tons of material continue…
I’ve had this idea bouncing around in my head for a while now – I’m hoping that writing it down will help me see the pattern more clearly. First, a few facts: DST offers $150K in seed funding on ridiculously friendly terms to *any* Y-Combinator company Salesforce pays $250MM for Heroku (or around 80x rumored sales) continue…
Step 1: From Team + Opportunity to Company Just over a year ago Founders Co-op invested in a new company called Untitled Startup. The co-founders, Aviel Ginzburg and Damon Cortesi, were well-known hackers in the social media community. They knew that social media marketing was headed for the mainstream and had a long list of continue…
Today the White House announced Startup America, a new economic initiative to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. I’m proud to announce that Founders Co-op is a launch partner for this initiative as a charter member of the TechStars Network. Andy and I started Founders Co-op to help the best local technology continue…