If you are in or around Boulder and are interested in all things related to entrepreneurship, startups and venture capital, here is your event of the year:

Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurship Week

The events are too numerous to list (see the link above), but some of my favorites will be:

1. NewTech meetup on 4/7 (okay this makes the event a little longer than a week)

2. The Entrepreneurial Mashup, where we honor folks like Brad Feld, David Cohen and several Colorado-based companies for what they mean to the community.  We’ll also play plenty of Rock Band.  What I’m most excited is that folks from CU to "grizzled veterans" will be there blending current, past and future entrepreneurs in an event that won’t soon be forgotten.  It’s going to have food, entertainment and plenty of surprises.

3.Feld versus Weiser – The second smack down (okay, not really, it’s friendly) between these two discussion important current topics, followed by an Entrepreneurs Unplugged session

4. The whole afternoon / evening of 4/16 has a variety of panels and events featuring our governor Bill Ritter.

5.  New venture challenge – on the morning of the 17th, the first annual new venture challenge at CU will have its first annual winner

All are welcome.  I hope that you are excited as I am to participate in the activities.  For more information, check out the link above. 

I (Jason) will be visiting the University of Michigan in a couple of weeks to speak to different campus constituencies about entrepreneurship and venture capital.

As part of that, I’m going to plant my butt in a conference room on campus for a couple of hours and talk to anyone that wants to come by and chat, pitch me, talk about venture capital, etc.

Location:  Lorch Hall (Economics Building) Room 171, 611 Tappan, Ann Arbor

Time: 3pm to 5pm

Date: Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Students, professors, members of the community all invited.

Thanks to my friends at Kendall Media Group, here is the video of my recent Venture Capital Crash Course at the Silicon Flatirons.

Venture Capital Crash Course with Jason Mendelson from Andrew on Vimeo.
I give a 25 minute presentation and then hold an hour town-hall question and answer session.  Great questions were asked, so if you are interested in what goes through a VC’s head, take a gander.

The video is really well done.  The slides are integrated into the presentation.  I’d highly recommend Craig Kendall if you need any video creation or editing work.  Thanks Craig for putting all the time into the video.  Here’s a bit about Craig:

Founded on 13 years web and video experience and a passion for top quality video, Craig Kendall is the founder of Kendall Media Group and eventon.tv. Currently partnering with many Boulder area technology programs including IgniteBoulder, the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup, and Silicon Flatiron’s Crash Course for Entrepreneurs, eventon.tv is helping provide video recording and production for the web. Having recently returned to Colorado after 13 years in Tennessee, Craig is thrilled to be part of the technology community in Colorado.”There’s some really amazing things happening in the Boulder/Denver area as far as technology and entrepreneurship and Kendall Media Group is excited to be a part of it,” says Craig. Reach out to Craig at craig at kendallmediagroup dot com.

For those of you unfamiliar, the VCIC (Venture Capital Investment Competition) is an international competition pitting the best and brightest graduate business school students against each other.

I had the pleasure of being a judge this year in the Mountain regional qualifier and was really impressed with the program.  Each region contains six top schools competing against each other.  Each team has five students who must interview three real companies seeking venture funding, do diligence and then offer and negotiate a term sheet to what they consider the best team.

Oh yeah, and unlike me, they have 15 minutes or so to interview each company and about an hour to prepare a term sheet including return metrics.  In other words, it’s much harder than what I have to do.

I’m very happy to report that the University of Colorado team won their regional this year and will be heading to the University of North Carolina (the creators of the program) to compete with all the winners April 16-18.

I’ve gotten to know each of the team members, as they are either current or former students in my venture capital course and despite my miscellaneous ramblings, they seemed to have learned enough on their own to really impress.  Here’s to an outstanding result in the finals!

For more coverage and a nice picture of the winners, check out Julie Penner’s writeup.

If you are looking for something to do this summer, check out what Startup2Student is organizing. 

The goal is to introduce students interested in summer programming internships or jobs with early stage entrepreneurial companies in the Boulder/Denver area to these companies, as well as to introduce the students to some young entrepreneurs who have chosen a career path of entrepreneurship.

Mark your calendar for March 12th at 5:30pm.

Last night, I was a guest of the Silicon Flatirons to present a "crash course" on venture capital.  Basically, it was a no holds barred town hall-type conversation where I led off with a brief presentation and then opened it up to the 200 or so attendees to ask questions.  I encouraged the audience to ask anything they wanted about venture capital, getting funded and "secrets" of the VC ecosystem.

The event was videotaped and hopefully soon, I’ll be able to post it on this blog.  Until then, here was the presentation that I gave. 

I enjoyed immensely hanging out with a lot of smart people interested in venture capital.  Thanks to all who attended.

For those of you in the Boulder/Denver area, I’m giving a 1.5 hour “crash course” lecture on the VC industry.

The program is February 24th at 5:15 at the CU law school.  You can find more information here.

The topics will include everything from what makes VCs tick, who are our bosses, what are things that you can do to improve your chances of receiving funding and things that many VCs don’t want to talk about.  No question is off limits and I hope that it will be a very interactive forum.

Hope to see you there.

No, I am not talking about a bad Rodney Dangerfield movie, rather this week I’ve returned to my role as an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado.  I’m stepping out of my comfort zone and teaching a class on venture capital. 

Last year was my first attempt at teaching a full class.  I was extremely fortunate to enlist Brad Bernthal, who is a real professor at CU, to teach it with me.  We had a blast and our student reviews seemed to indicate that they appreciated our efforts.  We call our class "VC 360" and try to teach a cradle to grave course on everything in the VC ecosystem, including from the eyes of the entrepreneur, which we do by including guess lectures from local CEOs. 

We tried to not only teach about how the startup ecosystem worked, but get them all involved in the community through outreach events, seminars and Boulder-based events.  Our goal was to put what we taught in real life context. 

This years class is an even more diverse group of law and business students.  Perhaps more interesting (with no slight intended toward folks paying tuition) is that we have three Computer Science instructors auditing our class.

Today was class number two and I’m already excited for lecture number three.  It’s highly rewarding to see so many people interested in startup culture and hope that our class, in a small way, can be additive to the Boulder community. 

Thanks to past and present students – you give back more than I put into the process and I’m very thankful.  I’m looking forward to another rewarding semester. 

Today, I was on a panel at Moye White’s gorgeous offices in Denver where we spoke about fiduciary duties of serving on a board of directors.

John Kellogg gave one of the clearest and concise presentations on fiduciary duties that I’ve seen on the subject.  I’d encourage anyone interested in the subject to take a look.

This past weekend, I went back to Ann Arbor, Mi to attend my 10th law school reunion.  Normally, I get hives when I’m around too many lawyers, but it was a fun event and reconnecting with old friends was pleasant.  

There were three big takeaways from the weekend:

1.  Ten years out, it was surprising how few of my former classmates stayed at their big firm jobs out of school.  (hmmm, maybe my theories of what ails the legal profession are true…);

2.  Going to a University of Michigan football game is still one of the best ways to spend a Saturday that I can think of (even if my Wolverines stunk up the joint and lost 45-20 to Illinois); and

3.  Despite everyone saying that we don’t look any different than we did 10 years ago, those are just self serving statements.  It doesn’t mean that many of us don’t still look good, rather ten years is really ten years.  I, for one, am definitely worse for wear. 

For those of you interested, I present a photographic journal of the football experience and some reunion pictures as well for those of you unable to attend.

Football:

- Everyone needs a good tailgate.  This fine gentleman gave us each a hotdog as we walked up the street.  Thanks random grill dude!

Everyone also needs a two floor beer bong.  Yippie!

And the stadium avec le marching band

Reunion:

Dave Davis, me and Drew Worseck.  This was before the football team decided defense was optional.

Me "reunited" with my law school house

David Bouman, Tanya and Paul Hunter and Dave and (committeewoman) Lynne Davis

Matt Drake, "Mr. Classy" pouring generic whisky into a bottle of coke to "tune up" prior to the game.  In hindsight, maybe he was the smart one.

The law school

We’ll see y’all in another 5 to 10 (sounds like a prison sentence).  Thanks to Carrie Newton and Jeff King for setting this all up us.