One of our portfolio companies, Sympoz has announced the launch of their programs targeting startup entrepreneurs.  Even better, the series stars some of my favorite people in startup land:  my partner Brad Feld, along with Brad Bernthal of the University of Colorado Law School and Mike Platt , partner at Cooley LLP.  We teach you everything that we know in this comprehensive video series.

Thinking about doing your first startup? Perhaps you’re a startup veteran, who has the bumps and bruises to prove it, looking to jump back in?

Let us help you maximize the opportunity and do it right.

Brad’s class, How To Light a Spark & Set Your Startup on Fire, is FREE for a limited time.  Brad has lived the startup story over and over. He offers straight-shooting advice: Does your idea have market potential? Is it the right idea for you? Brad’s raw and pragmatic advice will lead you to consider the competition, examine your motivation and be honest about your level of passion and commitment.

Brad Bernthal and I, who have for several years taught an oversubscribed course at the CU Boulder Law School, are joined by Mike in teaching, The Nuts and Bolts of Starting a Company. In this class, which includes over 4 hours of instruction for just $29.99, we join forces to teach you things your lawyer and venture capitalist may not want you to know. How to turn an idea into a company. Who to partner with. How to seek out money and what to do with it when you get it. You’ll learn what to put in your pitch deck, what not to say to a VC, and 15 common mistakes that will kill your startup before it gets off the ground.  And a lot, lot more…

For those of you who have read Venture Deals, consider this a great summary of some topics in the book, but more heavy on the business side of equation, with the benefits of interactivity between you and the instructors.

Sympoz classes are perfect for busy people; you can watch the professionally produced, HD videos anytime, anywhere on the planet, from any Internet-connected device, as often as you want. The Sympoz learning platform seamlessly blends discussions into the class experience, enabling you to ask questions of, and participate in conversations with your class community, including your instructors.

So, what are you waiting for? Join us in class!

One of our companies Organic Motion is powering an awesomely cool exhibit at Seattle’s EMP Museum. By use of their marker-less computer vision platform, one can put themselves in the middle of James Cameron’s Avatar. Here is a great news report about the event including an intro from James Cameron, himself.

Also, here is an example of a person using the system to reenact a scene from Avatar.

Today we announced our investment in Attachments.me.

What is attachments.me? It’s a really cool company and one that I’m proud to be associated with.

Imagine that you remember someone sent you a document about a particular subject or a funny video.  You just don’t remember who sent it to you or what the email text was.  Now, you will be able to search by subject matter embedded in links and attachments, and browse by content type, not just by sender, and the results will include not just data in the email body itself, but in the attachments and links themselves.

This mailbox crawling technology will allow for a single searchable interface to automatically group and filter the structured data and documents in a user’s email archive.  This data will also be accessible via mobile applications for on-the-go access.  Attachments.me recognizes the fact that for most users, email is their de-facto filesystem, knowledgebase and personal information manager, and that better tools are needed to access and manipulate the extremely valuable data in the messages a user sends and receives.

We were investors in Stratify (Acquired: Iron Mountain) which changed the way lawyers worked the discovery process by automatically reading documents and creating subject matter-based folders. Personally, I’ve always had a “thing” for technologies that allow machines to read, interpret and make our information processing faster as humans.  I’m stoked to get to try it again in a very different manner in a different industry.  I’m even more excited to work with Jesse Miller and Ben Coe on it, as well.

I thought I had seen about every possible way that a startup could market itself.  Until now.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I now present you Brightleaf’s marketing “materials” for their launch at LegalTech in New York this week.  (In all seriousness, they are doing a great job with their automated document platform and more instructive videos about what they are doing can be seen here.)

Today, Next Big Sound and Billboard announced the birth of the Social 50 which ranks the top 50 musical artists on the world’s leading social media sites.

Given the upheaval in the music industry in that it has moved away from radio spins and record sales as the sole factors in achieving success, it’s great to see the preeminent keeper of music charts, Billboard, agree that it’s time to start tracking other metrics to determine an artist’s reach.

Even more cool, however, is that our very own Next Big Sound is powering the charts that Billboard is using.

Check out the Social 50 here.

Our portfolio company, Sifteo, is hiring a Head of Marketing and some great game designers. These guys are making the next generation of gaming platform that also is right in the middle of the human computer interaction revolution. 

If you are interested in working for a really cool company and getting into the action early, here is your chance.

Here is the marketing job description.

And here is what they are looking for in game developers.   

I’m excited about the upcoming Blur Conference showcasing thought leadership in the human computer interaction ecosystem.

As active investors in the area, we’ll be there in full force along with some of our companies.

Interested in the conference?  Check out Brad’s earlier post about it.

And see below for a cool promo video from Organic Motion. 

I’m very excited to be able to show you, publically, for the first time, what Brightleaf is up to. Here is their video demo. Cool stuff.

When we first invested in Brightleaf, we were convinced they were going to fundamentally change the way that template-based law was practiced. Nothing since our investment has diminished our enthusiasm. The response to their platform has been tremendous. The costs savings associated with their software has even outpaced our expectations.
Kudos to early success and wins at Brightleaf. Enjoy the video, folks.

We invested in Organic Motion about a year ago and have been really happy with how far they’ve brought the technology forward.  For those of you who haven’t been introduced to them, they are the preeminent technology developer for marker-less computer vision solutions. 

They’ve recently made major inroads into the animation market.  The following two videos show some of what they are capable of.  The first video is a game that was developed by students at a German university using the Organic Motion SDK.  It’s great that folks are starting to innovate off of the Organic Motion platform.  The second video is an update, generally, about how the company is approaching the animation market.  Enjoy. 

Over the past year and a half I’ve had a front row seat to the development of Next Big Sound. From my earliest phone calls with CEO Alex White to mentoring the team through the TechStars program here in Boulder, I’ve watched them go from passionate music fans and talented founders to building a company and products of tremendous value. Billboard naming Next Big Sound as one of the 10 best startups and Alex to their 30 Under 30 list in August was great outside recognition of the progress that I’ve watched being achieved day after day and week after week.

Like most startups in their early days, the company was super busy with many different projects. Whether it was the API, SXSW charts, the Premier product, or re-launch of their free site, development of these offerings took the full resources of the company and there wasn’t time to integrate everything together.

We are coming up on one year since Foundry Group invested in the company. I always like to take a minute and reflect on each year since investing in a company. I’m really excited about NBS. Now is the time that we are seeing the integration of all of their hard work. Their output is impressive and I believe will fundamentally change how the recording industry interacts with data and analytics.

The team has more than doubled in size and today releasing their Premier product, updating their website to include even more great free tools and is announcing several major partnership and client wins. See the official press release here.

What’s the all the excitement about?

1. Premier – the most powerful analytics dashboard the music industry has ever seen. Charts, advanced geographical and demographic information down to individual fans, integration with Google analytics, record and digital sales, radio plays and P2P network information. And much, much more;
2. Early adopters at record labels, TV stations, management firms and artist service providers are already paying subscribers of Premier. Now anyone can subscribe as well;
3. Predictive Charts – Plenty of folks do a great job of charting who is already popular but there is no reliable place to go to find out who is going to become popular. The NBS25 charts the fastest accelerating artists across the internet identifying those artists that are statistically most likely to go on to become the next big sound; and
4. Stats – you can still search and compare any artist in the world but it is now much easier to subscribe to weekly email reports on artists’ social media stats and share interesting graphs across the web

In short, it’s the launch of Next Big Sound 2.0. It’s been an exciting and fun ride so far with Alex, David, Samir, Eric, Todd, Sam, Walter and the rest of the extended family. Thanks guys for letting me hang out with you.