The NVA Blog

I’ve been looking forward to writing this post for the last year! Today, Filtrbox launched publicly and released an entirely new version of our media monitoring service. There have been crickets here at the NVA blog for the last few months because we’ve been working around the clock to reach this milestone. Pretty exciting times, I must say. Please do check out Filtrbox and see what I’ve been up to! If you rely on up-to-date information and news to do your job, or are simply suffering from information overload, this just might do the trick.

One of the things that drove me to start the company was the frustration I had with RSS when I tried to track a non-trivial number of early stage companies and their venture firms. I never knew where the next piece of news was going to come from, and when a new deal came across my desk that looked interesting, I wanted to be able to just pull together news on them and keep an eye on things until I was ready to dive in.

Old Model:

1. Manually search for company name, person, or “space” in 2-3 search engines
2. Bookmark a bunch of decent pages
3. Find an RSS feed or two to subscribe to, unsure if the founders had their own blogs or sites
4. End up marking my 750 unread RSS items as read because there was no way I could tell what was new or relevant. RSS bankruptcy!
5. Go find those old bookmarks and see if any of the articles were useful

I could go on, but you get the point. I tried subscribing to FeedBlitz daily RSS updates via email, I tried Google Alerts (good for 2-3 keywords but more than that and it gets to be a pain fast). I knew there had to be a better way and something that I could use to quickly hone in on what was important and filter out what wasn’t.

New Model

1. Enter keywords into Filtrbox
2. Scan Daily Briefing emails in 5 minutes over morning coffee
3. Go about my day, already in-the-know

I can even read my Daily Briefing on my iPhone and know what’s up with everything I need to track…

Filtrbox is great for private equity investors, VCs, angels, and entrepreneurs because it offers article history, search, trending and noise control. Brad Feld is a fan and has blogged about the service before and uses Filtrbox to track his portfolio. Check out some of our video screencasts, and the “Colorado Venture Buzz” widget I have set upon the sidebar. These widgets are automatically provided when you create a FiltrFeed (custom RSS feed) in Filtrbox. BTW, if you like the widget you can build your own, I can give you my insert code, or just grab the feed!

Filtrbox is FREE for up to 5 Filtrs (searches), and only $20/month for 25 Filtrs, and there is a Team version this is great for a Ibank or VC office and you can even import your Google alerts if you use that service. Sign up here: https://www.filtrbox.com/signup.php

Check out labruinbear.com, an insightful blog penned by my brother in-law, Steven Sesar, who is on a quest to find the next great gig. Steve is, as we say, “in between projects” and documenting it. He’s been blogging about his experiences interviewing in LA and the valley with startups and VCs. Following his experience is really interesting (not just because he’s married to my sister, either) as Steve is being very transparent with his experiences and opinions. Turns out he’s a great writer also! Keep it up Steve. It’s not everyday I get to plug a family member while staying on-topic here…

If you are one of those people on the fence about switching to a Mac but you have PC only software or are an addicted gamer hanging on your Dell XPS, check this out. The new version of Parallels, which enables you to run XP or Vista on an Intel based Mac within a window is now going to support OpenGL and DirectX for 3D graphics. Check out this blog post from Ben @ Parallels where he shows Doom running full-speed on his Mac. Another super-cool feature is SmartSelect. Lets say you really like Word/Windows better than Word/Mac. You can assign Word compatible file types to open in any app on either the OS X or Windows side. Run your Exchange client and Office suite in Windows, and do everything else in OS X. Or, this means you can be reading email in Apple Mail, click on the attached Word doc and Parallels can open it in Word in your Windows VM. Brilliant! A better alternative to BootCamp also since you don’t have to reboot to jump to Windows…

This one is going to be good, folks. Ask the VC, the venture-world blog that is quickly becoming an indispensable resource for the tech start-up community, is going to do a series on start-up compensation. Expect opinion and details around how much executives should get paid, what good and bad deal terms are, and some thoughtful commentary on how to calculate and justify comp. packages at various stages of company development.

The topic of compensation comes up all the time, naturally. NVA deals with a lot of early stage companies where cash is king and our guidance is often to preserve as much capital as possible to fund business operations and hit milestones. Investors and Founders want to see tangible results for the early, high-risk money that goes into a company. Having even an extra 10k/month go out the door in the form of cash/benefits/expenses can have a direct impact on features, customer acquisition, and runway. The flip side is that even smart, talented and motivated people cannot work for partial salaries forever, and many deferred-comp deals evaporate. Every situation can have unique dynamics that require going deeper than a set of guiding principals, but we are all for having the community reading from the same play book.

Although I did not blog about it ahead of time, I was at Venture Capital in the Rockies (aka VCIR) this week. The event is a jam-packed one day conference that brings together VCs, companies and service providers. One of the goals of the event is to bring additional exposure of Colorado/Rockies-based investment opportunities to out of state VCs. VCIR also is a great way to see a lot of regional companies that are either already venture-backed or looking for funding. Great networking opportunity, and the venue is stellar too…

I was already familiar with a number of the companies presenting this year, but it was great to see their updated pitches and hear the Q&A sessions (even if many of the questions were more lobs than zingers). There were 30+ presenting companies and due to the 3 tracks I could not attend all of the sessions so I stuck to the IT/Internet services track primarily. What impressed me the most was that an entire track was filled with Biotech and Pharma companies. They are all local, more or less, and this is a great indicator of the level of activity in this space happening in this region. Who knew Colorado was a hotbed of Biotech!?!

The front range of Colorado is not silicon valley, but there is a broad and sophisticated array of startups in the area that cover everything from stock-video content (Thought Equity Motion) to carbon-fiber jet aircraft (Adam Aircraft). The biggest highlight of the event was the big-picture it provided…that is the fact that there are a healthy number of smart, motivated entrepreneurs starting great companies in this area. So if you are an investor on either coast sitting on your checkbook, take a closer look at the dealflow out here. Better quality of living, lower operational costs and motivated people are a good formula to create great companies!

Some of the more serious bloggers out there have already covered the event in detail for us. Here’s the short list:

• David @ ColoradoStartups.com profiles several of the companies here
• Daniel Primack of PE Week Wire/PE Hub has a VCIR hangover
• Podcast of the media round table discussion held on Tuesday night (thanks David!)
• Brad Feld’s summary (with several links back to ColoradoStartups.com too)
• Seth Levine of Mobius/Foundry Group profiles a few presenters here