The NVA Blog

TechStars just launched today. David Cohen, a successful entrepreneur himself, is the managing director of the program. It’s a Y-Combinator style startup incubator program that will be happening this summer in Boulder. Programs like these can make a huge difference in the lifecycle and trajectory of early stage startup. Have a great idea, need a little capital to get it off the ground? A summer in Boulder, CO sound good? Check this out…

David has assembled the who’s who of the local startup, entrepreneur, and investor scene for the program. It’s an amazing opportunity to learn a lot from really smart people in a short period of time.

Brad Feld has posted a good blog post about the program here. The Boulder Daily Camera covered it in an article titled “TechStars set to rise over Boulder“. Also, David built the techstars.org site using a very cool product from another Boulder-based startup, HyperSites.

Apple announced the iPhone today. They delivered on expectations, it appears. Won’t be available until June, and only on Cingular. That’s ok with me, the features are amazing. Anyone want a t-mobile Razr or Blackberry?

Great coverage on Engadget here.

MacRumors has the play by play too. A picture is worth a thousand words, check ‘em out.

Update: Apple has updated the apple.com website with some great animated tours of the iPhone. You can see the touch screen and touch-nav in action.

Attention start-ups! If you are thinking about, or have recently launched a new web property take a close look at Media Temple’s new Grid Server offering. It might be the most cost-effective and scalable managed hosting offering available on the market today. Media Temple has recently replaced their Shared Server (SS) product with the Grid Server (GS). This means that rather than sharing resources with an unknown number of other sites on a single hardware platform, your site is now part of a compute grid. The grid can distribute processes and I/O around to any of the hardware nodes associated with it to ensure performance is optimal and bottlenecks are avoided. Pretty cool. It also means you can launch a new public-facing website and not have to lose sleep over handling the traffic spikes or spending $1k or more on a dedicated hosting or co-lo setup. (that will come later once you are outrageously successful)
There are many cases where a managed, virtual infrastructure will not meet requirements for a sophisticated web property. You don’t get root access, scripting is limited, can’t create NFS mounts from NAS storage or other boxes, etc. But for $20/month and 1TB of data transfer, if you can make this work for you it’s almost a no-brainer. TIP - if you need more data transfer, just sign up for another account and move some of your large files over to the 2nd server.

For $20/month you get:

• 100GB of premium storage - this is probably SAN-backed which means some level of data protection built-in
• 1 TB of data transfer/month
• Ruby on Rails Containers
• Great LAMP support: PHP4/5, Perl, and Python. MySQL 4.1 and PostgreSQL 7.4.
• One-click installs for popular apps such as WordPress, Drupal, ZenCart.
• Ajax webmail
• In-House designed web control panel
• The ability to host up to 100 individual sites and 1,000 email accounts. Yes, for the same 20 bucks!

Many a website operator has jumped off of a shared hosting setup to a dedicated host to gain better performance and control over their site, but have also seen their bills increase 5x. The cost/benefit of this platform is so strong, it might even make sense to try to architect a new site/service around the platform if you can. Sure, there will be cases where requirements just don’t fit…but if you can make it work, you get enterprise quality infrastructure at a corner-store price.

Related Articles:
TalkCrunch (podcast with MT)
CyberCafe (talks about 100% uptime verified on the MT grid server)
Note: Newman Venture Advisors is not a MT customer, nor is newmanva.com hosted @ MT. We are promoting this because it is a phenomenal hosting solution at a kick-ass price. In case you are wondering, newmanva.com is hosted at Rackspace (who we highly recommend also)

It shouldn’t be news that the cost of starting a tech company, especially in the online space has come down dramatically in the last few years. There is an interesting thing happening in the tech/venture world right now where VCs are putting together smaller funds and doing more and more early stage deals. At the same time smart entrepreneurs can get their companies off the ground for less $$, and have less of a dependency on venture dollars in the early stages. Great opportunities for both investors and start ups to get things going.
Great article that sums it up today in the New York Times:
For Startups, Web Success on the Cheap

The folks over at Levensohn Venture Partners have started putting up podcasts about VC-centric issues. The site is called VC-IO. This looks to be a promising resource for investors and entrepreneurs alike and it is worth checking out. They aim to “open a window” into the VC world and discuss important topics relevant to whats happening in board rooms and partner meetings. There are only a few podcasts up so far, but the quality of the content (and recordings) is excellent.

They have started with two tracks, Governance and Entrepreneur. I thought the discussion of board room alignment on the Governance episode 2 was quite interesting and provided some meaningful nuggets of info around the value of having investors and board members who are philosophically aligned and share similar risk profiles. The value of these podcasts is that the participants are speaking from experience and provide real-world examples and context to the discussion.

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