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

Now that Dan Primack at PEhub has covered the story, we’d better make it official. We are thrilled to announce that Jerry has joined NVA as Senior Parnter. Jerry brings over 39 years of experience in investment banking, venture capital coverage, as well as institutional, principal and sales trading to NVA.

Jerry began his career at Merill Lynch and has also held managing director and executive positions at Hambrecht and Quist, Cowen & Co., JP Morgan and most recently Bear Stearns. Jerry is based in the bay area, so we are also announcing the opening of our “Silicon Valley” office. NVA services clients nationwide, and we now have two primary bases of operation, SF and Boulder, CO. Contact information for the two of us can be found here.

Back in April this blog mentioned Tru.Vu, a new company started by myself and Tom Chikoore. A few quick updates for those that have been tracking the company.

• The company is now Filtrbox, Inc. We changed the name recently for a variety of reasons, but suffice it to say we are happy with the new name too.
• New site is up, as is the blog. Check out http://filtrbox.com and blog.filtrbox.com for news and info on our progress. You can sign up for access to the preview version when we launch it later this year.
• TechStars is going very well. The program has been very well run and been immensely valuable to us. The program wraps up mid-August with a big demo/pitch day and we are all working our butts off to get ready.
• Another TechStars company, MadKast, has a cool social bookmarking/link sharing service they recently launched in Beta. It’s running on the filtrbox blog, and a whole bunch of other sites. Give it a try or get it for your own blog!

2007 is off to an exciting start! In addition to working with clients at NVA, I’ve been working hard on getting a new business off the ground. Tru.Vu was born out of frustration with the tools currently available to monitor and track online content and news topics. Managing alerts, RSS feeds, email notifications, search results, and the like might work for techies and power-users…but we (the collective WE of the software world) can do better and Tru.Vu intends to make it happen.

We got a functional prototype built quickly (as in just over a week) and submitted the project to TechStars, the Boulder, CO startup incubator I’ve previously blogged about. Just the other day we got the great news that Tru.Vu was accepted into the program. Only 10 applicants out of 300 got in, so we take this as a compliment but it means we need to work even harder to deliver on our vision. Out of the 10 teams in the program, Tru.Vu is the only Boulder-based company, and No Sleep Media in Denver round out the Colorado-based teams. No Sleep Media has a promising notification service called Loopnote. It’s great to see strong CO-based representation in TechStars, and is an indicator of the talent here.

The Tru.Vu website is up and we have started blogging there. It’s early days still so we are not releasing all that much detail on the product, but we’ll share info and insights as we make progress (so subscribe to the blog!)

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