Paul Berberian, Orbotix CEO

Paul Berberian has had a wild career.  He started with a $250,000 loan from his father and a scrappy, bootstrapped online conferencing service that sold for $16M.  He leveraged this experience into Raindance, a $100M VC-funded video streaming site that went public during the 2000 tech crash.  

Failures along the way, including a solar company and a Nielsen TV competitor, have been huge learning opportunities.  

Now the CEO of TechStars graduate Orbotix, Paul works as hard as ever to make an impact.  He believes that only hard work and a 'radical commitment' can drive success.  Paul shared some incredible stories from his own life - definitely an eye-opener.

Paul spent most of two hours helping us to refine our business ideas.  He used his large and varied knowledge, as well as a quick poll of the class, to add value.

The key takeaways from Paul's awesome talk were:

• Only hard work and a 'radical commitment' can drive success.
• Pick and choose each business believing it's your last - that you'll have a huge exit and never have to work again.
• Focus on something you care about and are great at; then, generalize to a broader market.
• You never know what kinds of crazy things you'll deal with as a founder/CEO.
• VC funding allows you to grow faster, but since you're diluted you need a bigger exit.
• Bootstrapping is more satisfying and profitable, but stressful when you borrow from relatives.

New Tech Meetup

Welcome! This is my first post about interning in the Startup Summer program.  I'll be covering events, interviewing participants, and giving some thoughts on working in the Boulder tech startup scene.

Google Glass has arrived in Boulder!  We got to see a great demonstration by Mark Scheel, who has been wearing and using them for a few weeks  These 'nerd goggles' definitely captured the crowd's attention - and, of course, took a photo of the audience.   

Mark Scheel, left, takes the lead on describing Google Glass to  a curious audience.

The notable startups for the night included Brian Shucker from Talos Robots, who is creating a more powerful robot controller, a hybrid between Arduino and a laptop in a smaller device.  The technology targets universities and serious hobbyists.

Jeff Mako from Seedpaths was a standout speaker, with a new idea to help turn high-school and college students into coders and connect them with recruiters and companies.  This model attracted interest and discussion from an audience which is passionate about education and technology.

The third speaker was Whitney Smith from Signature Select, an insurance reseller.  She urged every startup to get insurance to cover claims ranging from a broken key feature to an accidental security breach during an update.  These claims can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle - painful for cash-strapped businesses.

New Tech Organizer Robert Reich on the
mission and value proposition of Startup Summer.

Boulder New Tech Meetup is always a great event.  The group discussed what its goals should be and how it adds value to the community.  Interestingly, there are now around 10,000 members of New Tech Meetup, which is a sizable portion of the community.