It's five o'clock bound time.
How's everybody doing today?
You can't talk as I got you on mute.
There's going to be plenty of time to talk and ask questions.
This is David Cohen.
We're very excited to have you guys all in the call.
Techstars is a mentorship program.
We spend three months with about 10 companies
each summer in Boulder.
And at the end of the summer, they
get to pitch their ideas and their business to investors.
To get into Techstars, it's pretty competitive.
We only take about 10 companies.
Over 500 applied.
We whittle that down through a process of email
and then phone calls.
So it's really who we want to work with
and getting excited about what they're working on.
I think Boulder is actually a really unique place.
People are very happy here.
It's just a fun town.
Everybody's very energetic, outdoorsy.
It's always fun to bring people over the hill
coming into Boulder.
It's a stunning view.
Everyone's been incredibly supportive of what we're doing.
The state is very supportive.
The people in the community, the businesses
that are here, the sponsors that we have,
it's just been an amazing outpouring of help and energy
for these companies.
It's always exciting when the new companies are coming
to town every year.
Yesterday, we packed everything up in Chicago,
loaded it into David's BW Rabbit, and drove 1,000 miles
overnight to Boulder, Colorado.
I grew up in a kind of mountainous place, Reno, Nevada.
I knew what to expect in terms of the mountains
and all that sort of stuff.
It's such an inspiring environment to be in.
We're the Next Big Sound, which basically
lets anyone play the role of a record executive
and sign whatever bands they think
are going to become popular, their own online record label.
The Next Big Sound is a company that we
took this year.
I think I got about 10 referrals for those guys in the wild
where someone that knew them called me up and said,
these guys are great.
You should give them a shot.
They've made a lot of progress with their product,
and we just liked them.
We didn't think we would get in, to be honest.
We assumed we would.
We assumed we wouldn't.
Based on statistics.
It happened Saturday afternoon.
I was in a car with eight friends.
Got to check my email, and we're in.
I can't believe it.
And definitely took a while to kind of sink in.
And it's still sinking in.
Alex dances in front of venture capitalists all the time.
Alex is pitching one time, and he broke into song and dance.
It was pretty impressive.
Everlater is a really interesting case.
They ex-Wall Street guys taught themselves how to program,
working on a really neat product in a big industry
and a travel industry, and just kind of fell in love with them.
They're from here locally.
And so he had us in for a meeting, 9.30
PM on a Sunday night.
Absolutely grilled us.
I mean, a really constructive session.
For me, it's very fun.
I know they're sometimes nervous.
And then at the end of it, he said, well, hey guys,
I'd like to offer you a spot in the class of 090 for Techstars.
So we let him in the program to see what they could do.
I mean, look, I'm wearing like high tube socks.
To see this hat with like the bill up.
Well, Nate was my first friend, and not only friend.
We met in preschool.
You know, we were working big jobs on Wall Street.
You know, both of us had just had it with sort of cubicle life
and having 27 bosses above us.
We quit traveled, you know, as we were sort of traveling.
We just decided, you know, screw it,
we're going to start business together.
We just realized that there was no way for us
to share our travel experiences.
Every later is a way for you to record your travel experience.
So stories, photos, you know, and then take all that information
and share it with your friends and family.
I think, you know, had we had the money,
we'd probably still be, you know, lost somewhere in South America.
I met Retail in the Chicago airport.
We spent an hour there as I was traveling between New York and L.A.
interviewing teams, and I was just immediately impressed by them.
All three very smart, very bright.
I made a ton of progress with their product
and I had a really unique vision about it.
So I love that.
We all met in business school.
We went to the University of Chicago,
and we were all kind of involved in entrepreneurial type things,
and we decided to start working on this one company together.
This is my bedroom at the light.
We're not quite moved in, kind of sleep like a burrito in here.
We've gone without salaries for a year.
So I mean, we're pretty much coasting,
so this is very different for a bunch of MBAs.
The reality of it is when you're starting out,
it really scroungs around for cash, food, and just trying to survive.
Our tech company is a video analytics company.
We basically use crowd sourcing to track how people move through stores
and how the operational efficiency of employees and stuff like that.
TechStores exposes the companies that go through the program to about 60 mentors.
They're some of the best and brightest people in software and in the web
from across the country.
Colorado's an awesome place to launch your startup.
It's got a buzz, you know, and just to also see the impact that TechStores has had here.
The nature of the way people approach startups,
there's an energy to help the companies here, I think, get off the ground.
Getting into TechStores meant that we had a chance to pursue our idea 100%
without distractions, and that's like our dream.
For a lot of the companies, the first week will be a bit of a shock to the system.
We have orientation, we have sessions, they meet companies like Microsoft
and Google right away, so I hope they're ready.
Really, these 10 companies have the chance of lifetime,
and it's up to them not to screw it up.
