I think Everlater alone keeps most of the local coffee shops in business.
They run upstairs to Sydney's and grab a coffee, grab a triple espresso decaf latte.
The weeks leading up to investor day are absolutely insane.
We've just been working, you know, 18 hours a day.
So we're practicing the pitches every day.
A lot of the companies are practicing two or three times a day.
To a certain degree, every decision you make determines the success of maybe the next five
to ten years of your life.
But the amount of pressure and stress that creates is pretty high.
Everlater is outselling, they've got a market, they've got a product, they know how to deliver it.
I'm recording a video of our application for investor day.
So I'm going to take you a little bit under the hood of what Retail has.
Now what we're able to do is actually overlay Heatmap on top of it to show him where his
employees spend their time and, more importantly, what are they doing when they're there.
The next big sound has totally blown me away, to be honest.
They are being extremely hyper productive right now, the amount of code those guys are
cranking out and it's fast and it's furious.
The artist's name is in faint writing in those boxes.
Brad is the guy who gives you really direct street feedback.
That looks great.
I'm working on mockups for the homepage of the new site and Brad Felt just walked in and
I got to show it to him because we enacted some of his advice and he liked it.
So it's a good day.
You don't try to raise an angel round.
You don't try to raise a financing.
You're either going to do it or not.
The success of raising the angel round is merely a first step in the context of the business.
It has nothing to do with the ultimate success.
Not seriously, every one of these meetings you should start with an eight minute pitch.
We're close enough to investor day that you should, whenever you get the chance, just
practice it.
I mean it's kind of crunch time, right?
I mean for the pitch and all seriousness.
Where you were, whether it was good, it could be better.
We want to know who is at investor day.
Is tech crunch there?
Is the New York Times there?
On the floor is mentors, founders, and accredited investors or venture capitalists.
So about two thirds of the audience at investor day will be actual investors.
I'd expect there to be about 150 investors that come from all over the country.
I'd say half will be local and half will be from elsewhere.
And obviously really important to prepare hard, practice the pitch.
It's a big opportunity and you want to be prepared for it.
Paul Verbarian came to talk to us about failure and taught us a lesson at the Zini bottle,
which is his failed startup.
I came here to talk about failure, about starting a fantastic idea, building a great company,
and then only having it not hit its mark and having to shut it down.
Those lessons can be better than the lessons of success.
And I've been in Boulder for 15 years.
I am in the process of starting my sixth business.
However, today we're going to talk about number five.
Because number five falls into the category of failure.
And you're going to hear the story of the Zini bottle.
I am holding one of the last Zini bottles known to exist on Planet Earth.
We came to the conclusion that we didn't have enough money, we were in three different
businesses.
We made the choice to fail.
Failure is when you wake up and you say, it's over.
I think the best thing for me personally was to humble me.
You just have to persevere and not get down in the dumps when something goes wrong.
Work-life balance is really important, normally, but at Techstars it's kind of out the window.
I mean, you've got three months to get to a point where you're ready to present your
company.
You've got to make a ton of progress.
You all have your ties?
If you know what's going on.
If you have your tie, put it on, the bus leaves in exactly nine minutes.
All the founders are dressing up in their crappiest ties that they have.
So there's a surprise going on.
We have to bring ties, which you can see I got this awesome one, and raincoats, which
I've also got.
So we didn't know where we were going.
We got on a bus, had no idea where we were going to end up.
We thought we were going to have some business dinner, and it turned out that they'd gotten
us all tickets to see office space at Red Rocks, which was awesome.
The movie Office Space just makes a lot of, puts a lot of fun at sort of corporate culture,
and I think startups are a counter-corporate culture.
It's one of my favorite scenes from Office Space where they just take a bat and destroy
this printer that's saying PC load letter.
It's easy to be proud of all the founders.
I'd say every single one of them has worked their butts off and really focused this summer.
It is a good group.
Thanks.
