Mountain Musings

I know I said I’d write about the start-up side of the OC VC ecosystem in my next post, but I’ve decided I need to establish a bit more background before attempting to tackle such a topic so I’ve decided to post on a few related items of interest instead.

I just returned from a week in the Rockies where I attended VCIR and tried to help my kid build a snowman in less than ideal conditions.  If you’ve been paying attention so far, you might (and should) be asking yourself why the hell a VC from OC attended the conference and is now writing about VC in the Rockies if his blog is about VC in the OC???  Good question; I’m glad you asked.  Well, there are several reasons.

First, operating under the premise that the greater Denver/Boulder area is an emerging VC/start-up ecosystem also growing in the shadow of Silicon Valley, I thought it would be good to see how they compare to our own OC and to network with some of their “indigenous VCs”.  I learned that the combined Denver and Boulder Counties, where most of the 33 companies presenting at VCIR are from (along with the indigenous VCs), represent a combined population of roughly 850,000 spread out across about 1,100 square miles and includes a major research university.  Sound statistically familiar?  Yeah, I know, they have more land and a much lower population density but I found the similarities to our own OC similar enough to warrant comparison and I’ll write more on this comparison specifically in the weeks to come.

Second, this was the 24th year of the Colorado Venture Capital Association’s VCIR conference so I thought it would be a good idea to see the folks in action based on the assumption that they have had time to work the kinks out  and present a unified conference.  I wasn’t disappointed and think there is something to be learned here for future OC VC conferences.  This was the last year of the conference as presented by the CVCA as they announced at the conference that they were becoming the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association and would now include Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in addition to Colorado in the association.  The announcement caused me to lean over to Mark Heesen and quietly query if we SoCal VCs shouldn’t attempt to do the same thing given SoCal’s growing VC/start-up ecosystem prominence.  My question began what became an interesting dialogue and one on which I will convey my thoughts in the weeks to come so stay tuned for more on whether such a “Southern California Venture Capital Association” is merited.

Third,  I thought I’d check out the local start-ups to compare them against those I’ve seen here in OC.  While I was reasonably impressed, I’ll simply refer you to Dan Primack’s blog posting rather than share my own thoughts as I was able to meet and speak with him and found that I share his general sentiments here.  One of the more interesting companies I saw present was Me.dium and, in full disclosure, I’ve been participating in their private beta test for several weeks now and find their potential intriguing.

My final reason for attending was to hear Heesen’s keynote about the growth of Colorado’s emerging VC/start-up ecosystem and state of the industry in general.  Once again, I was not disappointed.  In fact, I will share the essence of his speech and the subsequent Q&A in a later post as I think both play to OC’s favor in the long-run.