Last week Don Dodge, Dan’l Lewin, and Dave Drach from Microsoft visited TechStars.  Don has a nice post up about his visit including brief descriptions of several of the TechStars companies that I don’t think has appeared in the wild yet.

Don, Dan’l, and Dave are good friends – among other things Dan’l runs the Microsoft Emerging Business Team which is responsible for Microsoft’s relationship with the VC community and venture-backed startups.  Scott Maxwell from OpenView – who sits on Dan’ls advisory board with me – summarized how EBT works from a VC’s perspective in a 2006 post titled Microsoft’s Work with Emerging Growth Companies – Five Stars.

TechStars was one of the stops on a day long tour that Don, Dan’l, and Dave made through Boulder.  This was true evangelism – only two of the ten TechStars teams are heavy users of Microsoft technology.  Some eyes got opened along the way – both directions – and I think the dialogue was great. 

Don followed up his post on TechStars with a thoughtful essay titled Angel investors deserve respect from VCs which riffed off of Rick Segal’s post titled Shortsighted Greed.  Great stuff for anyone playing in the seed stage of the investing universe.

I met Brian Williams – the CEO of Viget – on his swing through Boulder on Thursday.  Brian runs a successful web design and development company that has been involved in a number of interesting projects including Seth Godin’s Squidoo.

Brian spent the afternoon at TechStars and gave a presentation on his 9 Conflicting Tips for Start-ups.  I agree with them all, especially since most of them are the opposite of each other.  Maybe my friends at Startup Weekend will put this up on a board somewhere.

Boulder is one of the most athletic cities in the world.  Even though I’m a marathoner and can do +/– 2,000 feet on a two hour run, I’m way down low on the fitness ladder here.  The range of sports people play are wildly diverse, including stuff like “I ran up a 14,000’ mountain and back with one arm tied behind my back and all the toes on my left foot taped together while wearing sandals and a bike helmet.”  So – it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone living here that we have excellent shuffleboard facilities in Boulder.

My friends at Slice of Lime hosted a real shuffleboard dustup session with the TechStars gang last Friday.  At the end of it they retreated to a more traditional Boulder experience – having beers on a roof deck on a beautiful night while looking at the mountains.

TechStars is really cranking – I’m totally blown away by what everyone is working on and the level of engagement of the TechStars mentors.  I’m very optimistic that some great stuff is going to come out of this adventure and I’m looking forward to our first demo night on Tuesday.

A number of out of town visitors have swung by in the last 10 days including Don Loeb (ex-FeedBurner – now Google), Eric Marcoullier / Todd Sampson (ex-MyBlogLog – now Yahoo), and Noah Kagen (ex-Facebook – now Mint.)  Thanks guys for making the trek to Boulder – I know it was a massive personal sacrifice.

David has been videotaping a lot of sessions and put them up on TechStars.TV.  Some of the teams are now blogging – Matt has a funny post up titled Wear your swimsuit to your next VC meeting.  The quote of that particular event was Lisa Rutherford’s answer to how you should dress for a meeting with a VC; answer: “Be clean you.”

I love helping to create companies.  As my wife likes to say, I’m “lucky to have found a spot in the universe where my work is my play.”

On Thursday, I’ll be participating in the TechStars: Funding Your Startup event at 6pm at the Wolf Law Building on the CU Boulder campus.  The panel includes me, Gary Held (exec director at CTEK), Chris Scoggins (Sequel VC), Lisa Rutherford (ex-In-Q-Tel), Dan King (ReadyTalk CEO) and Kimbal Musk (Me.dium CEO).

The event is free, but you have to register.  As of right now, there are still 76 of 225 seats available.  If you are in Boulder, want to meet some of the TechStars folks, and sit in on one of the TechStars open sessions, please join us.

Do you want to hear me blather on about the Implicit Web?  Or hear Stan James of Lijit talk about how he ended up in Boulder.  Or watch David Cohen dodge a ping pong ball?  All this and more in the short (10 minutes) TechStars Video Update from Week #1. 

David has a summary of the great first week at TechStars.  The Intense Debate guys weighed in with a post of their own and the energy in the room was huge on Thursday night when I was part of a panel with Greg Reinacker, Andrew Currie, and Jason Mendelson.  It’s pretty awesome to hang out with 26 people that are at the very early stage of creating new companies, completely fearless, and focused on doing something great. 

One lesson from their backyard came if any of them ran in the Bolder Boulder.  If you don’t know about the Bolder Boulder, it’s a 10k race run in Boulder on Memorial Day that is now one of the largest 10k’s in the world.  This year everyone had an RFID chip on their shoe and was tracked throughout the race.  According to Steve Outing (I didn’t run it – I went and hid in Keystone for the weekend) there were a few problems – as Steve says, Version 1.0 seldom works well. 

To bad there wasn’t Facebook integration also.  That way you could check out how your friends were doing during the race on your cell phone while you were running.  Or you could just follow Tim Wolters advice and be Mindfulness.

I know David Cohen is excited – I hope the TechStars teams are.  The Denver Post had a nice article on How TechStars was born which includes several very silly pictures of us including one of me and David pretending to smash guitars while Jared talks on the phone and intelligently walks away from the nonsense going on in the background.

The real stars of TechStars are the entrepreneurs, which the Denver Post got right.  The supporting cast includes the awesome list of mentors that we have lined up for the summer.

The list continues to grow.  If you are a successful entrepreneur in Colorado and want to get plugged into the mentor program (or are a successful entrepreneur outside of Colorado and want to come play in Boulder for a few days), drop me an email and I’ll see if we can make something work out that makes sense.

The nice folks at PodTech interviewed me and David Cohen about TechStars.  In David’s words: “It’s another fantastic way to waste 9 minutes of your life before you get back to working on your startup (or whatever).”  Plus there’s a neat Theresa Chong painting in the background.