Jeff Bennett's Blog

Last night was the Investor Night for the nine start ups that endured the Tech Stars boot camp this Summer in Cambridge.  Tech Stars is an innovative program that was founded by David Cohen and Brad Feld out in Boulder, Colorado.   A small number of ventures get seed funding, office space, counsel from a community of proven entrepreneurs who act as mentors and access to investors.  This was the inaugural year for the program in Boston.  I posted about Tech Stars Boston and then again about the programs fit with New England’s entrepreneurial ecosystem earlier this summer.   I am sorry that I could not attend the Investor Night but it appears that it was a great evening.

Scott Kirsner, who I have proclaimed New England’s Chief Innovation Officer, published a really nice post about Tech Stars Boston Investor Night on his Innovation blog.  Scott created his own judging for the companies and classified them by interesting categories which I thought was great.

TechCrunch also picked up coverage of the Tech Stars Investor night with a very informative post written by Don Dodge.

A key for new ventures is that they meet emerging or unmet needs in the marketplace.  All of this years crop of Tech Stars companies fit this bill, but  I think a couple break out. Great to see Oneforty.com take home the “best position to be in” award.  I love what Laura Fitton and her team are doing to harness the ever growing community of developers that are building very cool applications for the Twitter ecosystem.  Laura has assembled a really good team and solid group of angel investors already.  It was also great to see  HaveMyShift take home the “best identification of a pain point” award, as this service lets workers at chains like Starbucks and Whole Foods trade off shifts which is a really big hassle and incredibly important to the service industry.

The other companies that participated in this years Tech Stars Boston program include:  Localytices, Tempmine,  Sensobi, LangoLab, AmpIdea, AccelGolf,  and Baydin.

Way to go Shawn Broderick for all his dedicated efforts managing the Boston Tech Stars through the boot camp this summer!