FastIgnite News

I am presenting an updated analysis of angel investment returns at Angel Bootcamp 2011. For more information, see my investment research.

I’m speaking at the DC Tech Meetup on Big Data. It’s going to be a great event–just the people on my panel include Michael Brown, CTO of comScore, and Tom Lang, CTO of TidalTV and previously CTO at advertising.com.

Over the past ten years, I’ve spent about half my time being an investor and half my time being an entrepreneur. I’ve helped start five companies that way. This is the way I approached the sixth but it tricked me. Shopximity got me so excited that I’m going to slow down my FastIgnite advisory work substantially and focus on Shopximity full time.

If you are an angel investor or are interested in seed-stage investing, take a look at the investment research section on the site.

Backupify, a company I’ve worked closely with this year, just announced it has closed its Series A. The round was co-led by Rich Levandov from Avalon Ventures and General Catalyst founding partner David Orfao who invested in the seed round.

If you don’t use Backupify, you should definitely try it–it’s consumer offering is all about piece of mind. If you are a business using Google Apps then you should look at the company’s enterprise services.

Cloud computing becomes particularly interesting when one throws away current assumptions about what is an application and what the relationship between an application and hardware has to be. Here are some thoughts on this from an article I wrote for GigaOm on VMWare and platform-as-a-service cloud computing.

Soon after my workshop on the evolution of cloud computing with Bob Brennan (CEO, IronMountain) and John McEleney (CEO, CloudSwitch) at the Nantucket Conference,  I’ll be leading another cloud computing panel with another great group of speakers at TiECon East:

• John McEleney – CEO, CloudSwitch
• Scott Crenshaw – VP/GM, Cloud Business Unit at RedHat
• Dave Fachetti – Managing Director, Globespan Capital
• Rob May – CEO, Backupify

The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) events are very well executed. I invite you to join us.

It is time for the Nantucket Conference again. Scott Kirsner, the organizers and the advisors have put together a great agenda and brought together an influential group of speakers and attendees. Just in the B range of the alphabet we have Bill Warner (founder of Avid), Bob Brennan (CEO, Iron Mountain), Bob Metcalfe (Polaris Venture Partners and inventor of Ethernet), Brad Feld (Foundry Group & TechStars).

I’m fortunate to be hosting a workshop on the evolution of cloud computing with Bob Brennan and John McEleney, CEO of CloudSwitch. I’ll share my thoughts on my blog after the event.

I joined AngelList, a great service by VentureHacks.

VentureHacks provides a great service to entrepreneurs and I’m happy to support them as a sponsor. I wrote about agile investing and agile founding teams.