This has been discussed many times before, but I'm not so sure about your argument against Rosetta Stone. They likely own that trademark and have spent lots of dollars building a brand awareness in the marketplace of that trademark (which, by the way, is hardly obviously indicative of what they do). Why should their competitors get to mooch off Rosetta Stone's investment in their brand and capture some portion of people who are clearly looking for Rosetta Stone? I mean "Rosetta Stone competitors" sure, but I don't think their competitors have an innate right to advertise on the trademarked brand name of Rosetta Stone.

Seth - I appreciate your sentiment here, but as a boulder entrepreneur who has been out on the road doing fundraising, the "did foundry invest?" question is real, and you should have a good answer for it. Of course, this is a huge two-sided coin because the "yes they did" answer absolutely IS a signal, and it's precisely the one you want to emit :)

Boulder entrepreneurs (and by extension TechStars) simply can't have it both ways. If you want the involvement of foundry group in your company (and this actually true for any advisor who makes investments), you're signing up to have the moment of truth eventually. Either your advisor, informal or formal, will invest or they won't. It's a great win if they do because it inspires confidence in other investors.

If they don't invest, it's a setback. But it's hardly a major one. As an entrepreneur, it's actually pretty easy to explain away why foundry (or somebody else) didn't invest, and to do it in a credible way. In fact with you guys, it's absurdly easy and here's the free template:

"well foundry are thematic investors. we're not really in one of their themes so while they are fans of what we're doing (afterall, we did get in to techstars & they're involved as informal advisors), they didn't invest because we don't fit their premise which they represent to their LPs".

The "signaling problem" isn't really a problem. In the worst case, it's just a softball question, and in the best case, it's a bragging point.

Next Big Sound does a fantastic job at recommending actions to their users that drive business value. I consider what they're doing to be an emerging gold standard for models to examine.

this is really all you need to know about gmail. do these things and you'll be happier.

thanks man for all your help to the founders over your years at techstars. your work has been a big part of the success of our community.

I'd offer that this is a great example of the DNA of a company being influenced by its founder where the "company" is Techstars entrepreneurs and the "founder" is David.

it's already deactivated.  i'm not going down the "delete" step just yet, mainly because i don't want to lose the pictures i have in there.

So sorry guys. failing like this really sucks. however, i have come out of the eventvue failure with even more determination to "make new mistakes". hope you guys get that energy again soon.

read the comments on the readwriteweb post, especially the first couple pages..

lol. you know you're successful when people pitch you on a comment thread to your bio on a third party site :)