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After nearly five years at Google, Friday May 30th was my last day. I’m extremely happy to announce that I’ve accepted a role at Techstars as Director, Techstars Vision.

I first started speaking with David Cohen, the co-founder and Managing Partner of Techstars, in the summer of 2009 when I was doing my first research on seed accelerators. Over the past five years, he and several others of the Techstars team have given me valuable feedback that I’ve used in evolving Seed-DB. As I’ve gotten to know the Techstars team, I was constantly impressed with the quality of the people I met, and started in my new role at the beginning of June.

What’s ahead — Techstars Vision
I’ve joined Techstars to build and lead Techstars Vision, a new Techstars product. One of the key aims of Techstars is to build a strong network to support startups, made up of founders, mentors, investors, and corporations. Techstars Vision fits into this by building a significantly deeper and broader network between corporations and Techstars companies.

There are two parts to Techstars vision. The first is helping our Vision partners truly understand the very early stage startup market, so they can best engage with it. We do that by doing deep analysis on early stage startups, examining trends in startups, and evaluating the overall seed market. The second is facilitating direct meetings, presentations, and engagements between corporate partners and Techstars startups. We hope that our Vision partners will turn into customers and BizDev partners of our Techstars companies, helping both sides succeed.

What’s continuing — Seed-DB
Seed-DB will not be changing at all; I will continue to maintain it as a completely neutral database of all accelerators and companies from those accelerators. Techstars will not be treated any differently than any other accelerator, particularly since I will continue to get funding data solely from Crunchbase. If anything, some of my work with Techstars Vision will align with Seed-DB and I’ll likely have more time to follow-up with the many e-mails I get around Seed-DB!

What’s behind — Google
It goes without saying that it was a very difficult decision to leave Google. I spent nearly 4.5 years on the same team, and in that time the team grew 8x and the revenue we managed grew 40x. (!) I’ve learned so much from my managers and Google’s leadership and culture and really value my time at Google. To this day, even with 50k employees, each week any employee can walk up to the mic at Google’s weekly TGIFs and ask Larry Page and his management team questions they really care about, no matter how hard-hitting they might be. That level of trust in employees and willingness to face reality will always inspire me. What I’ll miss most are my amazing colleagues; you know who you are.

Seed-DB was launched on July 25th, and since then it’s been a fascinating ride. Here is the latest news on everything related to seed accelerators and Seed-DB.

Follow Seed-DB on Twitter

Seed-DB now has a Twitter account: @GoSeedDB. Follow it to get all of the latest updates and announcements on the site. Like this newsletter, it will be low-traffic with just important updates for startups, accelerators, and investors.

Y Combinator Demo Day — public/stealth analysis

Some accelerators (like TechStars) publicly announce all of their companies at their Demo Days; while startups in other program (like Y Combinator) only publicly announce when they’re ready. Y Combinator’s Demo Day is taking place on Tuesday, August 21st.

In this years’ Y Combinator Summer 2012 class, there are 84 startups. As of today (Monday, August 20th), 50 of these startups (60%) have already gone public. I would expect another 10–15 startups to go public on Demo Day, leaving 20–30% of the startups to go public at some point in the future.

This past month on Seed-DB

I’ve focused effort on Seed-DB in the last month on two main themes:

• improving breadth and quality of data
• bug fixes in the application

In less than 30 days, the number of companies in the database has increased 25% to over 1600 companies. VC funding tracked has also increased by about 25% to over $1.28billion. And the number of jobs also increased 25% to over 3700 jobs created. Thanks to lot of feedback from accelerators and startups, I’ve cleaned up the data sources to improve the quality of data on Seed-DB, too. (There’s a link on every page where you can get in touch with me if you have data to correct!)

One problem with articles like Jared Konczal’s in Forbes is that the data in Seed-DB is still very preliminary; there are many gaps. I’ve tried to make these clear; users can now see what startups are associated with Crunchbase pages (and thus I’ve able to get funding/employee data) and which startups don’t have this data.

Finally, by launching and getting valuable feedback from a number of people I’ve identified and fixed a number of bugs in the application. Thank you to everyone that’s reached out to me with corrections.

Important upcoming feature

The biggest upcoming feature is an application deadline tracker. I’ll be adding a column to my list of accelerators to highlight programs that are open for applications. I hope this will help startups find accelerators that they might not otherwise know about.

Seed accelerators in my list will be able to send me the date applications open and close, as well as a link to their application page. If you run a seed accelerator, please e-mail me and I’ll add you to my announcements list once this functionality is ready to go.

Advice for seed accelerators

There are a few recommendations I have for seed accelerators everywhere:

1. Make it easy to find your startups; a portfolio page or something similar. (You’d be surprised how difficult it is to find startups from some programs.) If you can’t promote your startups on your own website, why are you doing it? Ideally categorize them by class.
2. Get startups to create a Crunchbase entry, and at least ensure they add the funding they got from your accelerator.

Thanks for listening; and be sure to follow @GoSeedDB!

I’m really looking forward to the London 2012 Olympics. But if you’re like me, you only have half a clue as to who’s been performing well in a couple of sports at best. And there are over 300 medals being awarded at this years’ Olympic Games.

I recently received a forwarded e-mail from a guy named James Hingston that says this:

Dear all,

Prompted by Richard, and my own desperate fanaticism, I’ve spent the past year putting together a complete form guide for the London 2012. The idea is that for any event… even the really random ones… you can dip in, get a solid idea of the form of athletes and teams coming into the Games, as well as some overviews on developments and changes that have taken place in the sport.

I’ve ended up developing it into a reasonably complete and semi-professional looking document (in for a penny, in for a pound) and so would not only encourage you to use it, but, if you think it’s any good, please distribute it as widely as possible amongst your friends and colleagues.

Many thanks as well (because she’ll kill me if I don’t credit her) to Lindsay for helping proof the document. It’s been designed so that you can dip in and out and use it as a reference guide — you don’t have to read all 184 pages…. She did.

Cheers,
James

This is the link to the document (http://bit.ly/OlyData) so that you can read/download/print it at your leisure.

(I will say that from the little I do know of various sports his medal predictions are a fair bit off, but the data he compiled is absolutely amazing.)

Get it here: http://bit.ly/OlyData

My father, Glen Christiansen, died when I was 17 years old, in my senior year of high school. As of today, he’s been gone for half of my life. As of tomorrow, I’ll have lived longer without my father than I did with him.

(I grew up in the US Midwest, where normally this kind of thing generally isn’t talked about in public. Part of me is fighting my instincts in writing and posting this note. But I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and feel a real need to mark this milestone in public. It’s quite a departure from my normal blogging; and is likely the last time I’ll post something this personal.)

My father was a wonderful man. I still have great memories of working with him on projects around the house, on my Cub Scout Pinewood Derby cars, on Boy Scout camping trips, and just as a loving father. My work ethic can easily be traced to the example that my father set. What would start out as a simple project at the beginning of a weekend would transform to a massive project by the end of the weekend, largely because he insisted on doing things right, and designing something that built a product with long-term flexibility and options. He also worked incredibly hard at his job, and in the service of others. Literally days before he died (and during Christmas vacation) he was at home processing paperwork so farmers that worked with his company could get bonuses that were owed them.

No father is perfect, but I think my dad came pretty damn close. And as the years have gone by, what remains are the most warm and generous memories of my childhood. He was diagnosed with cancer just about two years before he died, so our family had two years of knowing the end was near and in that time we were able to really savor that time together. Considering the late-stage cancer, he was in pretty good health that entire time.

I should mention here how much my mother means to me. My mother and father were such a great team, particularly during those last two years. She has always been a strong influence in our lives, but in my father’s final years really became the backbone of our family, and remains so today. We couldn’t have gotten through the experience without her. Her emotional support of our whole family was incredibly strong, despite the fact that she had just lost her husband and partner of 25+ years. I love and admire her strength and character.

What saddens me to my core is knowing how much of my life I haven’t been able to share with my father; how much more I could have learned from him. When he died, he knew that I had a full scholarship to college through the Navy ROTC program. But after he died, I ended up going to a different university. I had amazing experiences at the University of Michigan, and then spent six years in the Navy. I’ve lived in London for the past eight years. More importantly, I met my wife, fell in love, married and now have our first child on the way. I look back and see what I’ve done and how much I’ve changed in the last 17 years.

I wish I could have had him experience racing through the Australian Outback with my university team. I wish I could have had him out on my submarine for a Tiger cruise; I can only imagine the pride we both would have felt. I wish I could have taken him around to all of the amazing places in London. I wish I could have introduced him to my wife; I know he would have loved her nearly as much as I do now. And as I approach fatherhood now, I really wish I could turn to him for advice.

I still remember the last time I saw my father alive; up and walking off to the surgery that we hoped would prolong the time he had left. (It’s still painfully ironic that he survived his very first incredibly risky surgery when a football-sized tumor was removed from his body, but didn’t survive the surgery that was virtually routine.) While this memory will always be bittersweet, I try to focus on the fact that he lived a full life and literally walked with life, energy, and purpose to his dying day.

As sad as this all is, I’m incredibly grateful. For over 17 years, an amazing man helped raise me and become the person I am today. I’m very happy I had a loving father, who taught and guided me and set such positive examples of how to live life. While I’ve missed him for 17 years, and will miss him every day for the rest of my life, I am blessed and grateful for the life and love he gave me. I had a gift of 17 years with a wonderful man, a wonderful father (and two wonderful parents).

I love you, Dad.