Greg Berry's Comments

Unreasonable Blog : Interview with Founder of W1SD0M: Matchmaking for Entrepreneurs and Investors

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:42:33 +0000

Richard, thanks for asking. It's most certainly in our plan, although it probably won't be one of the first things we deploy. We think the hard part of the matching is that people don't necessarily have the best frame of reference on what "good" is. What makes a conference good or crappy, in your mind?

Andrew Wolk : Debriefing SOCAP09

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 20:26:58 +0000

I was struck by the wide variety of goals and foci in the crowd, and wrote about one flavor of change-making Jed Emerson's goal of transforming traditional capital markets, also picked up as a treat by The Economist. The other important theme I was tuned into was the diversity of web platforms supporting this space, and the willingness of the social enterprise / social media leaders to collaborate. More coming on that soon.

elephant journal: Yoga, Sustainability, Politics, Spirituality. : It's getting harder to hate Starbucks.

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:06:45 +0000

very cool, thanks for posting. like you, i've had a long buycott of starbucks. not only have i moved many proposed meetings from there, i've actively not bought anything on the two occasions when i just couldn't shift location. and this info makes it even harder to hold out -- like my son, i may now be stubbornly fixed in one view. but the one thing they do that i still can't support is exporting profits from our community. once they start re-investing profits in our community (IE, transform their entire corporate charter, ala B Corp), that will be the final straw in my ever weakening buycott. but thanks for keeping us up to speed on the evolution.

TechStars Blog : The Founders Launches

Tue, 2 Jun 2009 19:30:19 +0000

awesome. better than anything on "real" TV.

elephant journal: Yoga, Sustainability, Politics, Spirituality. : Social Media: Top Boulder, Colorado Twitter Tweeters You Should Follow.

Wed, 27 May 2009 19:25:21 +0000

Waylon, continuing to love the electronic elephant. Keep up the good work. Please include in your list: @nuance_intel -- boulder-based consultancy at the intersection of sustainable business, progressive capital and transformative IT. http://twitter.com/nuance_intel just finished a blog post about progressive economics, including TechStars, Slow Money, Balle and new banking, and last week on sustainability metrics for startups. Long live the boulder paradox: http://nuanceintelligence.com/

Colorado Startups : Announcing my new startup seed fund

Wed, 13 May 2009 22:46:53 +0000

Congratulations -- it's great to have someone as humble, smart and successful as you joining the ranks of fund managers in our community.

elephant journal: Yoga, Sustainability, Politics, Spirituality. : Green Media continues to rake in inve$tment dollar$ despite bad economy (translation: continues to s

Tue, 3 Mar 2009 18:51:47 +0000

waylon, at one level i agree -- local and independent media are important to the core of our democracy, our culture and to mindful living. i'm a very careful curator of my own media intake, and love the work you do at elephant, having been a reader and casual supporter for a long time. and i suspect that you and i share many perspectives on the world of right and wrong, good and bad, healthful and sickening. and we also want to live in worlds that are governed by rules more holistic than we do today. i suspect this is why you are considering running for the City Council (or whatever it's called). but i think you have made two leaps where i can't join you: 1. taking outside investment is akin to selling out. i do not agree. i will stipulate that treating media as an investment has essentially ruined "the news," but it's amazing how quickly people have rushed in to meet that void. i do believe that media has a responsibility to serve the people, and that is why i LOVE PBS and NPR so dearly -- they get paid by the people they serve. but the sad truth of the matter is that media *is* a business, and until we can push a new corproate designation through the DC power structure, it's not going to stop. so raising capital to grow your footprint is one pretty legitimate way to do it. if that capital leverages a media owner to do things outside that media company's ethics, it's a tough spot for the owner, but that's means they picked bad investors, not that investing in media is bad. 2. also, while i steadfastly support local business, largely because i want the profits (such as they are in media) to stay in my community, it's not to call all businesses outside our community bad. we all hold patagonia up as the scion of ethical business, but there are many outdoor clothing companies that manufacture and headquarter their businesses much closer to our home. what i think bugs me about this is that you seem to ascribe a moral certaintude about the badness of carpetbagging media firms that seems to be out of what i know of your character. i'd say, bring them on. you've got massive staying power, already demonstrated. you've got significant impact in your community. sure it's tough -- been following long enough to appreciate how tough. but your competitive differentiation -- highlighted in the first paragraph of this article -- is worth more than $500k. besides, until we change the game, we still live in a bottom-line driven world, and as much i don't like it, those are the rules of the game. namaste.

Media in the New Millennium : Rocky Mountain News: That's My Newspaper, Closing

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:14:11 +0000

Nice post -- sorry to all the hard-working journalists who are suffering today.

TechStars Blog : TechStars Boston

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:58:56 +0000

Great move. Good to see the program expanding. We need more entrepreneurs to keep building opportunity, innovation and new jobs.

Open Business : The Entrepreneur Commonsâ¢

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:15:09 +0000

Marc, Very interesting concept. Have RSS'd your blog, followed your twitter. As to the concept on the table here, we are working on a slightly different solution to the same problem set. At Business Catapult (.com), we are building a series of connected tools that creates one big service that builds communities of entrepreneurs and investors, ultimately helping them find each other, in a rules-based environment that optimizes everyone's role, info access and privacy. Although I'm a social entrepreneur at heart -- and was a .org guy in a .com world in the 90s -- I'm still skeptical of micro-finance for a couple reasons. But your idea around the clustered risk taking by entrepreneurs is brilliant. Will follow-up with direct communication to connect more privately.

PeteSearch : What analyzing digital communications misses

Fri, 2 Jan 2009 22:47:35 +0000

Pete, thanks for taking the time to write this out so carefully. Your first and third points dovetail nicely into the "it's only a demonstration of some small part of the world we live in," which has led me in the past to a relationship to SNA (social network analysis) that is summarized as "that's pretty cool in theory (i'm waaaay into discussions of the sociology of information), and a helpful secondary tool, but doesn't really provide "the truth." ... which is why i'm most interested in your second point. the question of "why are we even doing this?" and assuming the answer is not a PhD dissertation. When I think about the usefulness of SNA, I use LinkedIn as a case-in-point. I think there are a couple pieces of analysis that don't get done on LI which are more indicative of me to someone's reputation than # of connections. (as an aside, why are people always so into "bigger is better?", but i digress). i actually think that LIONs offer an important service, but I'm always a bit skeptical of their real reputation. the truth is nobody really "knows" one thousand people. seriously. so, i begin to slightly discount reputation of anyone above 400-500 connections (or so -- not a scientific measurement). second thing i do is a quick assessment of ratio of recommendations to connections. this quantitative ratio helps to inform a naturally qualitative analysis that starts to get to the bottom of what i actually care about -- the problem domain for me is quality of reputation, ie: do i really want to do business with this person. LI would be a very different place if this ratio were the dominant results criteria. thanks, again, Pete for the discussion.

PeteSearch : What does the BoulderTwits graph mean?

Fri, 2 Jan 2009 19:36:21 +0000

Pete, Great post and cool map. Good link to Valdis' work. I've been following and talking to him for almost a decade about social network analysis, he's one of the meta-thinkers in the space. My one challenge / concern with any of these maps is that they only cover one plane of communications. Valdis was doing some great work with emails several years ago, but in the case, it discounted people who were having regular and/or important phone discussions that would add a richness to a relationship, but was unmappable. Same case here. If someone attends regular f2f meetings with Brad Feld, so is a constant Tech Meetup socializer, or hosts an influential invitation-only social network, it's not represented here. Same thing is true if I've a different style of Twittering that emphasizes direct messages over public relies. Any thoughts to extending the analysis? Perhaps my ultimate weakness as a digerati is that I realize that lots of business and life happens off the internet (hard to believe, I know), but even within the digital confines, there are so many different planes of communications to track. I'm not trying to play Devil's Advocate (and really appreciate the effort and venue), but rather am seeking something that is a more comprehensive mashup of graphs within a broader "problem set" of influence and impact within the Boulder Tech Community. Would appreciate your thoughts, and everyone else's.