Occipital

We moved to Boulder about 4 months ago to participate in TechStars. Before getting here, I didn’t know much about Boulder except that it was a liberal city near the mountains and it was home to the University of Colorado, the team that beat my beloved Wolverines in 1994.

What we found was a thriving tech startup community nestled up against the beautiful foothills of the Rockies. The tech community here is incredibly supportive and filled with smart, interesting, and fun people. The mountains are beautiful, the air is clean, people are healthy, and the local beers are awesome.

If you want to experience Boulder for yourself, 20 boulder tech startups are hosting an all expenses paid job fair for 100 kickass developers. Here’s what TechCrunch had to say.

One of the things I’ve often read about doing a startup is that there are amazing highs and disappointing lows. We’ve definitely had our share of both, and when things get tough I think about why I’m doing this.

What gets me out of bed in the morning (or afternoon if we’ve been up late working) is that we’re working on hard, interesting problems that have the potential to change the world in some way and that I get to work with one of the smartest people I know. It also helps that I have the support of my amazing family, awesome friends, and how we’ve become part of the great tech community here in Boulder (which means more friends and smart people!).

We’ve got some exciting things on the way here at Occipital, so bring on the lows - they’ll make the highs we reach even sweeter.

Speaking of the slackers… Andrew recently unveiled the TechStars lipdub, which is an accurate portrayal of how we spent our days this summer. And by days, I mean one single hour. The beer is all product placement, that’s how TechStars stays afloat. It’s true. By true, I mean false.

TechStars LipDub from Andrew on Vimeo.

Subtitled: To the slackers go the spoils

One of last years’ TechStars was in Sidney’s today, and he callously remarked that the companies who took the day before investor day off last year were the ones who raised money.  It made me think a little, but it makes perfect sense.  If you’re serious about making sure something goes well, you’ll be ready in advance.  You won’t end up needing that extra day if you’ve planned appropriately.

But this is definitely not a brag post.  We won’t be drinking margaritas on the rooftops.  We will be squeezing all we can out of that last day — which, by the way, started just over an hour ago.

Starting Fluxcapacity (now Occipital) has been a learning process.  So far, the most striking revelation was becoming aware of the fact that that I care immensely about the type of company that Occipital becomes.
Among other things, I need it to be the type of company that has a distant vision which stretches the imagination.

This type of company and its products should interact with customers emotionally as well as practically.  Solve problems, but trigger something deeper along the way.

So far, I think that creating this type of company probably isn’t fundamentally different from most other types, but I do think it may shift priorities.

Oblong Industries is an example of a company that has a distant vision, and since their ideas served as the basis for the gestural computers in Minority Report, I think they certainly fit the imagination-stretching criteria.   A few weeks back, I asked Kwin, one of Oblong’s founders, whether he any thoughts on what it takes to build this type of company.

He came back with several observations, which I’ll summarize:

Getting backing from people who understand the vision for the company is crucial.  Finding the right hires is a challenge; for it to work right, this needs to be their dream job.  If you do hire correctly, imagination is abundant and diffuse, and not a limiting factor.  Finding a balance between practical milestones and your goals on the other side of the universe is something that you will focus a lot of energy on, even obsess over.  Even if you can find the right people, and the right balance, coordination overhead keeps the team size smaller than it might be.  The major arcs remain in place, but the roadmap will probably go all over the place.

Each of these observations warrants further thought, but the first two are about the people.  The investors and the employees.  For the employees, Kwin said it should be their “dream job, ” which sounds parallel to how Randy Pausch felt about working for Disney, perhaps the company with the highest imagination quotient of all.

At U of M, long before Vikas and I started working together, I remember him remarking in a short speech on how the greatest thing about being part of Michigan’s engineering honor society was that he knew he could  share his most far-fetched ideas with anyone in the group, and actually have a sensible conversation on the matter.  Until recently, I didn’t really know why that particular statement stuck in my mind, but now I think it makes perfect sense:  cultivating imagination is among the most important things to me.

It’s too early to say whether Occipital will be able to chase distant imaginative goals, but we will keep this objective close to the chest, and hold it with as much esteem as any of our other measures of success.

We’ve been working under our secret identity of “Fluxcapacity” for a while, but we’ve decided to unveil our real company name “Occipital”. After some tough negotiation by Jeff (using tactics learned at “Negotiation Tactics” with Sarah Reed and Jason Mendelson), we were able to get Occipital.com. We’ll be shifting our blogging over to this site, and you can get our feed here. You can still access the old Fluxcapacity posts here.

Here are the top 5 reasons why our new name is awesome:

5. People that know we do a lot of image processing and that “occipital lobe” is the visual processing center of the brain will understand the connection.
4. People that don’t know what the name means will think we were creative enough to make up a cool sounding word.
3. Today “Occipital” is an adjective that means “back of the head”. But after we’re done with it, the word will be firmly linked with “visual processing.” So if you’ve been calling your mullet “occipital hair” you’ll have to stop soon. Also, because Occipital is already an adjective, we won’t have to try to turn it into one like “Old Mutual“.
2. Instead of rolling off your tongue and into your heart like some names, it rolls straight into the visual processing center of your the brain.
1. Because the name is somewhat vague, we can easily branch out into other industries. “Occipital Lite - the only beer that won’t fill you up and makes everyone more attractive by interacting directly with the visual processing center of your brain.”