Cascadia rocks!

I spent last Thursday up in Vancouver BC at GrowConf (thanks again to Boris Wertz and Debbie Landa for the kick in the pants) and was incredibly impressed both by the quality of folks who showed up, and by the overall energy of the scene up there.

Andy and I created Founders Co-op to help build early stage companies located in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to our many Seattle-area portfolio companies we have two great investments in Portland (Urban Airship and AppFog), and have been working with Renny Gleeson and Rick Turoczy to create a Portland-based accelerator program (PIE) that will hopefully lead to more.

From the beginning, we thought of Vancouver as "in bounds" for our investment activity, but after three years and more than 25 investments we still haven't placed a bet north of the border.

Shame on us.

Thanks to a warm welcome from folks like Boris and Deb, Ian Bell of AppSocial, Jason Bailey at GrowLab, Brent Holliday of Capital West Partners, Kenshi Arasaki and Wilkins Chung at A Thinking Ape and may others, I met more great entrepreneurs in one beautiful Vancouver day than I had in my last five trips to the Bay Area.

I came away from GrowConf with a clear sense that "Cascadia" - from Portland in the south, through Seattle and on up to Vancouver - is quietly becoming one of the world's best regions for software innovation and entrepreneurial success.

Vancouver has been even more starved for early-stage capital and media attention than the Seattle or Portland markets, but that hasn't stopped it from building fast-growing, disruptive and (best of all) highly profitable companies like Plenty of Fish, A Thinking Ape and HootSuite.

In many ways, the lack of resources and attention has made the scene in Vancouver tougher, grittier and more self-sufficient than the bubbly markets to the south. As in Seattle, some locals lament the lack of attention, but my bet is that it's built deeper, stronger roots that will serve the community well over the long haul.

We still haven't made an investment north of the border, but based on my recent experience there that market has my full attention now, and I've never been more excited about the opportunities for Founders Co-op as an on-ramp for Cascadia's best young entrepreneurs.

Is Apple's iOS user experience a platform in its own right?

NOTE: I started this post before Steve Jobs announced his resignation as Apple's CEO, but it's particularly poignant in light of that news...

I had a fun, thought-provoking conversation this morning with Darien Brown, CEO and co-founder of YongoPal (a recent 500 Startups grad). The general theme of our conversation was the new kinds of social interactions being enabled by mass-market adoption of smartphones like Apple's iPhone and the many different devices powered by Google's Android platform.

Darien's perspective is specifically informed by the global adoption and usage patterns of his company's app: YongoPal is a sort of "virtual cultural exchange" platform, pairing members in different countries for week-long chat and photo-sharing sessions about each others' lives and cultures. To help break the ice, the application suggests specific activities (e.g., "take a photo that shows how you got to work today") to trigger conversations about how life is similar and different in different parts of the world.

One thing that Darien said has been rattling around in my head all day and I wanted to put it in writing to see if it still felt true. His comment was something to the effect that - in a global context - the tight constraints that Apple had put on the iOS user experience could be considered a platform in their own right.

While other "platforms" - e.g,. Twitter, Facebook - had succeeded in building up local adoption in other countries, the global uniformity of the iOS experience conferred instant cross-cultural familiarity and accessibility to iOS apps, making it effortless for people in different cultures to interact with each other.

In an increasingly global and cross-cultural world this felt like an important insight to record and share. I'm already on record as expecting Android to dominate the smartphone wars in the developing world, and I stand by that prediction, but Darien has given me something new to think about (which is one of the big reasons why I love what I do).

Welcoming Habit Labs to the Founders Co-op family

TechCrunch's article on this financing had already hit Techmeme by 10 this morning so pretty much the entire world has already heard the news, but I wanted to take a minute to officially welcome Habit Labs co-founders Jen McCabe and Buster Benson to the Founders Co-op family.

We've been looking for a way to work with Buster ever since he left Amazon + 43things but the perfect opportunity just hadn't come together. Then, a few months ago, I got a call from a Bay Area friend asking if I'd meet with an awesome woman entrepreneur who was moving up to Seattle. I had a great intro call with Jen, in which I learned she was teaming up with Buster by merging her YC-backed behavioral health startup (Contagion Health) with his (HealthMonth). From that call on I knew this was a team we wanted to back.

They've each done great things on their own, but as a team Buster and Jen are upping each other's game in a big way. Buster brings to the partnership a rare mix of pure software craftsmanship, end-user obsession and an abiding passion for instrumentation and analytics. Jen adds an infectious blend of energy, leadership skills, effective communications and health industry cred. Together, Jen and Buster are now busy assembling an incredible supporting cast of investors, partners and team members who share their dream of making a big dent in the world of consumer-driven health care. We're delighted to be in their family, and to welcome them to ours.