Lijit Unplugged

A fun and, dare I say, educational event hosted by Silicon Flatirons tonight featuring Todd Vernon and Walter Knapp, the CEO and COO respectively of Lijit. This is part of the Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, a chance to introduce local Boulder entrepreneurs to CU students, faculty and community to get their entrepreneurial juices flowing.

Lijit's mission is to provide super cool services to online publishers of all sizes that help them understand their readers better and create a business around their passion. It’s featured right here on this blog. Lijit not only provides search capability for blogs, it links to the blogger's network to provide levels of authority in the search results.

This method of leveraging social networks to refine search results adds up to better targeted advertising, i.e. double the click through rate of Google Ads.

According to the two executives, Boulder still gets 80% of its venture funding from out of state. They didn’t go into any great detail on how those funds were distributed, but the upshot is that most profits flow out of state once a liquidation event occurs. Another issue they mentioned with the Boulder startup environment is that it’s easy to start, difficult to exit.

The audience was enthusiastic, perhaps cooking up new entrepreneurial efforts for the future.