Startup Founder Stories: Contently

Joe Coleman and Shane Snow are self-described “internet dorks” that have been thick as thieves since childhood when they attended middle school together in Idaho Falls. Their first company together was an online greeting cards concept when they were sixteen years old. The two parted ways for college but knew they wanted to work together again eventually, Coleman tells me. “We wanted to do content marketing, which I had tried before during my last company (CashCrate), but I simply wasn’t a great writer or editor and it was so difficult to find good ones. Shane had moved to New York City to go to journalism school at Columbia and was also freelance writing for publications like Wired, Mashable and Fast Company. He brought this other perspective to content marketing; how fragmented the freelance life is.” Coleman followed Snow to NYC and the two brought in David Goldberg, who Snow had worked with previously. Goldberg had tired of life as a lawyer and met the design-savvy Snow on Hacker News while working as a developer. He then became chief technical officer, bringing legal chops to the team.

“When people we respected started recommending we do Techstars last summer, I was taken aback,” says Coleman. “As far as I concerned, accelerators like Techstars were for two guys in a garage just starting out…except in New York, where it’d have to be a parking garage, which would be weird. At the time, Contently had been around for almost six months, and we’d made tangible progress in terms of paying customers and a modest growth rate. Nevertheless, because of the quality of recommendations, they had our attention. We learned about certain companies in the last class that were further along, and we began to realize that the program was much more than just an accelerator for pre-product teams. In fact, the main benefits of Techstars happened to line up perfectly with our primary business goals. …now that we’re on the other side, we’d do it over again in a heartbeat. It’s an amazing experience for companies at the right stage–which may be later than you think.”

When they joined the second New York City program of Techstars last year, a $335K debt round from Founder Collective quickly fell in line with Techstars’ $18K in seed funding. “Contently is something that literally every one of our portfolio companies could use,” Founder Collective Managing Partner Eric Paley told TechCrunch for its announcement about the funding. In January 2012, Lightbank led a $2M series A round for Contently, adding to the news of ten Techstars companies raising a total of $42M in January. Consigliere Brand Capital also invested and even provided office space early this year while the founders set up a slightly bigger shop elsewhere.

Contently is now lauded by publishers and writers alike, having listened to the market’s needs. “We changed from more of a service-based model to a marketplace model,” Snow told Dave Lerner in a Mashable interview about progressing from $0 to $1M in revenue in a year. The founders slightly iterated to connect writers with brands and networks looking to invest in quality content instead of their original concept, matching every contributor to a large media news entity such as the New York Times. Featured publishers on Contently include the likes of Rackspace, CBS, Elle, Mint, and Best Buy and contributors include writers from Wall Street Journal, Denver Post, Wired, Reuters, and NBC, to name a few.

“One of the challenges is maintaining the vision as we grow,” Coleman confides. “Scaling the product, for any startup really, you’re constantly wishing you could build more stuff at any given moment. Prioritizing product development has been big for us lately. As we bring on clients each month, we’re trying to scale this gracefully.” These growing pains aren’t without their rewards. “I love the level of responsibility that comes with being an entrepreneur. You’re forced to learn so much and it’s so rewarding to become self-sufficient, make things work. As a founder, if things are going well or not, you’re ultimately responsible for it. The buck stops with you.”

For the founders of Contently and their users, something else grinds to a stop: the era of mass-produced, low-quality content farms.

Startup Founder Stories: UberSense

How’s your golf game? Would you like it to be better?  There’s an app for that. UberSense announced today that they have raised $1.1 million and released a new version of their app.

UberSense co-founders Krishna Ramchandran and Amit Jardosh met in 2004 in the UC Santa Barbara Computer Science Ph.D. program. Career paths took them to opposite coasts after graduation and years later they have taken on a big professional opportunity to collaborate building technology that changes the way people learn sports. The driving force behind their current collaboration started when Krishna started hitting the driving range three years ago.

“I started playing golf. I wanted to play like Tiger Woods. I quickly ran into a pretty serious problem…I really sucked.”

He began building his first app for personal use and Amit helped flush out some features. When they felt they had come up with something useful, they tossed it up on the Apple Store. Without any promotion or advertising, ‘SwingReader’ started climbing the ‘Top Paid Apps” list. They knew they were on to something. Preliminary research revealed that there are 100 million kids and adults who, like Krishna, aspire to be better athletes. Those people spend $6 billion on sports coaching in the U.S. alone.

“All of these people face the same problems I did. It’s very hard to see what you’re doing wrong and it’s hard to fix what you cannot see. We solved this by combining video and collaboration in a mobile application. It’s like putting a personal coach in the palm of your hand.”

Users record their performance using a mobile device and the app uploads it to the UberSense global community. Then athletes give each other tips. Unlike traditional video, the slow-motion playback and replay functions are smooth and don’t skip any frames. The system also provides the option to hire a professional (located anywhere in the world) to analyze your video. UberSense provides the tools for coaches to playback, stop the frame at precise moments, mark the video with drawings, record voiceover audio, and press “send” to return the commentary back to the student as a new video.

Over time, the proceeds from app sales grew to the point that profits covered their rent. Then their profit increased enough to bring on one or two employees and pay founder salaries with enough zeros that ramen could be cut out of their diet entirely. Going through user videos, they stumbled onto Major League Baseball and Olympic teams using the software for training. Doing well on their own, Amit and Krishna still wanted to be better entrepreneurs just as badly as they had wanted to become better athletes.

As their users gained a competitive edge by hiring a professional coach, they saw that Techstars could give their business a competitive advantage. They applied and were accepted for a spot in the Boston class for spring of 2012.

As soon as Techstars began, the power of mentorship kicked in, helping them understand the fundamentals and improve the business in concrete ways. There were a few big takeaways:

Product Development
The first lesson was that a simple product was a better product. Mentors stressed that having a lot of features was not nearly as important as doing a few key things really, really well. Krishna and Amit cut bookmarking and tempo tracking, two features being used by only 5% of users. With hundreds of thousands of users, 5% is a lot of people and the team got deluged with emails. After three weeks, users upset by the change were still active and the company had eliminated two high maintenance, low yield features.

Metrics
Mentors Justin Siegel and Will Herman stressed the importance of integrating data collection into their processes. Coming into the program, Krishna says they didn’t understand what users were doing, beyond anecdotal feedback.“User acquisition was a hazy concept until we started building metrics into the development process.”

Community Growth
The information provided by the metrics was an eye-opener. The range of activities to which users were applying the technology was broader than anticipated. With more than 20 sporting categories represented, the direction of the company shifted to building an inclusive platform. The data also told the story of how people were discovering UberSense apps through word of mouth and consistently high ratings in the Apple Store. Switching from passive growth to deliberate outreach was the next logical step. They put more focus on creating reputation badges and monetary incentive structures. The biggest lift was seen after upgrading social media sharing features. During the program, the aggregate number of videos uploaded increased by 66%, going from 3 million to 5 million.

When investors got wind of these numbers, the tables turned and many firms pitched for the opportunity to participate in their next funding round. Fred Destin of Atlas Venture talks about how he saw the Techstars coaching pay-off while negotiating his firm’s investment:

“What impresses us about Techstars companies is that they are more than ideas and output. Team, technology, and traction is a part of every one of these companies. UberSense is a great example of that. They keep raising more money but that’s because they have already built businesses that they are, to a certain extent, scaling. Techstars trains companies well on how to qualify investors. UberSense put us through the grinder – making sure we were aligned on strategy, on tactics, that they understood our seed strategy. We actually went through our whole portfolio with them and finally when every box was ticked, Krishna agreed to take our money.”

Looking back on the progress made in just three months, Krishna credits his team’s growth to the supportive environment in which mentors pushed them outside of their comfort zone.

“If an entrepreneur asks me if the Techstars program was worth it, I’m like…‘Are you kidding?’ Techstars cost us 6% of our equity but the value of our company increased many, many times over.” While the company’s net worth went up, Krishna’s golf handicap is down by 15 strokes.

Next stop: a hole in one.

Startup Founder Stories: Occipital

Occipital’s application to Techstars was submitted within five minutes of the final deadline. I’m sitting with Vikas Reddy on a Skype date with his co-founder, Jeff Powers, who is at Occipital’s San Francisco office. “That’s cutting it pretty close, guys,” I tell them. Applying by the early deadline is something heavily championed these days but Occipital participated in one of the early Techstars programs. The two met in school at Michigan, both officers in Tau Beta Pi. “We met at an event called Rock ‘n Bowl, at a light-up bowling lane place. Jeff had some delicious-looking chicken wings so I traded him for some of my M&M’s.” Reddy laughs quietly. “Before applying we had been working together for a while in this tiny apartment in New York City. Jeff was in Ann Arbor doing a talk on the day of the deadline. We had just been coding a whiteboard powered by LED light, so we were super busy. We applied before Jeff gave his talk and got an e-mail back from David Cohen within twenty minutes of hitting the submit button.”

When I ask what earth-moving details elicited such a prompt response, Powers says, “Likely who we are and our technical background. The product itself was receipt scanning. Taking your cell phone camera, snapping a shot of a receipt, and doing optical character recognition of it later.” Their hope was to build a personal activity tracking application that captured every purchase at every place you visit, including paper receipts that otherwise had no digital trail. With some Techstars fandom under my belt, I knew enough to know that this wasn’t their final product. So I ask. “How was the idea for RedLaser born?” “We were hanging out a lot with Paul Berberian in a basement office off of Pearl Street. We were brainstorming different business ideas. Vikas and I had just implemented a machine learning algorithm that could recognize so many things,” Powers reflects. “We were scratching our heads asking, but what should this recognize? It was frustrating. Then one morning before everyone else got into Techstars, we were looking at a desk and saw a barcode on a popular science magazine that someone had left behind. It had Einstein on the cover and it was an epiphany moment. We spent an entire day searching the web to see if anyone else was doing easy barcode scanning on the iPhone and we were giddy to realize nobody had.”

Was it true that there was a potentially in-demand product that no one had built well yet– an existing pain in need of a technology? Yes. And so RedLaser was built, a scanning application that is compatible with iPhone, Windows phones, and Android that as of this date has been downloaded over 15 million times. Barcodes can be scanned and immediately you can check prices to see if a better deal is available elsewhere.

Occipital announced that it had sold RedLaser to online marketplace giant eBay in early 2010 for an undisclosed amount. They both credit the eBay sale as happening at an opportune time. They had taken RedLaser as far as they had, it was in the top five for about three months in the App Store, and had already been featured in an iPhone app commercial. “If we had kept it, it would have been a monumental task,” says Reddy. As a mutual acquaintance of his by that time in the Boulder tech scene, I remember another friend teasingly using RedLaser to scan the bottles of wine Occipital had bought to celebrate, wary of how much they had (or hadn’t) spend on their friends that night.

Wanting to get back to the bigger problems they had originally set out to solve, Powers and Reddy kept chugging with Occipital. After RedLaser and only six months after completing Techstars, the Occipital team built 360 Panorama, a real-time panorama creation tool available for iPhone, iOS, and Android.

“How did you decide what to create next?” Reddy answers first. “What we were looking for was augmented reality ideas, looking around for ways that we could enable it. One of those things that’s needed for augmented reality is tracking. It didn’t even exist for rotating your phone around and taking a panoramic photo. No one had taken that core idea and built the technology. Programs existed but they were all manual and you had to stitch them together during or after taking the photo. We had 360 Panorama in the works by the end of 2009.” Last August, Occipital publicly announced their first major investment, a $7M Series A led by Foundry Group. The founders wrote: It’s going to be a wild ride, and where we’re going, we don’t need roads. Now the company spends its days building the platform that other developers can leverage.

“We are computer vision enthusiasts,” says Powers. “We’re so excited about computers and phones with a sense of sight. Computers can read text on the internet and enable certain things but what they can’t do, generally speaking, is see. It’s a combination of mathematics and computer science.” Reddy agrees. “Our top goal is to push forward the state of technology and change the world. I know it sounds a little cheesy but it’s not about making money. We want to be able to look back and know that we changed things and weren’t some flash in the pan. That’s what drives us and gets us up in the morning– the ability to create magical experiences.” Before I leave their office, I note their heads-down, passionate engineers and managers, a small team of eight. The only break they have taken since I arrived about an hour ago was to excitedly test whether or not running the microwave in the kitchen was negatively affecting the network speed during one of their real-time tests. It was. Magic indeed.

Startup Founder Stories: Orbotix

“In this video, as you can see, I’m controlling this robotic ball with my smartphone…you might ask yourself, ‘What’s so great about that?’ Well, it’s a robotic ball controlled with a smartphone.” The emphatic opening lines in Adam Wilson’s investor pitch for Gearbox during Boulder 2010’s Demo Day caused the entire audience to erupt in laughter and applause.

“It’s so crazy to watch our demo video,” says Ian Bernstein, founder and chief technology officer. “To go back and watch everything we said we would do and know that we’re actually doing it. We are twenty-six employees as of an hour ago and we’re hiring every day.” Now renamed Orbotix and expanding the capabilities of their product, Sphero, Wilson, and Berstein have come a long way.

Bernstein first applied with the idea to control devices over Bluetooth, making remote controls out of phones. With an idea that needed a big team and without a co-founder, his first application wasn’t accepted.

Wilson and Bernstein met at the end of December in 2009 after a mutual engineer friend introduced them. “Adam is a software genius,” says Bernstein. “We iterated on his idea using my hardware and electronics experience and came up with a few videos for an application for the Boulder Techstars program. Adam graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley on May 7th of 2010 and we immediately dove into the Boulder program when we were accepted. We have been working hardcore since then.”

Wilson elaborates. “We started out before Techstars trying to control robotics with our phone. We quickly moved away from the hobbyist market and started doing Sphero. What could we make that was a robot and infinitely expansible to the world? With an open SDK and API, developers can write their own apps and games that control this ball.” The potential is unlimited.

Two-thousand dollars generously given by family members fueled the cost of the dev board that was used to film the application videos for Nicole Glaros. “That’s what got us off the ground,” Wilson confides. “We bought one Android phone and that’s where we started. We had the seed money from Techstars but that money only helped us for the first two months because building hardware gets pricey. We were fortunate enough to pull together an angel round at $50K that pulled us through Demo Day at the end of the program and we were able to show an awesome prototype to investors.”

After Demo Day, Orbotix raised $1.1M, the majority of it led by Foundry Group and various angel investors. In April of 2011, they raised their series B of $5M, led by Highway 12 Ventures and Foundry Group. Wilson and Bernstein are both quick to attribute their success to their CEO, Paul Berberian, who joined the team serendipitously after mentoring them during the Techstars program. He brings over twelve years of entrepreneurship and running high-tech companies to the team. “Having Paul on our side has made everything so easy,” Bernstein explains. “He’s constantly out there playing with the product, doing demos, testing everything.” In an interview with Tech Cocktail earlier this year, Berberian said, “Everyone sees the world through the lens of his or her own experience. Some folks can see potential, and others can only see what is two feet in front of their face. Sphero is absolutely magical from a technological standpoint, and the potential is just beginning to be tapped. If you bought a new computer and all it had on it was a chess app, all you would see is an automated chess machine. But what makes your computer special is it can run numerous apps. You might use your computer for writing, while someone else uses it for gaming. Same machine, different function. Sphero is the same – there are a small number of apps today, but what is developed tomorrow will change how you think about robots.”

A typical workweek at Orbotix is jam-packed these days. Wilson is always in the office and Bernstein has spent much of his time in China, traveling constantly to maintain their hardware manufacturing responsibilities. But the long startup hours are not without their rewards. “We have so much fun,” Wilson says with a grin, looking a bit like the cat that got the canary. “The very first kid that got a Sphero as a gift posted a video of his ball on Christmas morning. He had drawn his own chalk racetrack in his backyard.” “It never gets old for us,” Bernstein adds. “It’s interesting to watch all the games people play with their pets, the videos they film. Skylar Castator (junior developer) made a remote control car that can drive around and we build a lot of chariots and fun, cute things.”

“This is so humbling,” Wilson tells me as I’m gathering my things to head back to the Techstars office a block away. “When I come into our offices at night and all of the rooms are empty, I tend to daydream about weird stuff. All of these employees’ lives are changed by ideas. I won’t call myself successful until I can walk into a major electronics store like Best Buy and see something I built on the shelf. It’s strange to realize this is a company I created. I could re-arrange the entire office and decide we’re a cat-shaped balloon business instead. I won’t…but I could.”

Startup Founder Stories: Next Big Sound

If Northwestern University ever needs a case study for success, their board should look no further than Boulder’s Next Big Sound. Co-founders Alex White, Samir Rayani, and David Hoffman found themselves together in an entrepreneurship class in 2008. White was a senior and Rayani and Hoffman were juniors. Hoffman and White had met slightly earlier than that when White was running the concert booking group on campus. Rayani was in charge of signing off on White’s spending, an annual $330K to bring in big acts like Flight of the Conchords, Kanye West, and OK Go. Hoffman and White had met previously too, both majoring in organizational change.

When asked how they first heard about Techstars, Hoffman says he first met Micah Baldwin, a mentor, at an information session at Threadless in Chicago. Baldwin championed the acceleration process and they applied to the 2008 program but were not accepted. What compelled them to apply again? “We love rejection,” White jokes. “We were the same team with the same idea but the second time we applied, our product had been built and was launched. We had press, thousands of users, knew how to work together,” Hoffman trails off, then smiles. “We applied again because we knew we were creating something real. We were heavily encouraged to apply again by many people in Chicago. So we did.” The second time was a charm and Next Big Sound became part of the Techstars program in 2009.

All three founders describe their incubation time at Techstars as worth its weight in gold. Prior to the program, what they had built wasn’t sustainable. “It was a failed attempt to build a fantasy sports network for music,” Hoffman tells me. “Everything about becoming part of Techstars was helpful because we were plummeting towards zero. Samir and I were still students and Alex had been sleeping on a couch in Chicago.” With no revenue, the product was going nowhere. That was about to change.

Out of the three-month incubation period of Techstars came a slight pivot. Their initial plan was to create a service in which anyone could become a record executive and sign artists they believed would become popular via individual online record labels. The concept evolved due to market demand and became the solid product it is today: actionable intelligence for the music industry. In their own words, they track more data for more bands online than anyone else in the world. But Rome wasn’t built in a day.

During Techstars, the founders often talked to mentor Jason Mendelson of the Foundry Group. A shared love of music had them talking about where the industry was headed and they saw eye to eye on potential macro changes. As Mendelson tells it, White pitched him by phone right before he had to board an important flight, creating a sense of urgency. As White tells it, he didn’t know Mendelson was traveling that day. Regardless, Foundry Group invested. “He really put his neck out for us and it was one of the strongest relationships we built that summer,” White reminisces. “We never expected him to be formally involved in the company.” Mendelson is a member of Next Big Sound’s Board of Directors. Prior to their investment in Next Big Sound, Foundry Group had never previously invested in a Techstars company.

“When the term sheet came for us right after Demo Day, it was a surreal moment for all of us,” says White. “August 6, 2009 was Demo Day and we closed with Foundry Group September 23rd, did another close with other investors and that was the last money we took until our announcement a couple of weeks ago.”

It’s been almost three years since the team drove 1,000 miles overnight in Hoffman’s Volkswagen Rabbit to arrive in Boulder and participate in Techstars. They haven’t left yet. On the day I visit their office off of Walnut, Rayani is taking a much-needed break from interviewing potential hires. He’s letting out steam by playing a game of FIFA on their big screen. A kegerator hums nearby, a staple of startup life. A Bob Marley poster is hung to the left of that and a screensaver of the Matrix Code flickers gently in the background. It’s after 5:00 but most of the staff is still hard at work.

Earlier this month, Next Big Sound announced that it had raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding round led by IA Ventures and Foundry Group. White was recently listed with the likes of Lil Wayne and Taylor Swift in Forbes 30 Under 30 for music. He spends his days on enterprise sales and lots of traveling. On a flight last year, he ended up next to Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon. Um, randomly? Yes. White eavesdropped on their conversation about the microphone arrangement for a stadium show while working up the nerve to introduce himself and pitch Next Big Sound to Cronin. Cronin is now a huge fan of the company and endorses them whenever he can.

Hoffman is passionate about delighting users and clients. “You can’t ever stop giving them stuff you know they will love, even if they haven’t requested it.” A perfect example is their 2011 State of the Industry report, a detailed list of statistics. “It has overarching trends and highlights from the whole year. Because we’re tracking so many artists, we’re able to do what many can’t. Our customers didn’t ask us for this but the information involves their artists and gives them context as to how their roster stands against competitors or versus the industry at large. Making data useful is our overarching priority.”

Hoffman is running product and design and Rayani runs all technology for the company. White handles PR, business development, investments, and media. The three founders marry their customer requests and feedback with their own vision for Next Big Sound. In their rare downtime, they give back to the startup community. “So many people helped us when they didn’t have to. We help the Techstars companies out when the Boulder program is in session. David Cohen usually calls us when the company switches their idea: ‘Hi, we’re a month away from Demo Day and our story makes no sense and we need to pull it all together. Help us.’ We go to Demo Days and love helping out where we can.”

In the meantime, Next Big Sound progresses, ten people strong. Music plays over their loudspeakers every afternoon. On Friday mornings, everyone sits together to eat bagels and talk about the past week and the week ahead. These days their hands are full running the company that powers the Billboard social charts. Everyone in the music industry turns to Next Big Sound when they need to understand what’s happening with any artist online.

We constantly espouse at Techstars that we accept incredible people and teams, not necessarily their companies or ideas. It’s awe-inspiring to see what such a passionate team can do in a matter of two years.

Husk Lowcountry Cuisine

Husk Restaurant, located on Queen Street in historic downtown Charleston, is self-described as a celebration of Southern ingredients. Manning its kitchen is James Beard Award-winning Sean Brock and Lowcountry native Travis Grimes. Their rules? “If it doesn’t come from the South, it’s not coming through the door.” Joe Rahim, Inspirato’s Photography and Digital Imaging Manager and resident gastronomist, visited recently to sample a few of their Southern delights. We sat down to look through his food photography and discuss the highlights.

Q: What brought you to Husk?
Joe: The serendipity of a delayed flight home to Denver allowed me enough time to stop in for a meal. Our on-site team recommends Husk and since we mention it on the destination section of our website, I wanted to get a photo that would be true to the restaurant. I connected with Dan Latimer, their Operations Executive, and he was very warm and welcoming.

Q: Before dining at Husk, would you have described yourself as a fan of Lowcountry food?
Joe: Absolutely. Charleston is a great city and it’s a gateway to a few of our other Inspirato destinations—Isle of Palms, Kiawah Island, Palmetto Bluff, and Hilton Head Island. I like to think of Charleston as the epicenter of the cultivation of Lowcountry cuisine. I’ve always had a personal fascination with shrimp and grits and Charleston’s version has a very distinct style. They serve it as a soupy tomato base with onions, bell peppers, and sausage and it’s simply beautifully over grits. I like to think of it as Southern fajitas, with grits sitting in for tortillas.

Q: How are their dishes typically prepared?
Joe: Their approach to food is very much inspired by tradition. A new menu is created daily according to what local ingredients they have on hand. This is the true definition of a farm-to-table restaurant. Even the sausage is made in-house. In addition to locally sourcing the food, all of the restaurant’s stoneware is made by Cone 10 Studios, a local art co-op for ceramics. Besides the loyalty to local sourcing, this was some of the most elaborately presented food I’ve ever seen. Each plate was pleasing to the eye and had edible flower garnishes. It was a photographer’s dream.

Q: Did you try a few dishes?
Joe: Of course! One was their shrimp and Geechie Boy grits with house sausage, fennel, English peas, smoked tomato, and crispy pig ears. It came with a skillet of cornbread made with Allan Benton’s bacon. I also enjoyed a flounder entrée and some slow-cooked heritage pork with grilled asparagus, spring onion, sweet peppers, preserved tomato vinaigrette, and goat’s milk feta cheese.

Q: What was the best thing you ate at Husk?
Joe: By far, the flounder. It was fried in chicken fat and served with spring vegetables, Mepkin Abbey shiitake mushrooms, charred ramps, and chicken consommé. The chicken skin was actually seared on the filet of fish and served over a savory broth. I keep dreaming about it.

Q: Let’s talk about the bar. Did you try anything?
Joe: Not on my first trip. I had eaten in the early afternoon and walked back to where I was staying afterward. Later in the day, I asked around about where to find a good whiskey and two different people emphatically said, “Husk.” Intrigued that the suggestion would be repeated, I returned and bellied up to their bar. I had made a new friend on the walk over who was also headed there. He was traveling across the country and described Husk as a must-stop. He was raving about their variety of Japanese whiskeys but I’m more of a bourbon fellow. The Husk mixologists craft handmade drinks and pour artisanal microbrews. There’s also a generous wine list.

Q: What would your advice be for future patrons of Husk?
Joe: Arrive with an open mind about the menu. One of the dishes even had pig ear in it! The chefs know what they’re doing. Don’t be intimidated and be sure to make a reservation since their menu is in high demand.

Winter Vacation to Tuscany

Vacationing in the rolling hillsides of Tuscany conjures up images of summer and warmer months but traveling to these charming historical spots in the winter provides a variety of activities and places to explore. Visiting during the low season in Italy means you won’t have to wait in lines or worry about the availability of museum tickets and restaurant reservations. In the countryside surrounding our Signature Residence options are countless villages and provinces ripe for long day trips of exploration. I review a few here that I had the pleasure of experiencing with my husband and friends during a week in January.

Explore: Siena
This lovely city is the capital of the province of Siena and its historic center was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Siena Duomo: Construction on this marble masterpiece began in 1215 and it has been carefully maintained in the centuries that followed. A few euros grant you access to walk around its staggering church, library, and Cripta, which was recently rediscovered in 1999 during excavations and used to function as a sort of porch entrance for the structure. Be sure to access the narrow spiral staircase up the tall, square bell tower to get a panoramic view of the city and surrounding valley.
Piazza del Campo: The city’s main piazza is home to the Palio di Siena, a famous horse race held twice a year dating back to medieval times. Today you can buy a cup of creamy gelato and enjoy it picnic-style on the piazza’s sloped surface or cozy up to one of the many restaurant patios surrounding the square. Outdoor seating areas are heated so that you can dine alfresco and enjoy prime people-watching even on chillier days.

Taste: Florence
Everything begins and ends in Firenze, the capital city of the Tuscan region. Long considered the birthplace of the Renaissance, the city is an economic center and most business in the region happens within its rich architecture.
Libreria Brac: Tucked away in an unassuming side street and sans signage, Libreria Brac is a local favorite and a hidden gem. Just a handful of tables are positioned around full bookshelves for a playful library atmosphere. This vegetarian spot will win over the biggest carnivore in your group; food is farm to table and features unlikely combinations such as pear carpaccio with balsamic and crostini with eggplant. Insider tip: order one of their combo plates, which includes your choice of pasta or rice, a vegetable or cheese, and carpaccio or salad. Portions are generous and prices are reasonable.
Osteria Vini e Vecchi Sapori: When your stomach grumbles, steer clear of the countless tourist traps in Florence. Have your Destination Concierge call ahead to make you a reservation at this family-owned bistro. It has been lovingly managed by the same family for four generations and photos clutter the walls of the dining room, which is so small that the owner locks the door when tables are full, even during business hours. A handwritten menu with thoughtful versions of Italian classics will be given to you after you’re seated. So obvious is the experience by the chefs in the kitchen that you can’t go wrong with any order. The grandfather of the family oversees his patrons from a counter where he slices prosciutto fresh to order. The servers are incredibly warm and playful, even grinding pepper into our laps in jest after taking care of the same on our salads. Don’t leave without trying the daily-made raspberry tiramisu.

See: San Gimignano
Affectionately nicknamed the “Manhattan of Tuscany” for the medieval towers that comprise its skyline, this small, walled city is in the province of Siena and most famous for its churches and frescoes.
iScuplture Gallery: Housed in an old tower, this rare contemporary gallery features art by only Italian sculptors. You’ll see creations made of bronze, ceramic, wood, and marble. The studio is currently open by appointment and the knowledgeable staff will guide you through elegant pieces by 24 different artists.
La Bottega del Sale di Duccio Nacci: Duccio Nacci was born and raised in San Gimignano and sells his stunning photography in both black and white and color at a reasonable price at his workshop near the Piazza Duomo. His snapshots range from memorable portraits and candid snapshots of people to scenic images of the Tuscan landscape he knows so well.

Through the Halls of La Posada de Santa Fe Resort and Spa

When American artist and curator Sara Eyestone first came to La Posada, she was just a small child with her grandmother in the late 1950s. She peered upward to take in the work of famous artists such as Georgia O’Keefe and Will Shuster gracing the hotel’s walls. At that time, local and traveling artists were welcomed to the grounds at a discounted rate and painted on site. Tourists attended creative classes and prestigious collectors knew that the hotel was synonymous with the finest purchases available on the market. The program fell by the wayside over the years as La Posada grew and changed hands several times. Given her history, it only makes sense that two years ago Eyestone was hired as art curator for the establishment (and the only hotel curator in all of New Mexico) and dedicated her vision to reinstating La Posada’s sense of art community support to honor its colorful past, the glory days of the 1940s and 50s.

Within La Posada’s hallways, lobbies, restaurants, and bar, Eyestone features original, American art by living artists only. Currently showing 45 artists such as Bruce Clovis Smith and Nancy B. Frank, who casually stops by to deliver a new painting while I’m chatting with Eyestone. She also boasts over 400 on the waiting list as so many are eager to show at the historic site. While the hotel takes a small commission, selling this work at its studio rate is a far cry from the galleries nearby which double and triple the cost. A long-time artist and showing in La Posada herself, Eyestone should know. “The way to support the arts is to support the artist,” she confides, one hand emphatically tapping the arm of her chair in the lobby during our interview. She began the current collection by hanging the work of 20 artists and re-arranging them carefully as they sell. These days, she easily keeps busy hanging and re-hanging as items sell, often to newlyweds who marry at La Posada and want to begin collecting as husband and wife, taking home an original piece of art from the location of their ceremony. Artists have a two-year contract with the hotel that they can renew but their work must remain exclusive to La Posada. You won’t find any of the same artists in any of Santa Fe’s galleries off of the plaza nearby.

You need not be an esteemed artist to enjoy Eyestone’s gracious company. She offers various classes to the community at large. Every Thursday from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m., she hosts memoir writing classes, asking attendants to read The Paris Wife and A Moveable Feast, compelling them to think imaginatively as writers, often for the first time. She also imparts her own knowledge of oil painting in a two-hour class for a minimal fee. “It’s the cliff notes of oil painting,” she says with a smile. “I demonstrate how to thin and thicken paint, what each tool does, and encourage people to paint an apple.” Eyestone’s eyes flicker with enjoyment as she retells the memory of a particular class—a father and daughter vacationing together. The father was especially satisfied with his apple painting, bragging loudly until he saw his daughter’s still life, far superior, at which point he declared he would keep his day job. Other art events on-site include art history tours and chef-hosted afternoon receptions with the artists.

During our tour, Eyestone exchanges pleasantries with everyone we pass. She is widely known and everyone we encounter is happy to see her. She keeps reiterating to me that she dreams of recapturing La Posada as the art destination it once was. Having gathered and displayed some of the best American art of this century with incredible passion and warmth, I can’t help but wonder if she knows that she already has.