Today, I had the opportunity to accept the Seattle Alliance of Angel’s Company of the Year Award for entrepreneurial excellence on behalf of the LiquidPlanner team.  We are deeply honored and feel very lucky given the many great companies the AoA could choose from.

We were surprised because we’ve been heads down for about 12 months working on the 3rd generation of our software platform; we simply assumed we were off the radar. But I guess that says something good about the start-up community in Seattle: they pay attention.  We love building our company in Washington and enjoy the technology lifestyle.  We have found the talent and resources we need locally– from great professional and technical service providers to a deep bench of investors and advisors. We have found advisors who are more than willing to share their extensive operating experience with us.

When Jason and I started LP, people we knew told us that project management was a solved problem and there was no point in competing with the big guys and their giant sales teams. They were wrong on both counts. We are committed to building the best social productivity software on the planet and maybe that’s why customers are telling us they see 30%-40% more projects getting done with the same resources since they switched to the Liquid Method.

We will be stirring the pot even more in a few weeks with our upcoming LP 3.0 release. LP 3.0 is an “Extreme Makeover,” updated to reflect many of this things we have learned since the start about what works well and what doesn’t work so well in social project management. This seems like a good time to share the first part of this makeover, our new logo that will go live with the release:

Our story would not be unfolding as it is without the support of the Seattle Alliance of Angels. They have been fantastic partners in the LP venture and I highly encourage new entrepreneurs to connect with them. Last year they put over $10M into 33 companies. If you have the right plan and a bit of luck they will invest in you.  If you are really lucky, you’ll get somebody like Geoff Entress from the AoA to be on your board. He is super active, never missed a monthly board meeting, and treats us like we are the only company he works with (the actual number is north of 40).

So from the whole team at LP, we offer a big THANK YOU to Geoff, the AoA, and the State of Washington.