Lance Cottrell helps startups achieve success through advising, mentoring, and an educational platform he founded in 2019, Feel The Boot. Lance’s entrepreneurial journey started in 1995 when he put his Astrophysics Ph.D. on permanent hold to launch Anonymizer, the world’s first commercial internet privacy service. He grew the consumer service to serve one million active users and over one hundred thousand paying subscribers before pivoting to address a radically different market. Following the 9/11 attacks, he shifted Anonymizer’s focus to providing undercover operations platforms as a service to the national security community.
In 2008, Lance sold the company to Ntrepid (formerly Abraxas), a small government contractor, and became their chief scientist. In that role, he had the ability to impact the company in many ways. He helped them develop the next generation of technologies that evolved from Anonymizer’s solutions. He continued to present and sell these solutions to government customers. He also acted as the public face and spokesman for the company and directed the marketing team.
In 2019 Lance created the Feel the Boot website, podcast, and YouTube channel as a platform to make his advice and training available to a far larger audience. In 2020, he finally left his chief scientist role to focus on advising, investing, and Feel the Boot. Lance also joined the Founder Institute as a Global Entrepreneur in Residence, which allows him to mentor founders worldwide.
Lance brings a scientific approach to everything he does. From the age of six, he planned to be a physicist like his father. Fortunately, his mother brought some balance with her perspective as a sociologist. While attending a math/science/computer focused high school, he took a formative job at the local science museum explaining the exhibits to confused visitors. The job required him to quickly analyze the visitor’s level of understanding and immediately frame the discussion in a way they would understand. This synergy of physics, sociology, and communications shaped all of his endeavors thereafter.
Lance became frustrated with his Ph.D. when he discovered that the one-hundred-hour Hubble Space Telescope spectra he was using only provided a signal to noise of one. While the data he acquired from the Keck telescope in Hawaii was fantastic, it could not cover a critical part of the near UV spectrum that only Hubble could provide. At the same time, he became involved with a group called the Cypherpunks, who actively developed open-source privacy software. One of their primary efforts was creating anonymous email “remailers.” These services had well-known vulnerabilities and limitations, so Lance developed a new generation of remailers called Mixmaster in his spare time. Mixmaster quickly became popular and much more rewarding than the astronomical frustrations of his thesis. The combination of academic ennui and the excitement of privacy and cryptography caused Lance to pause work on his dissertation while he started Anonymizer. He thought that he would then be able to finish his Ph.D. in his spare time. That was not his most brilliant idea, the pause eventually became permanent, and the mostly completed draft languishes to this day.
Lance and his wife Barbara grow premium Russian River Valley Pinot Noir, which they sell to select local wineries while keeping a small amount to make non-commercial wine under the name “Turkey Roost.” Lance is also active with local service organizations. He is a past president of the Rotary Club of Healdsburg Sunrise and served on the board of Sonoma County Habitat for Humanity.