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Doing the right thing

One of my favorite services is unsubscribe.com. It’s a gmail plug-in that with one click lets you rid your inbox of unwanted newsletters. I recently analogized newsletters to tending a garden. You have to stay on top of the weeds or they get out of control. Unsubscribe.com lets you do that. With this as a backdrop, I was pretty surprised to receive the following in my inbox last week: Thank you for being one of our paying customers, your trust and support helped propel us to where we are today. With that being said, I’m excited to tell you that beginning yesterday, August 4th, 2011, we have made our full suite of products (Email Unsubscribe and Social Monitor) completely free, which…

Beware of ASSHOLE VCs

Before Foundry makes an investment we perform extensive due diligence. We meet with various company managers, talk to other people in industry to get their take, call current and prospective customers, exercise our own network of contacts to get background on the idea and team, perform reference checks on key management, etc. While this process varies, we’re always diligent before entering into what we view as a long term partnership with the company. What more and more entrepreneurs are realizing is that they should be doing the same kind of due diligence on their potential funders. We’ve been long time fans of this kind of reverse due diligence and always encourage entrepreneurs to “check us out” before making a decision…

Pattern recognition

VC’s love to talk about their pattern mapping abilities. “We add more value because we’ve seen so many companies go through all sorts of situations before and we can quickly map whatever’s happening at your business to what we’ve seen in the past and leverage this experience.” Or so the logic goes. But what’s going on right now with early stage company valuations suggests that VCs may be poor judges of at least some of these patterns. Or at least that they’re incredibly human when it comes to estimating the likelihood of certain events actually happening. In 2002 a series of random shootings rocked the Washington DC area. For a period of about two weeks, an unknown assailant killed 10…

Entrepreneurs First!

A few years ago I was talking to a fellow venture capitalist about an entrepreneur he had previously backed. “That guy should love me!” he exclaimed, “I made him 50 million bucks!” And then moved on to some other topic which I can’t remember because I was numb with disbelief at his previous statement. He backed an entrepreneur who built a business that after a number of years had a very nice exit and he made the entrepreneur money? Obviously his logic is completely backwards. And while I don’t know that many VCs would express such an extreme view of that sentiment I do think that most believe that not only is a healthy VC ecosystem important for entrepreneurship to…

If you’re in the cloud you really need a parachute

Fred Wilson recently posted about his move to the cloud and the freedom that having his data always available has given him. More and more people and companies are freeing themselves from the constraints of desktop software and captive data stores in favor of cloud based applications and the freedom of readily (and always) available data. We recently went through a similar move at Foundry – although we haven’t completely moved to Google Apps for all of our documents and spreadsheets – and it’s been incredibly liberating. I blogged about my move to a Mac from a PC last year, but haven’t had a chance to follow that post up with a report on the more important move from a…

Call List Manager – an app waiting to be born

I searched the app store recently for an app I was sure someone had come up with. But alas, no one had. So I thought I’d throw it out there in the hopes that someone wanted to take it on. Like many people I maintain a “to call” list. I do a lot of work over email, but I’m also on the phone anywhere between 5 and 12 hours a day and at any given moment I have a healthy list of people to get back to. I’ve tried different ways of managing this list – from putting them in as calendar reminders (works to create the list, but it’s not persistent enough) to using tasks (this has been the…

Getting to know you

You already know a lot about you. But I don’t. I sit at this end of the internets and type our posts on topics that I hope you’ll find interesting. And some portion of you tweet out links to posts that you like. And a smaller portion of you either comment on a post I’ve written or send me an email with your thoughts (all of these things – from just reading to any level of engagement – I appreciate!). But I don’t know a whole lot about you in aggregate. I use Google Analytics on the site which lets me see a little bit about where you come from to get to my site (and where you go after…

Your idea is overrated

I’m not going to rehash the “why I don’t sign NDAs” stuff that I’ve written about in the past (here it is if you want to see it), but being asked a few times this week to sign NDAs has gotten me thinking about the value of ideas. Actually, this is something I’ve recently been noodling on and my conclusion is that people 1) overvalue their idea on the front end of a project and 2) once something has become successful undervalue the day-to-day tactical execution that made the idea successful. Ideas are great. But they’re not as valuable as most people make them out to be. and by correlation, Execution is almost universally underrated and in hindsight taken for…

Don’t call it AdTech. It’s “Adhesive”

For about the past year my partners have been pushing me to write up some thoughts on AdTech investing. “We’re not AdTech investors,” I’d push back, “we just have a bunch of companies in the portfolio that are working in and around online advertising.” And for a while that worked pretty well. Most of our AdTech investments would be labeled “glue” (they were all connecting or intermediary technologies – just applied to online advertising). Then Jason came up with the name “Adhesive” which seemed to stick (that was bad, wasn’t it) and after a few months procrastinating I ended up writing up our thoughts on AdTech investing and posted them today over on the Foundry blog. And while I really…

Do less slower

I’m sure you’ve read David Cohen and Brad Feld’s book Do More Faster. And while I thought the book was full of great advice for entrepreneurs (and I’m incredibly proud of David and Brad for writing it, if admittedly, having heard the moniker of the title oft repeated a few too many times – see here for my partner Jason’s clever tease of them with some help of Xtranormal) I actually think sometimes the best thing a startup can do is to do the opposite of what the book’s title suggests (although some of the inside chapters do not) and Do Less Slower instead. I’m quite serious about this. While early stage companies are always trying to squeeze just a…