My wife took me to kick-boxing class yesterday and if I was to be honest with you, I'd have to admit that I pretty much got my ass handed to me.  Kickboxing is HARD. This isn't athletic club kick-boxing.  This is Muay Thai kick-boxing at the local Thai dojo.  My wife's been going for months and is really good (and before you ask - yes, she can clearly kick my ass any time she feels like it).  She's been asking me to go for a while but I've resisted. Not because I didn't think it would be fun (and as it turned out it was even more fun than I thought it would be), but because I didn't know how to do it and I was seriously afraid of embarrassing myself (although as you can imagine, none of the excuses I used to avoid prior participation included this openness of reasoning).  Finally, having run out of good reasons not to go along, I acquiesced.  And it was great.  I had fun. I sweat (a LOT). I beat the crap out of my punching bag. I learned the proper way to kick and punch.  And occasionally I put it all together and actually looked like I knew what I was doing.

This post isn't really about kick-boxing, however.  It's about trying.  It's about putting yourself in situations that are uncomfortable or foreign and giving it your best shot.  I made a ton of mistakes in class yesterday.  And, as it turns out, didn't feel stupid at all.  To the contrary, I felt great for having made the attempt. At the end of class we warmed down with a few minutes of meditation and breathing exercises.  During this quiet time the instructor read a passage that started with the line "here we leave our egos at the door" and went on to talk about the virtues of challenging ourselves to our own level of ability and experience. 

I think it's often true in business that we are reluctant to try new things. To leave our comfort zones and branch out to new area. And - perhaps most importantly - ask for help. In business (and in life), its extremely hard to leave truly leave your ego at the door. But think about how much more we'd get done if we did...

I've been mulling over a few ideas in search advertising. Curious if anyone out there has come across any companies innovating in the search value chain (I'm thinking about things like Yield and Clickable). 

In case there was any doubt how far advertising on the Internet has to go, consider that The University of Phoenix is the single largest brand advertiser on the Internet (with some $20m in monthly spend, which is pretty minimal in the context of brand ad spending) and that Internet advertising per household (dollars spend on online advertising divided by total US households) was $288. Compare that with $818 on newspapers (or just over $1k on "direct telephone") (sourced from Mary Meeker's TechTrends June 2008).  We've got a long way to go, baby!

There are a couple of posts up this morning that I'd like to point you towards.

The first is over at Mendelson's Musings (written by my partner Jason Mendelson) that talks about our work with Nancy Raulston, our team's executive coach (direct post link here). I'm fortunate to work with a group of partners that believe (as I do) that part of building a great firm is building a strong foundation for communication and feedback. We take this work very seriously (starting with the 360 degree review that Jason describes and continuing twice a year at team off-sites where we Nancy facilitates a group review) and even base a portion of our compensation on this work (literally putting our money where out collective mouths are).

The second is today's post on the Foundry Group blog titled "There is no "I" in Foundry" which describes our team approach to running Foundry and contrasts that with the more typical venture firm.  While there wasn't a plan to release these two posts on the same day, they both point to an overall philosophy at Foundry that we are stronger and more successful investors as a group rather than as individuals.

For me these posts really highlight why I'm proud to be a part of Foundry and to call Jason, Ryan, Brad and Chris my partners.

Last month I wrote a post that tried to share the venture perspective of turning down a deal (see "Saying 'no' can be hear to do").  In that case I was referring to a specific deal that was particularly hard for me to turn down, although in the post I was trying to generalize to the many potential investments that we take a serious look at but don't end up closing.  While there's typically less anguish around it, saying "no" to deals is something that occurs with frequency inside any venture firm. The comments to this post got me thinking about the other side of the equation - specifically what should entrepreneurs who have built up a relationship with a VC over the course of a due diligence process do when that process ends in a "no". 

I have to tell you that I'm shocked by the failure rate of companies I've engaged with to stay in touch. I'm usually pretty direct when I've seen a potential investment that I like, but for one reason or another I've turned down the chance to invest.  While the vast majority of the time I'll simply turn town the chance to invest (and try to give my full reasoning why), sometimes I'll say something more like "please keep me updated on your progress," or "I'd really like to stay in touch," or "please put me on your 'friends of xyz company' mailing list so I can hear what you're up to".  This isn't a throw away comment and I don't do it often - mostly for companies where I'd consider an investment in the future after the company has made more progress or where I had a personal affinity for the entrepreneur and I sincerely want to help them be successful, even if I didn't feel I could do so as an investor.  I NEVER say this if I'm just searching for a nice thing to say (if you've learned nothing from this blog, I hope its that I'm direct in my interactions).  It's a balancing act, I know - I don't want to lead anyone one (as Gerald noted to me: how can you say "no" while a) protecting your reputation as an open minded deal maker, b)remaining open to appropriate future considerations, c) being honest concerning the reason or reasons that affect your decision making, d) respecting the cost of opportunity that all parties have bore to participate in the pre-deal exploratory process, and e) remaining empathetic in a healthy way while defending and protecting your interests and positions - not easy, but certainly what we strive for). 

So apologies if my disbelief seems vain, but if 25% of the companies I ask to stay in touch with me actually do, I'd be surprised.  They may feel that either I wasn't sincere or its a waste of their time to bother with keeping me up to date, but I think that view is extremely shortsighted.  The friction of maintaining a "friends of my company" email list or one of "potential next round investors" or just "people I care to keep informed" is so low that it seems to me crazy not to do so.  The companies in the 25% group that do this well have figured out how to provide regular, informative, short and to the point updates that make me (and the rest of the group they are communicating to) feel that they are getting the inside scoop on the company.  Sometimes they ask for specific help. Sometimes they are just basic updates.  Always, I enjoy hearing what these companies are up to. 

Pardon me for believing that Netflix introduced their new movie streaming box just for me, but with my DVD player recently dying and my Netflix account basically wasting away how could I think otherwise when Netflix rolled out the ability to stream movies directly to my living room.  The fact that it had an HDMI output (which happens to be the only spare cable I have running from my TV at the moment) was just gravy.

Seriously though, I was pretty stoked to add this to my account (and for only the cost of a $100 piece of equipment).  I know the hard core Apple users out there are going to tell me I should have bought the AppleTV thing, but I want my content rented and streamed, not owned and impossible to access if I don't follow the Apple DRM rules. 

It could not have been easier to set up (less than 10 minutes - fully half of which was me trying to figure out how to crimp on a new end connector on the CAT5 cable running from my media cabinet to the router). Once online, I plugged the device in, it game me a code to type into my Netflix account and in about 30 seconds I was ready to go.  Streaming quality is excellent and the buffering delay is generally less than 10 seconds at the start of each show. And I've only had one major blow-up (the system dropped and reset itself) in over 10 hours of watching content.

My only complaint is the one everyone seems to have come up with already - there's just not enough content available on demand (for example not a single movie in our queue was available for streaming). I have to believe the people at Netflix are frantically working on this problem.  Once they solve it they'll have one rockin' service.

I've spent a bunch of time with a handful of the TechStars teams in the last few weeks. The first week of TechStars was a complete whirlwind (lots of new people to meet, presentations from a bunch of big tech vendors, learning the lay of the land in Boulder, etc).  Now the teams have caught their collective breath and are starting to realize just how quickly the summer rolls by when you're creating and building a business.

While it's fun to run and gun during the early stages of business formation, I've always been insistent that the teams that I work closely with map out their work for the summer early on. It's not something that's set in stone but is a good guide of where we think we can get to in a 12 week period. These roadmaps get modified on a regular basis throughout the summer but the overall framework generally remains the same (in part because each team is striving to make discernable and demonstrative progress by the final "pitch" day at the end of the program). 

I've been around plenty of start-up businesses. Some have been more methodical than others at planning out where they were going and what they were doing; at collecting data early on in their dev process from prospective users and working that into their product thoughts; at working their dev cycles to allow key issues to be surfaced earlier rather than later; at thinking through scale before their first users hit their system; etc.  Others, not so much. I bet you can guess which ones have the higher success rate...

I was recently interviewed by Larry Nelson from w2w3.com. That piece is now up on the w3w3 site, and is (in my humble opinion) worth a few minutes to check out.  I talk about what it's like to work at Foundry Group with Brad, Ryan, Jason and Chris as well as about the role of company advisors (inspired by recent posts from this blog on that topic - here and here).  Enjoy!

While I've always dreamed of being a rock star (who hasn't?!?), my partners Ryan and Jason actually are (at least when they are done with their day jobs).  I wrote about their recent Soul Patch album here. 

The guys are playing a gig on June 21^st at Redfish Brewhouse in Boulder.  They start at 930pm - sharp.  It’s a onetime event, as the band resides in Boulder, San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

I told them that I’d shamelessly plug their gig on my site as payment for missing the show.  Like Brad, my wedding anniversary is the 21st and I won't be in Boulder that night.

If you go, take pictures so I can see what I missed!

For most technology professionals (really most professionals of any kind) email is so integrated into our work that we can hardly imagine life without it.  Sure, it can be a distraction at times and - especially if you carry a wireless device - hard to escape from.  But it also greatly enhances productivity, allows us to communicate quickly and effectively and to have asynchronous interactions with a great number of people.  I know in my own work life I send and receive between 200 and 300 emails a day.  And since I'm already tied up on the phone or in meetings for at least 5 or 6 hours in any given day, email allows me to be significantly more productive (and to process more information and communication with a far greater number of people) than without it. 

So it's with much curiosity that I'm watching my friend Mark Solon - a partner at Highway 12 Ventures in Idaho - experiment with an email free summer.  He describes the heart of his thesis this way: If the people who sent the majority of those e-mails knew that I didn't have an inbox, they would have either picked up the phone and called me or (and this is the heart of it) probably wouldn't have bothered because it really wasn't that important after all.  The link above will take you to the article he wrote about the project. I like Mark, but I'm skeptical that this is going to work.  Even with his secretary printing out important documents (board packages and the like), the limits of old school communication in my mind significantly outweigh the upside from people self filtering their communications with you.  Not to mention, I'd be perpetually worried that I was missing something.

We'll see what Mark has to say at the end of the summer.  I'm curious in the meantime - could you live without email?