Posts By / seth levine

New Builders | Black Lab Sports Forum

Black Lab Sports is hosting a great event on Wednesday, April 28 from 6pm – 8pm that will focus on the intersection of themes from our upcoming book (The New Builders) and diverse founders working in sports and performance technology. The event will be hosted by Black Lab Sports CEO JP O’Brian and Cody Burkhart of NASA and, along with my co-author Elizabeth MacBride and me, will feature some amazing guests working at the forefront of human performance: Dhani Jones, former NFL linebacker for the Giants, Eagles, and Bengals. After football, Dhani turned his attention to entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and activism as well as hosting the Travel Channel’s Dhani Tackles the Globe, VH1’s Ton of Cash, and CNBC’s Adventure Capitalists. Marques…

Bolster’s Board Benchmark Study | Shout-out to Execs Looking for Independent Director Roles

As we’ve recognized the need to diversify our networks to better diversify our companies and company boards, Foundry has been working with a number of firms such as HimforHer, Valence, ReadySet, and others. We’re also partnering with Bolster – a company that, although we’re not direct investors, we have strong ties to through several of our partner funds who are investors as well as through our long, long time relationships with Bolster’s CEO, Matt Blumberg (who was CEO of Return Path in the Foundry portfolio) and Micah Mador (former Foundry Network and Community Catalyst and now Partnerships Manager at Bolster). Today, Bolster released their Board Benchmarking survey analyzing the diversity, composition, and compensation of 250 private company boards (including over 50 Foundry portfolio…

Behind the Scenes: Writing “The New Builders”

Many readers likely already know that I’ve been working on a book for the last several years – The New Builders: Face to Face with the True Future of Business. It’s due out in a few weeks and I’m really excited about it. Writing a book was challenging but in many ways, it was an unexpected pleasure. I thought it would be fun (and interesting) to post about the process a bit. Especially as we’re about 10 days away from its release on May 4th. I have long been interested in looking at ways that we can support diverse entrepreneurs and connected with my co-author and friend, Elizabeth MacBride, around this topic some years ago. Main Street businesses – the…

The Covid Churn You’re Not Thinking About

Early on in Covid many businesses, of course, worried about the ways that Covid would affect their business. Many made various contingency plans and quite a few adjusted spending (marketing, sales, hiring, etc) in anticipation of Covid’s impact. While in hindsight I think many (in the tech world, I’d probably say most) companies ended up faring better than they expected, some did not and I think even those that ended up being fine were happy that they took the matter seriously and had contingency plans, even if not all of those plans needed to be implemented. As we begin to come out of Covid there’s another kind of business impact that I think is important to anticipate and plan for….

Net Dollar Retention vs. Net Revenue Retention

Net Dollar Retention (NDR) and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) are both important measurements in any business but many companies conflate the two or (more frequently) only report on one. Both are key metrics but for different reasons. Equally important is separating out NRR for your largest customers versus the rest of your customers since often the behavior of large customers is markedly different than average customers. Their effect on a business and can be hidden in aggregate data and a sense of their impact is lost. NDR and NRR are as defined as follows: NDR measures the average percentage change in revenue over the first 12 months of a customer. NRR measures the percentage of revenue retained from all customers…

The Importance of the Democratization of Capital

The democratization of capital may be messy at times, but it’s much better than the alternative. And it’s long over-due. Robinhood’s actions to restrict trading in GameStop stock, as well as several other issuers, was completely the wrong response to an increasingly active capital class. It’s time to give up this old notion that small investors somehow need to be saved from themselves (as they claimed was the reason they halted trading in GME and other issues *). For years, capital investment has been the sole purview of the wealthy in the United States and elsewhere. We’ve long had a series of laws that restricted people’s abilities to invest in private stocks and at that same time, given fee structures…

Startup Communities | Rural Entrepreneurship

I’ve always loved Brad’s Startup Communities – it’s long been my favorite of his books, built upon ideas that are clearly stating the test of time. In it, he talks about the key ingredients to building a startup community and talks about our experience in Boulder – one of the first startup communities to really thrive outside of the traditional tech hotbeds of the coast (but certainly not the last). He’s recently come out with a new version of the book, as well as a companion book called The Startup Community Way. They are outstanding. In the nearly 10 years since the original book was published, the Startup Communities landscape has changed quite a bit. Robust startup environments began to develop…

Declaring Victory for The Finance Assistant Network

Back in April, not long after COVID-19 hit, Lew Visscher from Lew’s List, Phil Vottiero from High Plains Advisors, and I launched the Covid-19 Finance Assistance Network (FAN)  The network partnered volunteer CFOs with small businesses that were in need of financial guidance on carrying their business through the crisis and navigating the Federal programs from the CARES Act. Recognizing that smaller operations were at a huge disadvantage because they didn’t have access to the legal and financial resources that larger firms do, we wanted to do something to help them. Establishing FAN was a way to provide pro bono support to smaller businesses that were the most vulnerable to the shutdowns happening throughout the country. We had 80 financial…

One Thing at a Time

I’ve been doing a light mindfulness practice over the past month and a half through a portfolio company of Foundry’s called Meru Health. It’s been a great experience (my first time trying to do work like this on any consistent basis) and has taught me a number of things. Perhaps the most important has been the realization of how infrequently I do only one thing. I had no idea how infrequently I was able to focus on just a single thing. In fact I almost always have several things going on at the same time – I’m walking the dogs but also Voxing. I’m on a Zoom, but also replying to a quick text. I’m taking a shower, but also…

Trump’s Legacy of Racism

As I listened to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden give their speeches from Wilmington on Saturday, I was struck by the contrast they offered to the rhetoric we’ve heard coming out of the White House for the past 4 years. Perhaps I had forgotten what ‘normal’ actually was. Both Biden and Harris spoke to the entirety of America – those that voted for them and those that didn’t. They spoke of character, honesty, science, and a belief that our strength comes from collective action, not from divisiveness. I woke up Sunday morning, as I imagine many of you did, with the feeling that a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. That, while America remains surprisingly divided, we’re back on…