The evolution of Gluecon
I was thinking about the evolution of our Glue conference as I drove into work this morning. It’s pretty remarkable how much the infrastructure ecosystem – and therefore our little conference that focuses on it – has changed since we ran our first Gluecon in 2009. The initial premise for Glue was to get together to have a detailed conversation about the technologies that were underlying the trend of the web as a platform (web-as-a-service). And while there was plenty of talk about “cloud” at the time we were talking about it as somewhat of a parallel universe to “web” that connected at very specific end points. And when it came to applications, since “web” was the end point when we said “application” we meant “web application”. And it was pretty clear what was a business application and what was a consumer application and the venn diagram intersection between the two wasn’t particularly meaningful. …
April 19, 2011· 3 min read
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 don’t consider myself and “AdTech” investor, I suppose that thee who protests too much… …
April 12, 2011· 5 min read
Do less slower
NewImage.png 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. …
April 6, 2011· 2 min read
Beware of the volume of your CEO megaphone
Someone used this phrase with me a few days ago and I thought it effectively captured something that’s come up a number of times in the past few weeks around CEO communication. Many great entrepreneur CEOs are fantastic visionaries and seem to have a constant (often what feels like endless!) stream of ideas flowing from their brains. And because they’re often gregarious people they’re not shy about sharing this idea stream. However often this idea flow isn’t accompanied by any metadata and the lack of context can sometimes lead to companies zig zagging around as managers react to the most recent meeting they’ve had with their visionary boss. Enter the comment about the “CEO Megaphone” and I think we’ve found an apt description to what sometimes goes on within a company. When CEO’s talk, their voice is amplified by their position in the company (always as the boss and sometimes as the boss and company founder – which can amplify the weight of their voice, especially around product direction, even more). Since a CEO can’t turn off the megaphone, it’s important that s/he recognize the amplification effect it has.
April 4, 2011· 1 min read
Ok Color. How about solving the more basic (and important) problem with photos?
NewImage.png Ever hear of this start-up called Color? They launched a social photo sharing thing yesterday. And raised $41M. Oh wait. Everyone has heard of Color by now (and has an opinion about it; re: their capital raise, I’d refer you to a recent post on that subject) What I want to talk here isn’t the Color business, the financing or how much it paid for Color.com. It seems to me that this most basic problem with photos hasn’t come close to being solved yet. And while I don’t have a strong opinion around what Color is doing (although with age, I fear that I’m finding that many of these types of apps don’t much appeal to me personally) the hype around it did make me wonder why no one has yet figured out an answer to this much larger and more interesting problem: …
March 24, 2011· 3 min read
Have less funding than your competitors? Good!
NewImage.png I’ve sometimes joked with companies in our portfolio that the best way to deal with a better funded competitor is to use their own relative lack of funding to their strategic advantage. But actually, this solution isn’t meant tongue-in-cheek – I’m being dead serious. While we have a few companies in the portfolio that have, for various reasons, raised significant amounts of capital, many of the businesses in which we have invested haven’t. Not only are they reasonably capital efficient measured alone, but when compared with their peers, a number have raised far less capital than companies with which they compete. …
March 17, 2011· 2 min read
Civility in the Debate with Runners in Boulder
My partner Brad beat me to this post after an email exchange on the subject this morning, so I thought I’d take some of his post and rewrite it from my perspective (note that I’ve purposely lifted some entire sections and changed the words to be written from my mountain biking perspective). While we disagree on the issue at hand, we strongly agree that the tone of some of the debaters isn’t productive or helpful. …
March 10, 2011· 3 min read
The real bubble
great business plan tweet.jpg While there’s been plenty of discussion and debate about whether we’re in some kind of valuation/venture bubble right now for early stage tech, there is one bubble that I’m pretty sure of. I’m seeing more great business ideas right now than I can remember seeing at any time in my 10 year venture career. We typically see around 1,500 business plans a year at Foundry (we actually see more than that, but this is the approximate number that are relevant to our investment focus). On average we’ll take a meeting with somewhere around 10-15% of these and hear a bit more than what was in the introductory email or initial business plan. And we typically invest in 8 (our Foundry blog does a pretty good job of tracing our investment history and pace if you flip through our old posts). These numbers work for us and for our strategy and part of our operating philosopy is not to deviate significantly from our investment pace (depending on the mix of seed investments this number could go up or down in any given year but overall we’re comfortable at roughly the 6-10 new investments per year pace). …
March 4, 2011· 3 min read
The birth of a new Foundry theme – Distribution
Today on the Foundry blog we detailed a new theme in which we’ve been investing for a while, but which only really came together as a coherent thematic concept in the past year or so. This theme – distribution – involves companies leveraging the inherent scalability of the Internet and it’s key platforms in targeted, but extremely large markets. I thought the history of how we evolved our thinking around distribution – basically the birth of the distribution theme – would be illustrative both around how the group dynamic works in the Foundry partnership as well as how we think about our thematic investing approach. …
February 22, 2011· 3 min read
Changing the world – one unreasonable idea at a time
One of the things I like the most about community hours is the chance to meet people that I may not have been able to connect with otherwise. And while the initial meetings are brief (15 minutes) every once in a while someone makes an indelible impression during that time. One such person, whom I met about 18 months ago, is Daniel Epstein. Daniel, along with his partners Teju, Tyler and Vlad, started something they call the Unreasonable Institute. The Unreasonable Institute is something bold and audacious and exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from Daniel and his partners once you get to know them. The goal of the Unreasonable Institute is to accelerate the growth and learning of entrepreneurs tackling some of the world’s greatest social and environmental challenges. 2011 will be the second summer the Institute has gathered 25 high-impact entrepreneurs in Boulder for an intensive 6-week program to help accelerate their business ideas. Paired with an outstanding group of mentors, these companies spend their summer fine tuning their ideas and honing their businesses. …
February 12, 2011· 2 min read