The Entrepreneur’s Foundation and RMVCA Partner Up
At this week’s VCIR Winter the RMVCA will be announcing a partnership with the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Colorado. In case you’re not familiar with the organization, the mission of EFCo is to encourage entrepreneurs and companies to give back to Colorado by endowing their communities with a gift of stock early in the life of their company. The hope is that this gift will serve as both a seed for a philanthropic culture within member companies and, of course, will mature into a cash gift that will help strengthen community organizations (each company specifies the recipient of their gift). …
February 7, 2011· 2 min read
Don’t be average
I’ve written before about what I perceive to be an emerging, key trend among many new tech startups – the vast volumes of data companies now produce and the importance of having someone in your organization whose job it is to sift through these stacks of data and look for trends and patterns (I’ve even suggested to a few college students interested in startups and entrepreneurship that they make sure they’re taking plenty of math and stats classes as I see this as a great way for a young person with limited experience to pitch themselves to be quickly impactfull working with a start-up). …
February 3, 2011· 2 min read
Come to Glue for Free
You wouldn’t know if from the lack of activity on VC Adventure, but my one and only new year’s resolution for 2010 is to blog more. More consistently. More often. More reliably. So prepare for a flury (or at least a steady trickle) of blogging! Back in the fall we announced that our Glue Conference had teamed up with Alcatel Lucent to sponsor 15 companies from across the country to attend Glue on ALU’s dime (selected companies not only get admission to the conference but also will be featured in ALU’s demo space at the show). Submissions are open – you can find out more information on applying here. …
February 3, 2011· 1 min read
Simplifying Performance Marketing – Foundry Invests in Integrate
Performance marketing has been both a very lucrative side of internet advertising but also a bit of the wild west, where rules are made to be stretched or broken (with alarming regularity). And while the simplicity of pay for performance has been attractive to many advertisers, diligence has been required to monitor the quality of the traffic and leads generated by performance marketers. In particular, control of creative assets and their appropriate use has been a concern for many advertisers. In addition, existing performance marketing platforms have been limited solely to online assets. …
December 14, 2010· 2 min read
Time vs. Money
Yesterday I had a long conversation with an entrepreneur about the relative value of time versus money in start-ups. Our conclusion: Time is more valuable than money Of course both are critical assets of any business – particularly an early stage business – but often companies make the wrong trade of time vs. money. This happens in dozens of different ways at businesses every day and ranges from big decisions on accelerating hiring to small ones like how to prioritize product features. I’m not suggesting that companies should run out and double their engineering teams (which would presumably accelerate the timing of their product at the expense of cash burn) but I am saying that in many companies the fundamental understanding of the time/money equation is tilted in the wrong direction. …
November 19, 2010· 1 min read
HR as a core competency
In the world of start-ups, HR is at the bottom of the bottom of the heap of priorities most companies are working on. The vast majority of companies think about HR as a process and compliance function, outsource it to 3rd party providers (payroll, benefits, etc.) and doing their best to forget about it. If there’s any focus on HR as a function it is around recruiting (also typically outsourced and generally treated as very episodic). Sure – there’s plenty of talk about “culture” – of success, of working hard, of some other superlative that’s not particularly interesting or differentiating (“we want to hire great people and expect them to be hard working and successful!” duh) – but little real work done to actually execute against that and almost never someone made responsible for achieving success in people management. …
November 18, 2010· 3 min read
Gluecon and Alcatel-Lucent team – changing the game at Gluecon 2011
[Cross posted from a piece I put up on the Foundry Group blog earlier today] Our goal for Gluecon has always been to make it *the* gathering place for developers working on the connective technologies that hold the web and IT infrastructure together – from web services to SOA to APIs and cloud computing. Eric Norlin – our partner in Gluecon, Defrag and now Blur – has helped bring together technology leaders for an in depth (and proudly geeky) conversation around the changing landscape of these technologies and the applications they support. …
November 3, 2010· 2 min read
What makes Boulder great
Someone asked me this week for some qualitative data on the factors that lead Boulder to emerge over the past 5 or so years as one of the country’s top markets for start-ups. It’s a great question and I know that there are many other cities that are trying to follow Boulder’s example. I thought it was worth posting these thoughts – I’m sure others will have things to add to this. …
October 29, 2010· 3 min read
There is no “Foundry Group Boulder Signaling Problem”
Forbes published an article yesterday by Maureen Farrell stating that there’s a “signaling problem” for TechStars Boulder companies who don’t raise money from Foundry Group. “… one byproduct of [Foundry Group’s] generosity for any young Boulder company is that, if it hasn’t been funded by The Foundry Group, it must explain why. Otherwise it has a signaling problem, something that happens when a VC invests in an early round but doesn’t show up for later rounds.” …
October 22, 2010· 5 min read
When is your start-up no longer a start-up?
A few days ago I received an email asking me if I had a “rule of thumb for determining when a start-up can no longer be considered a start-up”. The sender proposed a few potential answers but I thought this one might be a good one to put out there for feedback from readers. His suggestions were: *Two consecutive quarters of positive free cash flow? *Drop pooled benefits company like Administaff for in-house benefits administration? *Anything > C round, seeking to lever w/ mezz debt or file S-1? *Name of company becomes a verb in our lexicon? *Receive gov’t stimulus funding? *Oprah uses your product? …
October 20, 2010· 2 min read