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
Boulder featured on Fox Business News
For a long time my hometown of Boulder, Colorado has been known as a great place to live but more recently Boulder is taking on a reputation as a great place to start a company as well. And the rest of the country is starting to take notice (see BusinessWeek, HuffPo and the NY Times). Today Fox Business News did a few live segments from Boulder highlighting some of the people and institutions that are helping create great entrepreneurs and great companies here. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed live along with Lijit CEO Todd Vernon (Foundry is an investor in Lijit). I have to say it was a little nerve wracking to be doing a live feed (this occurred to me about 30 seconds before going on air, before which time I was perfectly calm, after which time I thought my heartbeat might be visible through my shirt). In the end it was super fun and great visibility for Boulder.
October 12, 2010· 1 min read
How to teach your child to ride a bicycle
image This is totally off topic, but every time I tell people this story they love it and say they’ve never heard of this idea before so I thought I’d post it here. I didn’t make this method up (I can’t remember who told me about it, but living in the cycling capital of the US – Boulder, CO – it could have been any one of a hundred different people). We taught our two daughters how to ride using this method when they were around 4 and will have one more shot at it in the near future with our 3 year old son. The idea behind this method is that kids know how to pedal (they’ve been doing that just fine with training wheels) – what you really need to work on is balance and the easies way to do that is to take away all the other distractions so they can just focus on that one thing. Once they have that down they’ll be good to go. Both of our girls learned to ride using the method below in a few hours start to finish (where finish = riding around the block for the next hour by themselves). …
October 6, 2010· 4 min read
My RAIN Makers Conference Interview
I spent a couple of days last week out in the Twin Cities at the RAIN Makers Conference. I have to say I was pretty impressed (and surprised) by the strength of the entrepreneurial community in Minneapolis/St. Paul. I’ve known a few of the key guys from that community for a few years through Defrag and Glue but it was great to see how many people are really involved (there were something like 250 people at the conference). I shot an interview with Jeff from Tech[dot]MN that I thought I’d repost here. …
September 28, 2010· 1 min read