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The New Foundry Video Is Almost Here
You may have seen the video that Foundry Group produced a few years ago – a hard hitting glimpse into the life of a VC told in SNL style. The video (and more importantly the song) was written and...
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Getting our Angel List On
In the news/hype cycle of venture and start-ups it’s rare when a single news item captures the attention of the entire community, even for a few days, let alone 3 or 4. But AngelList‘s announcement of...
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Is the cost of starting a business less than zero?
There has been a well documented and discussed deep decline in the cost to start a technology business over the past ~ 15 years. From the days where every website was custom and each site element was a...
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SaaS Nomenclature
This has come up a few times so it seemed worth putting out there. It’s important to get a consistent set of terms when talking about your business. For example when you say sales do you mean booking...
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Trada Update
Companies rarely grow in a straight line (or the fabled exponential one). Building a business isn’t about getting from point A to point D by passing through points B and C. There are fits and starts....
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Act Like A Leader
Act like the leader. Simple advice but I see companies not do this all the time. You’re the leader in this space – act like it. Don’t be ashamed, bashful or defensive about it. This doesn’t mean beat...
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Betting for a cause this SuperBowl
I’m a big football fan and, despite not having grown up in Denver, have been a fan of the Broncos since I was little (my grandparents lived in Denver and my sister and I spent a month every summer here...
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Entrepreneurship behind the wall: A trip to Palestine
If you’ve been a reader of my blog for any time you’ll know that I’m intrigued by (and a big fan of) the notion of The Democratization of Entrepreneurship. It’s not that I think entrepreneurship solves...
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Just say NO to that large fundraise
I wrote a post a few years ago about using your lack of funding to your competitive advantage. The basic gist was that all businesses act within constraints and that the discipline that can result from...
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The 4 Keys to a Successful Angel Investment Strategy
With the increasing popularity of angel investment sites such as AngelList and CircleUp more and more people are making investments. I love this trend and have a longer form blog coming on the subject...
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Camp DevOps! (at Gluecon 2014)
One of the big uptrends in technology is the rise of DevOps. Whether your organization is a large enterprise or a fledgling startup, DevOps can help. We have seen this first hand in many of our...
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Why doesn’t British Airways Want to Make Money?
British Airways parent company finally got back into the black in 2013, presumably benefitting from an increasingly favorable global economy. They certainly were not benefitting by their own policies...
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Taking the long road
I first met Carrie and Tony Requist of U Grok It in February of 2012. We were hosting a DEMO event with VentureBeat and UGrokIt was one of a handful of companies that was chosen to come in and pitch. I...
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Syndicate Funding on AngelList – A Company’s Perspective
A few months ago AngelList announced Syndicates – enabling investors on AngelList to create fund-like groups of investors to invest together in AngelList companies (following a single lead investor)....
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It’s time to get away
As we approach August, and having recently taken some time off myself (some real time off this time – more on that experience in a different post) I thought it might be a good time to talk about the...
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Venture Outcomes are Even More Skewed Than You Think
The typical “successful” venture portfolio is often described as having the following outcome: 1/3 of companies fail 1/3 of companies return capital (or make a small amount of money) 1/3 of companies...
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Some more data on Venture outcomes
Quick update here. The data I site below is from Foundry LP StepStone. Since my original post I’ve confirmed with them that they’re ok with my identifying them as the source of the data. And they’ve...
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Accelerating Accelerators
I spent the day on Thursday last week in a small classroom on the Georgetown campus reviewing finalists in the SBA’s Accelerator Competition. Announced a few months ago, the Accelerator Competition is...
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Ryan Martens on Councilperson Macon Cowles’ Ignorance of the Boulder Startup...
Like many here in Boulder, I felt that Boulder City Councilperson Macon Cowles’ recent remarks about our startup community were both ignorant and offensive. A group of entrepreneurs posted an OpEd this...
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Ello World
At the front end of every new investment we hope we’ve found the next break-out company. But it’s rare when you have the feeling that you’re investing in a business that may both be that and has the...
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IPO or M&A? Here’s exactly how large companies exit
I wrote a post a few months ago based on some data from Correlation Ventures about the distribution of returns on venture deals (which revealed that outsized winners are, in fact, much more rare than...
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Introducing Pledge 1% – Let’s make a difference together
There’s a great scene in Office Space where the movie’s heroes check their ATM balance after one of them has written a program to scrape tenths of pennies off of Paymetech (the movie’s fictional...
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Once bitten but nothing learned …. betting on the Superbowl again
Apparently I didn’t learn from my experience last year. As you may recall, I bet Dan Levitan from Maveron $5,000 that the Broncos would beat the Seahawks in last year’s Superbowl (one of several...
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The growth imperative (but beware)
First off, a note of apology. It’s been months since I’ve posed here. Not for lack of desire – more about some combination of crazy busyness and lack of proper prioritization. I miss it and am going to...
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Charts of the Day – The complexity of raising Series A
The charts of the day comes from a new Mattermark report on the current pace of financing. Both relate to the pace of seed funding in the US and the challenge of raising Series A financing. The first...
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This may not be the bubble you’re looking for
At great risk of wading into a debate where there’s no winning, I thought I’d present a few pieces of data that suggest that we’re not exactly in a market bubble right now. Massive caveat here: I’m...
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Boulder needs to VOTE NO on 300 and 301
Below is from a post we just put up on the Foundry blog. It’s critical in this election that the business community in Boulder takes a stand for progress and against closing the doors to the city. The...
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Introducing Foundry Group Next
This was also posted on Brad Feld’s blog and a similar announcement is up on foundrygroup.com as well. Over the years at Foundry Group we’ve built an extensive network of companies. While we’ve...
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The Profit Imperative
With the markets crashing around us and the sky once again falling I thought it was time to revisit a few fundamentals and perhaps more importantly share some what what we’re now seeing in the private...
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Welcome to Foundry
I send a note to each new company that I work with at Foundry that sets up what I hope will be the key tenants of our working relationship. I thought it might be fun to post it publicly – I think it...
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What the current markets are and are not telling us
In response to a comment to my post earlier this week about the Profit Imperative, I rattled off some ideas about the current state of the markets. I thought it was worth sharing as a full post (I’ve...
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Entrepreneurial Density
I’ve been throwing this term around for a while and thought it was worth writing about, as I believe that understanding entrepreneurial how density can shape an entrepreneurial ecosystem is very...
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The Power of We
This is not a post about politics, but let me start with something I’ve noticed over the past few weeks in the presidential race, which is Hillary Clinton’s shift from using “I” to using “We” in her...
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The Importance of Robust Angel Ecosystems
Earlier this week I gave the keynote address at the Colorado Angel Capital Summit. While the audience was Colorado focused, the overall message I delivered about the angel ecosystem is very relevant to...
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The Community Foundation, EFCO and Pledge 1%
Cross posting this article I wrote for The Community Foundation of Colorado. As many of my readers know, I’ve been passionate about the intersection of startups and community for years. And...
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Why Companies Fail
I’ve touched on aspects of this topic before, but thought it was worthy of a full post. Companies in the venture business fail all the time. As I wrote last year, the majority of venture rounds fail to...
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Friday Afternoon Inspiration
Short post today from a portfolio company of ours and how they describe their culture and mission. I love it and thought it was a good way to end the week. We all move forward, together We understand...
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Venture Returns by Sector
Readers of this blog know that I love sharing data from Correlation Ventures (they have a pretty extensive database of venture deals and venture outcomes and love to post share trends from time to...
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Joining The B Team
For a long time I’ve been fascinated by the intersection between entrepreneurship and social change. When I say that I’m not describing social entrepreneurship (a term I really don’t like; it’s not a...
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New Registration Status at Foundry Group
We have some entertaining news to share with you today. We have recently registered with the SEC and are now considered Registered Investment Advisors. Did we do this so that we can have cooler...
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Shadow Boxing
There’s nothing I value more about what we’ve created at Foundry than the relationship I have with my partners. Brad, Jason, Ryan and I are not just business partners, but best friends. This...
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Supporting Cliff Avril and New Story
Earlier this month Seattle Seahawks defensive end Cliff Avril announced that he would support building homes in Haiti – devastated most recently by hurricane Matthew. For every sack Avril gets this...
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Taking a deep breath
Below is a note I just sent to our CEOs. While I’m dismayed at what happened last night, now isn’t a time to be reactionary. And the US needs a strong and vocal counterbalance to the hate and bigotry...
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Free Money | Supporting Entrepreneurial Non-Profits
At Pledge 1% our mission is to encourage entrepreneurs and companies to give back to their communities through the donation of equity, product, profit and time to non-profits. We launched this program...
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There is no middle ground
While I’ve been very vocal on my Twitter feed for months about Trump I haven ‘t put up any long form content here about it. Maybe it has just been easier to shout into the Twittersphere than it was to...
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2 Productivity Hacks That Will Change Your (work) Life
I’ve been putting a lot of effort into enhancing my productivity. I actually hired a coach to help me with this (more on that in another post) and have changed around a LOT of my work life in an effort...
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You can be much more productive. Here’s how.
I wrote a post a few days ago about 2 productivity hacks that I’ve been using that have transformed my work life. I got a great response to that post with a number of people asking me what other tools...
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Weighing in on Judge Gorsuch
A number of people have asked me to share my views on Neil Gorsuch in more detail. I’m sure the curiosity stems from the intersection of my personal relationship with Neil and my absolute disdain for...
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Reading Your VC Pitch Meeting
I’ve come to realize that many – most – entrepreneurs suck at reading pitch meetings. Frequently what I hear from a company CEO is completely uncorrelated to what I hear from the VC they were pitching....
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Humility Over Pride
[a version of this was originally posted at Unreasonable.is. i was thinking about it today and wanted to repost it here with some additional commentary. in light of some of what we’re reading about in...
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