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Marc Barros on the shift from Product to Marketing/Sales
Marc Barros, the founder of Contour cameras wrote a great follow-up to my post on your company’s shift from a product focus to building out a sales and marketing organization that’s definitely worth...
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The Democratization of Entrepreneurship
One of the great trends we’ve been witnessing over the past decade, and in particular the past 5 years, has been what you might call the “democratization” of entrepreneurship”. It’s a powerful trend...
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#3010: The Video
I blogged last year about the amazing 40th birthday trip my wife Greeley sent me and 9 friends on – cycling through Slovenia and Italy (original blog post along with a bunch of pictures here). We had a...
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Measuring customer satisfaction
There was a great thread this week on the Foundry CEO email list about Net Promoter Score and how companies are using it to measure the satisfaction of their customers (specifically in the case of...
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Boulder is for Media
Recently Boulder based Datalogix announced that they had raised $25M to accelerate the build-out of its online ad targeting data business. The Datalogix story is one of perseverance and adaptation and...
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The ten year entrepreneur
It’s easy to get lost in the celebration of high flying companies that quickly take an idea to market, scale and sell. It’s exciting, financially lucrative and makes for great reading. We’ve been...
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Forget about the rest. What makes a good VC?
I should preface this post with the caveat that a VC describing what it takes to be a good VC runs the obvious risk of falling into a trap of vanity and lack of self-awareness. I hope I haven’t, but...
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The best company vacation policy
Quick note here before I jump in to remind you that I’m not your lawyer (in fact I’m not a lawyer at all). I’m not offering legal advice. You have your own lawyer for that… I’ve seen all sorts of...
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What your “About Us” page says about your company
Maybe it’s because I always love the back story of how an idea came together or because I’m particularly partial to team stories, but I love checking out the “About Us” or “Team” pages on websites. And...
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Handling rejection
Update below with the final email in the chain where the entrepreneur apologizes (and talks about some challenges around fundraising that led to his frustration). I just tweeted about an unfortunate...
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One Metric to Rule Them All
A well instrumented business will have literally hundreds of metrics that they track to understand the key parts of their business. Each group within an organization likely has a key metrics dashboard...
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Reputation Matters
Reputation matters. You know that and so do I. But it’s easy to forget that you’re either building or destroying that reputation in every interaction you have. Not to mention widespread reputation...
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Hacking Hardware With A Dragon On Your Side
For years, many of our most high profile hardware investments have had a quiet partner. Dragon Innovation – experts at helping hardware ideas actually happen – have helped companies like Makerbot,...
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Branding Colorado
Last week at the conclusion of the COIN Summit Colorado released an new brand for the state. The new branding effort was lead by Aaron Kennedy (of Noodles fame) with the help of a brand ‘committee’ (I...
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Helping our Community with $100,000 from Foundry Group. Please join us.
I don’t need to tell you about the devastation that has rocked Colorado over the past week. The rain started and it just wouldn’t stop. I’ve lived in Colorado for 17 years and I’ve never seen anything...
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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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