It’s a VC cliche that great management trumps a great idea. In this case there’s a lot of truth to the cliche. Over the course of my venture career I’ve been exposed to all combinations of teams and ideas and am constantly reminded of not only the power of great teams, but also of the pitfalls of poor ones. We’ve thought about this a lot at Foundry and have pushed each other hard on investing only in people we’re ecstatic about as entrepreneurs (and resisting the temptation to "fix" management teams that are not A+ or fool ourselves into believing that an outstanding idea is more important than the people who implement it). This last point is often missed on…
Archives / November, 2008
Killer UI
One of the companies I work with is in need of some first class UI help. Ideally we’d like someone who has a great design aesthetic and who also can code that design in Ruby or PHP. However for the moment we can use someone with the former talent (who can wire frame up their work which we can then get coded) since we’re looking to get our basic prototype up and running. The company is based on Boulder, but the designer doesn’t necessarily have to be local. Email me directly if you’re interested (or know someone who is).
Generations
For me the greatest impact of Barak Obama’s historic victory yesterday is the generational shift that it enables. I’m not talking about his generation, although there’s clearly a passing of the baton from the 60’s generation (people born in the 40’s) to the 80’s generation (people born in the 60’s). I’m talking about his kids (and your kids and my kids) generation. About the millions of children who woke up this morning with real possibility – with the realization that there are truly no limitations on their ambitions. I’m talking about the son of my best friend – about as aryan looking as one can be – who now likes to wear white shirts because he thinks they make his…
Sonos keeps getting better
If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll know that Sonos is one of my favorite all time inventions. For those of you living in a closet, Sonos is a system that allows for wireless streaming of music throughout your home with the ability to separately control dozens of music "zones". You can easily stream music from various online sources (or your own music library) and their controller makes it easy to create play-lists, cue up music and play different tunes in different parts of your house. If you have ears, you should own one of these. Last week Sonos announced a bunch of new features – free integration with Pandora (I was already paying for this – it…