Most startups spend plenty of time working on things like their product plans, requirements docs, market studies and the like. They are important aspects of running their companies and the kind of things that improve with collaboration and varied input from as well as from the iterative and inclusive process they typically require. You’d expect to find documents related to these sorts of activities on an intranet or company wiki and you’d expect that they’d be included in the occasional board package and discussed with advisors. I’d suggest companies add something else to this list: a detailed overview of how they conduct hiring. Most start-ups will tell you that hiring great people is one of the most important determinants of…
Archives / January, 2009
Openness
We were talking today at our regular Monday partner lunch about accessibility and openness. At Foundry we strive to be transparent and available – from our various blogs (the Foundry blog; plus each of our personal blogs - Jason, Ryan, Brad as well as this one) to direct email addresses on our website. While in many ways venture capital has been somewhat of a mystery to most people, we’re hoping to provide a little transparency into our daily lives, into the mechanisms we use to evaluate companies and into how VCs think about investing in and growing companies. With that as a backdrop, I wanted to remind readers that I love hearing from you. Comments to blog posts are great,…
Why you should get stuck on "Glue"
At Foundry, we’re trying not just to respond to the conversation, or even to simply be a part of it. We’re looking to help form and shape the conversation around technology areas that we care deeply about. Maybe this sounds cheesy, but it’s absolutely true. My partners and I are technology geeks first and foremost. To that end we’ve been lucky enough to team up with Eric Norlin to work on a few conferences that bring together thought leaders in the technology industry. I’ve written about Defrag several times – a conference that we’ve helped Eric create here in Denver in the past two years that has focused on leveraging technology to better organize, interpret and consume disparate information (thus…
start your business now!
While the financial world may seeming to be coming to its end and everyone’s natural instinct may be to baton down the hatches and not do anything to rock the boat too much, I think that now is actually a great time to start a business. Our own experience suggests that many great companies start their lives in down markets and this view informs our belief that as early stage investors we should remain consistent in our investment pace in both good markets and in bad. In fact, I think there are some great natural advantages to starting companies in a time when the markets are down. There’s less competition. For money; for talent; from 10 other people who have…
AdBurner, FirstDocs and our 2008 investments
First off, happy 2009 to you all! I’m looking forward to a little more frequent blogging this year (if not exactly a resolution for 2009 since I think those are a bit cheesy, at least a goal for the year). A few items of note to start off the blogging year: Today NewsGator, AdMeld, Technorati, Gigya, Medialets and Tremor Media announced AdBurner – a partnership that is designed to optimize the management and monitization of network traffic for large publishers. NewsGator is providing the distribution platform through their widget network and existing publisher relationships and the remaining companies are the key partners for monitizing that traffic – whether that traffic is a diverse media type, on a mobile platform, etc….