Today on the Foundry blog we detailed a new theme in which we’ve been investing for a while, but which only really came together as a coherent thematic concept in the past year or so. This theme – distribution – involves companies leveraging the inherent scalability of the Internet and it’s key platforms in targeted, but extremely large markets. I thought the history of how we evolved our thinking around distribution – basically the birth of the distribution theme – would be illustrative both around how the group dynamic works in the Foundry partnership as well as how we think about our thematic investing approach. For us, the discussion around this theme evolved from our experience in Zynga. We have…
Archives / February, 2011
Changing the world – one unreasonable idea at a time
One of the things I like the most about community hours is the chance to meet people that I may not have been able to connect with otherwise. And while the initial meetings are brief (15 minutes) every once in a while someone makes an indelible impression during that time. One such person, whom I met about 18 months ago, is Daniel Epstein. Daniel, along with his partners Teju, Tyler and Vlad, started something they call the Unreasonable Institute. The Unreasonable Institute is something bold and audacious and exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from Daniel and his partners once you get to know them. The goal of the Unreasonable Institute is to accelerate the growth and learning of…
The Entrepreneur’s Foundation and RMVCA Partner Up
At this week’s VCIR Winter the RMVCA will be announcing a partnership with the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Colorado. In case you’re not familiar with the organization, the mission of EFCo is to encourage entrepreneurs and companies to give back to Colorado by endowing their communities with a gift of stock early in the life of their company. The hope is that this gift will serve as both a seed for a philanthropic culture within member companies and, of course, will mature into a cash gift that will help strengthen community organizations (each company specifies the recipient of their gift). As a founding Trustee of EFCo, I’ve been involved with helping spread the message about the great work of the organization…
Don’t be average
I’ve written before about what I perceive to be an emerging, key trend among many new tech startups – the vast volumes of data companies now produce and the importance of having someone in your organization whose job it is to sift through these stacks of data and look for trends and patterns (I’ve even suggested to a few college students interested in startups and entrepreneurship that they make sure they’re taking plenty of math and stats classes as I see this as a great way for a young person with limited experience to pitch themselves to be quickly impactfull working with a start-up). One word of caution about these data that I’ve been digging into a lot recently is…
Come to Glue for Free
You wouldn’t know if from the lack of activity on VC Adventure, but my one and only new year’s resolution for 2010 is to blog more. More consistently. More often. More reliably. So prepare for a flury (or at least a steady trickle) of blogging! Back in the fall we announced that our Glue Conference had teamed up with Alcatel Lucent to sponsor 15 companies from across the country to attend Glue on ALU’s dime (selected companies not only get admission to the conference but also will be featured in ALU’s demo space at the show). Submissions are open – you can find out more information on applying here. Our goal for Gluecon has always been to make it *the*…