Ever hear of this start-up called Color? They launched a social photo sharing thing yesterday. And raised $41M. Oh wait. Everyone has heard of Color by now (and has an opinion about it; re: their capital raise, I’d refer you to a recent post on that subject) What I want to talk here isn’t the Color business, the financing or how much it paid for Color.com. It seems to me that this most basic problem with photos hasn’t come close to being solved yet. And while I don’t have a strong opinion around what Color is doing (although with age, I fear that I’m finding that many of these types of apps don’t much appeal to me personally) the hype around…
Archives / March, 2011
Have less funding than your competitors? Good!
I’ve sometimes joked with companies in our portfolio that the best way to deal with a better funded competitor is to use their own relative lack of funding to their strategic advantage. But actually, this solution isn’t meant tongue-in-cheek – I’m being dead serious. While we have a few companies in the portfolio that have, for various reasons, raised significant amounts of capital, many of the businesses in which we have invested haven’t. Not only are they reasonably capital efficient measured alone, but when compared with their peers, a number have raised far less capital than companies with which they compete. I’m serious when I tell companies that the best way to combat an overfunded competitor is to take advantage…
Civility in the Debate with Runners in Boulder
My partner Brad beat me to this post after an email exchange on the subject this morning, so I thought I’d take some of his post and rewrite it from my perspective (note that I’ve purposely lifted some entire sections and changed the words to be written from my mountain biking perspective). While we disagree on the issue at hand, we strongly agree that the tone of some of the debaters isn’t productive or helpful. I’m in favor to opening up Eldorado Canyon Trail to Mountain Bikes. However, when I read the article titled “Boulder open space official: Return to civility in West TSA mountain bike debate” I couldn’t believe the tone of some of the people opposed to mountain…
The real bubble
While there’s been plenty of discussion and debate about whether we’re in some kind of valuation/venture bubble right now for early stage tech, there is one bubble that I’m pretty sure of. I’m seeing more great business ideas right now than I can remember seeing at any time in my 10 year venture career. We typically see around 1,500 business plans a year at Foundry (we actually see more than that, but this is the approximate number that are relevant to our investment focus). On average we’ll take a meeting with somewhere around 10-15% of these and hear a bit more than what was in the introductory email or initial business plan. And we typically invest in 8 (our Foundry…