I was thinking about the evolution of our Glue conference as I drove into work this morning. It’s pretty remarkable how much the infrastructure ecosystem – and therefore our little conference that focuses on it – has changed since we ran our first Gluecon in 2009. The initial premise for Glue was to get together to have a detailed conversation about the technologies that were underlying the trend of the web as a platform (web-as-a-service). And while there was plenty of talk about “cloud” at the time we were talking about it as somewhat of a parallel universe to “web” that connected at very specific end points. And when it came to applications, since “web” was the end point when…
Archives / April, 2011
Don’t call it AdTech. It’s “Adhesive”
For about the past year my partners have been pushing me to write up some thoughts on AdTech investing. “We’re not AdTech investors,” I’d push back, “we just have a bunch of companies in the portfolio that are working in and around online advertising.” And for a while that worked pretty well. Most of our AdTech investments would be labeled “glue” (they were all connecting or intermediary technologies – just applied to online advertising). Then Jason came up with the name “Adhesive” which seemed to stick (that was bad, wasn’t it) and after a few months procrastinating I ended up writing up our thoughts on AdTech investing and posted them today over on the Foundry blog. And while I really…
Do less slower
I’m sure you’ve read David Cohen and Brad Feld’s book Do More Faster. And while I thought the book was full of great advice for entrepreneurs (and I’m incredibly proud of David and Brad for writing it, if admittedly, having heard the moniker of the title oft repeated a few too many times – see here for my partner Jason’s clever tease of them with some help of Xtranormal) I actually think sometimes the best thing a startup can do is to do the opposite of what the book’s title suggests (although some of the inside chapters do not) and Do Less Slower instead. I’m quite serious about this. While early stage companies are always trying to squeeze just a…
Beware of the volume of your CEO megaphone
Someone used this phrase with me a few days ago and I thought it effectively captured something that’s come up a number of times in the past few weeks around CEO communication. Many great entrepreneur CEOs are fantastic visionaries and seem to have a constant (often what feels like endless!) stream of ideas flowing from their brains. And because they’re often gregarious people they’re not shy about sharing this idea stream. However often this idea flow isn’t accompanied by any metadata and the lack of context can sometimes lead to companies zig zagging around as managers react to the most recent meeting they’ve had with their visionary boss. Enter the comment about the “CEO Megaphone” and I think we’ve found…