A friend recently sent me a link to a talk John Mack gave at Wharton that I think is absolutely fascinating. I’ve read a number of books and articles about the key events surrounding the financial crisis but I find these sorts of first person accounts so much more interesting. And I think Mack is an extremely engaging person. I started my career at Morgan Stanley as an analyst in 1994 and actually had a great personal encounter with Mack that was probably my most memorable moment working in the banking industry. I was just starting my 2nd year at MS and was holed up in an empty office editing a draft of an offering document. Having undoubtably slept only…
Posts By / seth levine
Introducing Codespace – shared (free!) office space in Boulder for geeking out
One of the many things that makes Boulder a great city for start-ups is its incredibly collaborative environment (see posts on my love of Boulder here and here). From the willingness of mentors to help out TechStars companies, to collaborative efforts around recruiting great talent to our city, I’m constantly amazed at how many people are working to make Boulder an amazing place for businesses to thrive. Today there’s another new initiative launching to help young tech companies in our community – Trada is opening CodeSpace, a free co-working space dedicated to startup developers and software engineers. CodeSpace will be located in Trada’s downtown Boulder offices and will have over 2000 sq ft of space dedicated to the effort. While…
Exit Numbers – $100M is rarer than you think
Fred Wilson put up a post today that grabbed a slide from a recent presentation Mark Suster gave at a Founder Showcase event. The chart (and Fred’s post) back up with numbers the qualitative argument I was making in my recent post on Pattern Recognition (I wish I had these data when I wrote my original post!). In my post I argued that while there is plenty of talk about a handful of high flying companies (Zynga, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that vast majority of venture back companies can expect significantly more modest outcomes. In fact history suggests that a majority won’t even return invested capital to investors. All this talk about the stratospheric valuations of this small group of companies…
Pattern recognition
VC’s love to talk about their pattern mapping abilities. “We add more value because we’ve seen so many companies go through all sorts of situations before and we can quickly map whatever’s happening at your business to what we’ve seen in the past and leverage this experience.” Or so the logic goes. But what’s going on right now with early stage company valuations suggests that VCs may be poor judges of at least some of these patterns. Or at least that they’re incredibly human when it comes to estimating the likelihood of certain events actually happening. In 2002 a series of random shootings rocked the Washington DC area. For a period of about two weeks, an unknown assailant killed 10…
Entrepreneurs First!
A few years ago I was talking to a fellow venture capitalist about an entrepreneur he had previously backed. “That guy should love me!” he exclaimed, “I made him 50 million bucks!” And then moved on to some other topic which I can’t remember because I was numb with disbelief at his previous statement. He backed an entrepreneur who built a business that after a number of years had a very nice exit and he made the entrepreneur money? Obviously his logic is completely backwards. And while I don’t know that many VCs would express such an extreme view of that sentiment I do think that most believe that not only is a healthy VC ecosystem important for entrepreneurship to…
If you’re in the cloud you really need a parachute
Fred Wilson recently posted about his move to the cloud and the freedom that having his data always available has given him. More and more people and companies are freeing themselves from the constraints of desktop software and captive data stores in favor of cloud based applications and the freedom of readily (and always) available data. We recently went through a similar move at Foundry – although we haven’t completely moved to Google Apps for all of our documents and spreadsheets – and it’s been incredibly liberating. I blogged about my move to a Mac from a PC last year, but haven’t had a chance to follow that post up with a report on the more important move from a…
Call List Manager – an app waiting to be born
I searched the app store recently for an app I was sure someone had come up with. But alas, no one had. So I thought I’d throw it out there in the hopes that someone wanted to take it on. Like many people I maintain a “to call” list. I do a lot of work over email, but I’m also on the phone anywhere between 5 and 12 hours a day and at any given moment I have a healthy list of people to get back to. I’ve tried different ways of managing this list – from putting them in as calendar reminders (works to create the list, but it’s not persistent enough) to using tasks (this has been the…
Getting to know you
You already know a lot about you. But I don’t. I sit at this end of the internets and type our posts on topics that I hope you’ll find interesting. And some portion of you tweet out links to posts that you like. And a smaller portion of you either comment on a post I’ve written or send me an email with your thoughts (all of these things – from just reading to any level of engagement – I appreciate!). But I don’t know a whole lot about you in aggregate. I use Google Analytics on the site which lets me see a little bit about where you come from to get to my site (and where you go after…
Your idea is overrated
I’m not going to rehash the “why I don’t sign NDAs” stuff that I’ve written about in the past (here it is if you want to see it), but being asked a few times this week to sign NDAs has gotten me thinking about the value of ideas. Actually, this is something I’ve recently been noodling on and my conclusion is that people 1) overvalue their idea on the front end of a project and 2) once something has become successful undervalue the day-to-day tactical execution that made the idea successful. Ideas are great. But they’re not as valuable as most people make them out to be. and by correlation, Execution is almost universally underrated and in hindsight taken for…
The evolution of Gluecon
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…