In a reminder to both follow my own 10 minute rule advice and to be more careful blogging on 4 hours sleep, it turns out that I misattributed the Bits Blog article I pointed to in my last post on young vs. old VCs to the Journal instead of the Times. Apologies on that one. I just corrected it, but it was worth noting in it’s own post (and no – this doesn’t count as today’s post!).
Posts By / seth levine
Are young VCs better VCs?
There’s a great post up on the NYT Bits Blog that asks “Do Young Venture Capitalists Have an Advantage?” While established (i.e., older) venture capitalists have more name recognition and therefore theoretically access to better deal flow, younger VCs are closer to the technology and have more in common with today’s set of technology entrepreneurs – according to the article – which makes them have an advantage in today’s venture market. This is a great question and one that I think about a lot as I consider ways to be a better venture capitalist myself. In fact, one of the reasons I started this blog was to shed light on the progress of an individual VC as I rose in…
A post a day
I’ll admit (since it should be obvious to anyone who follows this blog) that I’ve done a terrible job this year of blogging consistently. I’m sure that much of it has to do with my schedule, but then again there are a lot of people who blog regularly who are plenty busy, so that’s not such a great excuse. I suspect that much of my problem is that I’ve just gotten out of the habit of regular blogging. What’s doubly frustrating from my end is that one of my explicit goals for the year for myself was to “blog more consistently”. So far, not so good on that front. So with this in mind, I’m going to throw my hat…
Medialets
Today over on the Foundry Group blog, we announced an investment in Medialets – a mobile analytics and advertising company that helps mobile application developers track usage and other statistics about their applications and provides technology that enables them to monetize those applications via advertising. I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about Foundry’s "thematic" investing approach in the past (here’s the key post to read if you haven’t and you’re interested). It surprises people however, when they hear us talk about some of the investments we’ve made in online advertising not as "advertising" but as part of our glue theme. Specifically we view advertising through the lens of connective technologies – those that help advertisers connect with users and remove…
Foundry Group Invests in Gist
Today Foundry Group announced that we’ve invested in Gist and I couldn’t be more excited about what they are working on (see our blog post here; Gist’s post here). Gist has developed a powerful product that helps users find and sort information about the people, places and companies that are meaningful to them ("where your inbox meets the web") . It’s an implicit service – they use information contained in your inbox, calendar and contacts to determine the strength of various connections and surface both public and private information about topics that are both timely and relevant for you. For example for an upcoming meeting Gist will organize not only news stories and social media mentions of the company and/or…
Subtle signs of change
The initial signs of hope in a market are often just the sense that things are swinging in the right direction. This is why measures such as "consumer sentiment" are so important to the outlook of an economy – when people think things are going well, they often do (and because consumers power over 70% of our economy how people are thinking about spending has a pretty material impact on how the economy actually does). There’s no venture capital equivalent to consumer sentiment (and frankly how could you poll a group of VCs and get them to agree on something anyway) but I feel that things are on the upswing – at least in the world of early-stage investing. Here’s…
Glue is coming together nicely!
I can’t promise that this will be my last pre-conference post on Glue, but I can promise that if you’re not planning on attending the conference you’re going to be missing out on a great event. To give you a sense of who is coming (other than our great group of speakers), below is a list of some of the companies and organizations that have people already registered for the event: AdMeld Alsop Louie Partners Avaya Best Buy Citizen Sports Cloud Ave Cloud Security Alliance Denver Art Museum Devver Facebook Filtrbox FreshBooks Gartner Guidewire Group IntelliWare Systems Internet Broadcasting Intuit Inc. Los Alamos Nat’l Lab Research Library Massachusetts Institue of Technology Meritage Funds NASA Ames Network World NeuStar Paypal Salesforce.com…
Sam Zell at CU!
Reposting from my partner Jason Mendelson’s blog about an upcoming event at CU Boulder featuring Sam Zell. This will be a great event. In the continuing Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, next week Sam Zell will be visiting the university. April 22nd, at noon in the large (Boulder NewTech Meetup) courtroom at the law school. More info here. It is free, but you must register, so keep that in mind. Sam is always an interesting interviewee and speaker and even more so this year with his recent sale of Equity Office Property and sell of the Chicago Cubs.
Hit me with your best pitch (@ glue)
Brad, Eric and I came up with the idea yesterday we’re calling Pitch Brad and Seth at Glue. The concept is pretty simple: if you’re an entrepreneur who is attending Glue (and you should be attending Glue) and you have a great business idea you’re working on and you’d like to get feedback from a few VCs (that would be Brad and me), we’d love to see you. Here’s what you have to do: 1. Register for Glue (use "pitch1" to take $100 off the price) 2. Shoot Eric (or Brad or me) a paragraph describing what you want to pitch and why 3. We’ll pick 6 startups 4. Your pitch will be 5 minutes (in a room with just…
How I keep track of information
I get this question all the time from friends and colleagues. Between portfolio companies, prospective investments, our investment themes, my partners, family and other topics that interest me, there’s a lot of information in my universe that I need to track. And this information ranges from blog posts, to tweets to mainstream press articles. It’s a lot to pay attention to (not to mention all of the individual blogs I follow ….). For a while I was using Google Alerts but 1) there wasn’t a great way to organize them (they just showed up when they showed up – as individual "hits"); 2) they seemed to be missing a ton of information; 3) at least 2/3rds of what came through…