[cross-post from the VCIR Winter blog] There’s a nice article up on Rocky Radar that highlights VCIR Winter. One of my favorite excerpts is below. Venture Capital in the Rockies was designed by the organizers to cater to a diverse audience. For CEOs, there is plentiful networking time and a chance to experience novel technologies. For venture capitalists there is an occasion to catch up with colleagues and “see some opportunities not on the radar screen of Sand Hill Road.” And for the entrepreneurs there are the eyeballs of over a hundred investors in attendance, as well as the chance to mingle with other companies and service providers. But let’s not forget the snow. The Colorado mountains are having one…
Posts By / seth levine
VCIR Blog
Some of you know that I’m chairing the annual Venture Capital in the Rockies conference this year (now called VCIR Winter). VCIR is put on annually by the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association and brings together a national group of venture capitalists for presentations by 22 rocky mountain companies that are currently seeking capital. This year’s conference will be held March 3rd through 5th up at the Hyatt in Beaver Creek (hey – we play to our strengths and the skiing up there is fantastic!). Being the conference chair has been a pretty involving job (certainly more than I thought I was signing up for – especially in a down economy with sponsorship budgets tight) but also a very rewarding…
hiring as a core competency
Most startups spend plenty of time working on things like their product plans, requirements docs, market studies and the like. They are important aspects of running their companies and the kind of things that improve with collaboration and varied input from as well as from the iterative and inclusive process they typically require. You’d expect to find documents related to these sorts of activities on an intranet or company wiki and you’d expect that they’d be included in the occasional board package and discussed with advisors. I’d suggest companies add something else to this list: a detailed overview of how they conduct hiring. Most start-ups will tell you that hiring great people is one of the most important determinants of…
Openness
We were talking today at our regular Monday partner lunch about accessibility and openness. At Foundry we strive to be transparent and available – from our various blogs (the Foundry blog; plus each of our personal blogs - Jason, Ryan, Brad as well as this one) to direct email addresses on our website. While in many ways venture capital has been somewhat of a mystery to most people, we’re hoping to provide a little transparency into our daily lives, into the mechanisms we use to evaluate companies and into how VCs think about investing in and growing companies. With that as a backdrop, I wanted to remind readers that I love hearing from you. Comments to blog posts are great,…
Why you should get stuck on "Glue"
At Foundry, we’re trying not just to respond to the conversation, or even to simply be a part of it. We’re looking to help form and shape the conversation around technology areas that we care deeply about. Maybe this sounds cheesy, but it’s absolutely true. My partners and I are technology geeks first and foremost. To that end we’ve been lucky enough to team up with Eric Norlin to work on a few conferences that bring together thought leaders in the technology industry. I’ve written about Defrag several times – a conference that we’ve helped Eric create here in Denver in the past two years that has focused on leveraging technology to better organize, interpret and consume disparate information (thus…
start your business now!
While the financial world may seeming to be coming to its end and everyone’s natural instinct may be to baton down the hatches and not do anything to rock the boat too much, I think that now is actually a great time to start a business. Our own experience suggests that many great companies start their lives in down markets and this view informs our belief that as early stage investors we should remain consistent in our investment pace in both good markets and in bad. In fact, I think there are some great natural advantages to starting companies in a time when the markets are down. There’s less competition. For money; for talent; from 10 other people who have…
AdBurner, FirstDocs and our 2008 investments
First off, happy 2009 to you all! I’m looking forward to a little more frequent blogging this year (if not exactly a resolution for 2009 since I think those are a bit cheesy, at least a goal for the year). A few items of note to start off the blogging year: Today NewsGator, AdMeld, Technorati, Gigya, Medialets and Tremor Media announced AdBurner – a partnership that is designed to optimize the management and monitization of network traffic for large publishers. NewsGator is providing the distribution platform through their widget network and existing publisher relationships and the remaining companies are the key partners for monitizing that traffic – whether that traffic is a diverse media type, on a mobile platform, etc….
‘Twas the Night Before Christmas – New School Investor Style
Forwarded from my partner Chris Wand. An Investor’s Rendition of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (by Travis Cocke) ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the land Not a banker was lending, not even “Gold-Man” Foreclosures were hung by the courthouse with care In hopes that Hank Paulson soon would be there. The Bankers were nestled all snug in their beds While visions of bonuses danced in their heads. And my teachers in their offices and me in my room Had just settled an argument about the depth of the gloom When out on Wall Street there arose such a clatter I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter Away to the computer I flew like…
meeting overload
The last couple of months have been tuff ones for me. I’ve felt constantly behind (thus the lack of blogging consistency) and most days consisted of running from one meeting to the next (typically 10 minutes behind). This has contributed to my feeling both burned out and feeling that I was letting too many things fall through the cracks. This was evidenced by 1) my inbox growing most days, not shrinking; 2) waking up at 5am to try to work on #1; 3) an over-reliance on multitasking (walking to a meeting, on the phone while responding to email); 4) my wife never being able to reach me during the day; and 5) generally feeling stressed and off-balance. My week off…
off-grid
I just returned from a full weeks vacation "off-grid", by which I mean that I neither checked voicemail or email, took any work related calls, etc. I was reachable, but made it pretty clear that this was for emergencies only. No nightly checks of my email, no popping upstairs for a quick conference call, no calling into the office "just to check in". Having zero willpower when it comes to this sort of thing I aided my quest to be off-line by leaving the laptop at home and turning off the data feed to my cell phone (I couldn’t imagine resisting the temptation of taking a peek at the hundreds of emails that were piling up if I saw them…