The last couple of months have been tuff ones for me. Iโve 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 offโฆ
Posts By / seth levine
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 couldnโt imagine resisting the temptation of taking a peek at the hundreds of emails that were piling up if I saw themโฆ
Management
Itโs a VC cliche that great management trumps a great idea. In this case thereโs a lot of truth to the cliche. Over the course of my venture career Iโve been exposed to all combinations of teams and ideas and am constantly reminded of not only the power of great teams, but also of the pitfalls of poor ones. Weโve thought about this a lot at Foundry and have pushed each other hard on investing only in people weโre ecstatic about as entrepreneurs (and resisting the temptation to "fix" management teams that are not A+ or fool ourselves into believing that an outstanding idea is more important than the people who implement it). This last point is often missed onโฆ
Killer UI
One of the companies I work with is in need of some first class UI help. Ideally weโd like someone who has a great design aesthetic and who also can code that design in Ruby or PHP. However for the moment we can use someone with the former talent (who can wire frame up their work which we can then get coded) since weโre looking to get our basic prototype up and running. The company is based on Boulder, but the designer doesnโt necessarily have to be local. Email me directly if youโre interested (or know someone who is).
Generations
For me the greatest impact of Barak Obamaโs historic victory yesterday is the generational shift that it enables. Iโm not talking about his generation, although thereโs clearly a passing of the baton from the 60โs generation (people born in the 40โs) to the 80โs generation (people born in the 60โs). Iโm talking about his kids (and your kids and my kids) generation. About the millions of children who woke up this morning with real possibility โ with the realization that there are truly no limitations on their ambitions. Iโm talking about the son of my best friend โ about as aryan looking as one can be โ who now likes to wear white shirts because he thinks they make hisโฆ
Sonos keeps getting better
If youโve read this blog for a while youโll know that Sonos is one of my favorite all time inventions. For those of you living in a closet, Sonos is a system that allows for wireless streaming of music throughout your home with the ability to separately control dozens of music "zones". You can easily stream music from various online sources (or your own music library) and their controller makes it easy to create play-lists, cue up music and play different tunes in different parts of your house. If you have ears, you should own one of these. Last week Sonos announced a bunch of new features โ free integration with Pandora (I was already paying for this โ itโฆ
The kind people at AdSense are easing our fears
I find it strange that Google felt the need to send the following note out to their publishers (are we going to stop writing/publishing because we fear the bottom has fallen out of the CPC market?!?). Dear Publisher, We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, weโre continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network. Weโre focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. Weโre bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and weโll continue to launch newโฆ
why do we stray?
A recurring theme in venture circles these last few weeks has been "Back To Basics" with VC pundits boldly prognosticating about the current state of the markets, talking about the infamous Sequoia deck and trying not to make people wince as they lay their claim to how they saw all this coming (Iโm not immune to this myself and offered what I hoped was some practical advice in a recent post). All of this gets me thinking, however โ why is it that companies got away from "the Basics" in the first place. Every time people think the rules have been rewritten and that somehow "this time will be different" they are wrong. So if we take anything away fromโฆ
i am a patriot
I really do try to stay away from politics in this space (with the somewhat recent exception of my post on attending the Democratic Convention, although even that post didnโt discuss policy). However I canโt seem to hold myself back this time. Iโm completely frustrated with some of the rhetoric coming out of the Republican party. Specifically the notion that there is a single "right" point of view on any given issue and that if you disagree with the Republican position, youโre simply not a real American. Itโs part of the view Bush laid out several years ago that youโre either "for us or against us" and precludes the possibility of any real conversation or debate. Itโs complete bullshit. Iโฆ
agile company creation
There is nothing linear about starting and building a business. There are plenty of twists and turns along the way and successful companies are not only are open to change from their original ideas but build systematic processes for checking and rechecking their business assumptions during the early days of their company. The idea really hit me this summer at TechStars, when I began thinking about the idea of company creation as "agile" (akin to the agile development methodology) watching how fluid the most successful TechStars companies were. They were constantly checking and rechecking the assumptions behind their businesses and reacting to what they were learning from prospective customers, early users and mentors. These check-ins were very deliberate and occurredโฆ