It’s a VC cliche that great management trumps a great idea. In this case there’s a lot of truth to the cliche. Over the course of my venture career I’ve 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. We’ve thought about this a lot at Foundry and have pushed each other hard on investing only in people we’re 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 on…
Posts By / seth levine
Killer UI
One of the companies I work with is in need of some first class UI help. Ideally we’d 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 we’re looking to get our basic prototype up and running. The company is based on Boulder, but the designer doesn’t necessarily have to be local. Email me directly if you’re interested (or know someone who is).
Generations
For me the greatest impact of Barak Obama’s historic victory yesterday is the generational shift that it enables. I’m not talking about his generation, although there’s clearly a passing of the baton from the 60’s generation (people born in the 40’s) to the 80’s generation (people born in the 60’s). I’m talking about his kids (and your kids and my kids) generation. About the millions of children who woke up this morning with real possibility – with the realization that there are truly no limitations on their ambitions. I’m talking about the son of my best friend – about as aryan looking as one can be – who now likes to wear white shirts because he thinks they make his…
Sonos keeps getting better
If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll 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 – free integration with Pandora (I was already paying for this – it…
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, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network. We’re 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. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new…
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 (I’m 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 – 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 from…
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 didn’t discuss policy). However I can’t seem to hold myself back this time. I’m 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, you’re simply not a real American. It’s part of the view Bush laid out several years ago that you’re either "for us or against us" and precludes the possibility of any real conversation or debate. It’s complete bullshit. I…
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 occurred…
Come to Defrag!
I can’t state it more simply or directly than the title to this post – you should be coming to the Defrag conference (www.defragcon.com). Foundry started Defrag with conference veteran Eric Norlin to bring together a group of technologists to talk about the challenges around increasing fragmentation of data online and the tools and technologies that are being developed to make sense out of this data mess. We strongly believe that rather than sitting on the sideline watching and listening to the conversation taking place within the markets we care about that we should be actively facilitating and participating in that discussion (you’ll hear more about a new conference we’re working on withe Eric soon). With industry thought leaders such…
out of digits
For those that scoffed at my posts (here and here) about the US savings rate falling below zero (written during the summer of 05′) here’s another, somewhat less scientific data point (not that the skeptics need further convincing these days). The National Debt Clock which counts the total national debt (not consumer debt, but that of the government) ran out of digits a few weeks ago. Oy.