Yahoo launched a private version of what they are calling FireEagle – a service that allows you to track your location to be shared with applications that build to the FireEagle API – its basically a location “broker” (for self reported location). I’m a big fan of location based services (we’re investors of IP geo-information company Quova and geo-spatial platform company deCarta), so the idea of a common platform upon which to build location aware applications. Through Quova, we’re small investors in Navizon who has a similar dev platform to FireEagle. So you can imagine my disappointment when I clicked over to the “application gallery” tab only to find nothing there. Nothing. Not a single “this is cool stuff, we’ve…
Posts By / seth levine
Finding your technical founder
I hear a version of this question a lot (like the one below today from Dawn): I talked to a firm that really likes my business plan but thinks I should have a technical co-founder. SIGH Any ideas how I could find a really good tech guy, preferably with some cache??? While not every business needs a technical co-founder, many (most) benefit from some early technical vision that is unlikely to be provided by the business founder. So where do you find these people that can code, help refine your technical vision and check the technical cache box? Here are a couple of ideas. Surf your sandbox. You know people. They know people. If you can’t think of someone who…
Taking a break once in a while
If you’ve at all been trying to unplug once in a while – as I have been to mixed success, you’ll enjoy this article from last Sunday’s NY Times.
To stealth or not to stealth
We’ve announced four initial Foundry investments (Lijit, Memeo, Oblong and Zynga) – in press releases by the companies, on our personal blogs or on the new Foundry web site. Truth be told, we’ve made a fifth investment which we’re not talking about much. That’s because it’s in "stealth" mode (shhhh). There are varying degrees of stealth, ranging from companies that won’t tell anyone what they are up to, to companies (like the one I’m referring to)that don’t have a web site and haven’t made any announcement of their business intentions or funding but aren’t hiding what they are doing in daily industry conversations, etc. This stands in stark contrast to companies (such as Path 101), which are all buy live…
Love revisited
I don’t write much about my kids on this blog – a little too personal and ultimately my wife and I think they should decide what and when they want to share online. I couldn’t resist this one, however. A few years ago I wrote about my own overwhelming feelings of love for my kids. Its great when they can return the sentiment! Below is a note from my 4 year old daughter. My wife helped her with the spelling, but she drew all the letters and picked the words herself.
And then there was Foundry . . .
There are a couple of very key dates in the history of Foundry Group. The day when Brad, Chris, Jason, Ryan and I actually formed the legal entity that is Foundry . . . the day last fall of the first close on our first fund, Foundry Venture Capital 2007 . . . the day shortly thereafter when we held our final close of that fund . . . and today – the day we’re launching a real web site. www.foundrygroup.com is now up and running and is much improved from the brochure-ware site we had as a stand-in during fundraising. We think it represents our collective personality well with a front page blog, links to ask questions at askthevc.com…
The power paradox
Dacher Keltner (Psychology prof at Cal) has written a fascinating article that describes some of the important attributes of leaders. He discusses these attributes in the context of obtaining and maintaining "power" – really leadership if you’re reading the article from the eyes of a VC or entrepreneur. The title of his article refers to the fact that the attributes necessary to obtain positions of power and leadership are the very attributes that tend to be eroded by those positions themselves (i.e., once people obtain power, they tend to lose it by acting in a way that is antithetical to the reason they rose to that position in the first place). Reading the piece through the eyes of a VC,…
I dropped my cholesterol 70 points in two weeks
This post is going to sound like an infomercial except this is 100% true and I’m not trying to sell you anything. About 8 months ago my doctor told me that I had high cholesterol (242 in total) and that it needed to come down or he wanted to put me on a statin (Lipitor, or something like that). Apparently cholesterol runs in my family (my dad and sister both have high cholesterol) and despite eating pretty well and being in descent shape, mine was high too. I’m completely against the use of statins for someone like me (see this Business Week article for a good summary of why – I’ve done quite a bit of additional research online that…
vc ware
In case you’re looking for this season’s latest VC styles. Note that Brad’s "treadputer" made the cut. Hat tip to Jason for sending this over
Explicit goals
Regular readers of my blog know that I’m a big fan of deliberate action. And while I’m not a huge "make a daily list and check the items off" kind of guy (since like many VCs I’m somewhat scattered in my day to day work) I’m a huge fan of regularly checking in against a set of explicit goals or outcomes. To that end, I like to make myself a quarterly list of large "to-do’s" for each of the companies with whom I work. These aren’t general things like "talk to XYZ CEO more often" – they are specific outcomes for each company that I’m trying to drive towards. They range from "Hire a banker to sell the business" to…