Foundry

We just made public over on the Foundry blog that our 2022 fund will be our last Foundry fund. I wanted to add a few personal thoughts here.  When we started Foundry, we were very open about our intention to eventually wind our operations down rather than try to build a generational firm. Over the course of Foundry, we deliberately structured our work in a way that reflected this goal, keeping our organization small and each of the Foundry partners closer to the portfolio (both the companies each of us was responsible for, but also across the portfolio more broadly). We’ve avoided unnecessary silos and kept our focus externally – on companies and our investors – rather than spending time…

Community is one of the driving forces at Foundry Group. We’ve kept ourselves intentionally small as a firm so we can keep our close connection with our portfolio founders from due diligence, to investment, and throughout the lifecycle of our investments. We strongly believe that fostering a mesh network model, which allows our network members to interact directly with one another, is the best way for all of us to learn, develop, and thrive together (vs the more traditional hub and spoke model that most firms end up falling into with partners as gatekeepers). Keeping this model improving and evolving is so important to us, especially in the current climate of social and economic change. We want our programming to…

I hope you saw that Foundry released our latest video last week – Bored Meeting. At the time I’m writing this more than 100,000 of you have, which is pretty exciting. Bored Meeting follows on the heels of two prior efforts – I’m a VC and Worst of Times. I’m fortunate to have a really talented partner in Jason Mendelson who writes, performs all the instrumentation for, mixes, edits and produces these songs and videos. It’s a labor of love for all of us – an attempt to bring a little personality and humor to a business that often lacks both. The process is a blast – from recording the song in Jason’s basement studio to working on costumes to…

There’s nothing I value more about what we’ve created at Foundry than the relationship I have with my partners. Brad, Jason, Ryan and I are not just business partners, but best friends. This relationship affects everything that we do at Foundry and I think shows in the way we run our firm and the way we work with the entrepreneurs in the Foundry portfolio. It’s been an interesting transition over the years to get to this point and one that we’re constantly working on (we’ve often used an organizational consultant to help with this; we also spend a day a quarter off site to work on Foundry as a firm, the portfolio and our relationships with each other).  We each have…