Short post today from a portfolio company of ours and how they describe their culture and mission. I love it and thought it was a good way to end the week. We all move forward, together We understand that work is an integral part of a challenging life journey. Embracing our journey together enhances everyone’s experience and growth. Practicing empathy, as well as earning and maintaining the respect of our coworkers, are the core principles from which we all move forward together. Our attitude shapes our experience We affirm attitude is contagious. We are mindful that cultivating a positive attitude fosters a fun and energetic environment where we can all deliver our best results. Our quest for improvement is never-ending We…
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Foundry Companies
Welcome to Foundry
I send a note to each new company that I work with at Foundry that sets up what I hope will be the key tenants of our working relationship. I thought it might be fun to post it publicly – I think it gives meaningful insight into how all of us at Foundry work with the company in which we have an investment. I’m psyched to be moving forward with our investment! I thought it would be helpful to send a few thoughts on working together – I do this with all of the new companies I work with. It will take a little bit for us to get a natural cadence going but the thoughts below frame my thinking on how…
Introducing Foundry Group Next
This was also posted on Brad Feld’s blog and a similar announcement is up on foundrygroup.com as well. Over the years at Foundry Group we’ve built an extensive network of companies. While we’ve invested in some of these directly, this actually represents the smallest set of companies that we are involved with. We have also invested indirectly in many others through our investment in Techstars. Yet another, and much larger set of companies, come from our investments in other venture funds. In 2013, we started thinking hard about the future of Foundry Group. When we started Foundry in 2006 we were very clear that we were not going to build a legacy firm. There would be no generational planning, no transitions to younger…
Ello World
At the front end of every new investment we hope we’ve found the next break-out company. But it’s rare when you have the feeling that you’re investing in a business that may both be that and has the potential to touch millions of lives. We feel we’ve found that in Ello – a social networking business that’s part Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, but at the same time all its own. Ello is a beautiful and easy to use product that allows people to express themselves as they see fit but without relying on selling its users to make money. We’ve just led the Series A financing for the business along with Bullet Time Ventures and FreshTracks Capital. As part of the…
Trada Update
Companies rarely grow in a straight line (or the fabled exponential one). Building a business isn’t about getting from point A to point D by passing through points B and C. There are fits and starts. Amazing discoveries and heart wrenching realizations. Huge highs and low lows. Trada – which has built a large crowdsourced marketplace for search optimization – has been through its version of this crazy growth curve over the past 5 years. We’ve learned a ton and along the way have delighted a large number of customers. But we’re having one of those non-linear moments at the business and came to the realization that we needed to shrink to grow. So we took the harsh medicine and…
Hacking Hardware With A Dragon On Your Side
For years, many of our most high profile hardware investments have had a quiet partner. Dragon Innovation – experts at helping hardware ideas actually happen – have helped companies like Makerbot, Sifteo and Orbotix (all from the Foundry family) move from product idea to product reality. As the startup world shifts from an intense focus on bits to celebrating atoms and the “maker movement” of hackers who give those atoms life, there is bright light being shined on the ability of those makers not just to come up with cool ideas, but to take those projects from ideas, to prototypes to delivered product. This is where Dragon shines, and where they aim to completely change the way great ideas are planned, funded,…
Reputation Matters
Reputation matters. You know that and so do I. But it’s easy to forget that you’re either building or destroying that reputation in every interaction you have. Not to mention widespread reputation travels in our ridiculously connected world. I was reminded (again) of this today from an exchange on our CEO email list (which includes about 75 CEOs of Foundry portfolio companies). The email read: To: FoundryExec From: [CEO of Foundry portfolio company} Subject: Have you done business with anyone on this list I’m on my way back from [an] investor conference where we met a bunch of VC & Private Equity guys. The event was really useful. Not only did I discover a whole bunch of folks wanted to…
Measuring customer satisfaction
There was a great thread this week on the Foundry CEO email list about Net Promoter Score and how companies are using it to measure the satisfaction of their customers (specifically in the case of NPS, their propensity to recommend the product or service to others). NPS can be a useful tool when used properly (which was much of the discussion on the email thread – who to measure, how often, etc.). But NPS can be cumbersome to measure, hard to understand granularly and not very helpful in letting you know what any given customer is really thinking about their interactions with your company (other than the extreme outliers). The discussion and thinking about both the benefits and limitations of…
With isocket, programmatic is taking a bite out of the big side of the pie
For about the past 18 months I’ve been talking about the coming of programmatic technologies (machine to machine buying and selling) to the premiums side of the display ecosystem. It was one of my “2012 AdTech Predictions” published last year in AdExchanger and I expanded on that prediction in a piece earlier this year, also in AdExchanger. The basic idea is simple. Programmatic technology has made a huge difference in online advertising – bringing down transaction costs, allowing for better audience and content targeting, enabling publishers to better manage their inventory while at the same time allowing advertisers to make better buying decisions (not to mention spot ad buys). It’s been a great addition to the ad stack and for…
SideTour’s Ultimate NYC Weekend
Today is the last day to enter SideTour’s contest for the ultimate New York Weekend. It’s a great chance to win a really unique weekend in New York from a company whose business is built around helping people find cool and unique experiences (SideTour is a Foundry portfolio company – in case that wasn’t obvious).