Quick break from Covid related topics for a moment to post something I’ve been intending to write about for a few months but haven’t had the chance to commit to paper. It’s perhaps a boring topic – Options and your company’s option program – but an important one. Despite how much time companies talk about the importance of their employees and, in many cases, how every employee is also an “owner” of their business through their option program, most companies are pretty ad hoc (or down right sloppy) about how they plan for and execute their option program. My hope with this post is to push your thinking around options and encourage you to formalize what you’re doing into an…
Category
Startups
Resilience
When asked recently if I could describe the attribute that is most important to becoming a successful entrepreneur the word that came to mind was “resilience”. I don’t hear it talked about much in the context of entrepreneurship, but I think it perfectly captures the combination of the ability to bounce back from the adversity, challenge and failure that goes hand in hand with being an entrepreneur while at the same time recognizing and learning from your mistakes. The best entrepreneurs we work with have an uncanny ability to face challenges head on, recognize where they’ve made mistakes, learn from them and move on. That last part is critical – dwelling on your prior mistakes serves no one, slows you…
What’s a Fair 409A Discount?
Quick note: I’m not your lawyer. I’m not giving legal advice in this post. Back in the olden days of venture capital, company boards had wide discretion in pricing company options. As is true today, there was a requirement that options be priced at or above the “fair market value” of the underlying stock (otherwise there would be tax consequences to the optionee and sometimes to the company as well). However the board could determine what that fair market value was and, generally speaking, there wasn’t a practical way that these valuations could be challenged. Most boards did some level of work to determine the FMV of a company’s stock but generally options were priced between 10% and 15% of…
Different vs. More
I’ve had this conversation with a number of founders recently and thought I’d post something here about it in the hopes that others see it/resonate with it as well. In the world of startups we often talk about “more”. More funding. More sales. More efficiency. More. More. More. And, of course, there are plenty of times when “more” is appropriate. When something is working, and working efficiently, doing more of it is often the right call. That said, often times “more” isn’t the right answer at all. And focusing on it obscures the need for the real answer: “different”. This should be intuitive but in my experience often gets missed (either in its entirety or at least in part) as…
How Startups Actually Grow
We’ve all seen the growth curve on the left – all successful startups strive for a version of one. But in reality, the notion of a smooth growth curve actually masks how most successful companies truly grow. Our experience at Foundry suggests that if you blow up the growth curve you’ll find that companies grow linearly and that what creates the log curve is a series of small changes that either change the slope of the growth (it’s still linear, but now growing faster) or that “jump” the growth curve up (growing at the same rate but now from a high base). Examples of things that fit in the first category are changes in sales efficiency, successfully adding to the…
Marc Barros on the shift from Product to Marketing/Sales
Marc Barros, the founder of Contour cameras wrote a great follow-up to my post on your company’s shift from a product focus to building out a sales and marketing organization that’s definitely worth reading. A few excerpts here: 1. Make A Clear Definition of Success Early on, often before you raise venture capital, you want to create a clear picture of what the future looks like. That picture can include a range of things such as how you define your culture, values, employee morale, size, revenue growth, market domination, etc. Equally how you define success could range from world domination (e.g., Square) to building a small company focused on great products (e.g., 37 Signals). Whatever the definition for success is, the best…
Shifting from a product company to a sales/marketing company
At the risk of overgeneralizing (although to be fair as a VC that’s pretty much my job description) and understanding that there’s plenty of grey area here, I’ve really been noticing recently just how challenging it can be for organizations to move from being product focused to sales and marketing focused. It seems worthy of a post (and hopefully getting some feedback on). Early on in their lives most companies are built around a focus on product. They tend to be engineering heavy, key deliverables center around feature releases and sticking to a dev schedule and success is measured by the progress a business makes on building and releasing product vs. revenue generated from that product. Then, at some point…
Introducing Colorado Entrepreneurial By Nature
When it comes to the question of nature vs. nurture for entrepreneurs it’s clear that both are important. While great entrepreneurs are born with at least the seed of that entrepreneurial spirit, it takes some encouraging – as well as plenty of guidance, help and support – to see that seed blossom. I’ve had the great fortune to experience the evolution and transformation of Colorado into a community that I believe is one of the most supportive of entrepreneurs anywhere in the country. In fact, Colorado has always had an entrepreneurial spirit – from before its founding as a state as a frontier territory supporting prospectors and pioneers, through its history of ranching, the oil and gas boom, as a…
Your community of peers
Last week about 40 Foundry Group portfolio company CEOs and founders converged on Boulder for a half day of meetings followed by some social time. It was a truly amazing experience and such a great reminder of the importance of cultivating a peer group for you and your company. We have a very active CEO and founder mailing list at Foundry, where there are daily rifs on any number of topics and where portfolio companies can reach out to each other for help and advice (we have a separate list for CTOs, one for Boulder companies and another for Bay Area companies as well – all designed to build Community – with a capital “C” – around the shared trait…
The Seed Signaling Problem That’s NOT Being Talked About
There’s been plenty of chatter over the past few years about the potential pitfalls for entrepreneurs taking seed money from VCs. This includes a recent and very thorough overview of the issues by Elad Gil which I’d highly recommend reading, even if you’re already familiar with the issues around seed financing (and in particular the so called “party round” where everyone takes a piece but no one takes the lead). I’ve noticed something recently that’s a bit of the flip side of the same problem that everyone is talking about but that I haven’t seen mentioned yet. I’m seeing an increasing number of Series A pitches where a company has at least one venture investor in its seed, the business…