Someone used this phrase with me a few days ago and I thought it effectively captured something that’s come up a number of times in the past few weeks around CEO communication. Many great entrepreneur CEOs are fantastic visionaries and seem to have a constant (often what feels like endless!) stream of ideas flowing from their brains. And because they’re often gregarious people they’re not shy about sharing this idea stream. However often this idea flow isn’t accompanied by any metadata and the lack of context can sometimes lead to companies zig zagging around as managers react to the most recent meeting they’ve had with their visionary boss. Enter the comment about the “CEO Megaphone” and I think we’ve found…
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Ok Color. How about solving the more basic (and important) problem with photos?
Ever hear of this start-up called Color? They launched a social photo sharing thing yesterday. And raised $41M. Oh wait. Everyone has heard of Color by now (and has an opinion about it; re: their capital raise, I’d refer you to a recent post on that subject) What I want to talk here isn’t the Color business, the financing or how much it paid for Color.com. It seems to me that this most basic problem with photos hasn’t come close to being solved yet. And while I don’t have a strong opinion around what Color is doing (although with age, I fear that I’m finding that many of these types of apps don’t much appeal to me personally) the hype around…
Have less funding than your competitors? Good!
I’ve sometimes joked with companies in our portfolio that the best way to deal with a better funded competitor is to use their own relative lack of funding to their strategic advantage. But actually, this solution isn’t meant tongue-in-cheek – I’m being dead serious. While we have a few companies in the portfolio that have, for various reasons, raised significant amounts of capital, many of the businesses in which we have invested haven’t. Not only are they reasonably capital efficient measured alone, but when compared with their peers, a number have raised far less capital than companies with which they compete. I’m serious when I tell companies that the best way to combat an overfunded competitor is to take advantage…
Civility in the Debate with Runners in Boulder
My partner Brad beat me to this post after an email exchange on the subject this morning, so I thought I’d take some of his post and rewrite it from my perspective (note that I’ve purposely lifted some entire sections and changed the words to be written from my mountain biking perspective). While we disagree on the issue at hand, we strongly agree that the tone of some of the debaters isn’t productive or helpful. I’m in favor to opening up Eldorado Canyon Trail to Mountain Bikes. However, when I read the article titled “Boulder open space official: Return to civility in West TSA mountain bike debate” I couldn’t believe the tone of some of the people opposed to mountain…
The birth of a new Foundry theme – Distribution
Today on the Foundry blog we detailed a new theme in which we’ve been investing for a while, but which only really came together as a coherent thematic concept in the past year or so. This theme – distribution – involves companies leveraging the inherent scalability of the Internet and it’s key platforms in targeted, but extremely large markets. I thought the history of how we evolved our thinking around distribution – basically the birth of the distribution theme – would be illustrative both around how the group dynamic works in the Foundry partnership as well as how we think about our thematic investing approach. For us, the discussion around this theme evolved from our experience in Zynga. We have…
Changing the world – one unreasonable idea at a time
One of the things I like the most about community hours is the chance to meet people that I may not have been able to connect with otherwise. And while the initial meetings are brief (15 minutes) every once in a while someone makes an indelible impression during that time. One such person, whom I met about 18 months ago, is Daniel Epstein. Daniel, along with his partners Teju, Tyler and Vlad, started something they call the Unreasonable Institute. The Unreasonable Institute is something bold and audacious and exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from Daniel and his partners once you get to know them. The goal of the Unreasonable Institute is to accelerate the growth and learning of…
The Entrepreneur’s Foundation and RMVCA Partner Up
At this week’s VCIR Winter the RMVCA will be announcing a partnership with the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Colorado. In case you’re not familiar with the organization, the mission of EFCo is to encourage entrepreneurs and companies to give back to Colorado by endowing their communities with a gift of stock early in the life of their company. The hope is that this gift will serve as both a seed for a philanthropic culture within member companies and, of course, will mature into a cash gift that will help strengthen community organizations (each company specifies the recipient of their gift). As a founding Trustee of EFCo, I’ve been involved with helping spread the message about the great work of the organization…
Don’t be average
I’ve written before about what I perceive to be an emerging, key trend among many new tech startups – the vast volumes of data companies now produce and the importance of having someone in your organization whose job it is to sift through these stacks of data and look for trends and patterns (I’ve even suggested to a few college students interested in startups and entrepreneurship that they make sure they’re taking plenty of math and stats classes as I see this as a great way for a young person with limited experience to pitch themselves to be quickly impactfull working with a start-up). One word of caution about these data that I’ve been digging into a lot recently is…
Come to Glue for Free
You wouldn’t know if from the lack of activity on VC Adventure, but my one and only new year’s resolution for 2010 is to blog more. More consistently. More often. More reliably. So prepare for a flury (or at least a steady trickle) of blogging! Back in the fall we announced that our Glue Conference had teamed up with Alcatel Lucent to sponsor 15 companies from across the country to attend Glue on ALU’s dime (selected companies not only get admission to the conference but also will be featured in ALU’s demo space at the show). Submissions are open – you can find out more information on applying here. Our goal for Gluecon has always been to make it *the*…
Simplifying Performance Marketing – Foundry Invests in Integrate
Performance marketing has been both a very lucrative side of internet advertising but also a bit of the wild west, where rules are made to be stretched or broken (with alarming regularity). And while the simplicity of pay for performance has been attractive to many advertisers, diligence has been required to monitor the quality of the traffic and leads generated by performance marketers. In particular, control of creative assets and their appropriate use has been a concern for many advertisers. In addition, existing performance marketing platforms have been limited solely to online assets. Enter Integrate – a platform that simplifies the execution of performance marketing campaigns and allows advertisers unprecedented control over their campaigns. Integrate places transparency into the marketplace…