For a long time I’ve been fascinated by the intersection between entrepreneurship and social change. When I say that I’m not describing social entrepreneurship (a term I really don’t like; it’s not a subset of entrepreneurship, it’s simply “entrepreneurship”) or impact investing, at least not as they’re commonly understood in the current business lexicon. I really mean two things: The first is the application of entrepreneurial principles and startup techniques to solving critical, basic needs problems around the world (many of the companies I’ve worked with as a founding board member at the Unreasoanble Institute fall into this category, as one example). The second is that all businesses, regardless of the product or service they produce, can work to create…
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foundry group
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…
Getting it Right the 2nd Time (our investment in SEOMoz)
It’s not often in this business that you get a second bite at the proverbial apple, but with our funding of SEOMoz announced today we got just that. I first met SEOMoz founder and CEO Rand Fishkin in late 2008. It was a pretty memorable meeting in the lobby of the Vitale. At the time I was deep into the SEM side of the search world and was thinking about whether we wanted to place a bet on the organic side of search (aided at the time by what seemed like a large number of SEO agencies trying to productize their service into some kind of software package). It was clearly a big opportunity. I liked Rand a lot and…
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…