Foggy
image Clear announced last night that they had shut down. The note on their website says the following: Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available. At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations. It goes on further to say that customers will not be able to receive a refund “because of it’s financial condition”. With over 250,000 customers (each paying between $100 and $200 annually) it’s a little surprising to me that they couldn’t figure out a way to make this work. I suspect (as does my partner Jason Mendelson). that the airports were charging more than I would have realized to make Clear lanes available. …
June 23, 2009· 2 min read
Getting to getting to
I was reminded once again this week of the importance of the deliberative process vs. outcome. Or perhaps better put, I was reminded that sometimes the best outcome is simply the deliberation itself. In business one is often extremely focused on solving problems and moving on – sometimes at the expense of valuing the discussion around the problem. This week I was in several meetings where instead of pushing through to a quick decision on something we stopped and had a longer conversation. In one case this resulted in people having the chance to voice an opinion about a matter that we almost blew by without realizing that there were such strong views around the table – eventually reaching what I think was clearly the right decision, but something that had we not stopped to talk about would have been pushed off and not dealt with for at least another month. In the second case a similar discussion took an unexpected turn as we realized that the answer we were trying to come to wasn’t actually to the question that we needed to be asking. …
June 18, 2009· 2 min read
There’s "something called the Internet"
There’s a clip that’s been making the rounds in the last week of a Tom Brokaw spot from the mid-90’s on “the Internet”. I love the quick clip with Eric Schmidt (then of Sun) and the casual walk around with Bill Gates. I also really like the pitch for the IBM notebook that’s “4 pounds”. The amazing thing to consider is not how quaint some of the technology appears in this video, but how far we’ve come so quickly. This video is only 15 years old. After the video ended I sat back in my office for a bit and considered how pretty much all of the things that are state of the art right now will seem as quaint as the technology in the video (and if they’ll seem as outdated as the technology in the video). Mind blowing.
June 16, 2009· 1 min read
How I keep track of information
I get this question all the time from friends and colleagues. Between portfolio companies, prospective investments, our investment themes, my partners, family and other topics that interest me, there’s a lot of information in my universe that I need to track. And this information ranges from blog posts, to tweets to mainstream press articles. It’s a lot to pay attention to (not to mention all of the individual blogs I follow ….). For a while I was using Google Alerts but 1) there wasn’t a great way to organize them (they just showed up when they showed up – as individual “hits”); 2) they seemed to be missing a ton of information; 3) at least 2/3rds of what came through was old news (i.e., someone had made a minor change to a page which caused the Google crawler to mark it as ‘new’); 4) there was no history, tracking, etc; and 5) they were clogging up my inbox. I could go on, but if you’re a heavy user of Google Alerts, I’m sure you’re already shaking your head up and down in sympathy. …
April 2, 2009· 4 min read
Start your business now! (revisited)
I wrote a post a few weeks ago listing out the reasons that right now is a great time to start a business. A few days ago TechCrunch came out with their TechCrunch 2008 Year in Review (their first paid report). The post that summarized the report had a preview of some of the data they write about and included the following graph that does a great job of showing why the current market can work in your favor. Have at it! …
February 23, 2009· 1 min read
hiring as a core competency
Most startups spend plenty of time working on things like their product plans, requirements docs, market studies and the like. They are important aspects of running their companies and the kind of things that improve with collaboration and varied input from as well as from the iterative and inclusive process they typically require. You’d expect to find documents related to these sorts of activities on an intranet or company wiki and you’d expect that they’d be included in the occasional board package and discussed with advisors. …
January 29, 2009· 4 min read
AdBurner, FirstDocs and our 2008 investments
First off, happy 2009 to you all! I’m looking forward to a little more frequent blogging this year (if not exactly a resolution for 2009 since I think those are a bit cheesy, at least a goal for the year). A few items of note to start off the blogging year: Today NewsGator, AdMeld, Technorati, Gigya, Medialets and Tremor Media announced AdBurner – a partnership that is designed to optimize the management and monitization of network traffic for large publishers. NewsGator is providing the distribution platform through their widget network and existing publisher relationships and the remaining companies are the key partners for monitizing that traffic – whether that traffic is a diverse media type, on a mobile platform, etc. With NewsGator, AdMeld and Technorati all in the portfolio (NewsGator and Technorati are Mobius portfolio companies, AdMeld is a Foundry Group investment) I’ve been close to the formation of this partnership. There’s clearly a market need here and the companies involved are all clearly top of class – they together have really created a compelling product. …
January 6, 2009· 2 min read
what’s a company to do?
Now that I’ve received a link to the Sequoia “Holy Shit” presentation about 30 times along with about a dozen emails asking “what do you think?” it’s probably time for a post. My partner Jason has a great post up on the subject (with a more general discussion of how the current markets effect our business – definitely worth reading) and Brad has some practical advice up this morning on his blog as well. …
October 13, 2008· 3 min read
MSFT still has it…
I spent last Thursday at Microsoft for their annual VC Summit. While there are plenty of ways that the company can improve, I walked away with the very distinct feeling that the “market” underestimates the innovation coming out of Redmond and the ways in which the company is clearly changing and adapting to the new technology world. Specifically, the products and people I encountered were forward thinking – clearly moving well beyond the OS and embedded software mentality that is the history of the business – and significantly more platform agnostic than they are given credit for (both product demos I saw included at least one Mac and other non-Microsoft based products). …
October 1, 2008· 1 min read
Move to Boulder!
A handful of Boulder companies are pooling resources to bring 100 software developers to Boulder (see Boulder.me). If you’re interested in a chance to come out and see what we have to offer, take a look at what they’ve pulled together (my partner Chris Wand is heavily involved and has a post up about the event on the Foundry blog). Not only is Boulder a beautiful place to live, it’s a fantastic place to work and build successful companies (see Ryan and Jason’s view of moving from the Bay Area to Boulder here and here). To quote from the “Boulder Wants You” post: …
October 1, 2008· 1 min read