You May Have Too Many VCs On Your Board
Those that have followed my blog for any period of time know that I love the data that my friends at Correlation Ventures gather and write about (for example the data behind my post Venture Outcomes are Even More Skewed Than You Think or IPO or M&A). Today they released some data on the correlation between the number of venture board members around the boardroom table and the success of venture funded businesses which I thought was pretty illuminating and which confirmed a long held suspicion of mine. …
March 13, 2018· 4 min read
Friday Fun #5 – I have your friend’s phone
One of my all time favorites.
March 2, 2018· 1 min read
The Changing Venture Market In 3 Images
Want to visualize how the venture funding market is changing? Look no further than these 3 slides (from a presentation put together by our friends at Greenspring). I don’t think much commentary is needed here. Average round size at Series A is increasing dramatically. Venture is being increasingly driven by large rounds (especially at the later stages – this is significantly skewing the overall funding numbers that are being reported). IPOs are the new Unicorns (they’re becoming more scarce than their $1BN valued cousins)
February 13, 2018· 1 min read
Friday Fun #4: Ordinals, Texas Style
Two of my partners are from Texas (Brad, which surprises many; and Lindel, which surprises no one). This article on the various ways of describing direction in Texas was hallarious. Who knew, “down”, “out”, “over” and “up” were directions…
February 12, 2018· 1 min read
What does it mean to be an “executive”
We have active and lively Foundry CEO and Portfolio Executives email lists. They are among the things that I love the most about the community we’re creating at Foundry. I love watching execs across the portfolio (who refer to each other as “Foundry cousins”) help each other out and share ideas. It’s an important reminder that great companies are created not by solo, heroic efforts, but by the collective force of entire communities. …
February 1, 2018· 6 min read
Friday Fun #4 – Behind the Scenes On Our Latest Video – Bored Meeting
I hope you saw that Foundry released our latest video last week – Bored Meeting. At the time I’m writing this more than 100,000 of you have, which is pretty exciting. Bored Meeting follows on the heels of two prior efforts – I’m a VC and Worst of Times. I’m fortunate to have a really talented partner in Jason Mendelson who writes, performs all the instrumentation for, mixes, edits and produces these songs and videos. It’s a labor of love for all of us – an attempt to bring a little personality and humor to a business that often lacks both. …
January 26, 2018· 2 min read
Focusing on Actions, not Results
I just had a conversation with an entrepreneur I’ve worked with for decades that resulted in an insight that I thought was worth sharing more broadly. We were talking about managing teams and in this case the challenge of getting some of his exec team focused on broader goals and the end result we’re driving for in the upcoming year (a big growth year for this business). The solution we outlined was to focus on actions (concrete, clear, definable) vs. the more vague set of results that we had been trying to align everyone around. We’re still driving to the same outcomes but the leap was too large in a couple of cases for people to get their hands around. By focusing on actions we moved a strategic conversation to a tactical one that each exec could internalize and the end of year results became the outcome not the driver, as they ultimately should be. Every journey starts with a step…
January 3, 2018· 1 min read
BREAK THE INTERNET TO SAVE NET NEUTRALITY
We have just hours. The FCC is about to vote to end net neutrality—breaking the fundamental principle of the open Internet—and only an avalanche of calls to Congress can stop it. So we decided to help “Break the Internet” on our sites. You can also support on Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube or in whatever wild creative way you can to get your audience to contact Congress. That’s how we win. Are you in? …
December 11, 2017· 1 min read
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 sales organization, establishing channel relationships that add predictable revenue, etc. Typically these are small and change the slope of growth only a bit at a time. But over time they add up. Examples in the 2nd category are generally either changes in product that increase pricing across the board or landing an outlier large customer. These tend to be bigger, more obvious, and less frequent. …
December 7, 2017· 2 min read
Friday Fun #3
Grumpy Cat always makes me laugh.
December 1, 2017· 1 min read