Once bitten but nothing learned …. betting on the Superbowl again
Apparently I didn’t learn from my experience last year. As you may recall, I bet Dan Levitan from Maveron $5,000 that the Broncos would beat the Seahawks in last year’s Superbowl (one of several ultimately losing bets). They failed to do so. In spectacular fashion. (truthfully I didn’t watch past the first play of the 2nd half) And that was just the most public bet I lost (that money went to Seattle Children’s Hospital, so at least I was supporting a good cause). There were others – less expensive but more humiliating. …
January 24, 2015· 1 min read
Introducing Pledge 1% – Let’s make a difference together
There’s a great scene in Office Space where the movie’s heroes check their ATM balance after one of them has written a program to scrape tenths of pennies off of Paymetech (the movie’s fictional company) transactions. The guys figure this action will both go unnoticed and also generate a relatively modest sum for them. Instead when they check their balance it turns out that the sum of their tiny rounding transactions actually equated to over $400k to them over a weekend! …
December 2, 2014· 2 min read
IPO or M&A? Here’s exactly how large companies exit
I wrote a post a few months ago based on some data from Correlation Ventures about the distribution of returns on venture deals (which revealed that outsized winners are, in fact, much more rare than most people think). Today I’m focusing on companies in those top return categories with some new data from Correlation that show the percentage of large exits (>$500M) that are generated through M&A vs. IPO (quick side note: I seriously love how much information Correlation collects and how free they are in letting me post about it – as a reminder, Correlation is a firm that co-invests based on an algorithm that predicts the success of the a company; we’re in a few deals together and I can tell you the process is quick and painless; end of advertisement, but seriously – these data are from their work and the fact that they’re so interesting shows why the model works for them). …
November 20, 2014· 3 min read
Ello World
At the front end of every new investment we hope we’ve found the next break-out company. But it’s rare when you have the feeling that you’re investing in a business that may both be that and has the potential to touch millions of lives. We feel we’ve found that in Ello – a social networking business that’s part Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, but at the same time all its own. Ello is a beautiful and easy to use product that allows people to express themselves as they see fit but without relying on selling its users to make money. We’ve just led the Series A financing for the business along with Bullet Time Ventures and FreshTracks Capital. As part of the financing, I’ll be joining the Ello board. You can find the Foundry post about this investment here, and a post from Mark Solon of Bullet Time Ventures here. …
October 23, 2014· 4 min read
Ryan Martens on Councilperson Macon Cowles’ Ignorance of the Boulder Startup Community
Like many here in Boulder, I felt that Boulder City Councilperson Macon Cowles’ recent remarks about our startup community were both ignorant and offensive. A group of entrepreneurs posted an OpEd this weekend responding to those remarks in the Daily Camera (it’s worth nothing the diversity of those entrepreneurs vs. Councilperson Cowles’ flatly incorrect characterization of Boulder entrepreneurs). Ryan Martens – a long time Boulder entrepreneur and community activist – felt the same way and asked to borrow this spot to post some of his own thoughts on the diversity of the Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem as well as the many ways that entrepreneurs in Boulder are giving back to our community. His post follows. …
September 2, 2014· 4 min read
Accelerating Accelerators
I spent the day on Thursday last week in a small classroom on the Georgetown campus reviewing finalists in the SBA’s Accelerator Competition. Announced a few months ago, the Accelerator Competition is a program of the Small Business Administration through which they are awarding $50k to each of 50 accelerators across the country to promote entrepreneurship (that’s $2.5M in total for those of you w/o a calculator handy). For a government program it has surprisingly few strings attached – it’s really an experiment by the SBA to see if they can facilitate entrepreneurship across the country through providing assistance to the various programs that support entrepreneurs around the country. Of several hundred applicants the group last week reviewed the top 99 to come up with the final 50 who will be awarded the prize. …
August 26, 2014· 2 min read
Some more data on Venture outcomes
Quick update here. The data I site below is from Foundry LP StepStone. Since my original post I’ve confirmed with them that they’re ok with my identifying them as the source of the data. And they’ve offered to help me play with the raw data of a future report – I’ll work on some interesting updates here soon! Yesterday’s post on venture outcomes – Venture Outcomes are Even More Skewed Than You Think – generated lot of traffic. Clearly, it’s interesting to put real data against a heuristic and see how reality maps to our expectations. As I pointed out in my post, the data set from Correlation Ventures I was working with had some limitations. For starters, I didn’t have the raw data to run my own cuts of the analysis. And more importantly the data were financing level, not company level. A bunch of people asked me about this and I’m working with Correlation to see if the next time they do this analysis we can get a few different views of the data. …
August 13, 2014· 4 min read
Venture Outcomes are Even More Skewed Than You Think
The typical “successful” venture portfolio is often described as having the following outcome: 1/3 of companies fail 1/3 of companies return capital (or make a small amount of money) 1/3 of companies do well Fred Wilson, for example, described this a few years ago: I’ve said many times on this blog that our target batting average is “1/3, 1/3, 1/3” which means that we expect to lose our entire investment on 1/3 of our investments, we expect to get our money back (or maybe make a small return) on 1/3 of our investments, and we expect to generate the bulk of our returns on 1/3 of our investments. …
August 12, 2014· 4 min read
It’s time to get away
As we approach August, and having recently taken some time off myself (some real time off this time – more on that experience in a different post) I thought it might be a good time to talk about the importance of vacation. No – this isn’t going to be a post that waxes poetic about the importance of recharging and how the startup culture is totally fucked up in its crazy work ethic. All true, but I’d actually like to approach the question here from a purely business perspective. …
July 31, 2014· 2 min read
Syndicate Funding on AngelList – A Company’s Perspective
A few months ago AngelList announced Syndicates – enabling investors on AngelList to create fund-like groups of investors to invest together in AngelList companies (following a single lead investor). It’s a great idea and at Foundry we quickly decided it would be an interesting experiment to form our own syndicate. We were the first formal venture fund to do this. Since then we’ve completed about 10 deals (I say “about” because we have a few things in various stages of completion as I write this – the intent of FG Angels is to make 50 AngelList investments – about 1 per week). …
May 21, 2014· 15 min read