Reputation Matters
Reputation matters. You know that and so do I. But it’s easy to forget that you’re either building or destroying that reputation in every interaction you have. Not to mention widespread reputation travels in our ridiculously connected world. I was reminded (again) of this today from an exchange on our CEO email list (which includes about 75 CEOs of Foundry portfolio companies). The email read: To: FoundryExec From: [CEO of Foundry portfolio company} Subject: Have you done business with anyone on this list …
August 15, 2013· 2 min read
One Metric to Rule Them All
A well instrumented business will have literally hundreds of metrics that they track to understand the key parts of their business. Each group within an organization likely has a key metrics dashboard that guides their department functioning and informs their decision making. These dashboards then roll up to other dashboards to form the core of the key metrics that an executive team or CEO look at daily (or more) to keep their pulse on the functioning of their operations. …
August 9, 2013· 6 min read
Handling rejection
Update below with the final email in the chain where the entrepreneur apologizes (and talks about some challenges around fundraising that led to his frustration). I just tweeted about an unfortunate email exchange I just had with a company founder, but 140 characters isn’t enough to really do the matter justice. And more important than my venting (and to be clear this post is definitely part that) is the real issue that many entrepreneurs face about how to handle a “rejection” email from a potential funder. This is an example of how not to do it. …
July 23, 2013· 7 min read
What your “About Us” page says about your company
Maybe it’s because I always love the back story of how an idea came together or because I’m particularly partial to team stories, but I love checking out the “About Us” or “Team” pages on websites. And while many (too many) are really bland, some companies really take the opportunity to show off their story, talk about their mission or present their team in an interesting way. I’ve been polling people for a while for pages that people particularly like. Here are a few that I think are really great. Please add to the list in the comments section. I’m also always curious about the right balance between mission driven About pages that talk about the higher calling of the company and team driven About pages that highlight the people that work for a business. I don’t know that I necessarily prefer one to the other, but it’s always interesting to see which a company chooses to highlight. …
July 23, 2013· 2 min read
The best company vacation policy
Quick note here before I jump in to remind you that I’m not your lawyer (in fact I’m not a lawyer at all). I’m not offering legal advice. You have your own lawyer for that… I’ve seen all sorts of variations on vacation policies over the years (some harsh, some that famously pay you to take time off and everything in between). And I’ve come to a conclusion on the best PTO and vacation policy: none. …
July 15, 2013· 3 min read
Forget about the rest. What makes a good VC?
I should preface this post with the caveat that a VC describing what it takes to be a good VC runs the obvious risk of falling into a trap of vanity and lack of self-awareness. I hope I haven’t, but you be the judge… There’s been a real uproar over Andy Dunn’s recent missive slamming venture capitalists. In it Dunn asserts (I’m paraphrasing here and I’d encourage you to go read the full post) that 98% of VCs suck. And his last line pretty much sums up his feelings: “98% of VCs who read this post self-identify as being in the top 2%. The other 2% are actually the top 2%.” There have been some good rebuttals of his overall critique – and especially of the 98/2% split (which, interesting, is perhaps an admission that certainly by track record, and implicitly by some of the other critiques Andy offers, there is some split between good and bad VCs -or Dumb and Not Dumb in Andy’s parlance; by the way, his math is completely wrong – the majority of venture returns are generated by an order of magnitude more than 2% of VC firms). I particularly like what Mark Suster had to say on the topic in his response – especially his opening point, about liking the VCs you know and hating the rest (Andy calls out his own VCs as being great in his post, to Mark’s point). …
May 29, 2013· 2 min read
The ten year entrepreneur
It’s easy to get lost in the celebration of high flying companies that quickly take an idea to market, scale and sell. It’s exciting, financially lucrative and makes for great reading. We’ve been fortunate enough to have a few companies like that in the Foundry portfolio (Zynga, AdMeld and Gist all went from idea to sale/IPO in a relatively short period of time). But the reality is that most companies take years (and years and years) to develop – the average time from company founding to exit event is now approaching 10 years. And in many respects, being a great entrepreneur isn’t about coming up with company ideas and executing against an initial product spec. Its really about the perseverance, dedication and stubbornness that is required to see a company from that point just after the initial exuberance of getting a product into market and having a few people use it, through the realization that building a scalable business is going to be really freaking hard (I called this period the “trough of disillusionment in a post years back), to the point where you (hopefully) have proved the skeptics wrong and despite the obstacles, mistakes and miscalculations find yourself with a real scale business. …
May 8, 2013· 2 min read
Boulder is for Media
Recently Boulder based Datalogix announced that they had raised $25M to accelerate the build-out of its online ad targeting data business. The Datalogix story is one of perseverance and adaptation and it’s great to see them taking off. TechCrunch reported on the financing here. One thing caught my eye in the story and got my hackles up. In the very first paragraph about the financing Josh Constine said the following: …
May 6, 2013· 2 min read
Measuring customer satisfaction
There was a great thread this week on the Foundry CEO email list about Net Promoter Score and how companies are using it to measure the satisfaction of their customers (specifically in the case of NPS, their propensity to recommend the product or service to others). NPS can be a useful tool when used properly (which was much of the discussion on the email thread – who to measure, how often, etc.). But NPS can be cumbersome to measure, hard to understand granularly and not very helpful in letting you know what any given customer is really thinking about their interactions with your company (other than the extreme outliers). …
April 17, 2013· 2 min read
#3010: The Video
I blogged last year about the amazing 40th birthday trip my wife Greeley sent me and 9 friends on – cycling through Slovenia and Italy (original blog post along with a bunch of pictures here). We had a video put together of the whole experience that I thought I’d share. Thanks to Mike Shum for the video production!
February 27, 2013· 1 min read