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
The Democratization of Entrepreneurship
One of the great trends we’ve been witnessing over the past decade, and in particular the past 5 years, has been what you might call the “democratization” of entrepreneurship”. It’s a powerful trend and one that I think will have a huge impact not just on the US economy and workforce, but perhaps even more intensely on other areas of the world – particularly developing economies. There are several underlying factors that I think underpin this sift that are worth noting: …
February 20, 2013· 4 min read
Marc Barros on the shift from Product to Marketing/Sales
Marc Barros, the founder of Contour cameras wrote a great follow-up to my post on your company’s shift from a product focus to building out a sales and marketing organization that’s definitely worth reading. A few excerpts here: 1. Make A Clear Definition of Success Early on, often before you raise venture capital, you want to create a clear picture of what the future looks like. That picture can include a range of things such as how you define your culture, values, employee morale, size, revenue growth, market domination, etc. Equally how you define success could range from world domination (e.g., Square) to building a small company focused on great products (e.g., 37 Signals). …
February 5, 2013· 5 min read
The #hash economy
Back in the late 90’s I started noticing URLs at the end of many TV advertisements. They started as general company URLs (and were relatively infrequent) and eventually because almost ubiquitous leading not just to company home pages but eventually to product pages or other ares of a company’s site were one could get more information about whatever was being hocked on TV (or in a magazine, etc.). Fast forward a few years and we saw the same phenomenon with brands and their Facebook pages. And then Twitter. These were/are great ways for brands to get more information to people interested in their products. And to some extent through Twitter and Facebook “engage” with people so inclined to interact in that way with the producers of products they like and use. …
January 31, 2013· 3 min read
Shifting from a product company to a sales/marketing company
At the risk of overgeneralizing (although to be fair as a VC that’s pretty much my job description) and understanding that there’s plenty of grey area here, I’ve really been noticing recently just how challenging it can be for organizations to move from being product focused to sales and marketing focused. It seems worthy of a post (and hopefully getting some feedback on). Early on in their lives most companies are built around a focus on product. They tend to be engineering heavy, key deliverables center around feature releases and sticking to a dev schedule and success is measured by the progress a business makes on building and releasing product vs. revenue generated from that product. …
January 24, 2013· 3 min read