Last week about 40 Foundry Group portfolio company CEOs and founders converged on Boulder for a half day of meetings followed by some social time. It was a truly amazing experience and such a great reminder of the importance of cultivating a peer group for you and your company.

We have a very active CEO and founder mailing list at Foundry, where there are daily rifs on any number of topics and where portfolio companies can reach out to each other for help and advice (we have a separate list for CTOs, one for Boulder companies and another for Bay Area companies as well – all designed to build Community – with a capital “C” – around the shared trait which is Foundry as an investor). These lists are great and have been extremely popular with companies (the four Foundry partners actively participate in the lists as well). It was creating this sense of Community around a shared investment from Foundry that precipitated the organization of the CEO/Foundry Summit. And interestingly, the entire thing was organized by the group, not by Foundry.

While we had talked about putting together a CEO meeting a few times I think we were concerned about “forcing” everyone to show up by decree of their major investor and wanted to be sure that it was an idea that people really supported. So when Charlie Wood (of Spanning) and I were having lunch in Austin a few months ago and he brought up the idea, I encouraged him to take the lead and use the group email list to coordinate.

The response was overwhelming and a few days after Charlie’s initial email, the date and basic outline had been planned. The agenda was crowdsourced to the group, each session was lead by a different CEO and everyone paid their own way. The results were pretty amazing. The level of conversation was extremely high and the ideas that were passed around the room super valuable. A couple of very specific company challenges were addressed (and I think solved or at least put on the right track) and we generated a number of topics that we wanted to go even deeper on the next time we’re together (with the thought perhaps of doing entire events around just a topic or two and letting those companies in the portfolio who are facing specific challenges around those topics attend along with some outside resources to help us all out). Perhaps most importantly CEOs and founders from across the portfolio (and across the country) got the chance to meet and spend some time together – often people who only knew each other by email.

Being connected to the Foundry family was an easy way in this case to bring people together, but I’d encourage all entrepreneurs reading this to consider pulling together a similar get-together (large or small) of their peer groups. We’ve done this a few times before (Jason put together a Digital Home summit and, along with Walter Knapp from our portfolio company Lijit, I organized a Digital Media Summit in Boulder – in both cases the attendees were both Foundry portfolio companies as well as many other companies from within the ecosystem). While there’s some work involved, the pay-off is enormous. On the more casual side of the equation but along the same general lines, when I was in San Francisco last week I brought together about 17 of our Bay Area CEO/Founders for dinner. No agenda in that case, but plenty of conversation and connection.

I think the main point is that by actively creating Community you end up with a peer group that can be really helpful to your company. And you can determine the qualification for membership to create the greatest impact for you and your business (“all businesses in our building”, “businesses with female CEOs”, “businesses working on partnerships with XYZ company”, etc.).

I’d encourage you to think about how to create that kind of peer group for you and your company.

It’s funny how things have a way of working out. I wrote recently of our experience with SEOMoz – from initial meeting a few years ago to finally investing in them earlier this month. Today we announced our investment in Mocavo – a genealogy search platform that provides users with the best tools available to find information on their ancestors. More specifics on the business in a minute but the year long journey from TechStars to Foundry investment is worth noting.

I first met Mocavo at the start of last year’s TechStars Boulder. I liked founder Cliff Shaw a lot and appreciated (although at the time didn’t share) his passion for genealogy. When he asked me to mentor them through the program I thought it was a pretty safe bet. “Sure thing Cliff,” I said at the time, “there’s zero chance that I’d invest in a genealogy site, but it would be fun to work together!” Through the summer I held to that party line.  Cliff and I kept meeting regularly even after TechStars (Cliff knows my soft spot for sushi and would regularly invite me to the Mocavo offices for brainstorming sessions with the team over take-out). But over the winter the lightbulb went off on what a big idea Mocavo really is. I had known that genealogy is a huge (and growing) market but was beginning to realize just how novel the tools that Mocavo is bringing to the market are. And the pent up demand in genealogy circles for better access to content, better tools for sharing this content and better ways to bring offline content (the majority of historical content still resides offline). And how passionate genealogists are about their pursuit of family history and as a result how much time, effort and money they spend in their pursuit.

Launched in March of 2011 (although their paid features only launched a few months ago), Mocavo has seen great growth in visitors to its site, searches on its platform and information indexed in its search engine. The company isn’t out to replace existing genealogical tools – it’s here to augment those tools and provide an overlay social experience that is natural to genealogy. I couldn’t be more excited to be working with the Mocavo team (along with Cliff, I’ve gotten to know Richard, Andy, Ryan really well over the last year).

Welcome to the future of your past!

California, Massachusetts, New York, Colorado. That’s the order of states with the greatest dollar value of seed and early stage investment according to a PWC MoneyTree study that my partner Jason blogged about today. $290M invested in 41 companies based in Colorado in 2011. Compare that with 2006 when Colorado ranked 12th on the list with just under $90M invested in 32 companies.

That’s an incredible achievement and says a lot about the state of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Colorado and our rising profile on the national stage. I’ve written extensively on why Boulder specifically, and Colorado in general, are great start-up markets (see here, for example). And these data show that the work and effort of many people in our state is paying off. I often tell people when they ask me how to replicate the success we’ve had here in Colorado that the journey is a long one. When building an entrepreneurial community one needs to take a 10+year view of the effort. When I think back to what the Colorado market looked like when I joined the venture industry about 12 years ago (based here, but working for a CA firm), it’s almost hard to fathom the changes. And while the number of venture firms located in Colorado has diminished significantly in that time, the overall entrepreneurial environemnt has really flourished. All giving support to what I believe to be a key truth about our industry – entrepreneurs come first!

So congratulations to all the great Colorado entrepreneurs who have made this state a great place to start and build a business.

It’s not often in this business that you get a second bite at the proverbial apple, but with our funding of SEOMoz announced today we got just that.

I first met SEOMoz founder and CEO Rand Fishkin in late 2008. It was a pretty memorable meeting in the lobby of the Vitale. At the time I was deep into the SEM side of the search world and was thinking about whether we wanted to place a bet on the organic side of search (aided at the time by what seemed like a large number of SEO agencies trying to productize their service into some kind of software package). It was clearly a big opportunity.

I liked Rand a lot and while we’re often skeptical about services companies “productizing” their offerings, SEOMoz was never really built to be a services business and as Rand carefully explained, while early, they were clearly seeing product traction. Plus they had great tech and a solid team.

So, clearly we passed.

I actually don’t remember exactly what it was that made us not jump at investing (Brad talked with the company as well at the time). But whatever it was, with the benefit now of a few years hindsight it was obviously the wrong call.

To our luck (and to SEOMoz’s credit and benefit), the company grew organically (apparently we weren’t the only ones to have got this one wrong). And then even more to our luck (and at the time to the company’s dismay, but clearly to their long term benefit) an agreed upon large financing deal fell through at the last minute (Rand’s post on that experience is really worth reading if you haven’t already).

So here we are. Back at the table and with a second chance to get it right. The story of how we ended up investing this time around is a good one – and one described in detail on the company’s blog post this morning.

So welcome team SEOMoz to the Foundry portfolio! And thanks for giving us another chance.

There’s been plenty of chatter over the past few years about the potential pitfalls for entrepreneurs taking seed money from VCs. This includes a recent and very thorough overview of the issues by Elad Gil which I’d highly recommend reading, even if you’re already familiar with the issues around seed financing (and in particular the so called “party round” where everyone takes a piece but no one takes the lead).

I’ve noticed something recently that’s a bit of the flip side of the same problem that everyone is talking about but that I haven’t seen mentioned yet. I’m seeing an increasing number of Series A pitches where a company has at least one venture investor in its seed, the business is very clearly doing well and where the entrepreneur is simply not pursuing their existing institutional investors for money (note: please give me a little credit here for knowing the difference between an entrepreneur not pursuing money from their existing investors and their being told by their investors that they’re not interested; I’m talking about cases where it’s either pretty clear that the business is seeing excellent traction or where we’ve actually been able to confirm that they’re trying to go around their existing investors).

You could call this the VC seed signaling problem.

A VC throws some money around into a bunch of different seed rounds assuming they’re buying optionality for their Series A. But by essentially ignoring these seed companies some investors are showing them that perhaps they’re not the value added VC that they claimed to be. I’ve heard a variation of this themea number of times in the past few months. Entrepreneurs completely disappointed with the lack of attention they’ve received from their seed investors and as a result choosing to either try to keep them out of their Series A rounds or minimize their participation (most have received pro-rata rights as part of their seed investment so sometimes this becomes a negotiation – again, clearly evidence that these entrepreneurs are indeed telling the truth on this subject as their seed investors try to negotiate for more participation in the Series A).

I find this pretty amusing. At Foundry we view seed investing the same way we view all of our investing – we believe that we’re in this business to add value to the entrepreneurs and companies we back regardless of the capital we have invested (great post from Brad here explaining this in more detail). Clearly that view is not held across our industry.

As you may know from reading prior posts on the subject the two days that comprise the Glue Conference (May 23rd and 24th, 2012) are some of the most information packed and interesting days of my year. To me what sets Glue apart is that it stands almost alone in the conference circuit as a show that’s neither company specific (Google I/O, Dreamforce, Chirp) or startup celebrity focused (DEMO, TC50, etc.). There are only a sparse few events that are developer focused  – which makes Glue that much more important.

Glue is an incredibly well run conference and you can tell by looking at both the substance and structure of the agenda that Eric and Kim have put a lot of thought into how to enable conference attendees to get the most out of being there. From the simple things that you’ll appreciate long before you realize that you rarely see them at other conferences (power strips at each table, blazing fast wifi, killer soundtrack, etc) to the break-out sessions designed to dive deeply into a subject or technology, to the ample networking, to the ALU DemoPods (see below), Glue is an event designed to enable every attendee to get the most out of their being there (Eric and Kim don’t believe that their job stops when you walk in the door; a great sign of this is that you’ll often see them roaming the floor putting people together that they think should meet).

Last year and again this year, we’ve partnered with Alcatel Lucent to bring the Glue DemoPod to the conference, enabling 12 early stage companies to the show to show off what they’re up to. This was a huge hit last year, with the conference attendees voting for their favorite new company among the bunch (with the winner getting the chance to make a keynote address to the entire conference on the last day of the show). Thanks to ALU, we’re doing it all again for 2012 with another great batch of companies:

• Ducksboard
• CloudMine
• ownCloud
• Mortar Data
• Keen.io
• Tempo
• Kronovia
• RapidEngines
• Cloudability
• Emergent One
• Distil
• WhenAUser

New to this year’s Glue is a focus on the hackathon. We’ve done them each year of Glue, but never with the emphasis we’re placing on it in 2012. This year we’re bringing in a great group of hackathon sponsors to help us out (Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Pearson, Cloudspokes (Appirio), Mashery, Loggly), we’re extending the hackathon into day two of the conference, and we’re seriously upping the ante on prizes. Glue is about developers and developers like to build stuff. Come hack away!

So whether you’re an enterprise developer (staying current on technologies, checking out what start-ups can help accelerate your own businesses and internal development initiatives), a start-up developer (all of the above plus looking for a chance to interface, recruit and push the envelope with the next generation of technologists) or a C-level exec (in particular looking to see what’s 3-6 months out on the horizon) Gluecon is for you.

You can register for the event here. Or email me if you have any questions.

About a month ago I switched from my iPhone 4S to the Galaxy Nexus from Samsung. I was finally making the move from AT&T to Verizon and I couldn’t bear the idea of paying $450 once again for another 4S “upgrade”. I’d been meaning to try Android and figured now was as good a time as any. And since I wanted to run Ice Cream Sandwich that meant a Galaxy Nexus. I switched cold turkey and have been using the Nexus exclusively. Since a lot of people ask me how I like it I thought I’d post some thoughts.

First, the conclusion (in case you don’t want to read any further). I like the Nexus and Android and it’s definitely a workable phone. But I’m likely going to switch back to the iPhone platform when the 5 comes out this fall (but stay on Verizon for sure).

What I like about my Galaxy Nexus:

• First off, Verizon kicks AT&T’s ass. In a month I’ve maybe had one call drop on dial. On AT&T, calls failed to connect on the first try about 40% of the time. Overall network coverage was much better, data speeds were much better and I had coverage in more places (NY, SF, Boulder, etc.) than I did with AT&T (I’ll allow here that the test wasn’t apples to apples and that differences in the hardware itself may be partially responsible).
• Swipe to answer. Swipe right to answer. Swipe left to send to voice mail. Swipe up and you can send one of a few pre-programed text messages back (or write your own custom message). Love this feature!
• Screen yumminess. Simply put, the screen on the Nexus is beautiful. Stunning, actually. And large.
• Flexibility. Android as an open platform is just way more flexible than iOS. I can arrange my screen as I’d like, there are more apps for any one thing you’re looking to do, you can customize your environment as you like. And I love the way you can nest contacts and have your favorite numbers grouped together logically and available on your home screen.
• Batteries. I’ll talk about why this is so critical below, but I do like that I can swap my battery on the Nexus. I carry 3 batteries with me at all times (including one of the extended batteries) and when I run out of juice I can just pop another one in. Sadly, this happens all too often…

What I didn’t like so much about my Galaxy Nexus:

• Battery life. Wow, does the Nexus suck down the juice. Depending on what you’re doing, you can run down your battery in an hour (for example, tethering the phone will discharge a fully charged battery in less than 60 minutes). I mentioned that I have 3 batteries for my phone – this is because owning a Nexus is an exercise in battery management. The phone needs to be plugged in at every opportunity possible. And I’d strongly recommend getting the extended battery as well as an external charger for your batteries (so you can plug the batteries in and charge them when they’re not in your phone). There’s no way I’d recommend getting this phone unless you’re willing to take on the task of power management.
• Bugs. There are some bugs in Ice Cream Sandwich which make it a pain to use from time to time. I’ve had my phone freeze up on me a few times. If you’re in the video camera and you let the screen go to sleep, you will have to re-boot the phone (which takes about 3 minutes) before you can use the camera or video camera again. Dialing a number directly from calendar is really kluge and usually takes me about 5 attempts. The text database on my phone get messed up and this causes all incoming texts to show up in double. Full calendar items only show up when you enter the editor in the calendar. Bunch of little things like that.
• Are you sure? There are a lot of things that you’ll attempt to do on Android where it will ask you to confirm your selection (are you sure you want to delete that; are you sure you want to dial that number, are you sure you want to power off, etc.). I found this really annoying.
• Facebook. The Facebook app for Android is really bad. Mine consistently loaded slowly, sometimes didn’t load at all and generally was only usable if you were willing to be extremely patient (the app doesn’t cache any data and has to reload from scratch each time, although even that doesn’t explain the remarkable latency in the app). I don’t buy phones for one app. And to be clear, it’s not like I’m addicted to Facebook – honestly, I could quit any time. But it was a bummer that this didn’t work better.
• Soft home key. The home key on the Galaxy Nexus is a soft key. And you’d think after a month I’d stop accidentally hitting it when I was typing. But you’d be wrong. I hit it all the time and have to go back into the app I was working in. I prefer a hard home key. Or at least a soft key spaced a bit further away.
• Size. I found the Galaxy Nexus to be a bit big for my tastes. For some things this was great, but overall, I found it hard to use with only one hand and difficult at times to navigate because of it’s size and where the various command keys ended up being laid out because of that size

So there you have the highlights and lowlights. I’m glad I ran this experiment and I’ll definitely hold on to this phone while I wait to see what the next Apple release looks like. But I’ll probably head back to iOS in the next 6 months…

Would love your thoughts here if you’ve also made the switch.

I was sitting in a conference room yesterday where there were several different makes of laptops out on the table. Seeing a bunch of computers this way really hit home how beautiful Apple’s laptops really are. And its not just the clean silver case – several of the PCs had a similarly styled exterior. For me, its the rounded corners. Simple. Elegant. Clearly Apple cares about every aspect of their laptop design.

There are a few great vignettes in Walter Isaacson’s book on Steve Jobs that talk about Jobs obsession with rounded rectangles. From the original Macintosh application windows to Apple laptops to the iPod, iPhone and iPad designs. And while its harder to produce products with these rounded corners, the cost of not doing so is much greater.

I think we’re all starting to realize what Jobs realized a long time ago. Design matters.It matters a lot, in fact. Great design is not just a part of Apple’s success, I think it has a lot to do with the success of companies like Pinterest or Instagram as well. Its no longer acceptable (unless you’re Google, apparently) to have crappy looking product. More and more of the companies we work with are waking up to this and spending more time and focus making the look and feel of their applications as great as their functionality. Because in the application world, many people (and businesses) do judge a book by its cover.

I write often about my love of start-ups. And in truth, I really enjoy all stages of a company’s development – each for a different reason, of course (the early days, working closely with the founding team on product; mid-stage when maybe you’re helping with key management hires as the business scales; and later when hopefully the business has grown quiet large, working on strategic partnerships, overall strategy or maybe the sale of the business). And each stage has its own cadence (which, of course varies from business to business).

Most of the time, it takes years to validate an investment thesis as companies work methodically through product launches, and the stages of scaling a business. It’s only after time (and very often a few false starts) that we realize that our investment thesis was correct. But every once in a while I get to work with a company that takes off immediately after our funding it. It’s a rare pleasure to see an idea so quickly and immediately take off. And while there are plenty of companies that have a slower start to their lives that later become great successes, that early success (and here I’m talking about customer and revenue success, not funding or “user” success) often portends really good things to come.

Integrate – who today announced an $11M Series B financing with Comcast, Liberty Global and Foundry – is one of those rare companies. Launched in April of 2010, the company was scaling quickly even during the time when we were first looking at at and later working through the details of our initial investment ($4.25M which closed in the fall of that year). Founders Hart Cunningham and Jeremy Bloom have been fantastic to work with and together, they’ve built a substantial business.

Integrate brings together advertisers performance marketing campaigns in one platform. The company’s platform allows any B2B and B2C advertiser to plan, execute, track, analyze and optimize an integrated marketing strategy.  The marketplace combines thousands of quality-vetted online and offline media sources (internet, print, out-of-home, television, radio and call centers).  To me it represents the future of performance marketing. Not just in its breadth of offerings, but also in the fraud and other controls they’ve put in place to help enable a safe environment for traditional, more brand oriented, advertisers.

I’ve embedded a video below of co-founder Jeremy Bloom talking about the company and the new funding round on Reuters this morning. And I’m looking forward to continued success at Integrate and welcome Sam from Comcast and Bruce from Liberty Global to the team!

I put up a post this morning over on the Foundry Group site which I thought I’d repost here with some additional comments. It concerns whether companies in a shared venture portfolio should have any special rules of engagement about hiring from other companies in the portfolio. The question of whether Foundry has a “policy” around this has come up a few times and we wanted to clarify very clearly that we  absolutely don’t (nor could we – not only would such a blanket rule be to the detriment of our portfolio, it would also likely be illegal). That said, I do know that a few of the CEOs in the portfolio have a “no poaching” policy when it comes to friendly companies. That may include companies backed by the same investors (Foundry or others), or it may just apply to a few companies where the businesses have a tight relationship and the CEO feels that actively recruiting from that company would be detrimental to that relationship and therefore detrimental to their company. To me, this is the real key. Arbitrary rules around hiring and, in particular, recruiting practices seem spurious. Altruistic in their ideal, but flawed in execution. And in any event I think the lens here should be a business one. Companies with which you have an important connection are in a different class relative to recruiting efforts than other companies. There’s no real moral line to be decided – the business relationship itself is what drives the decision. Curious what other companies do in regards to their recruiting practices. Comment away!

The question of how we handle companies within the portfolio company hiring from each other has come up a number of times recently and we thought it would be a good idea to hit the subject head on, publicly.  With over 40 companies in the Foundry portfolio, and with many of these companies concentrated in specific geographies (in particular Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle and New York) there are often times when an employee from one company in which Foundry has an investment applies for a job or is approached by another company in which Foundry has an investment.

To be absolutely clear, Foundry has no policy relating to the hiring of employees by one portfolio company from another. We believe in the free and fair movement of people and ideas and we don’t ask that portfolio companies refrain from hiring employees from each other. Ultimately it’s up to each company to determine their own hiring practices based on what they believe to be the best interests of their business.