The future of your past (our investment in Mocavo)
mocavo logoIt’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. …
May 16, 2012· 2 min read
California, Massachusetts, New York, Colorado
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! …
May 1, 2012· 2 min read
Getting it Right the 2nd Time (our investment in SEOMoz)
SEOmoz-542-304It’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. …
May 1, 2012· 2 min read
The Seed Signaling Problem That’s NOT Being Talked About
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). …
April 23, 2012· 2 min read
Glue 2012 will be the best Gluecon yet
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. …
April 16, 2012· 3 min read
Impressions of Android and the Galaxy Nexus
galaxyAbout 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. …
April 3, 2012· 5 min read
Rounded Corners
roundedcornersI 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. …
March 23, 2012· 2 min read
One platform to rule them all
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). …
March 21, 2012· 3 min read
Hiring between portfolio companies – playing nice in the sandbox?
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! …
March 20, 2012· 3 min read
The solution to my iMessage problem
iMessageIt turned out that the solution to my iMessage problem was relatively straightforward. That said, it only worked because I still had my old phone (it hadn’t been stolen; I hadn’t traded it in; etc.). It also worked when doing things like going to Apple’s site and deauthorizing my devices didn’t (which I still don’t understand). So the problem I pointed out really is a serious bug. But for me, I had the phone and the solution (as a few people suggested in the comments to my post) was as simple as disabling iMessage on my device. Apparently this triggered a reset on the Apple server such that messages sent to me were no longer being routed through iMessage, thus fixing my problem. Problem solved. …
March 7, 2012· 1 min read