Boulder featured on Fox Business News
For a long time my hometown of Boulder, Colorado has been known as a great place to live but more recently Boulder is taking on a reputation as a great place to start a company as well. And the rest of the country is starting to take notice (see BusinessWeek, HuffPo and the NY Times). Today Fox Business News did a few live segments from Boulder highlighting some of the people and institutions that are helping create great entrepreneurs and great companies here. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed live along with Lijit CEO Todd Vernon (Foundry is an investor in Lijit). I have to say it was a little nerve wracking to be doing a live feed (this occurred to me about 30 seconds before going on air, before which time I was perfectly calm, after which time I thought my heartbeat might be visible through my shirt). In the end it was super fun and great visibility for Boulder.
October 12, 2010· 1 min read
How to teach your child to ride a bicycle
image This is totally off topic, but every time I tell people this story they love it and say they’ve never heard of this idea before so I thought I’d post it here. I didn’t make this method up (I can’t remember who told me about it, but living in the cycling capital of the US – Boulder, CO – it could have been any one of a hundred different people). We taught our two daughters how to ride using this method when they were around 4 and will have one more shot at it in the near future with our 3 year old son. The idea behind this method is that kids know how to pedal (they’ve been doing that just fine with training wheels) – what you really need to work on is balance and the easies way to do that is to take away all the other distractions so they can just focus on that one thing. Once they have that down they’ll be good to go. Both of our girls learned to ride using the method below in a few hours start to finish (where finish = riding around the block for the next hour by themselves). …
October 6, 2010· 4 min read
My RAIN Makers Conference Interview
I spent a couple of days last week out in the Twin Cities at the RAIN Makers Conference. I have to say I was pretty impressed (and surprised) by the strength of the entrepreneurial community in Minneapolis/St. Paul. I’ve known a few of the key guys from that community for a few years through Defrag and Glue but it was great to see how many people are really involved (there were something like 250 people at the conference). I shot an interview with Jeff from Tech[dot]MN that I thought I’d repost here. …
September 28, 2010· 1 min read
Preparing an effective executive summary
Today’s guest post comes from Ted Rosen, a partner at the law firm Fox Rothschild. How to write an effective company “teaser” is one of the most common topics I’m asked about by entrepreneurs and I think Ted has some excellent thoughts on how to prepare a company summary that hits the right points but isn’t so long that you’ll lose your reader’s attention (or make them abandon the summary before reading the important parts). Ted really nails it in the piece below. I’d especially call out “jargon free” and “keeping it simple” – the inverse of which are probably the two most common traits of poorly formed executive summaries. As always, I welcome comments, ideas, suggestions, etc. You can reach Ted directly at trosen@foxrothschild.com. …
September 28, 2010· 5 min read
There Is No VC Seed Investing Signaling Problem
My partner Brad recently wrote a great post entitled “Addressing the VC Seed Investor Signaling Problem“. This, along with several larger funds reaching out to me to ask for advice about starting their own seed investing programs got me thinking about the hype surrounding the VC Seed Investor Signaling Problem. My conclustion: THERE IS NO VC SEED INVESTING SIGNALING PROBLEM As Mark Suster points out in two fantastic posts on the subject (here and here) signals abound in the investment world. And frankly, as signals go, this isn’t a particularly major one. I’m serious. There are a million reasons that an investor group may or may not be able to continue to support an investment, some of which relate to their view of the performance of your business and many of which have nothing to do with it. …
September 16, 2010· 4 min read
My AdExchanger Interview
imageAdExchanger just posed an interview that I did with them that touched on some of our ad-tech investments as well as our overall investment philosophy. I’ve cross posted an unedited version of that interview below. 1. Why get into the venture capital side of the business? Do you ever get the entrepreneurial “itch”? I first got into venture capital about 10 years ago and I love my job. I was running a few business units for a small public company and while I enjoyed the operational side of my job, I was also responsible for M&A and partnerships and had a particular affinity for the transactional side of my job. While I consistently have the entrepreneurial itch, I actually think this makes me better at investing – it reminds me of why I’m in business (to support entrepreneurs who are the real stars of the show). I’ve also co-founded a few companies (including Trada which is a company in the Foundry portfolio that helps advertisers better execute paid search campaigns; I wrote about that experience recently on my blog: https://sethlevine.com/wp/2010/08/trada-from-the-beginning) and I’m very close to many of our portfolio companies at an operational level which helps to satisfy the entrepreneur in me. …
September 10, 2010· 8 min read
My Big Mac
image So after much teasing by friends and in a vain attempt to solidify my geek creds, I finally took the plunge and ordered a MacBook Pro. I’m dumping my Microsoft infrastructure and am going to switch over cold turkey once I get the thing set up. I’m anticipating a difficult few weeks transitioning. And here’s where I need your help. For readers that have made the switch, what advice do you have to make it go smoothly? For all Mac users, what programs, add-ons, short-cuts, Mac resources (particularly a directory of short-cut codes) do I need? Also, very specifically, I’m looking for something that will let me sync a network share locally so that all files are available off-line. This needs to then sync up the changes when I’m connected back up to the network. And the catch is that this needs to happen against a Windows server. …
September 8, 2010· 1 min read
TechStars Loves NY!
image This morning we announced that TechStars is opening it’s 4th (and final) program in New York. As readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan and supporter of TechStars (and, along with my Foundry partners, an individual investor each of the TechStars programs in Boulder, Boston, Seattle and now New York City). For those unfamiliar with the program, TechStars is a mentor driven accelerator for start-ups. Founded in Boulder and now running programs in Boston and Seattle, New York will be the final US city to which we take the program (we feel the model of having non-overlapping terms is the best way to maximize the success of each city program). Working with TechStars companies for me has been an absolute blast. The teams bring an energy and enthusiasm that is infectious and the progress that they are able to make over a 3 month period is nothing short of amazing. …
September 1, 2010· 2 min read
StockTwits Ticker Link and Private Company Symbols
StockTwits announced two great new features in the last week that are worth checking out. The first is a partnership with SecondMarket to expand the StockTwits platform to include private company streams. So just as you’d tag a post with $AAPL you can now tag private companies (think $ZYNGA,$4SQ, etc). Just as it is for public equitites, tagging your posts (tweets, blogs, etc.) with private company symbols is a much more efficient way to identify the company you’re talking about and become a part of the broader conversation about a company. StockTwits has put together an impressive database of private company symbols and is adding to this list daily. …
August 31, 2010· 1 min read
Has convertible debt won? And if it has, is that a good thing?
Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, sent out a tweet on Friday saying: “Convertible notes have won. Every investment so far in this YC batch (and there have been a lot) has been done on a convertible note.” It’s an interesting data point on Y-Combinator companies, but is this truly a macro trend? Have convertible notes really won? And if so is that good for start-ups? Good for investors? I think the answer to these questions are that 1) it’s not at all clear that this trend is as definitive as Graham suggests; 2) it’s a mixed bag for entrepreneurs (more positive in the short run, potentially negative in the long term); and 3) it’s clearly not a positive trend for early-stage investors. …
August 30, 2010· 9 min read