How not to pitch your business
I had an exchange with an entrepreneur last night that I couldn’t resist posting (I did resist including the guy’s name, however). It started with a relatively typical email. One which I wonder why I still receive but still get regularly. The entrepreneur writes: Seth…..I’d like to pitch you on a start up. I need the help of someone like you. I haven’t filed any patents yet and I need a nda signed. can we do it? …
August 12, 2010· 2 min read
Trada – from the beginning
Brad has a lengthy post up describing how we think about seed investing at Foundry Group. In it, he describes our philosophy around seed investing and differentiates it from what others (but not everyone) in the market is doing. Importantly, he notes that: our seed investments are not “options on the next round.” We price our seed rounds as equity investments, always lead or co-lead … and treat them the same way we would a $10m investment… when we make a seed investment, it gets everyone’s attention. We try hard not to smother it with love, but we recognize that we usually each have something unique to add to a seed investment and try to help accordingly. As a result, we are all emotionally involved in the investment (a phrase you’ll see in later posts about this topic) which I believe is both beneficial to the entrepreneur and extremely important to the VC firm. …
August 10, 2010· 5 min read
Head in the clouds
I spent the month of July up at our place in Granby, CO (just outside of Winter Park). My partner Brad has been a longtime fan of taking a month to work somewhere else, not travel and clear your head, but I’d never given it a try. And while I understand that not all jobs allow for this, I suspect that more people could do it (at least for a week or two) if they really wanted to. …
August 10, 2010· 2 min read
The rise of RTB and our investment in Triggit
Clearly a hot topic in online ad-tech right now is the rise of exchange-based buying and the advent of real-time bidding platforms (RTB) that allow advertisers and publishers to transact on an impression by impression basis. Given all the focus on RTB I sometimes have to remind myself that true real-time trading is less than a year into its existence. And given its nascence, the landscape of companies (buy side platforms, sell side platforms, data providers, agencies, brands, publishers, etc.) that are playing a part in these exchanges is changing rapidly. …
June 24, 2010· 3 min read
Rewarding failure
This seems like an appropriate topic against the backdrop of my recent post on becoming more of a data driven organization. When you expose data, you expose not just those areas of your business that are doing well, but also those that aren’t. And this brings up an interesting question: Does your organization embrace failure or only reward success? Specifically, do you encourage people to create challenging goals and give them credit for the work they did trying to achieve them, or do you (implicitly or explicitly) encourage people to sandbag and as a result “overachieve”? The answer to this question may be more nuanced than you originally think once you sit down to consider it. In fact, most people in our society are programmed to reward overachievement rather than an effort that falls short of achieving a really high goal. But the behavior this can encourage is counter-productive to many business activities. And while we may pay lip-service to the “setting lofty goals” idea, the reality is that most companies don’t work this way. They have engineering deadlines, sales goals, etc and rather than creating a culture of setting aggressive targets and trying like hell to get there, they prefer the greater certainty and achievement of “managing expectations”. Failure is something to be defended against (and if you do fall short, there’s always a reason that’s not your fault). …
June 18, 2010· 2 min read
How I lost my 1K status
If you followed this blog last year, you know that my quest to hit United 1K status ended with a December 26th trip from Denver to Washington DC. I left the house around 7:00am that morning and returned home that evening at 6:00pm, happily tweeting about the 30 miles I had to spare. And while I never want to make 1K again (that’s just too many miles to fly – especially back and forth from Denver to the east and west coasts, and in particular considering that I probably had another 20k miles on other airlines last year as well) I was pretty pleased with my achievement. …
June 15, 2010· 5 min read
Data, Data and more Data
I had planned to title this post “If you have a data intensive business, don’t forget to look at your data.” But when I thought about, really all businesses are (or should be) data-intensive. And as a result all businesses should be obsessed with the data their systems generate. Measure. Track. Analyze. Adjust. Years ago I remember sitting in ServiceMagic board meetings when Rodney or Mike (the co-founders) would pull out a Blackberry and announce: “in the 45 minutes since this meeting began, we’ve made 62,135 dollars and 37 cents!” They were obsessed with their system data and they had designed their platform from the very start to allow them to pull out any and all data they wanted. They had access not just to revenue data, but to leads, customer contacts, call center calls, sales funnel changes, site visitors, marketing spend, etc – really anything that had an impact on their company. As a quant-geek myself, I really appreciated what went into the design of their systems that would allow them to surface these operating metrics so easily (not to mention the mindset of Rodney and Mike to insist that they had access to this information at all times). …
June 9, 2010· 2 min read
Made your Glue plans yet? It’s not too late!
image Our Glue conference is finally upon us. The agenda and speakers are locked down and all the final details are being attended to. We have a great group of speakers lined up this year across a number of different tracks: The ”Hacking Identity” track – which highlights user managed access (Eve Maler), federated provisioning (Nishant Kaushik), XAuth (Chris Messina), and Webfinger (Brad Fitzpatrick) and follows it up with a discussion moderated by Ian Glazer (of Burton Group, now Gartner). …
May 21, 2010· 2 min read
Am I just a greedy VC?
My partner Jason has an impassioned post up about the carried interest debate currently taking place in Congress. No matter how you feel about Congress’ efforts to change the tax classification of VC profits from capital gains to ordinary income it’s worth a read (and keeping an open mind). Obviously this issue is important to me and to all VCs. And while I know there are differences of opinions on the subject (clearly given the intense debate going on right now) I think Jason does a nice job of talking through the personal (this feels overstepping), professional (there are other markets where innovation is taking place where investor are actually being completely exempt from taxes that will draw talent away from the US) and legal (how do you differentiate between a VCs partnership interest from other partnership interests not subject to the proposed tax change?) arguments against the tripling of tax on the long term profits of investors. …
May 19, 2010· 4 min read
Your reality filter
One of the great joys of working with entrepreneurs is the energy, enthusiasm and aspiration they bring to their businesses. But don’t forget to consider your business for what it is, not what you hope it will be. Which is to say that there’s a balance between planning for the future and recognizing where you are today. And striking this balance is part of what makes a great entrepreneur – the ability to consider in all aspects of your business (sales, product development, engineering, etc.) the right mix of practical current reality and future aspiration.
May 18, 2010· 1 min read