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
23 days until Glue
As you can see from the date of my last post, I’ve been a bit tied up. Not to worry – new content coming soon. Including some more thoughts leading up to our Glue conference. In the meantime here’s a repost of some thoughts from Eric Norlin as we near 3 weeks out from Glue. Yes, we are “rounding the bend” — 23 days until Gluecon. I feel like I’ve droned on endlessly about how great it’s going to be (I probably have), so let me just take a different approach by highlighting some things I’m looking forward to — starting at the END of Day 2 and working backwards a bit. …
May 3, 2010· 2 min read
How Trada Works – Niel Robertson’s Knitting Video
[Updated with the new video link/embed] You may not have realized this, but Niel Robertson is not only building a unique SEM marketplace, but he’s also a passionate knitter. The video below shows off both of these passions and is well worth watching. On a more serious note, I’m a big fan of companies producing these sorts of fun but informative videos. People respond so much better to highly visual, straightforward media such as this.
April 14, 2010· 1 min read
Stealth mode is back. Long live stealth mode!
Recently Dan Frommer over at the Silicon Alley Insider wrote about the reemergence of “stealth mode”. While I’d argue that it never really went away in the first place, it seems that more people are seeing the virtues of staying under the radar as they build the basics of their business (despite TechCrunch’s declaration that stealth was stupid…). After some hazing from my Foundry partners about several of the companies that I work with remaining silent about their operations (and in some cases off of our website so as not to attract attention to the fact that they’ve been funded) I wrote a post on the topic here. …
April 8, 2010· 3 min read
Are you “under-promising and over-delivering”?
Someone at a meeting I was in a few weeks ago made a statement to the effect that he valued management (sales management in particular) following this mantra. I couldn’t disagree more. While it makes for a great VC cliché it seems to me that it’s not a good plan to set an expectation with companies that you work with that you want them to essentially lie to you about the results they expect. Following this down the management line – from board to CEO to VP of Sales to Sales Manager to Salespeople – and you’ll completely cloud your view of what’s really happening in a business (where at every step of the way each person tries to set up an expectation that is lower than what they actually believe they deliver). …
April 7, 2010· 1 min read
Medialets Announces Universal Mobile Ad SDK
Earlier this week, Medialets made a significant announcement: the launch of their universal mobile ad SDK. This is an initiative that the company has been working on for months and is truly groundbreaking in the industry. The Medialets universal ad SDK allows app developers to have complete flexibility in how they manage the ad inventory available through their applications. Publishers can serve Medialets rich media ads, ads from other mobile ad networks as well as ads from their own first party ad server – all from one SDK. The Medialets SDK is already up and running with major publishers (Washington Post, NPR, Variety, Fandango, etc.). …
April 1, 2010· 1 min read
Have you registered for Glue yet?
I can’t help myself at this time of year but to remind you that you probably haven’t registered for Glue yet and that you need to get on it. Glue is one of three conferences that Foundry helps facilitate with Eric Norlin (the others are Defrag and Blur, the latter of which is still in development but coming this summer). Glue is an in depth discussion about the web as a platform and the future in a world where most (all?) apps live in the cloud (either public or private). Once again, Eric has put together a fantastic agenda (you can see the full list of topics here). This year’s speakers include: …
March 22, 2010· 2 min read
The new era of venture capital
You already know the about the state of the venture capital industry in 2009: venture investing down (32%), exits down (14%; slowest exit year for VC backed companies since 1995), fundraising down (56%), IPO’s almost non-existent (8 venture backed IPOs in 2009). It’s a bleak picture for the industry overall, even if there’s a group of us that continue to believe this is a great market in which to be investing (and it clearly is). These stats got me thinking about the future of the venture industry and I thought I’d offer up some thoughts on where we might be headed. …
March 22, 2010· 3 min read