Years ago I wrote a post about M&A negotiations in which I stressed the importance of using listening in the negotiation process. Last week I was talking about the importance of listening with Micah (not in the context of M&A – just in the context of life in general) when he said to me that he felt that listening, like many things in business, was an acquired skill (i.e., the harder you practice it the better you get).

I couldn’t agree more. There’s a real art to listening effectively and completely – one that’s harder to do effectively than it seems but can be pretty obvious to everyone around you when you’re not. I had a colleague once who had a very specific verbal tick – he’d start saying “right, right” when someone else was talking – a sure indication that he had something that he desperately wanted to say and that he had completely shut down listening. Eventually I figured this out (and even mentioned it to him) – and stopped talking when he did that as I knew I was just wasting my time until he got to get whatever it was he felt he needed to say off his chest.  It really sticks out to me as a reminder of both how clear it is to those around you when you’re not listening and how important it is to stop getting ahead of a conversation, shut down your need to respond to every point in real time and to listen to what’s being said around you.

Last year was my first joining Walker on his annual “Colorado Hajj” trip riding from the state capital building in Downtown Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (a 14,000ft mountain west of town) and back. It’s a pretty insane ride, but extremely fun and the kind of challenge that once you’ve tried it, it’s hard not to crave doing it again. This year’s ride came significantly earlier in the season’s than last year, meaning that legs and lungs were that much less prepared for the massive undertaking. Last year, Walker and I did the ride alone, but this year we had a gang of 8 to make things more interesting (and provide better drafting during the early ride). To give you a sense for what we did, check out the ride elevation profile below. You’ll see we stopped at mile 100 on the way back – more on that below.

 

Here’s the chronology of the trip for those interested:

3:40am: Roll-out from Walkers house in Wash Park (just outside of Downtown Denver)

4:00am: Capital Building. We met up at the state capital building to officially hit the “5280 step” (the step leading up to the capital, pictured below, is officially one mile above sea level). Weather was surprisingly balmy – probably 65 degrees with almost no wind.

5:58am: Top of Lookout Mountain. Just outside of Golden we hit our first real climb up Lookout Mountain. Last year we rode Lookout just as the sun was rising. This year, riding so close to summer solstice, we were riding in the morning sunlight. The top of Lookout Mountain is fantastic – we followed a rolling road for a few miles with great vistas west to the divide before descending slightly to a quick ride along I-70.

From I-70 we took the frontage road that descends down to the river and then up and over Floyd Hill. We eventually ended up on the old highway 6, which is now a bike path that leads into Idaho Springs (the Scott Lancaster Memorial Path)

7:44am: Idaho Springs.  We stopped in Idaho Springs for a well earned breakfast burrito. From here it was to be about 30 miles – all uphill – to the top of Evans.

10:19: Echo Lake Lodge. 14 miles from the summit of Mt. Evans is the Echo Lake Loge and the fee station to the road up the mountain. We stopped at the Lodge for a refill of water (they couldn’t be nicer to cyclists at the lodge) and heard reports from the top of high winds and snow flurries. Still, undaunted, we layered up with clothing and figured we’d head up as far as we could.

The weather up wasn’t as bad as the reports had indicated and while cloudy and somewhat brisk, the riding was smooth and, for me, relatively comfortable despite my being the only person in the group not riding a triple or compact gear set-up (although I do run a 12-27 in back for a small amount of climbing relief). From Summit Lake we headed up the final 5 miles of steep climbing and switchbacks to the summit of the mountain.

 

1:32 Mt. Evans Summit! The time gaps here should give you some sense of the difficulty of the riding, but persistence is key on this trip and at just after 1:30 we topped out at on the Summit. The weather was starting to turn, but we had time for a nice shot by the trail sign (that’s me, Bo and Pat in the picture below).

With the weather quickly deteriorating (it was snowing when we took off from the summit) we started back down. By this time the snow was really falling and the roads were completely soaked. Unfortunately breaking caused my hands to freeze up and I spent most of the very fast ride down trying to keep my fingers from going completely numb (think ambient temperature in the 30’s and speeds of 35MPH through the rain). Towards the bottom it was actually enjoyable (after the feeling returned in my fingers and toes) but at the top I was seriously considering whether I could hitchhike down.

2:45  Back at Echo Lake Lodge. After about 45 minutes of the coldest, wettest descent of my life I was back at the Echo Lake Lodge. Fortunately the Lodge is heated and we warmed up with some lunch and hot beverages. The rain was really coming down now and we decided that we’d ride up and over Squaw Pass and down into Evergreen and then make a decision about whether to call in a ride.

The ride down from the top of Squaw Pass (which wasn’t a very long ascent, although my legs were not happy with me at the time) was extremely fast and extremely fun. In hindsight I might have backed off a bit given the rain but I was very focused on hitting Evergreen and meeting up with the sag wagon we had called in to come pick us up.

4:45 Evergreen. Definitely worse for rain ware but happy to be off the bike, we called it quits in Evergreen and grabbed a ride back into Denver.

The final ride stats according to the Garmin GPS that we had along were as follows:

Mileage: 100.48

Time: 9:42hrs

Total Elevation Gain: 13,203

Max Elevation: 14,179

And despite the cold and rain, we’ll all be doing it again next year. Care to join?

 

 

 

Clear announced last night that they had shut down. The note on their website says the following:

Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.

At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations.

Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been

unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor

to continue operations.

It goes on further to say that customers will not be able to receive a refund “because of it’s financial condition”. With over 250,000 customers (each paying between $100 and $200 annually) it’s a little surprising to me that they couldn’t figure out a way to make this work. I suspect (as does my partner Jason Mendelson). that the airports were charging more than I would have realized to make Clear lanes available.

Whatever happened it’s a real bummer. I know many people thought that Clear lanes were somehow elitist (pay more and get through security faster) but as someone who travels constantly, it was an extremely small price to pay (both monetarily and in loss of privacy) to ensure not just faster entry into airports but consistency in the time it took to get to my gate. I’ll miss it and hope someone will pick up the assets and get the program up and running again.

I was reminded once again this week of the importance of the deliberative process vs. outcome. Or perhaps better put, I was reminded that sometimes the best outcome is simply the deliberation itself.

In business one is often extremely focused on solving problems and moving on – sometimes at the expense of valuing the discussion around the problem. This week I was in several meetings where instead of pushing through to a quick decision on something we stopped and had a longer conversation. In one case this resulted in people having the chance to voice an opinion about a matter that we almost blew by without realizing that there were such strong views around the table – eventually reaching what I think was clearly the right decision, but something that had we not stopped to talk about would have been pushed off and not dealt with for at least another month. In the second case a similar discussion took an unexpected turn as we realized that the answer we were trying to come to wasn’t actually to the question that we needed to be asking.

In both cases we could have easily move off of a topic before really talking about it because there seemed to be an easy and fast (although in hindsight incorrect) answer. If all we were searching for was that answer we would have completely missed the boat.

There’s a clip that’s been making the rounds in the last week of a Tom Brokaw spot from the mid-90’s on "the Internet". I love the quick clip with Eric Schmidt (then of Sun) and the casual walk around with Bill Gates.  I also really like the pitch for the IBM notebook that’s "4 pounds".

The amazing thing to consider is not how quaint some of the technology appears in this video, but how far we’ve come so quickly. This video is only 15 years old. After the video ended I sat back in my office for a bit and considered how pretty much all of the things that are state of the art right now will seem as quaint as the technology in the video (and if they’ll seem as outdated as the technology in the video). Mind blowing.

Most early stage companies feel stretched. While they don’t lack for ideas, they typically lack for resources (money, people, time, etc.). In my book this is a good thing. Scarcity of resources forces starker choices and ultimately results in better decision making. I sometimes joke with companies about the occasional over-funded competitor and tell them to use their relative lack of funding as a “competitive advantage”. What I mean is that lacking endless resources (or seemingly endless resources – in many cases even gobs of money eventually runs out) will force them to focus on what’s important, not what everything that’s possible, probable or half way interesting.

To me this discipline results in better decisions and ultimately better companies.

One thing that comes up early on in many of the companies that I work with is the question of how to build a framework through which to make decisions about product and business direction.  Because it’s easy to get sidetracked (or just blinded by all of the possibilities out there) I often suggest to companies that they come up with a “mantra”. It’s oversimplified and doesn’t work for every situation (and of course needs to be revisited as the business changes over time) but the idea is to boil the key drivers of the company down to a sentence or two – maybe some broad categories that define they most important areas of focus or possibly something that looks like a statement of purpose. When a question of priority or direction comes up you can then bounce that idea off your mantra and see what happens.  For example – “will this gain us more publishers” “will this make our advertisers more successful?” “will this help travelers share their experiences better” etc. I’ve found that doing this up front helps streamline decision making and have been in many conversations where we’re grappling with how to prioritize a series of tasks where we throw them up against our two or three mantras and what falls out is a clear priority of what needs to be done right away, what can be done later and what shouldn’t be done at all.

Like any advice, you can’t take this one to the extreme, but particularly early on in a company, or when you have a specific near to medium term goal, this kind of exercise can help provide a great framework for decision making.

I tweeted today about conference I spoke at this morning on the subject of the role of social media in venture capital and private equity (not from an investment perspective, but how VC and PE professionals can use social media – blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. – to be more successful investors; more on that idea in a separate post).  I joked in two tweets after the event:

“one person in today’s crowd (of 150) had a twitter account. i definitely had my work cut out for me!”

and

“forgot to mention that i was also the only person in the room wearing jeans (not that this fact was all that surprising to me)…”

The 2nd inspired Theo Skye from Medialets to put together what he’s calling the “Tweetire Ratio”. See below:

In a reminder to both follow my own 10 minute rule advice and to be more careful blogging on 4 hours sleep, it turns out that I misattributed the Bits Blog article I pointed to in my last post on young vs. old VCs to the Journal instead of the Times.  Apologies on that one. I just corrected it, but it was worth noting in it’s own post (and no – this doesn’t count as today’s post!).

There’s a great post up on the NYT Bits Blog that asks “Do Young Venture Capitalists Have an Advantage?”  While established (i.e., older) venture capitalists have more name recognition and therefore theoretically access to better deal flow, younger VCs are closer to the technology and have more in common with today’s set of technology entrepreneurs – according to the article – which makes them have an advantage in today’s venture market.

This is a great question and one that I think about a lot as I consider ways to be a better venture capitalist myself. In fact, one of the reasons I started this blog was to shed light on the progress of an individual VC as I rose in the business. As part of this I try to think introspectively about what makes a great venture capitalist and how one hones these skills. Seeing the post on the NYT blog seems like a great opportunity to dive into this question again. And the Times has it wrong in my view – they are playing off of a stereotype which may have some general applicability but misplaces the attribute.

Age is not the defining attribute of a good (or bad) venture capitalist – it’s drive. And while there’s some correlation between being a younger VC (which in our business at the partner level is generally late-30’s through mid-40’s) it’s just not the differentiator. In my view all great VCs have drive. And while having drive won’t make you a great VC, not having it will almost certainly leave you behind. I think the Times is mistaking age for this hunger to work, learn and stay current on technology that characterizes the drive of great VCs. It’s true that many people who have been in the venture business for a while lack this drive and it’s also true that many younger VCs that I know have an incredible desire to work hard and succeed but there are plenty of “experienced” VCs that have been at it for 15 years that still wake up every morning charged up for their day and spend their weeks crisscrossing the country in search of new ideas (my partner Brad comes to mind – he’s by no means “older” at only 43, but he has been in the VC business for a long time and without question has no lack of drive or work ethic). 

I may be over-generalizing but in my world view there are Old School VCs and New School VCs.  Old School VCs are partners/firms that prefer to sit back in their offices, have entrepreneurs come to them, invest only in their back yard and show up at monthly board meetings to offer their wisdom. New School VCs are out in the technology community, seek out new trends and companies, engage with the tech ecosystem (both start-ups and more established companies), invest where their investment focus takes them, aren’t afraid to travel and generally work significantly harder than the stereotype of a venture capitalist. The former aren’t necessarily old, they’re just old school. Likewise the latter aren’t necessarily young, they just aren’t resting on their laurels (or don’t have them yet).

When I think about what we’re trying to accomplish at Foundry Group (and what my friends at similar firms like USV, Spark, True, HW12, etc.) are trying to accomplish I don’t define our style of investing and managing our firm based of our ages. I think about how much my partners and I enjoy our work, how much we care about being successful and how hard we’re willing to work to be so. That drive is not a trait of a young or old venture capitalist – that the trait of successful venture capitalists.