Here’s one take on that ubiquitous question (ubiquitous at least for those of us who live outside of the bay area). The simple answer is Nerds and Money, but the more complex answer is much more amusing.

Link – http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

While search marketing is already a huge business, more and more companies each day are discovering the advantages of advertising directly to customers through search engines. Companies like that they can directly measure the impact of their spending – from the clicks they are generating all the way through the products they are selling as a result of those site visits and that they can quickly and easily scale up their spending on what’s working in their search campaigns. With different ad groups, ad copy and landing pages, search marketers can customize their campaigns to fit their business needs.

If there’s a downside to search, however, it’s that effectively managing search campaigns is extremely difficult. Even if you confine your efforts solely to Google the complexities of creating ad groups, generating keywords, pricing each keyword, creating deep links into your product catalogue, managing spend variants by day, figuring out broad match vs. phrase match vs exact match vs negative match, etc are daunting.

One of the ironies of search is that while technology of search itself is in many ways disaggregating the relationship between marketers and consumers (and bringing them directly together), the business of search itself isn’t something that can easily be disaggregated by technology in the same way.  Search is simply not something that lends itself well to machine automation. And while there are a few software platforms available for managing search campaigns (mostly focused on the high end of the market spending > $100k/month on search) these packages are primarily designed for people who are already search experts. It’s almost impossible to take search knowledge and put it into an algorithm. As a result, companies that lack this expertise are at a huge disadvantage in the search game (this is true of many agencies as well who use search marketing as a lead-in to offer other more lucrative services).

Today we’re launching Trada. And fundamentally changing the game in search marketing.

Trada has been working in stealth mode for the last 18 months to build a system that harnesses the power of a “crowd” of search experts to work on behalf of advertisers. The Trada system easily allows advertisers to upload campaign information and connect with hundreds of search experts. It’s not a referral site – the Trada experts work together, through the Trada platform, to create the broadest possible campaign for each advertiser. These experts get paid only for generating clicks and/or conversions for Trada advertisers (depending on whether a campaign is in pay per click or pay per action mode). We work in the middle to enable these campaigns and make our margin based on our search experts’ ability to beat your pre-determined CPC or CPA rates.

The company opened its system to a small group of advertisers in January 2009 as it worked out the specifics of the platform. Trada has served over 70 customers in that time period. The average campaign in the Trada system has over 100 ads (most proposed by Trada optimizers), 6,200 keywords and an average of more than 20 optimizers working on behalf of each advertiser. If you’re working in search marketing, these numbers blow you away. Advertisers can currently run campaigns – through a single Trada interface – on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

This company is near and dear to my heart, as I’ve been with CEO Niel Robertson and the rest of the Trada team from the very start of the business (and together with them am a co-founder of the company; read Niel’s post launching the company on the Trada blog). I’ve known Niel for almost 10 years now and one of our goals with Trada has been to step away from the traditional VC/CEO relationship. We’ve done that over the last 18 months of the business and developed an unusually close partnership – the initial result of which you see today. There’s a ton more to come with Trada. Stay tuned!

Learn more about the search revolution at www.trada.com.

I was sent the following a few days ago:

In order to give investors a sneak peak of what we’re up to, we’ve created a
short video (4 mins): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9fiEu_TBdU

I appreciate the effort behind stuff like this (as well as the novel thinking). 

While we’re on the topic, if there’s ever something you want me to take a look at, tag it to my del.icio.us account (for:slevine).

Just over 48 hours ago 72 people came together in Boulder Colorado to see if they could come up with a business idea and launch by midnight Sunday.  We started Friday night with a handful of ideas . . . winnowed the list down to the top 3 favorites . . . and picked one to run with.  Here’s the result:

The process of working on a business with 70 people in such a short period of time was amazing.  I’ll put up some of the notes I took throughout the weekend in a post tomorrow but you can see a running tally of the experience at www.startupweekend.com.  This was entrepreneurship on steroids and was as much about the social experiment of starting a business as it was about the idea itself (something lost on many of the comment authors on our TechCrunch posting, but not lost on anyone who actually participated). 

Check out what we accomplished, but know that this is just the tip of the iceberg…

As promised – a few thoughts on StartupWeekend now that I’ve had a chance to both get over my disappointment that we didn’t release anything on Monday morning and more importantly time to think about what worked and what didn’t work last weekend. There seems to be no lack of opinion on the subject (see the comments to the “Success and Failure” post on the StartupWeekend website and the mass of comments left on the TechCrunch article about the weekend or just do a Google search for StartupWeekend).

Overall, it was a great experience. We had an outstanding group of founders from a broad cross-section of Denver/Boulder technology companies. Andrew did a great job of facilitating the weekend without being too heavy handed (although see below for some ideas on where more structure might have benefitted the ultimate goal of the project). A lot of the people involved have posted on their blogs or elsewhere online that as a “Social Experiment” StartupWeekend was a success. I think what they mean is that we had a fun time, everyone contributed, and no-one wanted to kill anyone at the end of the weekend (which says something given that many people were operating on only a few hours sleep over the 50+ hours that the project was active). That said, if StartupWeekend is only a social experiment the concept will have pretty limited value (and a limited life – it’s fun to do once, but to make it a regular occurrence, there needs to be the realistic expectation that a ‘product’ will actually be released). Don’t get me wrong – I loved the ‘social experiment’ side of the weekend, but the goal of the project was to produce something in the period of time we were together (and capitalize on the buzz generated by the excitement around the process for the benefit of the company that was created). The journey was great, but we actually needed to get somewhere. I know Andrew wants to replicate the Boulder StartupWeekend elsewhere around the country – I’d love to see this happen and think what we learned last weekend will help make the effort in other cities more productive and ultimately more successful.

That said, VoSnap will launch – and soon. The project did live beyond the weekend and, after everyone got some sleep and returned to their Monday-Friday lives, there was a great deal of interest by the group in continuing with the project. Not just to the first launch, but beyond that (and potentially building a business around the project). When it’s up and working I’ll put up a note and link to the working site. It definitely says something both about the weekend and the group of people who participated that the project will live on beyond Monday. It’s emblematic of why the weekend was such a great experience.

Here are some summary thoughts on what worked, what didn’t work and what we might do differently when we do this again:

What worked:

• Picking the idea: We ended up with something that was realistic to do in a weekend and had the potential for legs beyond the two day project. Having a site where the founders could post ideas and doing an initial vote before we showed up on Friday night were keys to vetting the list before we even showed up (we spent around an hour picking the idea – that felt about right)
• Group dynamics: While there were plenty of type-a personalities in attendance, the group self organized really well and it was clear that people checked their egos at the door. It helped that this was a one weekend project (at least that was the thought going into it). A lot of work was done by these groups – much of it not visible to people following along on-line. PR, business development, marketing, etc. were all on their game and came up with plans/ideas that will serve the company well beyond Sunday night.
• Focusing on one project: When I looked around the room on Friday night I thought to myself “no way can this many people stay busy for the weekend”. Andrew held to his guns and insisted that we all work the same idea. He was right on – while a group of much more than this size probably wouldn’t work the weekend needs to be about ONE idea and the focus of the group needs to be singular in that respect.
• Quick meetings/quick decisions: Every hour we met for 7 minutes for an update. This is an incredibly effective way to communicate with a group w/o disrupting everyone for a long period of time. A few people have actually extended this idea beyond StartupWeekend to their day jobs. We were maniacal about keeping these short and as a result there was a lot of information conveyed at regular intervals in a very short period of time. Andrew also implemented a system of “quick votes” to make decisions (VoSnap would be perfect for this!) – the idea was to lay out the options, vote and move on. Quick votes allowed us to keep moving throughout the weekend.
• Buzz. StartupWeekend really took on a life of its own online last weekend. It started with David’s regular blog posts on www.startupweekend.com but also included the live video stream that was put up (which regularly had nearly 100 viewers), flickr photos and, of course, the TechCrunch posting. At the beginning of the weekend very few people outside of the Boulder tech community knew what StartupWeekend was and VoSnap didn’t even exist – by the end of the weekend there were hundreds of mentions online of both and tens of thousands of hits to the VoSnap site (there are more than a thousand people now on the VoSnap mailing list).

What didn’t work/what to do differently:

• The product. I guess I have to start here. On Monday we had a lot of things working, but the product wasn’t one of them (still isn’t – at least not publically). I think we should have put up whatever we had on Monday morning. On the one hand, this would have been fodder for those online who were down on the idea of creating a product over the weekend. On the other hand, it would have been true to the idea of the weekend (to create something in 2 days).
• The development process. We had a lot of great developers, but we made a bad choice of dev environments (at least in the context of putting something out in a weekend) and as a result we ended up scrapping a lot of the initial work that was done on Saturday on the product. In retrospect, we should have appointed a dev lead ahead of time, probably had the development team meet before the weekend to review the likely top candidates (based on the pre-weekend voting) and make the choice of development platforms ahead of time. The decision wouldn’t have been rushed and it would have been more well thought out. In the end, we made some choices that might have been right for the long term success of the product, but made it difficult for us to complete the first rev in time to launch on Monday. There were also a few among us that recognized this early (David, Andrew and I had this conversation on Saturday) but we (wrongly) decided to let it go.
• More developers. Out of 70 people we had probably 7 hard core developers. This ratio was too light. Many of our early stage companies are between 30% and 50% development staff. While on top of the 7 dev types, we had a handful of other people that would probably count as “engineering” in the numbers I just quoted, this imbalance set us up for some challenges (not the least of which was that development of the business plan, pr, marketing, etc pretty quickly got very far ahead of what we could do in a short period of time and probably contributed at least some to feature creep).
• Communication after the fact. During the weekend we did a great job of communicating with the outside world. Through emails, blogs, streaming video, flickr, etc, we were very open about what we were up to. A surprising amount of work has taken place since Monday, but we’ve been totally mum about it beyond the founder group (to give you a sense of the volume of email traffic, I’ve created a separate inbox just for VoSnap related email so I can see it all in one place).

I’ll end with a few pictures to give you a sense of the environment we were working in (two views of the main room and one of a stand-up product meeting).

Community is one of the driving forces at Foundry Group. We’ve kept ourselves intentionally small as a firm so we can keep our close connection with our portfolio founders from due diligence, to investment, and throughout the lifecycle of our investments. We strongly believe that fostering a mesh network model, which allows our network members to interact directly with one another, is the best way for all of us to learn, develop, and thrive together (vs the more traditional hub and spoke model that most firms end up falling into with partners as gatekeepers). Keeping this model improving and evolving is so important to us, especially in the current climate of social and economic change. We want our programming to be impactful, relevant, and able to serve our community in a way that promotes growth, development, collaboration, and ultimately successful company and fund outcomes. In light of this, we’re excited to announce that we’re hiring a Head of Network to expand and develop Foundry’s network programs. The full job description is below. If you or anyone you know fits the bill, please reach out to us at apply@foundrygroup.com. And please help us get the word out!

We’re looking for a leader to create a more robust, dynamic, and connected network program at Foundry Group. The Foundry Network, as we’ve been calling it, encompasses founders, CEOs, executives, general partners of our underlying venture capital fund investments, limited partners (our investors as well as other investors in the funds we have investments in), and other members of our ecosystem. We regularly bring together members of this community to connect, share, and learn from each other. 

We know we’re just scratching the surface for how powerful this network can be. We’re looking for someone with the vision, background, experience, and skills to help us form the next chapter for The Foundry Network and to continue to grow and adapt how we work with our ecosystem in ways that support and empower our portfolio of companies and VC funds.

ABOUT US
Foundry Group is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies and venture fund managers. Our passion is working alongside entrepreneurs to give birth to new technologies and to build those technologies into industry-leading companies. We also seek to leverage our experience and relationships as fund managers to help the next generation of venture firms create industry-leading investment businesses. We invest in companies and funds across North America.

SOME INITIAL THOUGHTS ON THE DETAILS OF THE POSITION
We’ve put a lot of thought into the development of our network and need help taking it into the future. Below are a few ideas we have about this position and the future of The Foundry Network. We’re looking for someone who can help us craft the vision, not just execute on ours. So take this as a rough draft. 

As Head of Network you will participate in our weekly partner meetings and be a member of the senior team, which includes our CFO and General Counsel as well as all of the Foundry Group partners. You’ll have access to and know pretty much everything that’s taking place across The Network and our portfolio. At its core, this role will help strengthen connections between the people with whom we work- we believe strongly in mesh networks, not hub and spoke models. We are also excited to continue to expand The Network and the work we do in this area, such as in talent sourcing, data sharing, and community support. 

We’ve historically engaged our network through active digital communication channels, in-person events, virtual events, webinars, and small group meet-ups. Many of these we’ll likely want to continue. Some we may together decide don’t further our key goals any more and will stop doing. And, most importantly, there are opportunities to expand beyond the base that we’ve created to support our portfolio in new and creative ways. 

A LITTLE ABOUT YOU
It’s hard to put into words exactly what we’re looking for because the right person for this role could come from a number of different professional backgrounds. But there are a few things that we know will be important to success in this role and our firm culture. 

This is a relationship-centric role and we are looking for someone who has a demonstrated aptitude for building and maintaining professional relationships. You have built your own network and are driven by helping others succeed and connecting the dots between people and companies. You have connections in and around the tech industry and have interacted with executives at a senior level in prior jobs and experiences.

At Foundry, we are not top-down managers. Our Head of Network will need to be comfortable working independently and own this core functionality of our business You will be included in and supported by the core team, but the role is primarily self-directed. While we will provide input and help you understand our goals for The Network, there is a lot of room for creativity and expansion. 

In addition to creativity and vision, the ability to execute and achieve high-quality outputs are imperative for success in this role. Every senior role at Foundry – including our partners – is an individual contributor. We work collaboratively and in close coordination with one-another, but we do our own work and, while we have people on board to help with implementing events, much of the work of the Head of Network will be not just coming up with ideas, but seeing them through personally. 

We live by a #givefirst mentality at Foundry, and we hope you can show us how you’ve done the same. 

Finally, we want to be clear that this role isn’t a pathway to an investment role at Foundry. We want you to be excited about this role and this position. We think it’s a great opportunity to work alongside us as we continue to build out the Foundry Network.

EXPERIENCE
There is not one particular background that fits this role and we are open to candidates across the board. Given the autonomy of the role, we believe an individual with at least 7 years of professional work experience and who has previously held a senior level role will thrive. We’re focused on how your experiences drive your interest in this position and how they will contribute to your success in this role and at Foundry.

SOME DETAILS
Our firm is based in Boulder, but we’re open to you living anywhere, so long as (once travel resumes) you’re able to be here from time to time (most of our in person events are in Boulder, for example). This is a senior position and will be compensated as such. Additionally, we offer a generous benefits package (fully paid health insurance, along with a number of other benefits). 

Foundry Group is an equal opportunity employer. We strongly encourage and seek applications from candidates of all backgrounds and identities, across race, color, ethnicity, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, martial status, pregnancy or parental status, or disability. We are committed to creating a supportive and inclusive workplace. 

NEXT STEPS
If you’ve read this post and think, “this is me!”, we’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to be creative and choose a medium that allows you to express yourself and give us a sense for whether you are a fit for this role. To apply, please contact us at apply@foundrygroup.com. We’d love to hear from you by the end the day on Friday, November 6, 2020 if you’d like to be considered.

David Jackson, who is the author of The Internet Stock Blog (as well as a series of other blogs on investing and technology), was kind enough to add me to his recommended VC blog list. As part of our exchange about this I noticed that he hadn’t ‘burned’ his feeds through Feedburner (which is a Mobius backed company). I asked him why he hadn’t done this and he replied with some really good questions about their service.  I thought I would reprint them here, along with my responses with the idea that if David, as a sophisticated blogger, had these questions other people probably do as well.

David writes:
I’ve resisted using Feedburner, because:
1. It’s not clear to me how to migrate my current RSS feeds to them (without asking everyone to re-subscribe)
2. The company’s web site gives very little information about the service
3. I’m nervous entrusting my RSS feed to a company that might try to monetize it in future in ways I don’t want
4. I expect that Google’s RSS ads will end up providing fairly rich stats about the RSS feeds anyway

Here’s my response (actually in two e-mails, which I’ve combined here): 1. If you have control over the http directives on your site you can burn your feed without any change to your subscribers. See this post from the Feedburner forum http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=3.

2. I totally agree – their site pretty much sucks. I expect this will take some time to change, but they’re starting to hire up (they were 5 guys when we made our investment – we’re up to 10 and growing).

3. I get the concern, but can tell you that they absolutely won’t do anything to your feed that you don’t request. Here’s Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo’s post on the financing that talks about their business model – http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2?m=68. They are going to make money by managing feeds, by offering premium statistics and by taking a cut of ads in feeds (but ads will only be inserted in feeds that sign up for them).

4. Google stats I think will only provide you stats on the ads themselves, not the feeds. FB’s total stats pro package provides pretty in depth info on what people are reading and where they are coming from (you can trial this package on their site). Also with Google ads you have to have edit the source template, which is a pain (and something not everyone is able to do) and also means that you have to insert feeds into all of your posts (given the way most readers work, FB generally only inserts feeds in a portion of feeds to keep the content to ad ratio reasonable).

Don’t know if I convinced David to move over to Feedburner or not, but he knows I’ll keep on him . . .

Look for announcements soon from Feedburner on some very large feeds now using their service.

UPDATE: I received a trackback ping from Dadu Mimram writing on Strategic Board Blg – a great perspective from a Feedburner user and much more eloquent than my original post.  See Dadu’s post here.

eBay jumped on the App Exchange bandwagon with an announcement from their development conference this weekend of a bunch of new APIs and development tools. This was a pretty broad announcement – Shoping.com, ProStores and even PayPal (who had traditionally been relatively closed) are participating in the effort – and expands their existing developer efforts significantly (see their developer site for more information). API’s are certainly nothing new – they are common ways for companies to allow access to their systems – but it seems to me that application exchanges are the new ‘it’ thing to do for platform companies (Salesforce.com, Google, eBay, etc.). This is a pretty new concept – companies in the past were extremely protective of their platforms and wanted to control almost every aspect of access to their systems (in this paradigm “open system” often meant ‘we’ll let you use our proprietary scripting engine to ‘develop’ to our platform). Companies have loosened this view in more years and moved to more open API’s (sometimes through a developer program; more recently completely open to anyone who wants to access them). The AppExchange idea is the next logical extension of this (the “Web 2.0 model for development”, if you will) and makes perfect sense: open your system, give support and help to those that want to develop extensions to it and give them a single home where users of your software can find these extensions. Its free development work, makes your platform that much more powerful and provides a nice sourcing ground for potential acquisitions.

Now we’ll just have to wait and see if the more embedded platform players swallow their pride enough to do the same. Are you listening Oracle?

One of the big uptrends in technology is the rise of DevOps. Whether your organization is a large enterprise or a fledgling startup, DevOps can help.  We have seen this first hand in many of our portfolio companies and the market in general.  This is why we are excited to be working with Eric Norlin and the Gluecon team and DevOps.com in bringing Camp DevOps to Boulder on May 20^th.

Camp DevOps is a follow up to the successful DevOps conference we help host last fall here. That conference was very well received and we think Camp DevOps will be even better.  Held at CU Boulder Atlas building, it is a full day chocked full of DevOps. There will be keynotes, technical tracks, business tracks, panel discussions and something called “Hello World” which are hands on technical training sessions.

The lineup of speakers for the show is great with keynotes from Sanjiv Sharma of IBM (and author of DevOps for Dummies), Rajat Bhargava of JumpCloud and Howard Diamond of MobileDay. Plus we’ll be there! You can see a full lineup of speakers and register at http://CampDevOps.com

The show is only $49.99 and that includes breakfast and lunch.  If you are already going to Glue admission is free. Also if you buy the admission for Camp DevOps you receive a $100 credit for Gluecon as well.

This will be a great event for the Boulder community on a subject that is near and dear to many of our companies. Hope to see you there!

Elizabeth Macbride and I wrote an OpEd piece that was posted on CNBC this morning addressing what we believe to be significant shortcomings of the CARES Act and the SBA’s Payroll Protection Program (PPP). Specifically how the stimulus is failing to meet the needs of small businesses around America in this time of crisis. This is urgent and needs to be addressed as soon as possible. I’d encourage you to click through to read the full piece, but below I’ve outlined the key recommendations we make at the end of the OpEd:

1. Set up individual loan funds

2. Urge big business to pay receivables faster

3. Appoint a clear leader

4. Provide more clarity

5. Expand the program