A post a day
I’ll admit (since it should be obvious to anyone who follows this blog) that I’ve done a terrible job this year of blogging consistently. I’m sure that much of it has to do with my schedule, but then again there are a lot of people who blog regularly who are plenty busy, so that’s not such a great excuse. I suspect that much of my problem is that I’ve just gotten out of the habit of regular blogging. What’s doubly frustrating from my end is that one of my explicit goals for the year for myself was to “blog more consistently”. So far, not so good on that front. …
June 10, 2009· 1 min read
Medialets
Today over on the Foundry Group blog, we announced an investment in Medialets – a mobile analytics and advertising company that helps mobile application developers track usage and other statistics about their applications and provides technology that enables them to monetize those applications via advertising. I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about Foundry’s “thematic” investing approach in the past (here’s the key post to read if you haven’t and you’re interested). It surprises people however, when they hear us talk about some of the investments we’ve made in online advertising not as “advertising” but as part of our glue theme. Specifically we view advertising through the lens of connective technologies – those that help advertisers connect with users and remove friction from the overall system (both AdMeld and Lijit are examples of companies in the Foundry portfolio that fit into this line of thinking). …
May 12, 2009· 3 min read
Foundry Group Invests in Gist
Today Foundry Group announced that we’ve invested in Gist and I couldn’t be more excited about what they are working on (see our blog post here; Gist’s post here). Gist has developed a powerful product that helps users find and sort information about the people, places and companies that are meaningful to them (“where your inbox meets the web”) . It’s an implicit service – they use information contained in your inbox, calendar and contacts to determine the strength of various connections and surface both public and private information about topics that are both timely and relevant for you. For example for an upcoming meeting Gist will organize not only news stories and social media mentions of the company and/or people you’re meeting with, but also organizes all of your correspondence with people from that organization (separating out email, attachments, etc.). I use it every day to help me sift through the mass of data and information that’s important to me (see my post on that subject from a few weeks ago here). For Foundry, the problem Gist is attempting to solve is right at the intersection of Email and Implicit Web – two themes that we’ve been involved with for many years. …
May 5, 2009· 2 min read
Subtle signs of change
The initial signs of hope in a market are often just the sense that things are swinging in the right direction. This is why measures such as “consumer sentiment” are so important to the outlook of an economy – when people think things are going well, they often do (and because consumers power over 70% of our economy how people are thinking about spending has a pretty material impact on how the economy actually does). …
May 4, 2009· 3 min read
Glue is coming together nicely!
I can’t promise that this will be my last pre-conference post on Glue, but I can promise that if you’re not planning on attending the conference you’re going to be missing out on a great event. To give you a sense of who is coming (other than our great group of speakers), below is a list of some of the companies and organizations that have people already registered for the event: …
April 23, 2009· 1 min read
Sam Zell at CU!
Reposting from my partner Jason Mendelson’s blog about an upcoming event at CU Boulder featuring Sam Zell. This will be a great event. In the continuing Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, next week Sam Zell will be visiting the university. April 22nd, at noon in the large (Boulder NewTech Meetup) courtroom at the law school. More info here. It is free, but you must register, so keep that in mind. Sam is always an interesting interviewee and speaker and even more so this year with his recent sale of Equity Office Property and sell of the Chicago Cubs.
April 15, 2009· 1 min read
Hit me with your best pitch (@ glue)
Brad, Eric and I came up with the idea yesterday we’re calling Pitch Brad and Seth at Glue. The concept is pretty simple: if you’re an entrepreneur who is attending Glue (and you should be attending Glue) and you have a great business idea you’re working on and you’d like to get feedback from a few VCs (that would be Brad and me), we’d love to see you. Here’s what you have to do: …
April 2, 2009· 2 min read
How I keep track of information
I get this question all the time from friends and colleagues. Between portfolio companies, prospective investments, our investment themes, my partners, family and other topics that interest me, there’s a lot of information in my universe that I need to track. And this information ranges from blog posts, to tweets to mainstream press articles. It’s a lot to pay attention to (not to mention all of the individual blogs I follow ….). For a while I was using Google Alerts but 1) there wasn’t a great way to organize them (they just showed up when they showed up – as individual “hits”); 2) they seemed to be missing a ton of information; 3) at least 2/3rds of what came through was old news (i.e., someone had made a minor change to a page which caused the Google crawler to mark it as ‘new’); 4) there was no history, tracking, etc; and 5) they were clogging up my inbox. I could go on, but if you’re a heavy user of Google Alerts, I’m sure you’re already shaking your head up and down in sympathy. …
April 2, 2009· 4 min read
Don’t be caught on the sidelines
On my drive in this morning I was trying to think of reasons for you to NOT come to Glue…and came up completely blank. Glue is a unique chance to engage about some of the most current topics surrounding web technology with a national audience. Come talk with George Reese about securing cloud infrastructure (he has an upcoming O’Rielly book on the subject); hear about OAuth, OpenID and how they play into web architectures and services from Andrew Nash (PayPal) and Danny Kolke (etelos); debate the role of XMPP with Peter Stain-Andre, Jack Moffitt and Seth Fitsimmons (3 XMPP heavyweights); rub shoulders with Mitch Kapor (uber-angel/advisor, founder of Lotus Development Corp); geek out about cloud databases with Alex Iskold (AdaptiveBlue/ReadWriteWeb) and Stu Charleton (Elastra); and much much more (see the full agenda). …
April 1, 2009· 2 min read
dotting i’s and crossing t’s
Will Herman’s post yesterday on the challenges of co-CEO’s reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest. Many businesses run loose and fast in their early days. And lets face it, the kind of people who are drawn to starting companies often aren’t process people – they are creative thinkers. While that’s part of the fun of early stage companies, don’t forget that there’s a side to what you are doing that needs to be properly documented and orderly. It’s not just Mark Zuckerberg who has founder problems – I’ve seen many business partnerships with the best intentions disintegrate, where their founders who were no longer seeing eye to eye, had to work out (or not work out as the case may be) the details of their split. And while I’m certainly not your lawyer, I’d strongly recommend that even if you are starting your company with your childhood best friend who you just got out of the army with that you put together at least a basic set of documents that will cover not only the formation of the company itself (which most people don’t tend to forget…) but also clarifies who owns what, what – if any – vesting there might be on your founders stock, what IP is owned by the company (and that the work you are doing together is company property, not individual property), etc, etc. …
March 20, 2009· 2 min read