I feel like an email cross-dresser – I use a Microsoft product on my Apple product to access my Google product.
I’m a venture capitalist. I like to say my job is to help and support entrepreneurs. I can play a leadership role, but my organization can’t be the leader.
If the crisis lasts moments, rapid action is critical. But if it’s simply the beginning of a broader issue, especially one where the root cause isn’t known yet, the worst thing a leader can do is act immediately.
I separate the world of startup communities into two constituencies – leaders and feeders. The leaders are entrepreneurs and the feeders everyone else.
I’m a strong believer that you can build great companies in time of both greed and fear. But you have to be paying attention and operating under the right assumptions. You don’t have to believe history repeats itself, but you should accept that history rhymes.
By definition, as a company scales rapidly, it adds people quickly.
While it’s trendy to outsource your accounting to a third party, once you hit a certain size, it’s dangerous.
Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.
Twitter has always been that refreshing place where I can quickly find out what is going on in my tech world. I follow mostly entrepreneurs and VCs – some who I know and some who I don’t know. I have a few companies in my feed. But no newspapers, no magazines, and no mainstream media.
When we raised the first Foundry Group fund in 2007, we took over 100 first meetings. We told our story several hundred times. As part of it was a slide called ‘Strategy.’ I still repeat the elements of that slide regularly, a decade later, as our core strategy has not changed.
December used to be very difficult for me. For many years, I fought the transition to the new year, was generally exhausted at the end of the year, and just wanted to hide. I described myself as a ‘cranky Jewish kid who felt left out by Christmas.’
If you aren’t going to make your revenue plan, it’s unlikely you’ll make your EBITDA or Net Income plan. You don’t even have to get complicated and look at Gross Margin or more derivative metrics – if you are off in Q1 and have any sort of growth expectations , you are going to miss for the year.
I believe that all men and women are created equal, but it took our country until 1920 to acknowledge this for women. And then it took until 1964, the year before I was born, to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. And same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015.
I’m glad I get to live in the United States of America.
‘Sunspring,’ the first known screenplay written by an AI, was produced recently. It is awesome. Awesomely awful. But it’s worth watching all ten minutes of it to get a taste of the gap between a great screenplay and something an AI can currently produce.
I have a long history with Kansas City.
I watched my parents act as completely equal partners in their relationship, and as a son to a woman I respect immensely, I never thought of gender inequality as a child.
So many companies talk about increasing the number of prospects at the top of the funnel, but they spend remarkably little time making sure actions are taken – on a daily basis – to make sure these prospects convert into paid users.
What I’m looking for in my interaction is critical thinking on the part of the person pitching to me.
My view was, if I didn’t like Boulder, I’d keep going west, except I never really wanted to live in the Bay Area.
Governments spend all their time trying to get big companies to relocate their headquarters, and they end up subsidizing the move with tax breaks. And companies that relocate their headquarters are often not meaningful job creators.
I don’t read newspapers or watch the news on TV, deliberately to avoid the noise.
My wife is a writer. She grew up in Alaska. She told me she was moving to Boulder and that I could come with her if I wanted to. We were married at the time, so I chose to come with her.
As a company grows from 25 to 50 to 100 to 200 to 500 to 1000 people, the characteristics of who is the very best talent in leadership roles will change. It’s rarely the case that your leadership team at 1000 people is the same leadership team you had a 25 people.
Ultimately, the goal is to use acquisitions to compress time on product development and get people on the team, especially in senior roles, who can help build out areas of the company they have experience in.
If you’re in a city where there’s no clear startup community, the goal is not raise a bunch of money to fund a nonprofit; the goal is not get your government involved. The goal is start finding the other entrepreneurial leaders who are committed to being in your city over the next 20 years.
Periodically, at the end of a conversation, someone will ask me, ‘Is there something I can do for you?’ I used to answer with ‘Do something that is helpful to something or someone in my world.’
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