Brad Feld

Month: January 2009

Amy is in Mexico on vacation with her sisters and I’ve been spending most of the weekend in bed.  Sleeping.  I twisted my ankle running on Tuesday and had an intense week so I think I’ve come down with a strange sleeping sickness that I’ll call “the ankle twist.” 

I did manage to read through my RSS feeds this morning and found some good stuff for you.

Forecasting Sales in 2009: Will Herman is a semi-retired spectacular entrepreneur and CEO.  He’s also an old friend who has put up with me since 1984.  Whenever he writes something on sales (or selling) I read it carefully.  So should you.

Creating Silos: Eric Norlin is blogging up a storm around his ideas for the Glue Conference.  His latest post talks about the endless proliferation of application and data silos in the enterprise and on the web – and what can be done about it.  Glue is happening on May 12-13 in Denver, Colorado – get sticky and register now – it’s only $395 (use the code “early1” and get $50 off.)

Some Company Rules: Walter Knapp, the COO of Lijit, espouses some rules for managers and non-managers.  I particularly like #589: No one is ever too busy to return an email.

Don’t hide behind your board: David Cohen talks why a CEO should never start any sentence with “The board said …” or “The board decided …”

WordCamp Denver (Feb 28th, 2009): WordCamp in coming to Denver for the first time, on February 28th.  Matt Mullenweg will be keynoting.  Alex King, one of Colorado’s WordPress developers extraordinaire, will be presenting on the Carrington Theme Framework. 

What makes a great salesman? Pete Warden is most of his way on his migration from LA to Boulder.  While he’s quick to state that he “really suck(s) at selling”, I think he’s protesting a little too much.  He has a great expose on why Ron Popeil (the “I can sell you anything infomercial guy”) is so good at selling.

It Doesnt Take Much: Micah Baldwin explores whether or not the Boulder tech scene is like high school and – if it is – what you can do to break into the clique of your choice.  One option – just email me.  Remember Walter’s rule #589.

Now I’m heading back upstairs to try to finish reading Daemon before I fall asleep again.


I’m an investor in Bug Labs (personally, not through our funds).  When I first met with Peter Semmelhack, the CEO, on an introduction from Fred Wilson (the lead investor) I immediately got it.  After about 15 minutes, I said to Peter something to the effect of “ah – today’s version of the Healthkit.” 

Peter’s vision was that in addition to being a completely open source hardware product that allows you to prototype any consumer electronics device (or – more simply – any “electronic gadget”), all the software and design would be “open.”

Bug has just announced that they will be working with IDEO to redesign the user interaction of the product out in the open.  This is more than an open source software project – it’s actually a public hardware UI redesign that involves anyone in the Bug community.

I love the notion of the open source hardware movement as it is completely in line with the Ph.D. research I did at MIT under Eric von Hippel.  Bug Labs agrees and actually created the BUGvonHippel module to honor Eric!

If you want to participate (or just play along at home) hop on the Bug Blog, Bug Community, and the IDEO blog.


I fly a lot so I’ve been bizarrely obsessed with the US Airways crash last week.  While most of the video comes after the plane is in the river, it’s a pretty heavy video.

I think the pilot who landed this plane is an absolute heroic figure.  I only hope that in situations that intense I keep my cool.


This year at Sundance, Oblong unveiled Tamper.  The Tamper application is a gestural interface for cinematic design.  It is built on Oblong’s g-speak spatial operating environment and is a fun example of how Oblong’s core technology can be applied to a film editing system.

Tamper is part of the New Frontier on Main exhibit located at 333 Main Street on the lower level.  Oblong has set up a channel on YouTube to show some of the various videos that folks at Sundance are making with Tamper. 

I love working with these guys – they are mind-bendingly creative.


Greg Reinacker, the founder/CTO of NewsGator, has a post up titled Enterprise RSS – the State of the Industry that is a continuation of the discussion that’s recently ensued around Enterprise RSS (reference my post from the other day – Enterprise RSS at NewsGator is Alive and Well).  Following is the setup.

First, let me get this out of the way – RSS use in the enterprise is definitely alive and well. But it’s not in the obvious places. No one is writing articles talking about how their desktop feed readers are revolutionizing the way they do business. No one is talking about how they’re retiring their Exchange servers because so much content is delivered via RSS instead of email (and in fact, email is alive and well). No one is saying “if I only had Google Reader behind my firewall, I could save millions of dollars.” Few companies even say their users are clamoring for some sort of enterprise RSS application.

So if not all of that, then what?

My team and I, collectively, have detailed conversations with at least 50 different large companies every week, talking about the real problems they do want to solve. Many of these include 10 or more people on their side, ranging from IT folks to business owners with line-of-business responsibility. And these conversations rarely start with any mention of enterprise RSS.

Take a look at Greg’s post Enterprise RSS – the State of the Industry for detailed examples on what these conversations include.


Howard Lindzon cracks me up. Endlessly.  Continuously.  His latest rant is all about Asshat’s from 2008 put on by one of his new companies StockTwits.  I’m not really sure what an Asshat is since I don’t pay any attention to the public market, but I’m going to guess it had something to do with people that consider themselves experts in trading public equities. 

It’s definitely NSFW, rude, crude, and crass, but that’s how Howard likes it.


The National Venture Capital Association regularly has webcasts aimed at various members of the venture capital community.  On January 23rd from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. Eastern they are having one titled Beyond the Limited Partnership Agreement – Issues For Challenging Times.  The description follows:

The current global financial crisis is impacting the venture community in ways that no other economic crisis has. For the first time in our industry’s history, some of the most committed, long term investors in the private equity asset class are reevaluating their commitment, shifting strategy and making the future uncertain. Join us on January 23rd for a provocative discussion as our panel discusses many of the provisions that define the relationship between General Partners and Limited Partner investors, and how these are impacted by challenging economic conditions. In addition, our panel will cover some of the inevitable consequences that may affect the internal operations of the venture firm.

The panelists are:

Howard Rosenblum, Partner, DLA Piper LLP (moderator)
Eric Fitzgerald, Director of Venture Capital Investments, MetLife
Michael Greeley, General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners
Tom Hodge, COO and General Partner, Frazier Healthcare & Technology Ventures

If you are interested, register directly on the NVCA site to participate.


If you are located in the Boulder / Denver area and doing stuff with Amazon Web Services, there is a new group forming called AWS Anonymous.   Per the Colorado Startups blog, they are having their first meeting at The Cup in Boulder on January 20th at 10am.  Just show up if you are interested – it’ll be easy to find them since they’ll be the nerds saying things like EC2 and S3.


I’m so about this.

Thanks to localstops (via twitter) for pointing this out.