A CEO friend (who also is an excellent salesman) sent me a fun post titled Sales 101 with the comment "here’s one that will make you laugh in a sad but true kind of way." Yup – this pretty much sums up the dark underbelly of high tech sales. If you are a VP of Sales in a high tech companies, read slowly and see what you can do to improve the situation.
When I was a kid, one of my mom’s favorite lines was "go outside and play." I spent a lot of time outside. As an adult, I spent a lot of time in front of the computer, in conference rooms, in airplanes, and in hotels. But, I still try to go outside and play – a lot. Colorado is an outstanding place to practice playing, especially on the weekends in the mountains.
On Saturday, I climbed my third 14er – Quandary Peak. My guide was my long time friend and first business partner Dave Jilk who has climbed a large number of 14ers.
We had an absolutely perfect day for a climb. When we left my house in Keystone at 6am, it was 33 degrees. The average temperature was in the mid-40s, but the sky was completely clear and there was very little wind. From the top of Quandary, Dave named off 24 other 14ers.
It was a steep climb – 3000+ vertical feet over 3.5 miles. Even though we started early, about 15 or so people beat us to the top. As we headed down, we saw over 200 people heading up! It was like looking down on an endless stream of ants marching up a hill.
I know you worked hard today. Now, go outside and play.
We’ve just wrapped up our second year of doing TechStars and I’m really excited about some of the companies that have come out of the program this year. We held a Demo and Investor Day in Boulder on August 20th, and 150+ investors showed up to see the ten new companies from 2008. It’s always a fun event where investors get to see some really interesting early stage web companies. I expect at least 7 or 8 of the 2008 companies will eventually close their seed rounds, which is similar to what we saw last year.
This year, we’re going to try adding something new. We’ll be taking about a dozen of the twenty TechStars companies (from 2007 and 2008) on the road to Silicon Valley where we’ll be doing a demo day on September 23rd. These are the companies who are currently raising money and that already have some committed investment. Some of the companies are the new ones from 2008, but some of last years companies including Filtrbox, EventVue, Intense Debate,, and Brightkite will be presenting as well. These are fun 10 minute pitches and attendees will get to see all twelve companies in the morning. We’ll wrap up with lunch and some networking.
If you are an accredited angel investor or VC, or if you know someone who might like to attend on the morning of September 23rd, just drop me a note and I’ll be sure to get you an invitation to the event. I hope to see you there – it should be a fun day.
Ever since I left home for college in 25 years ago, I periodically get a call from my father that goes something like "Hi Brad, it’s Dad. I’m having trouble with my computer. Can you help me?" I fondly remember many long calls with my father where the exchange went as follows:
Brad: "Ok, now get to a DOS prompt."
Dad: "I’m there."
Brad: "What does it say?"
Dad: "C colon."
Brad: "Ok, type C colon backslash D O S"sound of dad typing way more than seven letters
Brad: "Dad, what are you typing"
Dad: "I thought I figured it out, but now it’s asking me to Abort, Retry, or Ignore"
Brad: "Hit Control C"
Dad: "Ok"
Brad: "Now type C colon backslash D O S"
And this would go on and on. About a decade ago, I told my dad I was retiring from tech support and now it was my younger brother Daniel’s turn. Daniel didn’t necessarily agree to this handoff of responsibility, so occasionally our IT guy Ross gets the call from my dad (usually after my dad leaving me a voicemail that says "Brad, can you remind me what Ross’s number is.")
Today, we announced that we’ve made an investment in Pie Digital. Soon, these tech support calls will be a part of history.
Now that I’m 42 years old, I’ve been around the computer industry long enough to understand that it runs in cycles. I don’t know how long the cycles are going to be, when they are going to reach a peak or a trough, but I do know that things will get better, will get worse, will get better, will get worse, will get better, …
When I reflect on it, the long term trend over the last 42 years has been amazing. There are lots of formal and informal studies and articles on this that all link to Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction and Clay Christensen’s ideas around disruptive innovation. As the cycles play out, great new companies get created around new innovation, some reach escape velocity, some get absorbed into other large incumbent companies, and some disappear.
Today’s New York Times has two short articles – one in Bits and the other in DealBook – that reminded me of this.
Our good friend Microsoft makes a key appearance in both articles. Pondering the rise, fall, rise, fall, … of each of these companies over a 50 year period – both at a macro company level and within specific product groups – is a fun mental exercise (at least for me.)
When I reflect on the various companies we’ve funded over the past year I get really excited about the stage of the cycle we are in with the new Foundry Group portfolio. Independent of who wins the upcoming election, I think the vector of innovation around software and Internet will be steep and many of the things we’ve been talking about for the past 20 years as science fiction are going to start to instantiate themselves as real products and services. The relationship between humans and computers is once again changing rapidly and the number of different amazing things that I can envision happening in the next two decades is extensive.
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.
One of last year’s TechStars companies – Filtrbox – is hiring. They are looking for a Java + LAMP developer and a Flash/Flex/RIA developer. If you fit the bill and are looking for a gig in downtown Boulder with a great early stage company, drop ’em a note at jobs (at) filtrbox.com.
The gang from Lookery is in Boulder tonight and having a publisher meetup from 6:30pm to 9:00pm in the TechStars Bunker. I’ve started using Lookery on Feld Thoughts and am starting to collect a different set of analytics about you, oh blog reader.
Lookery is a user-targeting service and advertising network. They provide free analytics to promote to publishers, bringing them attention, organic traffic, sales leads, and partnership opportunities. They are looking for publishers who represent:
Cool stuff – definitely worth hanging out and having a beer with them if you fit the description or think you might want to partner with them. Sign up on the Facebook page for the event.
I’m speechless. I don’t think I even know how to process this anymore.
Eric Norlin – who runs the Defrag Conference – has a good post up today titled The metaphors we’ve outgrown. He riffs off of the Google Chrome announcement. At the end of it, he answers "what makes Defrag different."
People ask me all of the time what makes Defrag different? I kind of giggle and tell them that I’m proud that we’re not a conference loaded with case studies. Don’t get me wrong, that has a very useful place (in a nearly mature market). We’re just nowhere near that place. Defrag is about gathering to explore, imagine and build these new metaphors. The web should be getting smarter, more implicit, more enabling.
Let the rest of the world get mired down in economic uncertainty, productivity enhancement and cost reduction. There’s plenty of time for you to do that (trust me). Come to defrag and help us grow out of these metaphors. And then watch as the supposedly “pie in the sky” things you find at Defrag are suddenly “real world” things that you’re using and implementing everyday. Kinda cool, huh?
For all those interested, I’m still using Chrome – mostly enjoying it a lot but starting to notice the things it is missing, especially all those fun implicit web plugins I’ve been using.