Brad Feld

Month: January 2009

Is Your City Growing?

Jan 05, 2009
Category Places

I’m always amused by articles that are headlined “Jobs outlook uncertain for 2009”.  No shit sherlock.

I was pleased, however, to learn that Boulder, Colorado is one of thirteen cities (“metropolitan areas”) out of 381 in the US that are actually growing. 

The cities that are growing are Boulder, CO.; Lafayette and Louisiana, LA; Bethesda, MD; Jacksonville, NC; Binghamton, NY; Oklahoma City; OK.; State College, PA.; and Brownsville, El Paso, Laredo, McAllen, and San Antonio, TX.

I get LA, but Brownsville, El Paso, Laredo, and McAllen?  Must have something to do with that electronic border fence thing.


I do this every year just because it’s a pet peeve of mine.  It’s now officially 2009 – time to update all those copyright notices if you haven’t turned the ending year into a variable.  What’s the point of these stupid copyright notices on the bottom of every web page anyway? 

Kudos to Matt Blumberg at Return Path for (a) reminding me about this and (b) having his copyright notices automated.  Google – not so automated.  Microsoft – not so automated (although Live appears to be).  Yahoo – automated!  Ask – not so automated.  Ebay – not so automated.  IBM – not so copyrighted!  I could go on but it’s time to go have lunch with my partners.


As everyone gets fully back to work after the Christmas / New Year holiday season, there was something that you just did with friends and family that will have a huge positive impact on your work (and life) if you apply it going forward.

While it might sound trite, make sure you spend social time with the people you work with.  Or – in English – “play.”

It’s 2009 and we can (and should) be optimistic about the future, but we are still in the midst of an economic down cycle.  I have no idea when the cycle turns positive, but the notion of enjoying social time together with the people you work with applies in both good times and bad.

Most of the people I’ve talked to this morning seems rested, positive, and ready to get going again.  Some of this is a natural dynamic that seems to happen when the clock in Times Square counts down to 0 and the calendar clicks over to a new year.  Some it is because of all the sugar we just ate.  Some of this is because many of us got to spend a lot of time with friends and family that we don’t see as often as we’d like (or – additionally – that we are now finished spending this time with family for a while.)

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we spend at least 33% of our lives at work (and often > 50% of our waking time working).  Don’t forget to hang out and have fun with the people you work with.  Lunch anyone?


One of our portfolio companies – Zynga – is looking for great game producers.  Mark Pincus, Zynga’s CEO writes about it on his blog.

“We are open to anyone from game industry, consumer internet or i-banking analysts and associates or mgt consultants.  You should be numbers oriented, love games and have a competitive spirit.  Our company is a meritocracy where those delivering great results advance fast.”

If you are in the bay area and fit this profile, drop an email to flo@zynga.com.


Saturday Morning Reading

Jan 03, 2009
Category Books

It’s 2009, people are getting ready to get back in gear, and there’s a lot of good stuff floating around the blogosphere this morning.  Here’s some of it.

Economic Recovery Plan: Philip Greenspun has some prescriptive ideas about what the US needs to do to dig itself out of the ditch.  I agree with some of it and disagree with some of it, but it’s all stimulating.

Another Resume Tip: Whenever there is a downturn, the number of resumes that flow through my inbox increases dramatically.  Many of the companies we’ve invested in, including most of the Foundry Group investments, are growing so I’m happy to get these.  If you are a software developer, Joel Spolsky has a superb suggestion about how to shape your resume so I’ll pay attention.

Putting The Band Back Together: Fred Wilson has a nice post where he hypothesizes that when times are tougher, serial entrepreneurs tend to swarm together around the best opportunities.  The music metaphor of “putting the band back together” applies nicely.  Fred’s got some good hints about how to think about equity in these situations.  We are seeing this regularly also – one of our recent seed investments and another that we are closing early in January are cases of “getting the band back together.”

Google, why are you tracking links in my Gmail message? I’m not sure I care about this, but Dave Taylor does and I know that a bunch of other people, especially those of you that haven’t given up on your privacy, probably do.  It’s an interesting issue.

Why Government Investment in Broadband Is Justified Now: I hope one of the legacies of Obama is a real national broadband infrastructure in the US that is better than anywhere else in the world.  So does Tom Evslin; he has some good suggestions around it.

The $100 Fund: The crazy cats at VC Wear are giving away $100 in t-shirts for the stupid Twitter apps you can come up with.

My Holiday Project: A Twitter Search Engine Built on Windows Azure: Dare Obasanjo isn’t going to win a t-shirt from VC Wear for this one.  He explains his experience building a cloud based app for Twitter on Microsoft Windows Azure.

Burnout: Jon Fox of Automattic / Intense Debate realizes he was burned out and does something about it.  Are you burned out?  I hope you aren’t anymore and did something like what Jon did over the holiday break to recharge.

TechStars Meetups soon in NYC, Boston, Boulder, Paris, and more all the time: TechStars 2009 is starting to get rolling.  There are lots of pre-application meetups happening – follow the TechStars Meetups page if you are interested.

It’s too windy and cold to run outside today so I think I’ll go do my 1:45 run on the treadmill while watching The Matrix.  I always take the red pill.


2008 was a fantastic year for entrepreneurship in Boulder.  While the VC firm I’m part of (Foundry Group) invests nationally, the partners have made a deliberate decision to live and work in Boulder.  As a result, we believe it is our responsibility to participate actively in Boulder’s entrepreneurial community.  I’ve been living here since 1995 and have seen and helped Boulder evolve into a serious entrepreneurial hub, as written about by my friend Ben Casnocha in his article Start-Up Town in The American Magazine.

There are many people that are now engaged in the Boulder entrepreneurial community in a wide variety of ways.  I believe that entrepreneurship and innovation are the fundamental drivers of long term economic growth in the United States and have dedicated my work life to this area.  Even thought no one really knows what the 2009 holds for us, I’m hopeful that the entrepreneurial energy and momentum that has been generated in Boulder over the past few years will continue strongly in 2009.

To get us started, Andrew Hyde put up two posts that are relevant to all Boulder-based software and Internet entrepreneurs.  The first is HackSpace at TechStarsOn January 15th at 5pm, the TechStars space (the Bunker) will be opened up for anyone to come hang out and hack together.  If you know where the Bunker is, just show up.  If you need more info, drop Andrew an email at andrew {at} startupweekend.com.

Also up on the Boulder is for Startups site, Andrew has a post titled Boulder Jobs.  If you are a company in Boulder that is hiring, drop Andrew a note (andrew {at} startupweekend.com).  If you are looking for a job, drop him a note also.  Look for a steady evolution of a local job site that builds off of the very successful Boulder Job Fair event a few months ago.


I rang in the new year with some mental floss.  I found David Stone’s The Echelon Vendetta on one of our bookshelves in Keystone as I was looking around for a palate cleanser after my run of serious books last week.

Last night I got about 80% of the way through it.  At around 11:20, long after Amy had gone to bed, I actually got scared reading it.  I hadn’t figured out the end game yet, so my brain was whirring around a lot.  The book was taking place mostly in the Rocky Mountain West (Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado) and I suddenly had an image of the bad guy stalking me from the giant open space behind the two story picture window I was lying in front of. 

I rarely get scared reading a book – the only thing that really gets me is when bad stuff is happening in a setting near me.  For example, I had to stop reading Dry Ice by Stephen White because of the Boulder setting.

So, that was it.  I closed the book, got a glass of water, went up stairs to sleep, and woke up around 10:30 am.  Yum.  Welcome to 2009.

I just finished off The Echelon Vendetta and it’s easily one of the best spy / CIA / conspiracy / thriller that I’ve read in a long time.  Stone’s bio says it’s “is a cover name for a man born into a military family with a history of combat service going back to Waterloo. Stone, a military officer himself, has worked with federal intelligence agencies and state-level law enforcement units in North America, Central America, and South East Asia. Retired now, Stone lives in an undisclosed location with his wife, photographer and researcher Catherine Stone.”

It shows.  I just bought Stone’s other book The Orpheus Deception on my Kindle – given my poor impulse control I expect I’ll read it next.

Disclosure: If you click though the link on this book, I get paid a small amount from Amazon (approx 6% of the purchase price) based on my affiliate code that I put in the link.  Please read the post I wrote titled The Dynamics of Full Disclosure for more on this.  I don’t plan to put this disclosure note on any more book posts this year – hopefully this will be satisfactory for anyone that cares.