Several months ago my friend Ben Casnocha sent me an article from Boston.com titled How the city hurts your brain… And what you can do about it. The article starts out strong and continues all the way through.
“Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.”
Regardless of how calm and centered you are, the first quarter of 2009 was a stressful time for most people. These stressors came from lots of different places, but were especially evident to me whenever I was in a major city or an airport where I’d always try to take a few minutes, sit quietly, and watch the look on people’s faces as they walked (or hustled, or ran) by.
The article isn’t anti-city – in fact is concludes with:
“Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory — the crowded streets, the crushing density of people — also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge — one of the densest cities in America — contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.
The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits. Kuo, for instance, describes herself as "not a nature person," but has learned to seek out more natural settings: The woods have become a kind of medicine. As a result, she’s better able to cope with the stresses of city life, while still enjoying its many pleasures and benefits. Because there always comes a time, as Lou Reed once sang, when a person wants to say: ‘I’m sick of the trees/take me to the city.’”
This is seriously interesting stuff to me as I live my life in many different places including (a) a small city (Boulder), (b) the mountains (Eldorado Canyon and Keystone), (c) a tiny remote town (Homer, Alaska), (d) on the road in large cities (New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles), and (e) on vacation in a variety of places large, small, central, and remote. I never ever get tired of being in Eldorado Canyon, Keystone, Homer, or Boulder. Nor do I ever get tired of the stimuli from New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. I end up with short intense bursts (one to five days) in the big city followed by regular time away from it. While I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about the interplay between all of the different places I spend time in, there is no doubt in my mind that the time away from the big cities helps me stay fresh, mentally agile, and restored.
It’s starting to get light outside so it’s time for an hour run – all by myself – in the mountains.
From April 30 to May 2, the 10th annual Nantucket Conference is happening on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. I haven’t been to a Nantucket Conference, but I’ve heard of it and have considered going in the past. This year Scott Kirsner invited me to be on a panel and I happily accepted as I was already going to be in Boston for the TechStars Boston Mentor Dinner on April 30th before heading to Cincinnati to run the Flying Pig Marathon on May 3rd.
I’m on a panel on Friday afternoon titled “How is the Venture World Changing” with Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), Jo Tango (Kepha), and Paul Ciriello (Fairhaven). Dan Primack, the creator of peHUB Wire will be moderating, so it’s guaranteed to be spicy.
The agenda and list of participants look great. The conference is limited to around 150 people so rather than a 700 person noisefest it’ll be a neat opportunity to catch up with some long time east coast colleagues while meeting plenty of new smart people.
I’ve been told that there are only a dozen or so invitations left – if you are interested, feel free to request one.
F3EL7-T3YL2-MBN5P-ZQI6R-YE8PI
Ever type that into a pop up box on your computer when installing software? If not, you’ve never installed anything from Microsoft (or many other companies) – at least not legally.
This morning I was copied on an email from my partner Ryan McIntyre to a company we are talking to about funding that said:
“I use Pro Tools and other pro audio software regularly and since the SW is quite expensive, the SW vendors go to great lengths to use copy-protection, and most audio plugins and applications (and there are dozens) have some sort of authorization code scheme, ranging from friendly to downright byzantine. It drives me nuts, but my constant exposure to it means I’ve formed some opinions about what is “easy” when it comes to entering authorization codes. The easiest plug-ins (authorization-wise) in the audio world use alphabetical codes broken up into strings of words, so instead of the longs strings of numbers, you get long strings of words, which are much easier for a human to enter without a mistake. A couple code examples might be:
HOUSE-BIRD-TRUCK-DRUM
FLINT-TRUE-SWORD-CALLYou get the idea. I’m assuming third-part auth-gen packages must exist to generate codes like these that give you a big enough address space yet also make guessing authorizations relatively difficult. And that you could relatively easily change your process at the manufacturer for associating MAC addresses with device IDs.”
I prefer auth-codes that are haikus. I wonder if there’s a patent on this?
I’m psyched that my friends at Spark Capital have launched Start@Spark, their new seed program. In their post Why are we doing this? they explain:
“So, this must be a terrible time to fund a start-up company. Correct? Au contraire. This may be the best time in the last 8 years to start a company. While capital is scarce, the tectonic plates continue to shift creating major rifts. The walls are coming down and the barriers to entering new markets are falling along-side.
We don’t expect the economic woes to evaporate soon; however, we are long term investors. We are looking forward to what will happen in 4 years rather than in the next 4 months. We see a clear opportunity to partner with talented entrepreneurs who possessing the vision and commitment that transcend current market conditions. We have prided ourselves on being aggressive and funding disruptive, early stage companies.”
The program provides seed stage investments in early stage Boston and New York based companies that fit Spark’s areas of interest. They have a simple application process and – if they decide to fund you – provide a straightforward deal (convertible loan of up to $250,000 that converts into equity in the next round at a 20% discount; Spark has the right to invest up to 50% of the next round.)
This is not new behavior for Spark – our co-investment with them in AdMeld was a seed stage investment (although we structured it as an equity financing.) They are excellent early stage VC investors and it’s neat to see them formalize this type of program in Boston and New York.
Spark has also been super helpful in bringing TechStars to Boston. The TechCrunch article Spark Capital Launches Seed Funding Program Start@Spark mentions this affiliation but concludes “… undoubtedly they’ll be competing for the same investment sooner rather than later.” This is an incorrect conclusion. While TechStars is looking for great pre-seed companies to help get to a stage where they are ready to raise a seed or first round financing, if Spark wanted to invest in one of them prior to them entering TechStars, we’d be all for it (and if that caused the company to decide not to participate in TechStars, that would be fine.) And – optimally – one or more of the companies coming out of TechStars will be interesting to Spark – either for a full first round investment or a seed investment.
The notion that these efforts are fundamentally competitive perplexes me. I think it’s awesome that the Boston region is getting more seed stage focus and energy for software, Internet, and media companies. In my world view, the more options for entrepreneurs, the better.
I was in a board meeting yesterday with a company planning a major commercial release of their product “at the end of summer”. We managed to turn this into 8/31/09 at 11:59:59pm pacific time (since I don’t believe you can release something unless there is a time/date stamp associated with it.) As part of this discussion, we spent some time discussing the notion of a daily / weekly / monthly rhythm for both the CEO/CTO as well as the product team.
This morning, I read through an interview I recently did with Brian Roger (I’m the MyVenturePad Blogger of the Week.) Why my mom assures me that she’s proud of me for accomplishing this status in life (i.e. “Blogger of the Week”), I was intrigued by the amount of “rhythm” Brian incorporated into his interview. While some of the quotes make me sound like an overly rigid tool (e.g. “Each day he’s up at 5 a.m. – ‘regardless of the time zone I’m in’ – to begin ‘a two-hour information routine.’”), I’ve always felt that the notion of a strong rhythm was a critically important part to how I operate.
When I think of rhythms in my life, they break down into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, and decadal. Here are some examples of how I think about it.
Daily (M-F): Get up at 5am every day. Spend the first two hours of the morning in front of my computer (a) consuming info and (b) catching up on any email. Exercise (usually a run.) From 9am on, follow my calendar until the day is over (which my assistant Kelly manages – it’s very dynamic – and I try to schedule every phone call and meeting.) When I fly somewhere, I try to do it either first thing in the morning or at the end of the day and I try to sleep on the plane from take off to landing.
Weekly (S-Su): Sleep until I wake up. Hang out with Amy. Go for a long run. Catch up on email. Stay off the phone. Go to a movie. Read a book. Relax and rest.
Monthly: Life dinner with Amy (on the night of the first day of every month) – exchange gifts, review the previous month, and talk about goals for the next month.
Quarterly: One week vacation completely off the grid (no phone, no email) with Amy. 36 hour offsite with my Foundry partners (both backward and forward review as well as 2x / year facilitated performance reviews of each other). Deep review of all financials (personal and for every company I’m involved in.)
Annually: Once a year three day weekend trip with my dad. Once a year “Feld Men’s Trip” with my dad, his brother, my brother, and my two cousins.
Decadal: Personal review of my life (usually happens over a few months.) I’ve done this at age 30 and age 40 and expect to keep doing it.
Now, these are not complete (e.g. there are plenty of other specific things that happen in each rhythm interval), but they should give you a feel for what I mean. While this won’t work for everyone, I find that it has a huge impact on me and helps me focus on what is important, gives me plenty of time to reflect and process what is going on, and allows me to have plenty of rest and recovery time.
Wilson Sonsini puts out a quarterly Entrepreneurs Report. The Winter 2008 issues is titled Private Company Financing Trends. They asked me if I’d contribute an article around the topic of hints for pitching VC’s so I wrote an extended version of Perfecting Your Pitch.
The other articles in the Winter 2008 Entrepreneurs Report include:
Recently, I’ve been fielding a lot more requests to write for publications as well as for permission to resyndicate content from Feld Thoughts and Ask the VC (e.g. the republishing of this content on the MIT Technology Review’s Blogs page.) As I come up on the fifth anniversary of writing this blog, I’m finding myself intrigued by the dynamics of how user generated content has evolved.
In February, I did a “Beers and Boulder with Brad” event in Seattle. Local Seattle-based entrepreneurs Dave Schappell of TeachStreet and T.A. McCann of Gist put the event together and I was blown away by the response. Several hundred people showed up; I had a great evening of talking about entrepreneurship, local entrepreneurial communities, and the dynamics of startups. I also got to hang out for a few hours with a ton of Seattle entrepreneurs who looked like they were having as much fun as me.
Greg Huang summarized the evening and some of my messages very nicely in his Xconomy Seattle post titled VC Model Is Not Broken: Insights from Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group. Following are Greg’s bullet points from my talk – click through to the article to read the detail behind them:
Danny Robinson, a Vancouver based entrepreneur who runs Bootup Labs, invited me to do a similar event in Vancouver on April 22nd. Since I’m already in Seattle for a board meeting that day, I agreed to pop up to Vancouver and do it again (although I’m sure the content and questions will be different.) Danny put up a description and registration page post – it’s going to be April 22nd at the Steamworks Brewing Company.
There has been a lot of activity around entrepreneurship at CU Boulder lately, especially in computer science and engineering. This is encouraging to me as I believe that a strong culture of entrepreneurship at “your local university” is important to the long term health of any entrepreneurial ecosystem.
TechStars recently coordinated with CU Boulder to create five summer internships. Each of these internships will enable a CU Boulder student to work as a software engineer at TechStars for the summer. The overall dynamics are:
To get things started, I’m going to sponsor one of these. We are looking for four three (thanks Microsoft for sponsoring one!) more Boulder-area software / Internet companies to participate in these sponsorships. And – as a special bonus – I plan to host an event at the end of the summer for all five interns, the TechStars founders they worked with, and the execs from their sponsoring companies.
If you are Boulder-based, I encourage you to jump in now. Email me or Nicole Glaros to get involved.
I’m really enjoying writing my print column for Entrepreneur Magazine. It’s a different kind of writing than my blogging and exercises different mental muscles.
This month’s article A VC’s Biggest Flaw: Arrogance is out (both on the newsstands and the web). Amy told me this is her favorite one so far as it includes a number of people she’s met: Mr. Know-It-All and several of his cousins.
I hope you enjoy reading the articles as much as I enjoy writing them.