Month: September 2012
As an author, it’s always incredibly exciting to get the actual finished version of a book I’ve written. While I still haven’t seen a physical version of Startup Communities (it’s still in pre-order), the Kindle version is now shipping.
If you don’t want to wait any longer for it, you can grab a copy on the Kindle right now. And, if you’ve pre-ordered it on the Kindle, it should be pushed to your Kindle by now (if it’s not, tell me and I’ll nudge someone.)
A cool company named Simplifilm made a trailer for my new book, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.
What do you think of it? Any feedback – good, bad, constructive, or destructive is appreciated. And – if you like it – share it!
If you want an intro to the gang at Simplifilm, just ask.
Today, Return Path launched three new products and reframed its business as “email intelligence.” Matt Blumberg, Return Path’s CEO has an excellent post up titled Email Intelligence and the new Return Path.
Return Path is an extraordinary company that I’m proud to have been involved with for the past 12 years. At our board meeting last week, Matt gave me and Fred Wilson our 12 year anniversary gift – a pair of red Return Path-branded Adidas sneakers. I still vividly remember the phone call Fred and I had where we cut a deal to merge two nascent companies – Veripost and Return Path – in what became Return Path. We cut a deal in 10 minutes – I offered up a 50/50 merger and Fred suggested he wanted a little more since Return Path had raised 3x the money Veripost had. I responded with “how about 55/45” and Fred said “it’s a deal.”
Twelve years later Return Path is company with over 300 people, major offices in New York, Boulder, and the Bay Area, and other offices around the world. It has created and leads an entirely new category we call Email Intelligence. In 2008, after plenty of forward progress as well as some twists and turns, we finished divesting several older lines of business and focused the company entirely on a new category we created called “Email Deliverability.” As we grew, we expanded the definition to the point where the word “deliverability” only covered a subset of what we did, hence the creation of the category of “Email Intelligence.”
Matt says it extremely well in his post:
“Our solution to these problems is email intelligence. Email intelligence is the combination of data from across the email ecosystem, analytics that make it accessible and manageable, and insight that makes it actionable. Marketers need all of these to understand their email performance beyond deliverability. They need it to benchmark themselves against competitors, to gain a complete understanding of their subscribers’ experience, and to accurately track and report the full impact of their email programs.”
I’ve been investing in and around email since my first email-related investment in 1994 in a company very creatively named “Email Publishing” which was the very first email service provider. Since then I’ve had a number of investments in email companies including Critical Path, Postini, and SendGrid. I’m psyched with the success and leadership of Return Path to date, love working with everyone at Return Path, and look forward to continuing the journey as we work to ensure that inboxes contain only messages that users want.
I love this time of year. I get up at 5am, catch up on email (holy shit – is it already 6:37?), write a blog post, go for a run, and then have a completely jam packed day full of working with amazing people. Some days are awesome, some days have crushing challenges, all of them are stimulating.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve run incredibly hot from Labor Day through Thanksgiving. The boundaries seem to be the holidays and the bookends are Amy’s birthday (9/14) and my birthday (12/1). We often find ourselves in New York around Amy’s birthday and in some exotic warm beach place (like Mexico) on mine. Between the two is complete and total chaos, which is delicious when I give myself up to it rather than fight it.
Here are a few of the things going on this fall.
- We just closed Foundry Group 2012 – a new $225 million fund. We’ll start investing out of it before the end of the year.
- Companies we’ve invested in are doing major launches. Fitbit launched two new products yesterday (Fitbit Zip and Fitbit One), Return Path launches three today (Email Intelligence!), and MakerBot launches several magical things on Wednesday. Who needs Christmas – every day is Christmas around here.
- My fourth book, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City comes out at the end of the month.
- The Startup Revolution has begun. If you wonder why this matters, take a look at this Kauffman Foundation research on The Ascent of America’s High Growth Companies.
- I’m running a marathon in Utah (St. George), Vermont (Burlington), and Michigan (Detroit) in October. This is the first time I’ve done three weekends back to back (I’ve done two before).
- Amy and I are traveling all over the United States like nomads – San Francisco, Boise, Oklahoma City, St. George, Chicago, Des Moines, Burlington, Seattle, Detroit, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Lexington (KY), and Palm Desert. I love this country (and Canada). I’ve learned how to ship my clothes to different places – that makes the travel a lot easier.
- Amy and I are finishing up the next book in the Startup Revolution series – Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur which should be out by the end of the year.
- A second edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist – which I wrote with my partner Jason Mendelson comes out, along with a teaching guide that Jason and Brad Bernthal (CU Boulder) wrote.
- I’m spending all of my extra time with my three partners at Foundry Group, who I love working with, including a top secret two day retreat, time together at Defrag and Blur, and a few magic meals along the way.
As my dad likes to say, “if you aren’t living on the edge, you are taking up too much space.” I’m enjoying the edge this semester.
If you happen to talk to Kelly along the way, tell her thanks for putting up with me. Or send her flowers. Or chocolate.
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Thanks to all of you who participated in Operation Pre-Order for Startup Communities. I got a bunch of fun emails and am excited to share my newest book with you.
The Amazon winner is Jess Bachman. He’s from Bowmanville, Ontario which Google shows me is an hour east of Toronto. Hopefully we can connect during my Toronto trip in October.
The BarnesandNoble.com winner is Chris Rill from Mamaroneck, NY. I’ll catch him on my next NY trip.
The ratio of Amazon to B&N started out about 10:1 but ended up at 6:1. Later entries thought about it and figured out that odds were better if they bought from B&N since they guessed that more people would buy from Amazon. They were correct!
Last night Amy and I had an awesome dinner at Perla with Fred Wilson, Joanne Wilson, Matt Blumberg, and Mariquita Blumberg. Fred and I have been involved in Return Path for a dozen years and this has become an annual tradition for us when Amy and I are in NYC. At 12 years of service, Return Path gives a six week sabbatical and a pair of red Addidas sneakers as a “get ready for your sabbatical” gift. Fred and I got the sneakers, but not the six week sabbatical.
I sat across from Joanne and since the restaurant was noisy our table ended up having two separate conversations going. Joanne is awesome – if you don’t read her blog, you should start right now, especially if you are interested in NY entrepreneurship, women entrepreneurs, food, and the thoughts of an amazing woman. I still remember meeting her for the first time around 1995 and thinking how dynamite she was.
Oh – and if you are a seed stage company in NYC looking to raise money, you are an idiot if you don’t immediately reach out to Joanne and try to get her involved. She is one of the most thoughtful angel investors I’ve ever met.
We talked a lot about seed stage investing during our part of the conversation. Joanne has done about 25 investments in the past few years and has a very clear strategy for what she invests in. She works incredibly hard for the companies she invests in, is deeply passionate about the products and the entrepreneurs, and clearly loves what she does.
During the conversation we had a moment where we were talking about feedback. I told her about my approach of saying no in less than 60 seconds. She told me a story about giving entrepreneurs blunt feedback in the first meeting, which I always try to do also. And then she said something that stuck with me.
Joanne will often start a meeting by saying something like I give you permission to hate my feedback. You can decide that you want to tell me ‘fuck you’ after the meeting. But I’m going to tell you what my direct and honest reaction is.
Now Joanne is a New Yorker through and through. Aggressive, direct, and clear. But never hostile. Ever. And a deeply loyal supporter. So this feedback, while direct, is incredibly powerful. It’s often extremely hard for someone to hear, especially if they are in “I’m trying to convince you to fund my company mode.”
I play the same way. At Foundry Group, one of our deeply held beliefs is that we always be intellectually honest, no matter how difficult it may be. At TechStars we pride ourselves on providing direct feedback, but always saying “this is only data”, letting the entrepreneur make their own decision about what to do.
These are versions of Joanne’s permission to “hate her feedback.” It’s a powerful way to frame any discussion. And I know I’ll be using the phrase “I give you permission to hate my feedback” many times in the future.
My newest book, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, will ship around the end of the month. As a result, I’m activating Operation Pre-order today.
Between now and Sunday, if you pre-order a copy of Startup Communities, you will be entered into a random drawing. I’m going to pick two random winners – one for hardcopy book orders from Amazon and one for hardcopy book orders from BarnesandNoble.com.
All you have to do to be entered is email me the electronic receipt by 11:59pm EDT on Sunday night. I will announce the winners on Monday morning.
The winners will get a lunch meeting with me at their company sometime in 2013. I’ll spend 90 minutes with you and anyone on your team discussing whatever you want.
If you play, make sure you also Like the book (if you order on Amazon), tweet out or Facebook the purchase, or do whatever other social media thing lights your fire.
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I met Andy Swan at Lindzonpalooza in San Diego this year. Andy towers over me (he’s 6′ 9″) and I’m always attracted to people who make me (at 6′ 1″) feel short. Among other things, he’s got a super creative blog and is a successful entrepreneur, so we had a great discussion. We also talked about weight loss, which I was focused on because I was squarely in the middle of my Retrofit experience (where I’ve lost a solid 20 pounds in the last six months.) Recently Andy sent me a note saying he’d lost 40 pounds with just Fitbit – I asked him to write a blog post about his story. Here it is – it’s inspiring.
It had been 6 months since my knee surgery where they replaced my busted ACL (wakeboarding). I hadn’t weighed myself since, but I distinctly remember seeing “299.2” on the scale in pre-op. That was a new all-time high, and “300” seemed really high, even for a guy standing 6 ft 9. Just as the anesthesia started to kick in I thought to myself…. “well, this could go one of two ways. Either you get sedentary and fat while your knee heals or you take it as a wake-up call and start kicking ass.”
I decided to start kicking ass. I woke up from surgery incredibly optimistic and with absolute certainty that the year post-surgery was going to be BETTER than the year prior. Funny how obstacles can motivate.
Fast-forward 6 months of no official “rehab”, but a lot of weight training and gradual but intense increases in movement. I was as strong as I was 15 years ago as a college basketball player, and my knee felt great. Ya!
But…. I still felt big. Too heavy. Too soft in the middle. This was a problem. I’d worked really hard. Ugh.
Then I went out to San Diego and chatted with Brad Feld. Naturally, I looked through the companies he had invested in.
Interesting. The fitbit tracker keeps track of your movement during the day (how?! Who cares!). The fitbit scale is wifi-enabled and keeps track of your weight. Both sync online and work with MyFittnessPal, which I could use to keep track of my calories.
Tracking input. Tracking output. Tracking results in “real-time”. This was a perfect storm of awesome for a guy that really loves excess in all directions– and knows that what gets measured gets done.
I bought both with expedited shipping.
Instant obsession. 3 months later, I still feel completely incomplete if I haven’t burned more calories than I’ve taken in. I’m fixated on “doing more”. 20,000 steps is a good day. 10 miles moved is awesome. Partly to lighten up, partly so I can eat more and drink more. It works.