Today, we announced that we’ve led an $11 million round for about.me and that I’ve joined the board.
I’ve been living online since the mid 1990’s. I’ve tried every service I could find to create an online identity for myself, even Geocities. Today, my identity is spread out over many things, including my blog, Twitter, Google+, Foursquare, our Foundry Group site, the Startup Revolution site, my relatively inactive Tumblr, Facebook, and a hundred other services I’ve dabbled with.
When about.me appeared several years ago, I thought it was clever. I created an early about.me account and then promptly forgot about it after AOL acquired it. I was intrigued when Tony Conrad, the co-founder, acquired it back from AOL. I started paying attention to it again, especially since I was deep in the opposite side of the problem about.me addresses with our investment in FullContact.
I’ve known Tony for a long time and love working with him. I remember sitting in some theater in Chicago waiting to go on a panel at some startup event a few years ago and Tony literally grabbed my by the shoulders and said “you’ve got to meet this guy Bre Pettis.” That turned into our investment in Makerbot and another step along the path to me helping the machines take over.
When Tony reached out to me recently and said he was raising a round for about.me, I jumped on it. At first I thought he’d already raised too much money for us to be interested, but when I realized he still had a lot of it in the bank, I got comfortable with going deep. It was an easy call – Tony is amazing, the numbers are amazing, the product is amazing, and he’s completely obsessed with it. As am I.
If you don’t have an about.me account, go sign up and give it a spin. And get ready for some really awesome things, coming very soon.
I had my first good run in over two months. It was only 3.2 miles, but the weather was perfect and I felt great.
On March 30th, I ran 12.2 miles. It was a horrible run – I couldn’t breathe well from the beginning of the run. We’d just gotten back from a week of vacation in Mexico and I’d done 27 miles in the past five days. It was my third to last week of training before the Boston Marathon and I was planning on capping off a heavy week with a 15+ miles. After 12.2 miles, covered in a snail like pace of over 2:42:00, I called it quits. When I got home, I laid down on the ground to stretch and immediately couldn’t breathe. As in – not at all – zero oxygen getting in. After 15 seconds, I panicked and realized that if I didn’t figure out what was going on in the next 30 seconds I was going to be in serious trouble. I sat up and managed to choke down some air. After stabilizing, I told Amy what was going on. She tossed me in the car and drove me to urgent care, where I learned about bronco spasms and what a nebulizer was.
I took a week of antibiotics and tried again for a short run the following Saturday. I covered 3.2 miles (same as today) but couldn’t breath and my HR was at 170 within two miles. Crazy. I decided not to run the Boston Marathon (in two weeks) and began what turned into a bizarre and scary three weeks of investigation into all the things that could be wrong.
All the bad, scary tests came back negative. No cancer. No heart muscle damage. No pulmonary embolism. No lung impairment. After ten days on prednisone, I could breathe better but felt completely like shit. Every night I woke up after a few hours of sleep in a swimming pool of my own sweat. It got so bad that Amy put a garbage back under my sheet so I wouldn’t ruin the mattress.
I ran eight times in May – never more than 4 miles. Most of the runs were tentative – slow and careful. None felt normal. None were satisfying, except the four mile one in Tucson during our week off the grid. My weight went from 205 (before all of this) to 200 after the prednisone to 214 this morning. Clearly I was not finding any sort of physical equilibrium.
Today felt right. After two miles, it occurred to me that I wasn’t thinking about my breathing for the first time on a run since my shitty 12.2 mile run. I was just running, enjoying the morning, and smiling at the sunshine. I wasn’t scared of dying on my run anymore. I felt normal again. Well – as normal as I ever feel. Finally.
Amy and I were going to have a bunch of friends over to our house today but we got rained out. So, I read Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State instead.
It was outstanding – 5 stars.
Let’s start with the punchline from Warren and Brandeis in their 1890 Harvard Law Review article The Right to Privacy where they assert that the right to privacy is primarily a “right to be left alone.”
Ponder that for a moment.
It’s a hot topic in my household since Amy did her thesis at Wellesley on the right to privacy. At the same time, I’ve been very open with my belief over the last decade that there is no more privacy, that the government tracks everything we do, and if you build your worldview around the notion that you have privacy, you are going to be disappointed. I guess I’ve been watching too much 24.
Now, this doesn’t mean I don’t think one should have a right to privacy. If I believed that, the philosophical arguments in our house would escalate dramatically. Rather, I gave up my own belief that I have privacy. And, I’ve felt for a long time that society is in a very unstable situation with regard to data, data privacy, and personal privacy. And I think this is going to get much, much worse as the machines further integrate themselves into everything we do.
So I view the problem of privacy at a meta-level. And as a result, I find books like Greenwald’s fascinating, powerful, and deeply insightful into the cause, effect, reaction, and second-order effect of humans trying to process what is going on, defend their position, and advance their perspective.
I thought Greenwald did a particularly good job of three things in this book:
It doesn’t matter which side of the issue you are on. If you feel like calling Snowden, and possible Greenwald, a traitor, you should read this book carefully. If you believe they are whistleblowers, or even heroes, you should read this book carefully. If you believe the government never lies, or always lies, you should read this book carefully. If you believe journalists aren’t caught up in the game, are objective, and have integrity, you should read this book carefully.
I’ve felt for a long time that it’s a real cop-out to call Snowden a traitor or just react to the surface of what is going on here. There are some really profound forces at work that will impact the United States, our notion of democracy, and privacy, for many years. And the second order effects, including how other nations view the United States and the other four of the Five Eyes or the implications on global companies headquartered in the United States, will impact us for many years.
And, as a bonus, there are lots of revealing PowerPoint charts in the book from the NSA documents which, in addition to driving Snowden and Greenwald’s points home, demonstrate that the US Government needs some courses in making PowerPoint slides nicer.
As exits have been flowing nicely again the past few years, many of the entrepreneurs I work with have experienced their first big exit. I refer to this moment as when you find that you have life changing money in your bank account, which I like to call “fuck you money.” You now can do whatever you want with the rest of your life.
I was on a walk with an entrepreneur recently who was wrestling with this when we ran into another entrepreneur I had backed who had an exit a while ago and had wrestled with the question of “what’s next.” We chatted briefly and then he hopped on his bike and continued his ride.
Later in the day, I got the following magnificent note in my inbox from my bike-riding successful friend.
I was thinking about the ‘what’s next’ conversation. I’m sure you’ve seen everything and are all over it, but in my more limited experience, for some people it’s harder than the what’s first conversation (i.e. should I start a company or not?).
I find, unfortunately, that a reasonable percentage of people chase their tail endlessly looking for the next big win, but they can never catch it because they have no idea what they are chasing. Their life spirals inward as they get more unsure of themselves, more frustrated, more unhappy.
I think this state of uncertainty and self doubt causes more depression, divorce and addiction for some people than starting and running a company. Especially if they’ve never felt failure before. Now they fail all the time and they can’t figure it out.
I think it’s mostly because they never find passion again, or they look for it in the wrong places. There are a million things they can do in the world, but the spend most of their time looking for the next great technology company that sells a better widget, but doesn’t necessarily change their life in any meaningful way.
They have grand opportunity because they are unbound to do something they truly love. If you love mentoring, mentor, if you love the environment, help it. If you love children, teach them. If you love your family, share with them. Give back to everyone who gave to you on the path to success, and then give more broadly to everyone who seems deserving.
To me, that’s the real grand victory.
Totally brilliant. And so simple.
I had my first exit when I sold my first company (Feld Technologies) at age 28. After the dust settled and I had sold all the stock I’d received, I’d made somewhere between $1m and $2m after tax. When Amy and I talked about “what’s next” when I was 29.5 (about the time I finished working for the company that bought mine) one of the options for consideration was to retire and move to Homer, Alaska. I was making plenty of money consulting and, while I was investing much of the money I made from the sale into new companies as an angel investor, the idea of living in Homer was attractive. We figured we could easily live for the rest of our life on consulting income and what we’d managed to save, even if none of the angel investments I was making turned into anything. When one of them was acquired a few months later and we had another $1m after tax, we realized that we could easily live on $40k / year of cash in Homer, which would last us about 25 years if we made no other income.
We were deeply in the “should we just call it quits and go live a different life conversation.” But at almost 30, I just didn’t feel done, and in many ways I felt that I was just at the beginning of a new journey (which turned out to be true.) So we packed up, moved from Boston to Boulder, and decided to build a life in Colorado, while I continued to invest. This was 1995 and the path from there has been powerful and dramatic. By 1999 I had to ponder “what’s next” again after a number of my angel investments returned more money to me than I ever thought I’d have, and then again in 2002 after getting massively crushed by the collapse of the Internet bubble and losing even more money on paper than I expected I’d make cumulatively in my lifetime.
I’ve been through the “what’s next” discussion with Amy several times, including in 2004 when I doubled down on Mobius Venture Capital (instead of packing it up and calling it quits), in 2006 when we decided to start Techstars and Foundry Group, and again in 2013 after spending six months being extremely depressed.
Each time, I’m adjusted how I spend my life in the way my friend talks about in his final paragraph:
They have grand opportunity because they are unbound to do something they truly love. If you love mentoring, mentor, if you love the environment, help it. If you love children, teach them. If you love your family, share with them. Give back to everyone who gave to you on the path to success, and then give more broadly to everyone who seems deserving.
If you’ve recently had some success, as you go into the weekend, take some time out to ponder how you are you thinking about this. And share if you have any insights!
John Oliver and his new show Last Week Tonight has become Sunday night entertainment in my house. He’s simultaneously brilliant and hilarious.
Oliver took on Net Neutrality on Sunday. Due to my cable connection being down, I didn’t see it until Monday when I was able to watch it on my DVR. He started off by reminding us that American’s simply don’t respond to “boring” so he suggested we change the phrase “Net Neutrality” to “Cable Company Fuckery.” He then goes on to explain, in clear and outstanding prose while being hysterically funny, exactly what is going on.
If you are perplexed by Net Neutrality and are having trouble parsing the discussion, just watch this. If you want to laugh your ass off, watch this. And then take the requested action at the end.
Boing Boing has a good set up cribnotes up on their post It’s not Net Neutrality that’s at stake, it’s Cable Company Fuckery. The snippets they highlighted (a few of many) were:
– On Internet Fast Lanes: “If we let cable companies offer two speeds of service, they won’t be Usain Bolt and Usain Bolt on a motorbike. They’ll be Usain Bolt and Usain Bolted-to-an-anchor.”
– On the Rare Cooperation Between Consumer Advocates & Major Tech Companies: “What’s being proposed is so egregious, activists and corporations have been forced onto the same side. That’s basically Lex Luthor knocking on Superman’s apartment door and going, ‘Listen, I know we have our differences but we have got to get rid of that asshole in apartment 3-B.”
– On the Appointment of Former Cable/Wireless Industry Front Man Tom Wheeler As FCC Chair: “The guy who used to run the cable industry’s lobbying arm is now running the agency tasked with regulating it. That is the equivalent of needing a babysitter and hiring a dingo.”
– On the Notion that the Comcast/TWC Merger is Okay Because the Companies Don’t Overlap: “You can’t reduce competition when nobody is competing. You could not be describing a monopoly more clearly if you were wearing a metal while driving a metal car after winning second prize in a beauty contest.”
On Monday we had a Foundry Group portfolio company sales summit. We are fortunate in that we’ve got a bunch of amazing sales execs in our portfolio, including several CEOs like Howard Diamond of MobileDay and Matthew Bellows of Yesware who have long histories selling and building sales organizations.
The “enterprise sales software ROI analysis” as a selling tool comes up over and over and over again. And most people blow it, or try to bullshit their way through it, or put together something that is clearly not credible.
So I asked Matthew how he did it at Yesware. Following is his story. Oh, and if you are a Gmail user, check out Yesware.
After spending nearly 20 years selling startup software and services to big companies, I can safely say I’ve seen thousands of “Return on Investment” (ROI) slides. It’s the go-to slide for every enterprise technology salesperson, illustrated with a 4-8 table row, predictably showing that the service in question will pay back the required investment in 6-12 months. Never more (who can wait?), never less (unbelievable).
And like most startup business plans, ROI slides are almost always fake.
The salesperson or their marketing department has no experience to draw on or data from which to extrapolate. Moreover, there’s no accounting for the time value of money, the customer time required to deploy the service, or the risk of time wasted if the deployment doesn’t go well.
Occasionally, a few of the numbers on an ROI slide are based on a previous deployment of the technology. In the rarest cases, the slide has relevant and reference-able data that a potential customer can apply to their situation.
Because of the problems associated with software ROI analyses, we waited a long time to build one at Yesware. And we still failed the first two times we tried. Along the way, we learned that a decent, defensible and compelling ROI analysis requires two key components:
1. Reputable, reference-able customers: The first time we tried to build an ROI slide at Yesware, we anonymously evaluated the data of 40,000 salespeople across a six-month time frame. We were looking for evidence that the people who were using Yesware more actively were making more money than inactive users. Although we found out some great stuff about email open rates and times, and our ROI results looked great to us internally, when we talked to prospects, they were skeptical. Companies, products and industries are so different. No one felt good about applying a broad survey to their specific situation. Lesson learned: Unless a reasonably well-known company is willing to publicly testify to the specific numbers you are showing, you are skating on ice that’s too thin.
2. Identifiable benefits: The second time we tried to build an ROI slide, we worked with one well-known company, analyzing their email and Salesforce.com data. We were blown away by the results – a 40% increase in sales productivity between the active and the inactive Yesware users. It was almost too good to be true.
When we presented the findings to the partner company, they were ecstatic. Not because of our results, but because they just had the best quarter in their company history. They were happy to acknowledge that Yesware had something to do with their success, but a successful product launch also played a big role the 40% increase. Lesson learned: Accounting for your benefits should be easy for both the purchasing manager and the finance evaluator to measure. There shouldn’t be too many variables baked into the results.
We tried again, and this time we got it right.
In our most recent ROI efforts we compiled data from three separate companies to uncover the specific benefits their sales teams have achieved using Yesware. These are all well-known companies that our prospective customers can call to learn more – Acquia,Mimeo, Dyn, and WeddingWire. Each is a leader in building modern sales teams, and has offered to be a reference for Yesware.
With this kind of dataset, a simple survey can reveal incredible results. We discovered that on average, sales teams using Yesware:
There are certainly ways to make our ROI analysis better: We will continue to gather a bigger dataset both in terms of customers and salespeople. We will get data from companies outside the USA. And we will keep trying to better tease apart the various contributing factors to changes in productivity.
But overall, we’ve finally cracked the code on a decent, defensible and compelling Return on Investment analysis. I hope this guide helps you create your own.
Matthew Bellows is co-founder and CEO of Yesware, an email productivity service for salespeople. Follow him on Twitter @mbellows.
This spring Jason Mendelson and I taught a class called Venture Deals with the Kauffman Fellows Academy. It was a blast so we’ve decided to do it again.
KFA uses NovoEd as their platform. Jason and I spent two days recording videos around our Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist explaining each section and going deeper with Q&A. The course is a MOOC that includes significant Q&A that I participated in throughout the course, along with a weekly Google Hangout covering different topics.
Some of the reviews from the course kind of say it all:
Sign up for the course now – it’ll be running from June 16th to August 2nd. Use the discount code 2VD20 to get 20% off the price of the course.
Lately, I’ve been struggling to figure out the best way to have expanding email groups. I’ve tried all the obvious stuff and nothing is satisfying to me.
Historically, I’ve just used Google Groups. That’s great for things like the Foundry Group CEO list, where we control the list, but then we have to host it at a @foundrygroup.com domain.
For the Colorado CEO Jobs list, we were using Yahoo Groups for a while. Even with the new upgrade last year I find the UX to be terrible so I recently moved it over the Google+. Now I’m hearing complaints about not getting the emails which usually results from notifications being turned off, but you wouldn’t know that unless you were paying attention. And, if you don’t have a Google+ account, you can’t be on the list.
I tried Facebook Groups for another group – it had zero engagement.
What do you use? Any suggestions for me getting out of hell?