Will Herman wrote a super post on The Leadership Power of Great Public Speaking.  I’m a closet introvert, but I know the value of being a great public speaker (and am very comfortable – both as a public speaker and working a room.)  Mitchell Ashley – one of the execs at StillSecure – wrote about their holiday party on his post How to Work a Room and the brilliance of Alan Shimel and his extrovertedness. I love Alan and can imagine the party even though I wasn’t at it.  As both Mitchell and Will point out, a lot of it is in the delivery.

I couldn’t agree more with Tom Evslin’s post titled Web 2.0 – Greater Initial Investment Required.  If you are the founder of a company with the description “Web 2.0” somewhere in your executive summary then click now and read slowly.  It also compliments the current “Web 2.0 Bubble / Deadpool” meme that seems to be going around.

Jason Mendelson and I have started a new blog aimed at entrepreneurs called AsktheVC.  We’ve started this blog to discuss relevant issues in the venture capital and entrepreneurial ecosystem.

As you may know, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past three years writing about venture capital and entrepreneurship on Feld Thoughts. We’ve had great feedback regarding our regular posts on matters that effect people in our industry, as well as our blog series on topics such as term sheets, letters of intent, and 409A. We’ve also had a lot of fun and learned a lot from the questions that people have asked us.

We’ve decided to put more focused effort into regularly addressing these questions. I will still blog about venture capital and entrepreneurship on Feld Thoughts, and we’ll occasionally cross-post between blogs, but we’ll begin to use AsktheVC to address the steady stream of questions we are now getting on a daily basis from entrepreneurs around the world.

You can expect the same thoughtful and honest opinions that we’ve always had. We will also tackle bigger issues in a larger format than a single post. Our goal is that this blog becomes a broadly used informational source on venture capital and entrepreneurship. To achieve this, we welcome (and encourage) questions from you.  We hope you’ll subscribe and participate in AsktheVC.

Entrepreneurship requires serious determination.  So does life.  My friend Andy’s story of his dad’s fractured back reminded me of my favorite story about my dad’s dad. 

My grandpa Jack was the first entrepreneur I knew.  I met him when I was a few days old.  While I loved him and played with him a lot as a kid, I really got to know him when I was a teenager.  By the time I was running my first company, he referred to me (and my uncle Charlie – who was running his first company at the time also) as “the Typhoons.”  Jack was awesome.  Following is an example.

Jack ran a clothing business.  He didn’t believe in technology (“Do you want a fax of the receipt?  I’ll drive it right over to you.”)  His factory was in the worst part of downtown Miami.  Every morning during the week he got up at 4:30am, drove 45 minutes to his factory, was there by 6am, worked until 3pm, and then drove home.  Every day.  No matter how he felt.  Remember – this factory was in a terrible part of town – imagine a 70 year old jewish guy unlocking the front door every day at 6am.  Now – that’s a target.  Jack never had any trouble.  I’m sure the people hanging around the building waved at him and said good morning to him.

His morning routine included opening his safe, counting the cash and checks from the previous day, getting his deposit ready, and putting it back in the safe until the bank opened (at which point he hand carried the deposit to the bank.)  He had a big safe.  A really big, heavy safe.  On one particular morning, he must have been tired and not really paying attention.  As he put the money back in the safe and went to close it, somehow his hand got caught in the door and the safe closed on his thumb.  And locked.  And chopped off his thumb.

Now – at this point in the story – if it was me – I would have just laid down on the floor and screamed for a while.  And then probably passed out.  Hopefully someone would have found me before I bled to death.  Jack – on the other hand, went and found something to wrap around his finger and stop the bleeding (remember – this is a clothing factory – I’m sure there was plenty of “clothing” lying around.)  He then opened the safe and retrieved his thumb.  Yup – he had the presence of mind to remember the combination.  He wrapped his thumb in something, closed the safe, walked out of the building, locked up (he was the only person there at the time), got in his car, and drove all the way back to North Hollywood (where he lived) and checked himself into the hospital.  When we asked him why he didn’t just go to a hospital in Miami, he mumbled something about “not trusting the doctors in the big city.”

Remarkably, they sewed his thumb back on and it more or less worked fine.  He’d occassionally complain of it being stiff when the weather changed – but proudly wiggled it around whenever we asked him about it.

Now that’s determination.  Jack – we loved ya.

David Cohen – who writes the ColoradoStartups blog among other things – came up with a fun idea for a podcast series last week.  He’s going to do a “Virtual Board of Directors” podcast – starring me, him, and Niel Robertson – to answer questions that you (the entrepreneur) might have for a board of directors.  If you have a question, call (720) 274–0945.  While we won’t be giving any legal (or “official”) advice, hopefully we can have some fun with this while answering some questions.

Are you thinking about selling your company?  David Shanberg – who I worked with when I was an investor in PeoplePC and he ran corporate development – has a nice series up about M&A due diligence.  He covers:

• What you should expect
• How you can protect your confidential info while moving the process forward
• More on moving the process forward
• Looking out for warning signs

David’s now running his own M&A shop and has some interesting clients.

In 1983, when I was a senior in high school, I started my first company.  There were six founders – they are the gang below:

John Gruberman, Drew Debelak, Jeff Funkhouser, Steve?, Kent Ellington, and me (the smiling dude holding up the book on the bottom right.)  I can’t remember the name of the company, but it was probably something clever.  I’m 99% sure the book Kent (middle / bottom) is holding up is something about incorporating your business.

We’d cooked up some idea around Dungeons and Dragons, the game us little nerd boys played while we weren’t eating at Taco Bueno, listening to Rush, playing with our computers (Kent and I programmed a killer Yahtzee game on the TI Personal Computer which “accidentally” got shipped on their “auxiliary program” disk – Kent’s dad was the product manager before joining Compaq at the very beginning), or pretending to chase girls.

At some point, my other five partners decided to kick me out of the business for some reason – I think it was because they were all going to UT Austin and I wasn’t.  I remember not being very happy with most of them (except Kent) for a while.  I went to live in Boston, they went to live in Austin, and we basically went our separate ways.

I often forget about this being my very first company and often refer to Martingale Software (also a failure) as my first company.  I guess I’ll call this one my Zero-ith company.

I wrote a post this summer titled CEOs That Are Introverts.  While I’m very comfortable in group settings and have no problem in front of a crowd, I’d much prefer to be alone, with Amy, or with one other person or couple.  Some of my best friends are introverts – and one of them sent me this magnificent article from The Atlantic Monthly by Jonathan Rauch titled “Caring for Your Introvert.”  The next time you are with me, please feel free to pop open your laptop and sit quietly doing something near me while I work on my computer – I’ll enjoy it a lot (and – depending on whether or not you are an introvert – you might also!)

Ben Casnocha is hard at work at his book titled “My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley”; which Jossey-Bass (part of John Wiley & Sons) is publishing this spring.  I read a draft over Thanksgiving and I predict this book will end up becoming a New York Times bestseller – it is extraordinary (just like Ben.)  Ben has asked a number of his friends to write short essays (called “Braintrusts”) to include in the book.  I was honored that he asked me to write one on Mentors.  Following is my “Reflections on Mentors” which hopefully will make it into the book when it’s published this spring. 

My first mentor was my Dad. I remember going for a long walk with him near our house in Dallas when I was 13 where he actively stepped out of “dad” mode and went into “business mentor mode” for the first time. Part of the brilliance of his mentoring is that he realized I needed non-parental mentors, so he introduced me to a patient of his, Gene Scott, who had been an executive at several computer companies in the 1960s and 1970s. As a teenager, I had a monthly dinner with “Mr. Scott” and I got my first taste of how rewarding a mentoring relationship can be.

In college, I started two companies which both failed, but my mentors (and my Dad) stayed close to me and helped me learn, struggle through the businesses, and accept failure.

In my first successful company, Feld Technologies, one of our early clients – Stewart Forbes – became another influential mentor. While he taught me a lot directly, Stewart taught me how to learn by actively working with my mentors, versus just observing them. I learned that an active mentoring relationship – regular communications, a two-way exchange of ideas, and even some disagreements – is much more effective than a “lecture style” relationship.

When I was in my early 20s, my uncle Charlie Feld entered the scene. Charlie was the CIO at Frito-Lay and one of the most respected CIO’s in industry. Whenever Charlie was in Boston, he invited me along, unashamed to have his nephew in tow. He taught me to always be willing to include younger people in your activities so they can learn. And with his help, I learned a lot.

Not all my mentors were business people. Eric von Hippel, my graduate advisor at MIT, pushed me to figure out deeper lessons about life. When I dropped out of a Ph.D. program, got divorced, and sold my first company – all in the same year – Eric was there for me day and night to help me work through my first major personal crisis and determine how I wanted to respond to it. Eric taught me how to discover what I really wanted to do with my life, and then spend all my time doing it. Without a mentor, it would have taken me a much longer time to answer this critical question. Eric may have been in academia, but he could still play “life coach” to me, a good reminder that sometimes the best mentors guide you in areas outside their official domain of expertise.

When I sold my first company at age 27, I acquired two great mentors – Len Fassler and Jerry Poch. In addition to solid business advice, Len taught me how to be gracious in every situation. He emphasized the value of sticking with something through to the very end, whether good or bad. Jerry taught me how to always be direct and clear, no matter what the news. Even if I hadn’t gotten a dime for my first company, Len and Jerry’s lessons about graciousness, persistence, and candor would have more than paid for themselves many times over.

When I look back on these and all the other mentors I’ve had (and continue to have today) and the people whom I now mentor, one thing stands out: the rare, but brilliant moment when the relationship shifts, the distinction between mentor and mentee dissolves, and you become “co-mentors”. Even if you aren’t “peers,” the learning becomes bi-directional. Everyone in a mentoring relationship should strive for this equilibrium, because it is here where the greatest learning occurs.

It’s easy to take. It’s harder to give. The value, and joy, you derive from a mentoring relationship corresponds with the effort you put into it. When there’s a balance between the two the relationship can be extraordinary. Think about what you are learning from your mentors. Even more importantly, think about what you are teaching them.