Tag: foundry group
A few weeks ago I reposted some great advice from Fred Wilson for pitching entrepreneurs:
“Fundraising is simple: find investors that get excited about your company.”
Our experience with Spare5 and their experience raising money from us, where we just led a $10 million Series A Financing together with Madrona Venture Group and New Enterprise Associates, fits this quote perfectly.
Matt Bencke, Spare5’s CEO, had a conversation last November with Jason. I remember Jason walking into my office and saying that he’d been thinking about something like this for a while and was super excited about how Matt was describing what Spare5 was going to do. Within a few days, Ryan, Seth and I also spoke with Matt and his co-founders and agreed to participate in their $3.25M Series Seed round.
While it helped that our long time friend Greg Gottesman had been working Matt for a while and that Spare5 was the first company to emerge from Greg’s Madrona Venture Labs project, Jason bouncing up and down about it in my office when describing his excitement to me was the real spark.
Since then the team at Spare5 has made great progress. We are psyched to be leading this round with the same VC team that made up the company’s first round. For the last several months we have had an insider’s view into Spare5’s progress, promise, and challenges. We love what we see.
Spare5 is bringing a unique approach to a massive problem that is riding huge trends. More and more companies are swimming in data – both signal and lots and lots of noise. Whether your company is posting content, selling online, training machines, and / or trying to understand what people think, you need human insights more than ever before. Spare5’s micro-task platform gathers targeted peoples’ inputs, and synthesizes them into valuable insights. The other side of this trend is the fact that we’re a society addicted to our smartphones. Spare5 aspires to give everyone a host of new choices about how to spend spare time productively and make a buck while doing it.
If you have dirty data or not enough of the good, actionable kind, check out www.spare5.com/product. If you are some particular combination of audacious, ambitious, and inspired check out www.spare5.com/jobs. And if you’re just plain nuts, download the iOS app and let Spare5 tap into your particular kind of crazy today.
Yesterday we closed our fifth fund, Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. As with all four of our other funds, it’s a $225 million fund.
In 2007 we raised our first fund – Foundry Venture Capital 2007. We subsequently raised a $225 million fund in 2010, another one in 2013, and a late stage fund in 2013. Our 2013 fund was originally raised in 2012, but we didn’t start investing it until 2013 so we renamed it 2013.
Except for our late stage fund, each of our funds has 30 investments (+/- 2) in it. Each is $225 million. Each is roughly invested 1/3rd into companies in Colorado, 1/3rd into companies in the bay area, and 1/3rd into companies in the rest of the US (Boston, NY, Seattle, LA, Portland, Austin, Minneapolis, Washington D.C., Burlington, and Phoenix.)
Our investment strategy has been unchanged since we raised our first fund in 2007. We are thematic investors, an approach we pioneered with a few other firms that today is trendy (and often mislabeled). We invest $5 million to $15 million in a company over its lifetime. We are early stage investors – if you’ve raised more than $3 million you are too late for us. We only invest in the US, but will invest anywhere in the US. We are syndication agnostic – we’ll invest with other VCs or invest by ourselves.
Our late stage fund gave us flexibility to invest more money in our later stage companies. We aren’t a growth investor, but rather interested in investing more money in our winners. This fund has already seen two big exits – Gnip and Fitbit.
We view our jobs as taking a box full of money that our investors give us and giving them back a bigger box full of more money over time. It’s pretty straightforward. We try to do this our own special way while having a lot of fun doing it. We have a small number of investors (around 20) who we appreciate deeply for supporting us in our journey.
And we couldn’t do any of this without the founders we get to work with. We appreciate them more than anything. Well, other than Jason’s musical abilities. For example:
Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Return Path, has an outstanding post up this morning titled The Difference Between Culture and Values. Go read it, I’ll be here when you get back.
If you liked that, go get a copy of Matt’s book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business. It’s one of the books on my list of books all CEOs should read.
Matt distinguishes between culture and values. His punch line, which he reveals early, is:
Values guide decision-making and a sense of what’s important and what’s right. Culture is the collection of business practices, processes, and interactions that make up the work environment.
At Foundry Group, we have a slight modification to how we think of values. Supporting our values are a set of “deeply held beliefs.” These deeply held beliefs tangibly define our values and give us a frame of reference to operate.
For example, one of our deeply held beliefs is that “we will never grow.” Each of our funds is $225 million, we have four partners and no other investment staff, and we work out of the same office we’ve worked out of since we started in 2007. We’ve had opportunities to raise much larger funds and have considered it in the past given a variety of factors. But, we kept coming back to this deeply held belief and realized that raising a larger fund would violate our brand promise of only raising $225 million funds.
Our deeply held beliefs are fundamental to our values, although we are comfortable challenging them regularly to make sure they are deeply held, and make modifications on occasion when we learn new things but only after a lot of thought and discussion, among ourselves and with several of our very close limited partners.
For example, when we started we said “we’ll make around 10 new investments a year.” This came from a belief around the importance of time diversity of investing – we have a three year time horizon for making the 30 or so initial investments in the companies we want in each fund.
Until 2013, we made between 8 and 14 a year, which is close enough to 10 (although the year we did 14 was a year where we all said “too much – slow down.”) But at the end of 2013, when the JOBS Act became official and AngelList created Syndicates, we decided to understand the phenomenon better by participating in it. So, rather than sit on the sidelines, observe, and prognosticate about angel / seed investing, we created the FG Angels Syndicate on AngelList and have done around 60 seed investments in the last 18 months.
Another example of a re-evaluation of a deeply held belief was our decision to create our Foundry Group Select Fund. Until we created this fund, we limited the amount that we could invest in a company to $15 million. We would occasionally go a little higher (the most we have invested in a company from one of our funds, other than Select, is $17 million) but, especially with successful companies, we were limited to what we could do in the later rounds. During a particularly challenging financing for Fitbit, which we believed deeply in at the time as an unambiguously successful company, we were frustrated that we couldn’t write a big check in the financing. We talked to our LPs about what we were thinking, quickly raised a late stage fund to invest on in our later rounds for our portfolio companies, and made our first investment from that fund in the last round Fitbit did in 2013. With Select, we are no longer limited to investing $15 million per company.
Matt states in his post:
“A company’s values should never really change. They are the bedrock underneath the surface that will be there 10 or 100 years from now. They are the uncompromising core principles that the company is willing to live and die by, the rules of the game.”
I strongly agree with this, although I have one nuance. It’s hard to be absolutely correct at the beginning of the journey. So, instead of being dogmatic about values you created when you were three founders in a cafe somewhere, make sure you have one layer of abstraction about how you implement them, that can be tuned over time. For us, these are our deeply held beliefs, which support our values, but can be tuned as we learn new things. But, because they are deeply held, they can only be slightly modified, rather than torn up and replaced.
I passed on something referred to us by a close VC friend (who I’ll call Joe) who I’ve done a bunch of investments with over the years. A few minutes later I got the following email from the entrepreneur.
hey brad –
if you get a moment, i’d love to hear your unvarnished reasons for the denial. thanks for the time…- i remain a huge fan of your blog…….
I get asked regularly for feedback on why we pass on something, especially when we pass after a single email interaction. As with many things, it’s useful to start with your strategy, assuming you have one.
In Foundry Group’s case, our goal is not to invest in every great company, it’s to invest in ten potentially great companies a year.
As part of our strategy, we have purposely constrained our fund size ($225m per fund, which lasts about three years and covers about 30 investments) and our partnership size (four partners, no associates.) As a result, our goal is to say no in 60 seconds. Sure, we’ll miss some great opportunities, but that is fine as long as we believe (a) there are more than 10 great potential companies for us to invest in each year and (b) our deal flow dynamics are such that we see a lot more than the 10 we end up choosing to invest in.
Based on our current deal flow dynamics, if we had unlimited time, unlimited capital, and unlimited partner resources, there are at least 100 companies each year that we would invest in. This 100 number is not “deal flow” – this is actually investments that we’d make. So given our strategy constraint, we could miss investing in 90% of the things we wanted to invest in and still have enough new, great, potential investments to execute on our strategy.
Many of our quick passes are in the “it’s us, not you” category. There are a few things driving this. Following is the response I sent to the entrepreneur above in response to his question about why I passed.
1. Stage – this is later than our usual entry point. If you’ve raised more than $3m, we generally don’t engage. We don’t have to be the first money in, and we love to work with Joe, so I squinted and made an exception since you’d only raised $4m
2. Focus – We are very selective since we only do 10 new investments a year. I wrote a post about this a while ago (https://www.feld.com/archives/2009/06/say-no-in-less-than-60-seconds.html). I took the first meeting / call because of Joe. I tested high level response internally against the other 100 things that are in front of us. It was no where near the top (we have this discussion continually and use each other for reactions).
3. Engagement – I’m in Dubai next week and then Canada the week after that. Then I’m home for a week, in Cleveland, then in Boston/NY. So the next month is one of those months where nothing much new is going to happen on my end. We hate to play the slow roll game with entrepreneurs – one of our deeply held beliefs is to either engage or not engage quickly. Given #2 and then considering #3, I know that nothing is going to happen for a while and I have no interest in being the schmuck that just hangs around waiting to see if something happens.
Fundamentally, the quick positive reaction was “neat + Joe is awesome” then weighed down by 1, 2, and 3 above, resulting in “I’ll face reality quickly on this – we aren’t going to get there on it…”
While at some level this might not be satisfying to the entrepreneur, and I’ve had many challenge me to go deeper in my exploration of their company, given 20 years of investing it’s usually pretty clear when something is not going to happen. The reasons vary greatly, but having a strategy that causes it not to matter in the long run has been something that we’ve spent many hours talking about and making sure we understand.
Ultimately, understanding what we do, how we do it, and the strategy behind it is key to us being able to run Foundry Group with just the four of us. I take inspiration from a lot of people on this front, including Warren Buffett and his approach to his headquarters team for what is now one of the largest businesses on the planet.
There are clearly more than one way to run a successful VC firm – our goal is to run it the way we think we can be successful at it.
Foundry Group has now been around for over seven years and I’ve been working with my partners for 14 years. We’ve started to develop some traditions.
One of my favorites is exit gifts. When a company has an exit that generates a return for us, we give a gift to the partner who served on the board. These gifts are generally tuned to what the partner loves such as musical stuff for Ryan and Jason, bike stuff for Seth, and art for me. They are modest, but very thoughtful and something the partner wouldn’t have just gone out and done for himself. They are often self referential, such as the Makerbot sculpture of me created by an artist and printed on a Makerbot after Stratasys acquired MakerBot.
A few weeks ago Seth, Jason, and Ryan corralled me in our small conference room. Whenever they do this, I’m never sure if it’s going to be a happy thing or an intervention. Ryan was holding the following 2′ x 3′ framed print.
To get a better sense of this masterpiece, let’s zoom in on the G and the N.
This is a list of every tweet I made at @bfeld from the day of our investment in Gnip to the day that Twitter acquired Gnip. This first one is from 2/29/08.
The last batch is from 4/14.
Ryan told me that Gnip was used to generate the tweet list for the poster. And Postertext was used to print it. Thanks guys – this one made me smile a huge smile. I love this tradition.
There is a moment during the exploration of a new relationship where a switch flips and the answer is “I want to do this.”
With Mattermark, I remember the moment clearly – I was at The Kitchen in Boulder with the founders (Danielle Morrill, Kevin Morrill, and Andy Sparks) and my partner Seth. I had just put a garlic french fry in my mouth (if you’ve never had them at The Kitchen, they are epic) and looked over at Seth. He looked at me and gave me that “yeah – we should do this” look. And that was it.
As an investor for the past 20 years, I’ve had this happen many times. When I first started investing as an angel investor in 1994, I was focused on a very simple set of criteria. First, did I care about / have affinity for the product? Next, were the entrepreneurs obsessed about their product? Last, did I want to be a long term partner with the entrepreneurs?
With a slight diversion in the late 1990’s when everyone (including me) lost their mind for a few years, I’ve held to this algorithm for all my investing. If you look at the boards I’m on, including companies like Fitbit, FullContact, Oblong, Orbotix, littleBits, Yesware, and Return Path, this pattern should be pretty clear. And if you ponder how I originally got involved in Techstars, and how my role has evolved, those three criteria loom large.
I’ve been interested in private company data since I started Feld Technologies in 1987. Well before the web existed, I was physically tearing articles out of industry magazines and sending them to customers, prospects, other entrepreneurs, and my partner Dave, who probably got tired of the stack of paper with notes scribbled on them that landed on his desk each day. I’ve been through multiple iterations of competitive databases, endless applications for trying to keep track of companies I’m either an investor in or compete with, and every different type of alerting system you could imagine.
During the first decade of my experience with this, I couldn’t afford to subscribe to anything. Every now and then I’d get a free trial and realize how shitty the underlying data was. For the past almost 20 years, I’ve been able to afford the subscriptions, but the data is still shitty. There have been several efforts to crowdsource this kind of data, or make it publicly available, but none have resulted in anything magnificent.
So, regarding the question of “do I care about / have affinity for the product of Mattermark”, the answer was a strong, unambiguous yes. I know how hard the problem is, how wide open the opportunity is, how far it will scale in multiple directions (not just the data set, but the use case, target market, and ultimate product family.) My affinity in this case borders on obsession, just like it does with the Contact Management problem.
Now, let’s shift to #2: “Are the entrepreneurs obsessed about their product?” If you know Danielle, Kevin, and Andy, you know the answer is yes. But there’s nothing quite like experiencing it. Over the past year, as I’ve gotten to know Danielle, I’ve seen her obsession and focus, not just on the short term Mattermark product, but on the long game she and the team is playing. During dinner at The Kitchen, which was the first time we were face to face since we’d met at the beginning of the year, and the first time I’d interacted with Kevin and Andy, all I had to do was sit there, prompt every now and then, and I got another layer of product vision. Obsession. Endless intellectual exploration of where this could go. When I challenged ideas, there was no defensiveness, just more exploration. When I suggested things, there wasn’t blanket approval or rejection, but rather a socratic inquiry as Danielle, Kevin, and Andy tried to understand what I was suggesting. I watched Seth do his thing and the gang continue to engage the same way. At some point, Seth and I had the look I referred to at the beginning of this post.
I’ve always been impulsive about #3: “Do I want to be long term partners with the entrepreneurs?” For the first decade of my investing experience, I made a lot of mistakes on this dimension. Howard Diamond, a close friend and entrepreneur I’ve worked with since 1996 (now the CEO of MobileDay), regularly criticized me as been too trusting, too willing to see the good in people, and too patient with people. This kicked me in the ass very, very hard between 2001 and 2004. While it didn’t make me cynical, I calibrated my filters as I slogged through three more very long years between 2004 and 2007. I like to believe that I brought a new frame of reference around this to Foundry Group, informed by Howard’s constructive criticism, feedback from lots of other friends, learning from my mistakes, and all the long-term positive relationships that I now had as a frame of reference.
I also have a lot of people in my world who know me well, know what I like, and know who I will work well with. This includes a small set of VCs, such as Jon Callaghan at True Ventures and Greg Gottesman at Madrona who know me so well that they only approach me with companies and founders they know I will love. But mostly I use the many CEOs and entrepreneurs I have developed a long-term relationship with to help me calibrate what Amy likes to refer to as my “poor impulse control”, sort of like Raven’s from Snow Crash.
The combination of my own experience and feedback from my universe – both good and bad – made it clear that I wanted to be long term partners with Danielle and team. Recognize that I’m not looking for unambiguously good feedback – we are all flawed in different ways, make mistakes, and have endless and enormous opportunities to learn. An understanding and appreciation of that by the entrepreneurs I work with is deeply important to me.
Back to dinner. Seth eventually had to leave and we kept at it for a while. Driving home, I rolled around what was left in my mind as questions and concerns I had about making an investment. When I got home 20 minutes later, I had none. When we got together the next morning for more discussion, it was easy to look forward and pretend I was already an investor, which felt good. At some point, we shifted to a mode where I asked Danielle, Kevin, and Andy what they wanted, expected, and demanded from an investor. I let them ask me whatever they wanted for a while. But by this point I was all in, as long as they wanted to work with me.
Sure, we did some more up front work and some formal legal diligence, but in that moment at The Kitchen, Seth and I knew that we wanted to be investors in Mattermark.
And that was that. Last week we led a $6.5 million round in Mattermark. I’m delighted to finally be an investor in a problem I’ve been obsessed about for 20 years. We are at the beginning of the journey – check back in a decade from now to see whether or not we are successful. But, regardless, this is a team I hope to work with for the rest of my investing career.
If you’ve been following along at home, you know that we recently created an AngelList Syndicate called FG Angels. Our goal is to make 50 investments through AngelList before the end of 2014. We’ll contribute $50k to each investment; our FG Angels Syndicate will contribute up to $450k.
Shortly after doing our first few investments, I got a really nice email from a member of Impact Angel Group, a Colorado-based angel group that organized an investment in the FG Angels syndicate. It shows a second order effect of what we are trying to accomplish with FG Angels. I thought it was worth sharing.
I just wanted to say thank you for all of your work in breaking through the red tape to put together FG Angels. I believe all of our committed members have completed their investments as individuals and we have made our first investment through the LLC we put together.
We really appreciate the time you spent to answer our questions and work through the details. I thought it might be helpful for you to see the positive impact you are making for our small group, which I’m sure can be multiplied a hundred times over. As you all know, herding angels and getting new angels to actually pull the trigger is not an easy task. FG Angels has helped us address all of our major angel-herding challenges through the following:
- FG Angels increased the amount of capital our group has committed since our official founding in 8/13 by 103% which will certainly help us with deal flow, member acquisition etc.
- 18 of our 37 angels pledged to participate and 14 are actually participating. Our members have a variety of different backgrounds and interests, so this is the largest participation rate for one deal that we’ve seen to date.
- 15 of the 18 had never visited AngelList prior to researching FG Angels.
- 6 of the 18 who pledged and 4 of the 18 who participated are never-ever angels.
- 7 of the 18 are making their first investment as Impact Angel Group members.
- 2 angels are considering creating their own AngelList syndicate as a result of their experience.
- We created an LLC of 145k to allow some of our newer angels to participate at smaller amounts. 1% of the carry will go to the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Colorado. 1% of the carry will go back to us to help us support angel investing in Colorado.
- I learned an incredible amount about SEC regulations, crowdfunding and the logistics of AngelList.
A few weeks ago we had a summit for the women execs in our portfolio. About 40 women attended. Overall we identified about 70 women in our portfolio in leadership positions, which I estimate is about 15% of the exec positions in our portfolio.
The event was organized by three of the women – Joanne Lord (until recently CMO at BigDoor, now at Porch), Nicole Glaros (Techstars Boulder Managing Director), and Terry Morreale (NCWIT Associate Director). Like many of our internal summits, the agenda was organically developed and the event was a lightly structured, high engagement day. It was an all female event until 4pm, when I joined for a 75 minute fireside chat followed by a nice dinner at Pizzeria Locale.
This morning I’m heading over the NCWIT annual employee retreat and participating in the first session, which is a retrospective on the past year and current state of NCWIT. I’ve been chair of NCWIT for nine years and am amazed and what Lucy Sanders and the organization has achieved. Personally, I’ve learned an incredible amount about the issues surrounding women in technology and have a handle on what I think are root causes of the challenges as well as long term solutions.
Last night I gave a talk at Galvanize on failure for Startup Summer, one of the Startup Colorado programs. About 10% of the people in the room were women. After almost 90 minutes of talk and Q&A, the last question was an awesome one about the women in the room and what we could do to encourage more engagement by and with women in the startup scene.
About a year ago, we realized that none of our active companies had a female CEO. Today, three of the 58 do: Moz (Sarah Bird), littleBits (Ayah Bdeir), and Nix Hydra (Lina Chen). If you are looking for a percentage on that, it’s 5%.
5%, 10%, and 15% are low numbers. But at least we are looking at them, measuring them, talking about gender dynamics in tech, and taking action around it.
Every year or so my partners and I at Foundry Group create a new company, or start a new project, that we believe had the potential to change the way something works in our world, while simultaneously helping the entrepreneurs we work with, and the entrepreneurs we aspire to work with.
For example, in 2006, we co-founded Techstars. At the time David Cohen, the co-founder and CEO, was unhappy with how angel investing worked. He was dissatisfied with his experience and had a hypothesis around helping a group of companies get going, surrounding them with active mentors, and accelerating their early growth. The Techstars Boulder 2007 program was an experiment – we had no idea if it would work. Looking back seven years later, I’m immensely proud and satisfied with the impact Techstars has had on the world of entrepreneurship, especially at the early stages of company creation, and look forward to our goal over the next seven years of building the most powerful and connected early stage startup network in the world.
Our 2014 project is FG Press.
I wrote my first book, Do More Faster, with David Cohen in 2010. We worked with our publisher Wiley, who took a chance on us. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and it was really fucking hard. I remember sitting at my kitchen table in Homer, Alaska in July 2010 at 2am almost crying with frustration. I was just grinding through the last bit of it and the tedium of the process was overwhelming. I kept thinking “there has to be a better way” even back then, but there was something magical about holding the book in my hands in October 2010 when it came out.
In 2011, when my partner Jason Mendelson and I wrote my second back, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, I had figured out the writing drill, but I was still baffled by the publishing process. It was painful and tedious, and there were many steps along the way that made no sense. But I kept writing and learning.
In 2012 I thought hard about self-publishing everything I did going forward, but I didn’t feel like I completely grokked the publishing business yet. Venture Deals was a very successful book and Wiley increased their focus and attention on me. I had an expectation that somehow things would be different, better, more impactful, and more aligned, especially around process, promotion, and economics. So I decided to do four more books, which make up the Startup Revolution series, including the most recent one – Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors (the third in the series) – which just came out. Along the way, my long time friend Matt Blumberg (CEO of Return Path) decided to write a book so we added it on to the Startup Revolution series, resulting in Startup CEO: A Field Guide To Scaling Up Your Business.
There’s a lot more history, which I’ll cover in later posts, but all of this led to a place in fall of 2013 where my partners and I at Foundry Group started having a discussion about doing something different around the book publishing industry. We all are extensive readers and believe the long-form book is something that is very valuable, especially ones like Venture Deals that we believe will have at least a 20 year relevance, assuming we continue to update it. We also think it should be easier for more people to write and produce high quality, useful long-form books. While we think the entire process and engagement model is completely broken, that leads us to the punchline of the thing that is really wrong.
The relationship between the reader and the author has an immense amount of friction in it. And that friction comes from the publisher. It’s not just that the economics are wrong (why should the economic split between publisher and author be – on average – 85% to the publisher and 15% to the author?) but that the publisher sits in between the author and the reader. Sure – industrious writers can build direct relationships with their readers around their publisher – which is what happens today, but that’s silly. Shouldn’t the publisher be in the business of helping facilitate these relationships in addition to theoretically curating and producing the content?
We spent a morning together one day talking about this stuff. We came up with a very long list of issues, like the ones above, and then put the key question on the table: “What should we do about this.” My response was “let’s start our own publishing company.” Hence FG Press.
As with all new ideas, we started looking for patterns in things in the world that we liked. If you are familiar with McSweeney’s, O’Reilly, or Granta, then you understand where our brains were going and some of the companies that inspire us. Ultimately, we realized that the optimal model for what we were doing was Techstars, specifically the Techstars of 2006.
If you are a fan of analogies, Techstars is to “angel investing before Techstars” as FG Press is to “traditional publishing.” We are running an experiment in the first year. The experiment involves anyone who wants to participate. We expect to learn a lot and iterate very rapidly on what we are doing. And we plan to share out ideas widely, as a way of open-sourcing our learning, engaging with other people working on similar problems, while taking an author and reader-centric point of view, in the same way that Techstars took an entrepreneur and mentor-centric point of view.
Like Techstars, this is a new entity. It has a full time co-founder/CEO (Dane McDonald), just like Techstars was co-founded and run by David Cohen. It’s a self-funded entity, just like Techstars was for the first two years. Our goal is that it’s deeply complementary and integrated into everything we do and our point of view about the world of entrepreneurship, as Techstars is.
Will make mistakes. We’ll learn a lot. We’ll have fun. We hope you’ll come along for the journey with us. If you want to get a feel for one of the characters from our first book, just follow Mara Winkel on Twitter. And we’ll take Bitcoin, once we get the damn software working right.