Tag: google
It’s been a blast to have a house in Kansas City. I’ve made a bunch of new friends from it and have been able to participate in the radical growth of the startup community there, especially in the KC Startup Village where my house is located. I’ve gotten to experience Google Fiber first hand and also helped mentor a neat startup called HandPrint who has been living in the house for the past six months. And it continues to be really fun to tell the story of the look on Amy’s face when I came home and said “hey – I bought a house in Kansas City today.”
When I bought the house, it had an attic that was a mess. A really gross mess. Think mouse turds, busted boards, and damp rotting wood mess. I hired a contractor who the HandPrint folks hung out with and he turned it into a great new loft. Turnstone (a Steelcase company) offered to furnish the house as a way of highlighting their furniture in a startup environment.
It turned out awesome. If you’ve been following the story at all, the video below will give you a few minute glimpse into the house, some of the players including the amazing Lesa Mitchell who helped make it all happen, the snazzy Turstone-loft, as well as give you a look at the HandPrint team.
I’m trying to figure out the next fun place to buy a house like this.
David Cohen (Techstars Founder) and I are doing a Google Hangout On Air that is open to anyone on 11/13/13 (what a prime day for something like this). It’s part of a Google Enterprise series on Colorado pioneers driving the local economy and culture. We’ll be talking about Techstars, Colorado, tech, and anything else that comes up.
This came out of a series of interviews with Google recently where we explained why Foundry Group takes venture capital to the cloud with Google Apps and how Techstars assists tomorrow’s entrepreneurs with help from Google Apps.
Come join us! Register here if you want to hangout.
![HiRes_GFExNEXT_Logo_RGB-[2100x1828]-5_10 (1)](https://i0.wp.com/www.feld.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/HiRes_GFExNEXT_Logo_RGB-2100x1828-5_10-1.png?ssl=1){kind=logo}
I’ve been a big supporter of Startup Weekend, locally and nationally, since the very beginning and I’m continuing to do so by both sponsoring and mentoring in the NEXT Boulder program. NEXT by Startup Weekend is a wonderful next step for entrepreneurs looking for feedback on their idea or early business, while heavily leveraging the Lean methodology. Below are the words of Ken Hoff, an up-and-coming leader in the Boulder startup community. As the City Coordinator of the NEXT program, check out what he has to say about why he thinks the program is valuable. Ken can be found at @ken_hoff or thekenhoff@gmail.com. Following are Ken’s thoughts on NEXT Boulder.
NEXT Boulder is a 5-week pre-accelerator program, beginning on 10/15. Entrepreneurs will be immersed in the skills and tactics their startup needs and will get consistent advice and feedback from the best mentors in Boulder. Sign up here!
As a recent graduate of the Computer Science department at CU Boulder, I’m really lucky to have found what I want to do for the rest of my life, even if it was only recently. During my senior year, I took “Startup Essentials for Software Engineering” (taught by Zach Nies of Rally Software) and I can confidently say it was the best class I ever took at CU.
We learned how to take an idea and turn it into a company the right way using the Lean Startup process. We learned how to do customer development, conduct empathy interviews, and build a real MVP (not just an alpha version). We learned hands-on, functional, pragmatic skills for building a startup; not high-level theory or “how to write a business plan.” We got off the ground and out of the building right away.
Not everyone gets to have this experience – I was lucky to be a student at the time it was offered. For those of us who aren’t in school, you can try to do it all on you own, but you have to rely on the generosity of mentors to give you their time and their feedback. Accelerators and incubators can offer this, but they require you to have your business already in motion and are difficult to get into.
That’s why when NEXT decided to hold an event in Boulder, I jumped at the chance to help. I want to give entrepreneurs the same awesome resources I had as a student. NEXT can give aspiring entrepreneurs three major tools:
1. A cohesive, comprehensive curriculum on how to build your startup, with clear, pragmatic directions on what steps to take next.
2. The ability to work on your idea – something that you’re vested in and passionate about – and the confidence to take that idea to a competition or accelerator.
3. Copious advice and feedback about your company from the best mentors available, like Brad Feld, Nicole Glaros, Brad Bernthal, Robert Reich, and more!
NEXT Boulder runs from 10/15 to 11/12, and consists of weekly 3-hour sessions on Tuesday nights at the Silicon Flatirons Center in CU Law. Single founders can sign up, but co-founders are encouraged to attend together.
If you’d like to:
Attend NEXT, head over to NEXT Boulder to get your tickets, or contact me at boulder@swnext.co for more questions.
Sponsor NEXT, contact me at boulder@swnext.co for more information. It’s a great way to get your product or brand in front of lots of early-stage entrepreneurs and great mentors from Boulder.
Mentor for NEXT, contact me at boulder@swnext.co for more information. This is a great chance to give back to the Boulder startup community and see what the next generation of entrepreneurs has to offer!
A big thanks to Brad Feld for his generous donation, as well as Silicon Flatirons Center for the use of their space. NEXT provides entrepreneurs with the right combination of everything they need: skills, feedback, and the motivation to keep it going. I’m really looking forward to seeing a lot of great companies come out of the program!
I’m at the The Athenaeum at Caltech which is the alumni club / hotel on Caltech’s campus. I’m on Caltech Guest WiFi and am getting speeds of between 2 and 10 Kbps (e.g. miserably slow). My Verizon phone has one bar and is flickering between 3G and LTE, but is mostly 3G.
I have no expectation that I get a certain level of infrastructure and connectivity in my life, so this isn’t a rant about that. In fact, I’m amazed on a regular basis that any of this shit actually works. Rather, I’m intrigued by the disparity between the top and bottom speed of connectivity I experience on a daily basis with my laptop and my iPhone.
Last week in Kansas City I experience the 1gig internet speed that is provided by Google Fiber. I was in a house next door to mine – my Google Fiber was being installed yesterday.
The gap isn’t a little – it’s orders of magnitude. And it’s fascinating to think about the impact of this unevenness. In my house slightly outside of Boulder we have an old T1 line that gets 1Mbps to it via a CenturyLink connection – this is the fastest connectivity I can get where I live. In my condo in Boulder, we are on 50Mbps Comcast connection (although I rarely see more than 20Mbps). I get no cell service at my house outside of Boulder; I get strong cell service and LTE in my condo in town.
I realize that the typical speed I first got when using a computer was 2400 baud (actually – my first modem was 110 baud) – that was only 35 years ago. It’s remarkable the difference between 110 baud and 811.02 Mbps over 35 years, but it’s even more dramatic that within a week I’ve used the same devices and applications at 1Mbps, 20Mbps, 800Mbps, and then get stuck in a place where you are happy when things spike to 20 Kbps.
Richard Florida talks about the power of the world being spiky. It’s interesting to ponder in the context of Internet connectivity.
The chance to apply to win a slot to live in my Google Fiber enabled house in Kansas City are open for one more week – ending on March 25th at 17:00 CDT. Last week Google opened up Fiber access to the neighborhood my house is in and I registered for the $120 / month plan (which will be included in the house – no charge for that, or for rent, for the winners.)
I’m looking for entrepreneurs who are committed to living in Kansas City for a year who have a unique and novel approach to taking advantage of 1 gigibit Internet. The house is next to Homes for Hackers and down the block from KC Startup Village. The winners get to live for free in the house for a year and get to be kept warm by 1 gigibit Internet.
Apply now.
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In general, I love Gmail. While Amy likes to complain to me about how ugly it is, I don’t even see the UI anymore as I just grind through the endless stream of email that I get each day. My biggest struggle is figuring out how to keep up, without the email ending up dominating everything I do. In the past year, this has gotten a lot harder, but I continue to try new things.
Fortunately, spam is almost non-existent for me. We invested in Postini, which Google ended up buying, and it’s been a joy to have flipped a switch almost a decade ago and had spam go from “overwhelming” to “almost nothing.”
Every now and then, I get a flurry of spam from a new attack before Gmail figures it out. Today was one of those days – I had about a dozen things that looked sort of eBay notification like but with Arabic characters. So I hit ! and marked them each as spam as I was going through my inbox. Suddenly, my inbox reloaded and I got the following message.
I expect that by the time I finish writing this post I’ll have access to my inbox again. But stuff like this makes me physically uncomfortable – my morning routine was just interrupted and the machines decided I don’t get to access my email for a while.
While plenty of folks complain about the ambiguity and lack of precision around many of the issues surrounding Google apps, and more specifically the general lack of support, I usually don’t worry about this much. However, in the last month I’ve had two issues that caused me to remember that I’m increasingly less in control and the machines are increasingly more in control. This is one of them; the other was that I noticed an incredible slow down of performance of Gmail – just for me. After a week of pressing on it, the response from Google enterprise tech support was “you have too many things hitting IMAP – disable all of them.” A quick look at my Google Dashboard showed around 100 different apps that I’d authorized to access my account. I cut it down to about 30 – and got rid of several that I knew were high traffic that I liked, such as the awesome new Mailbox app – and things sped up again after 24 hours.
I recognize that if as we hand over control to the machines, they will make mistakes. That’s ok. But it’s jarring when one doesn’t have control over it, even for a little while. And yes, my Gmail is back up.
Evidence of Google Winning The Generational Shift Over Microsoft
An email was forwarded to me this morning that had the following text in it (I’ve anonymized “The College” but it’s a large, well-regarded four year university.)
The College is Going Google! What does this mean? How will it impact teaching and learning at The College? Many K-12 school districts are using Google Apps for Education, providing their students with access to Google productivity tools as early as primary school. Students coming to The College in the next five years may never have opened Microsoft Word, but will be familiar with sharing, collaborating, and publishing with Google tools. Are you ready?
I spend time at a few universities, including MIT and CU Boulder. I’m teaching a class this semester at CU Boulder with Phil Weiser and Brad Bernthal called “Philosophy of Entrepreneurship.” We had our first class last week – Brad Bernthal led so Phil and I sat in the back. I noticed a bunch of students with their email open during class – almost every one of them was using Gmail.
A meme went around a few years ago that kids using Facebook would never use email and that Facebook would replace Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. This never really made sense to me, especially since I’d already heard that text messaging would replace email, and then I heard that X would replace email, and now it was going to be Facebook. As much as email frustrates us, it’s still by far the most ubiquitous comm channel.
But as someone who switched completely from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps a few years ago, it seemed clear to me that Microsoft was going to come under incredible pressure on this vector. Office 365 was one of Microsoft’s reactions to this, but I still haven’t met any company that uses Office 365 as it’s primary infrastructure, although Microsoft has a nice site called NowOnOffice365.com that lists a bunch.
Now, it appears that Google is taking a page from the Apple playbook and focusing on higher education. Apple did this magnificently in the 1980’s when I was in college and did this again in the past decade. Jobs was always focused on universities – I still remember “computers are bicycles for the mind” and the 50% discount off of retail promotion that MIT had in 1984 or 1985.
I don’t focus on market share dynamics (I’m sure there are teams of people at Microsoft and Google focused on this) but the anecdotal evidence I’m seeing is powerful. And when The College switches to Google Apps because the students coming to The College are already well steeped in it and “may have never opened Microsoft Word”, something really interesting is going on.
If your organization is on Office 365, I’d love to hear from you in the comments to understand how you are using it. Are you using document collaboration via SkyDrive, or just Office 365 as the backend service for Email instead of Exchange?
If you are a college student using Microsoft Outlook instead of Gmail, tell me why.
I joined my first board of a company other than mine in 1994 (NetGenesis). Since then, I’ve sat on hundreds of boards and been to a zillion board meetings. It crushes my soul a little to think of the number of board meetings I have sat through that were ineffective, poorly run, or just plain boring. I guess that’s part of the motivation I have in writing Startup Boards: Reinventing the Board of Directors to Be Useful to the Entrepreneur (the next book in the Startup Revolution series which should be out sometime this summer.)
In the mean time, over the past two years I’ve done a lot of experiments with the boards I’m on. I’ve tried a lot of different things – some that are awesome, some that don’t matter, some that suck, and some that have been epic fails. For any that aren’t awesome, I’ve tried to kill the experiment quickly so it didn’t hurt anything and when I reflect on everything I’ve tried I think I’ve managed to “do no harm”, which is more than I can say for a lot of the other VCs who I’ve sat on boards with since 1994.
By this summer, I expect I’ll have a very clear view on the best practices from my perspective for making a Startup Board effective. Until then, I’m still running experiments, or experiencing experiments that the entrepreneurs run. And I’m thinking out loud (including in posts like this) on what has worked and hasn’t worked.
One of the things I’ve played around with is the board package. The number of different formats, styles, information incorporated, and distribution methods over the years boggles my mind. I not-so-fondly remember toting around “binders full of board meeting material” in the 1990s. Or pre-Gmail having a “board meeting folder” in Outlook so I could quickly find the upcoming board meeting documents. Or fighting through 19 attachments to an email to figure out where the actual board material was. PowerPoints, PDFs, Word documents, text files, Excel spreadsheets, Prezi docs, videos, email outlines – the list goes on.
Recently, I had a magical moment. I’m a huge believer in distributing the board material a few days in advance, having all the board members comment on it in advance of the meeting, and then having the meeting without going through the board material page by page. No death by endless Powerpoint, no reading a document I’ve already read. My favorite board meetings are the “one slide board meeting” where the only piece of paper allowed in the room is the agenda of the meeting.
When entrepreneurs don’t get this, I suggest that they pretend their board members can read and cognitively process the information in advance. And, if they don’t believe their board members will do this, just start having the board meeting under this assumption and watch how they board members get their shit together and read the material in advance.
In this recent magical moment, rather than receiving anything via email, a Google Doc notification showed up in my inbox. I went to it and the entire board package was in a single Google doc file. The entire management team and the entire board was included on it. As I read through the Google doc, whenever I had a comment or a question, I highlighted the section in question, hit Command-Option-M, and left a comment. Then, as other people read through the package, they left comments. And then the management team responded to the comments.
Voila – an interactive board package. Zero special technology. It wasn’t planned, or assigned. It just naturally happened. When we showed up to the board meeting, everyone had the issues in their mind. We’d already cut out an hour of setup, and probably another hour of discussion. So we got right down to the higher level issues that the board material, and comments, and the responses generated.
In this case, the CEO created a very simple agenda immediately before the board meeting that captured the strategic issues we needed to address. There were a few tactical questions outstanding – they got knocked off quickly. We had a two hour board meeting – 90 minutes of it was intense and fruitful. No one referred to any paper – we looked each other in the eyes for 90 minutes and had a deep, engaged, substantive discussion.
I’ve been describing this as a part of a “continuous board engagement” – similar to “continuous deployment and continuous innovation” in Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. I get information daily from most of the companies I’m involved in. I’m in the flow of a lot of information – some “noise” but a huge amount of “signal.” Then – the week before the board meeting, the current state of things gets consolidated into a dynamic document that allows everyone involved to interact with each other around the content.
I’m going to play a lot with this in the next few months. Any suggested tweaks or changes to this approach? Any obvious pitfalls?
I’m finding myself using Google+ more and more. I recently decided that the long game Google is playing is absolutely brilliant. They are being understated about it but doing exactly what business strategists talk about when they describe the long game as the one to play.
Rather than making a bunch of sweeping pronouncements, struggling to jam together a bunch of random crap in a big bang release, and then worry about staying involved in a feature race with a competitor, Google is continually experimenting with new functionality, rolling it out broadly in a fully integrated fashion on a continuous basis, and providing it as a core part of an ever expanding thing that is getting more and more useful by the week.
By now I hope you are saying something like “What the fuck is he talking about – Facebook is crushing Google+” or something like that. Yeah, whatever. That’s why it’s the long game that they are playing.
Here are some examples.
I live in Gmail. Suddenly, I found this magical thing called Circles to be useful. When I get behind on my email, I simply go through a few of the circles (Foundry, Foundry Ents) and clear the email from my partners, my assistant Kelly, and the CEOs I work with. I have persistent chat up – I find that 80% of my chats now go through Gchat (the other 20% are Skype, and they are almost always requested by someone else.) And now that there are Hangouts integrated, many of these are videos.
Google Voice is my Phone Number. I used to have desktop phones. I don’t anymore – I have a Google voice # and an iPhone. I give everyone my Google voice #. It works everywhere. I never think about what phone I’m using anymore. And I do many calls via the computer.
Google Hangouts is my new Calendar Invite. I hate the telephone. Hate hate hate. But I don’t mind chat. And I don’t mind a Google Hangout / video call. All of a sudden I can make invites from Google Calendar that are Hangout invites. Done – every phone call / conference call is now a Hangout.
I live in Chrome. I have several computers. I never notice the difference between them. I’m downstairs at my place in Keystone right now on my Macbook Air. When I go up into my office, I’ll be on my treadputer with a different Macbook Air (an older one) connected to a 27″ monitor. I switch regularly between the two throughout the day and don’t even notice.
Now you are thinking “Ok Brad, but other than the Hangouts, Circles within email, and Hangouts within Calendar, what are you using Google+ for?” Just those three things have completely changed my workflow massively for the better. And they just showed up for me one day – I didn’t have to do anything.
In 2012 I used all the normal Google+ stuff. I reposted content there. I followed people. I occasionally chatted, commented, or +1ed. Facebook-like features. But I didn’t care that much about that stuff – yet.
All of a sudden I’ve got Communities. I’ve got Events. I’ve got Pages. And Hangouts, and Circles integrats seamlessly with each of these things. And they are nicely integrated with Gmail and Calendar. And suddenly I can do On Air Hangouts. And, I can record them automatically and save them to my Youtube channel. Keep playing for another few years, user by user, company by company, integrated feature by integrated feature.
Yeah, it drives me batshit that Google still things I’m brad@feld.com, brad@foundrygroup.com, brad@startuprev.com, and brad.feld@gmail.com. Some day they’ll integrate these. And as I approach 25,000 contacts, I’ll probably start bitching about how this limit is ridiculous, just like I did at 10,000. But I can deal with all of that.
Google – thanks for playing the long game here. I wish more companies, especially other tech companies, did this especially when they have massive resources. Sure – some think they are playing the long game, but they are really playing the short game with a bunch of things that take a long time for them to get out the door. Different game.