I’m helping MIT (Fiona Murray and Alon Shklarek ) share a short survey exploring how founders around the world navigate ethical challenges. Insights will shape practical tools for entrepreneurs, investors, and ecosystem leaders. Survey link: https://mit.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2rVOSwnXT0Qe8qa?org=3 It takes just 8 minutes, and your input directly contributes to a healthier entrepreneurial ecosystem.
I learned how to do deals from Len Fassler. Last week, I got an email from Dustin Kloempken , who sent me a few quotes he wrote down from the Berkshire Annual Meeting. One of them jumped out at me. “Turn every page. One important ingredient in the investment field that very few people do. And those people who did read every page aren’t telling you what they learned. You have to read every page.“ ...
I’m not a sports fan, but wow, this is good. A growth mindset reframes failure… “When you work toward your goal, you’re taking steps to success.” pic.twitter.com/S6LFQoHw5y — Brian Solis (@briansolis) April 28, 2023 Thanks, Dave Mayer , for sending this to me.
On Tuesday, David Cohen (Techstars co-founder/chair) and I did an AMA for Techstars founders about the SVB crisis. The team at Techstars turned it into a podcast for our Give First series . The teaser from the podcast follows: The fall of SVB will go down in history as one of those ‘where were you when …’ moments. For David Cohen, he was sitting at a sporting event when his phone began buzzing incessantly. For Brad Feld, he was couch shopping with his wife. ...
GlueCon will occur for the thirteenth time, on May 24th-25th, in Broomfield, Colorado. My Foundry partners and I helped Kim and Eric Norlin create Gluecon in 2009 because we saw the need for a developer-focused event to explore emerging technologies around the cloud and APIs. The first year that GlueCon occurred, it seemed like nearly every session began with someone defining “what cloud computing is.” In the interim years, dozens of products and startups have launched or used GlueCon as one of the venues for their early premieres. Twilio, Docker, and Kubernetes all appeared on the GlueCon stage long before they were known by the wider tech community. ...
For those of you older than 40, it sort of felt like 2000. If you are younger than 40, a massive tech bubble just burst. I expect you know that. For the past six months, many VCs have been podcasting, tweeting, publicly writing, … and generally prognosticating about what you should do and what’s going to happen next. I think the best VCs didn’t prognosticate. They knew what was going to happen next. Instead, they worked with each company to help them deal with reality as it unfolded. Each company is different, and the dynamics of the bubble bursting were not generic. ...
The 2nd Edition of my book Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors launched today. My co-authors, Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Bolster , and Mahendra Ramsinghani, were a joy to work with. While the 1st Edition was a good book, I wasn’t particularly proud of it because I didn’t feel like it was my best writing. We worked hard on this edition, and I now feel like it’s equivalent in quality to my other books. ...
Since releasing my newest book The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors I’ve been continually getting the questions “Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship?” and “Why Nietzsche?” Dave and I cover this right off the bat in the book, so I thought I’d toss up an excerpt that addresses the question with part of my own origin story with Dave. It follows. Nietzsche? For entrepreneurs? It was the end of January 1988, about nine months since we had embarked on turning Brad’s solo consulting shop, Feld Technologies, into a real business. We were fraternity brothers and close friends and opened our first office directly across the street from our fraternity chapter house in Cambridge. We planned to use smart yet inexpensive software developers to build business application software. We employed half a dozen programmers, most of whom were undergraduates from our fraternity working part-time. We didn’t have any financing except for Brad’s credit card and the $10 with which we had purchased our common stock. ...
Last week I was scheduled to do a live interview with Eliot Peper about The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche . He opted to use Twitter Spaces and diligently tested it out a couple of days beforehand to confirm that it would work. Nevertheless, we immediately ran into difficulties, and after ten minutes, we decided to bail on the interview and reschedule. This reminded both me and Dave about our chapter in the book, “Play to the Audience.” Nietzsche says: ...
I was talking to a friend yesterday and he said, “Just another Monday.” But yesterday was Tuesday. I asked him what he meant. He said, “Every day feels like a Monday – I just get up and do it again.” It has been 427 days since I mark the start, for me, of the Covid crisis (March 11th – the first day I stayed home.) As the world, at least in some places, loosens up a lot, people are anxious to get back together in physical form. I see it everywhere around me – dinners, meetings, people in Zoom in offices, background noises, air travel, and endless requests to get together in person. ...