I first wrote about the Rule of 40 in 2015. I’d heard a late-stage investor describe it at a board meeting - growth rate plus profit should add up to at least 40% - and the simplicity stuck with me. So I blogged about it. Fred Wilson was at the same board meeting and posted his own version a few days later. Between the two posts, the Rule of 40 spread. It’s now gospel in SaaS.

I still like it. It’s a clean way to compress two things that usually fight each other - growth and profitability - into one number. Grow 40% and break even, you pass. Grow 20% with 20% margins, you pass. Grow 50% and lose 10%, you pass. Below 40%, you have work to do.

The number isn’t really the point. Rather, the market rewards growth until it doesn’t, and then it rewards profitability. I learned that the hard way in 2000. The Rule of 40 is a simple way to check that you aren’t too far out over your skis in either direction.

Others have tried to sharpen it. Bessemer proposed a Rule of X that weighs growth more heavily than profit - growth times a multiplier of two or three, plus free cash flow margin. The logic is that a point of growth compounds and drives the revenue multiple, so it’s worth more than a point of profit. I think that’s right for SaaS but it also makes my point for me. The moment you start weighting the inputs, you’re admitting the flat number was never the whole story.

While I’ve done plenty of SaaS investments, I also invest in hardware companies. Formlabs, Whoop, and Sphero today, and before that, MakerBot, Fitbit, Harmonix, and many others. I periodically get asked if the Rule of 40 means anything for a company that makes physical things.

While the answer is yes, you have to read the curve, not the snapshot.

The Rule of 40 grew up in software for a reason. SaaS has low marginal costs, high gross margins, recurring revenue, and fast iteration. A customer who signs up keeps paying. Margins show up early and hold steady. In that world, a single quarter’s snapshot tells you a lot.

Hardware breaks most of those assumptions. I’ve called it software wrapped in plastic for years. Development cycles run in years, not weeks. You spend real money up front on tooling, manufacturing, and supply chain, long before you ship a unit. Revenue often comes as one-off sales instead of a subscription, and even when recurring revenue shows up, it builds over time. Margins are real, but they tend to arrive later in a company’s life.

Point the Rule of 40 at a young hardware company and it looks broken. Growth might be strong while margins (including gross margin) are negative because the company is still building the thing. The number says “unhealthy.” The company says “on track.”

That’s the trap. A hardware company doing everything right can fail the Rule of 40 for years. If you treat the snapshot as the verdict, you push for profitability too early, you focus on the wrong things, or you cut the growth investment that makes the company worth something.

The fix isn’t to throw out the Rule of 40. It’s to stop reading it in a single time period.

For hardware, the shape of the curve matters more than any one quarter. Is the gross margin trajectory improving? Is each product generation more profitable than the last? Is the company earning the right to turn on the profit engine, or just delaying it? Those questions tell you whether a sub-40 number is a problem. In hardware, gross margin often tells the story. I’ve written before that founders and investors should go deep on it. Most don’t.

I’ve watched this play out in boardrooms for 30 years and the conversation feels different in a hardware boardroom than a SaaS one. In SaaS, growth versus profitability is a dial you can turn from one quarter to the next. In hardware, it’s a set of bets - on a product generation, a factory, a supply chain - you placed years ago and are now living with. The hardware companies that worked looked bad on the Rule of 40 early and great on it later. The ones that didn’t work looked the same all the way through. The difference was the slope.

Formlabs is a dramatic positive example. Today it’s over $250m in revenue, profitable, and depending on the quarter, hovers around or exceeds the Rule of 40. It’s the market leader in its category, with economics that look completely different from those of other 3D printing companies.

Over the years, Formlabs has repeatedly launched successful new products and entirely new product categories while simultaneously streamlining operations and improving margins. By contrast, its longest-tenured publicly traded competitor, 3D Systems, has seen revenue decline quarter after quarter for nearly five years, alongside deteriorating margins. Stratasys, which currently leads the public peer group in revenue, has fared only marginally better: revenue has also trended downward, and margin improvements have been modest. The result is two businesses that have effectively been treading water.

It did not look like that at the start. Getting a hardware business to the point where growth and profitability show up at the same time takes years of decisions that don’t fit on a single quarter’s scorecard. The decisions that get you there are the unglamorous kind - improving gross margin with each product generation, holding price discipline, and not turning on the profit engine until the growth engine has earned it. It also takes less capital than most people assume, which is one of the things that still surprises and delights me about well-run hardware companies.

If you had judged Formlabs based on a snapshot from its early years, you would have missed the company it eventually became.

The Rule of 40 is a good target. I’ll keep using it, in SaaS and in hardware.

Just don’t confuse the snapshot with the trajectory. Match the metric to the business model. In SaaS, you can mostly get away with the snapshot. In hardware, you can’t. Read the shape of the curve, not the single frame, and the Rule of 40 still tells you something useful.

Eric von Hippel was my doctoral advisor at MIT. I didn’t finish the Ph.D. - I dropped out - but Eric stuck with me through all of it, more as a mentor than an academic.

Around 1978, Eric said something that was radical at the time. “Innovation comes from users, not manufacturers.”

Today that sounds obvious. You read it and think “yeah, uh huh.” In 1978 it was heresy. The entire model of how products got made assumed the manufacturer was the source of the idea and the user was the recipient. Eric spent the next 48 years building the academic foundation underneath the opposite claim, along with a worldwide research community to go with it.

His Lead User work is the foundation for a wide body of research that came after. Lead users are the people who hit a need before the rest of the market does, and who build their own solution because nothing on the shelf does the job yet. They aren’t waiting for a vendor. They’re already solving the problem for themselves. If you want to know where a product category is going, find the lead users and watch what they’re hacking together.

His later work on sticky information is the part that matters most for what I’m working on. The insight is that the information you need to solve a problem is expensive to move. It’s sticky. It lives where the need lives, which is with the user, not with the manufacturer. So the place where innovation actually happens shifts to wherever the sticky information already sits. That’s usually the user.

Free and open source software is the cleanest example of all of it. The people who needed the software wrote the software. The user and the manufacturer collapsed into the same person. Eric pointed at FOSS for years as the canonical proof that his framework was real and not just a quirk of scientific instruments and surgical equipment. His book Democratizing Innovation is full of examples, and he released it as a free PDF under a Creative Commons license, which is about as on-brand as a theory of user-driven innovation can get.

My own research under Eric was on the boundary between the user and the manufacturer. Where does one stop and the other begin? When does a user become a manufacturer? I’ve been chewing on that boundary for almost 40 years.

Here’s my premise.

All future end-user software innovation will come from the user. Not most of it. All of it. And it should.

The first half of this is just Eric’s thesis, extended to a world where software is ubiquitous. The second half is the new part. The machines should be able to build it in a fully automated way. The user has the need and the sticky information. The machine has the ability to write, test, and ship the software. The boundary I’ve been pondering in different ways for 40 years is about to disappear, because the manufacturer is becoming a machine that the user operates.

When I built a small plugin earlier this year, I described it through a framework I’ve started calling The First User, which is my own riff on Eric’s Lead User. I didn’t build it because I thought it would sell or become a product. I built it because I needed it. I was the user, the machine was the manufacturer, and the boundary between us was a prompt.

A lot of people are circling this idea right now, talking about a bunch of overlapping concepts. One of my favorite thinkers here is Dan Shapiro. He’s been writing about the Software Factory and the Dark Factory - a set of levels that run from spicy autocomplete up to a fully automated factory where no engineer writes the code and no one is in the loop.

Instead of theorizing about this, I decided to build it.

For the past six months I’ve been building multiple machines that build and run machines. They’re all software machines. I deliberately use the word “machine” instead of “agent.” Agent has become a meaningless word - it gets attached to everything and means nothing. A machine is a fully defined, functional thing with inputs, outputs, and a job. Using the word forces me to actually define the thing rather than wave my hands at it.

Years ago I wrote about The Three Machines - the Product machine, the Customer machine, and the Company machine - as a way to think about how a company is organized. It’s still one of my favorite posts, as it helped me simplify how to think about a startup in a new way, and then use Dr. Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, from his novel The Goal, to figure out where to focus energy in the early stages of a company.

I’m using this theory of constraints to figure out whether any of this works. Find the constraint, fix the constraint, find the next one. The constraints keep moving, which is the whole point.

Right now this is a project that I’m working on with my brother Daniel. Maybe it turns into a company. Maybe it fails. Maybe something else happens with it. The future of this one is non-deterministic (see what I did there?)

What I do know is that I’m learning a shitload. I’m also having a ton of fun working with my brother, which is a great joy to me.

While I’m paying a lot of attention to what other people are doing, I’m using a philosophy many of the CEOs I’ve worked with in the past have heard. “Be obsessed about your competitors’ products and what they do and then completely ignore them and play your own game."

I’m in some online groups with people who are a lot smarter than me or are extremely experienced software developers. They are openly sharing what they’re figuring out, creating, and discovering. However, based on the approach I’m taking, a good chunk of the time I feel like I’m in a parallel universe, because some of my premises are just different from theirs.

That’s a fun and interesting place to be.

Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup in 2011 and changed how a generation of founders thought about building companies. He’s been an inspiration for me, especially around writing about entrepreneurship.

Eric has a new book coming out on May 26 called Incorruptible. The premise is one I think about a lot. The Lean Startup helps you build a valuable company. Incorruptible is about how and why to protect it, keeping a company mission-driven over the long term instead of letting it rot from the inside.

This rot is now everywhere, as described so clearly by Cory Doctorow in his book Enshitification.

On April 29 at 10am PT / 1pm ET, Eric and I are doing a fireside chat together. It’s virtual and free. Register here.

Last year I published Give First: The Power of Mentorship. It’s the long-form version of an idea I’ve been carrying around for fifteen years - that the best startup communities are built by people who put in more than they take out and don’t keep score.

The two books point at the same problem from different angles. Eric is asking how companies stay true to themselves. I’m asking how communities stay generous. Both are about resisting the pull toward extraction.

Register for free. I hope to see you there.

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.“

In 1996, I was sitting in a law firm conference room in NYC next to Len. We were working on the legal documents for Sage Hosting’s (which we renamed Interliant after we merged with a company named Interliant) first acquisition. It was tiny—a web hosting company doing maybe $100,000 of revenue annually. We had decided to buy this tiny company to get going.

Len read every page of the legal draft of the purchase agreement and marked it up. After reading a page, he’d slide it over to me to read and see what he’d marked up. We had the disclosure document, so we went through those pages.

By 1996, I’d done a lot of angel investments and a few VC investments, but only a few acquisitions. And, I’d deferred to the lawyers on the legal documents. While I generally knew what was happening, there was plenty of fine print that I hadn’t bothered to read or understand.

After an hour, I asked Len why he was going through every page. He told me, “Brad, in any document you sign, you should turn every page. It’s good practice for any document you read, but even if you are skimming, turn every page to make sure you don’t miss anything.”

I bought a green felt-tip pen and started doing this. As documents became predominantly online, I opened them and turned every page. I read every email I received. Even when I skim a book, I turn every page.

Today, I received many Docusigns with just the signature page. This bugs me, and I often ask for the entire document before I sign. Given that I’ve looked at a zillion legal documents, I can turn every page pretty quickly. But I still turn every page in a board package, a legal document that is new to me, or a long paper (academic or white paper) that someone sends me.

Fortunately, I’m a fast reader and have high reading comprehension. I can also read by paragraph (vs. by sentence), so skimming works for looking for things that are out of place.

I love it when people put easter eggs in documents to see if they get read. For example, a set of Return Path board minutes from about a decade ago had something like the following paragraph.

“After our lunch break, where we enjoyed Shake Shack, Mr. Feld drank two Shake Shack Chocolate Shakes in rapid succession. After a few minutes, he had to lie on the floor and nap for about 30 minutes.”

Turn every page—great advice from Len Fassler and Warren Buffett.

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.

Feld is no stranger to crises and his instincts kicked in quickly.

“I shifted into problem-solving mode,” says Feld.

But then, almost as quickly, the government stepped in and money began flowing. Crisis averted. It was time to reflect.

Listen as Feld and Cohen share insight into what they saw in the VC and startup community, how communication made all the difference and how many came together to support each other.

They also tackle the looming question weighing heavy on founders’ minds: how will this affect the future of startups.

As for the couch? Tune in to find out.

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. 

GlueCon has always prided itself on being a welcoming community that seeks quality interaction over being lost in a sea of people on an expo floor. We’ve long held GlueCon at the Omni Interlocken — a space that allows the attendees to come together in an informal fashion, making it easy to meet just about anyone you’d like to while at the event. 

It’s always been fun to host a national tech conference in Boulder. In addition to bringing in plenty of people from around the country, we always get focused attendance from a bunch of tech leaders in Boulder and Denver.

Some of this year’s presenters include:

• KellyAnn Fitzpatrick and Kate Holterhoff from Redmonk
• Adrian Cockcroft, ex-Cloud Architect (Netflix) and VP (AWS)
• Dormain Drewitz, VP, PagerDuty
• Alex Williams (interviewing an industry leader) from The NewStack

Topics cover everything from Observability to WebAssembly to Generative AI for developers to Microservice architecture. You can view the full agenda here. 

We hope that we’ll see you at this year’s GlueCon. Use “feld15” to grab 15% off of your registration.

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.

For example, one of the companies I’m on the board of grew by over 30% last year. Its revenue grew by 30%+. Its gross margin grew by 30%+. Its EBITDA grew by 30%+. Its FCF, before debt service, grew by 30%+.

Another company had a revenue decline of 25%. However, their GM% increased, and their GM$ stayed roughly the same as the prior year. Their EBITDA loss decreased by 50%, and FCF was close to $0 in Q422.

I have 14 other stories from the companies in our portfolio that I’m responsible for. My partners have another 50+. Each one is different. Each one took a ton of work from the leadership team. Many of these teams took on a set of intense challenges as early as Q122 when it was clear that whatever was unfolding was not what they had just finished planning at the end of 2021 when they came up with their 2022 plans.

Almost all of the prognosticating I heard in 2022 was similar to what I heard and often said in 2000. I was 35 at the time and rationalized continually that things would magically and suddenly change for the better. I was wrong, and then 9/11 happened, and then Enron and Worldcom happened, and business kept getting worse. 2001 was a dreadful year for me. 2002 sucked, but it wasn’t as dreadful. But it still sucked. 2003 was hard. 2004 was the beginning of what I now refer to as “the grind,” which ended for me around 2007.

Nothing is going to magically and suddenly change for the better. No one is going to raise a $100 billion VC fund and start spraying money around at fantastical valuations, followed by everyone else suspending disbelief and believing companies, regardless of their businesses, are worth 50x next year’s revenue. No one will value a company with a GM% of 10% at the same as a company with a GM% of 80% just because they are growing revenue at the same rate. Boxes full of magic beans are going to result in jail time. Interest rates aren’t suddenly going back to 0%.

If you are a fan of Harry Potter, think of 2022 as the sorting ceremony. When you put the 2022 hat on your head, did you end up in Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin? Did you address reality early in 2022? Are you just now addressing reality? Are you considering what reality might be and hoping it doesn’t happen? Or are you looking around saying, “Huh, what?”

Whatever it is, there’s no looking back and hoping something different happens.

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.

Effective boards are critical at this moment in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. While I hope this downturn is short, I think it will be long and painful. In either case, highly functioning boards can help startups navigate this moment, while dysfunctional and weak boards can accelerate the demise of startups.

If you have a board of directors, want to have a well functioning one, are a director, or want to be a director, I encourage you to grab a copy of Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors.

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.

Dave walked into Brad’s office after calculating preliminary financial results for January. Up to this point, we had mostly broken even, but the news was grim: we had lost $10,000 in one month. We had not seen it coming, and it took some effort for us to untangle what had gone wrong. Dave had been spending most of his time managing the part-time developers, who were primarily working on future products, instead of billing hours to clients. Brad had been selling computer equipment, which had low gross profit margins, instead of billing hours to clients. Much of our revenue for the month had come from one highly productive though erratic undergraduate developer, Mike, who was working on a billable client project.

Before we had a chance to figure out what to do, Mike quit, citing a need to focus on his studies. Now we had no choice: we fired everyone, shut down our month-to-month office, sold all the office furnishings, and moved the business to our apartments in downtown Boston. It was gut-wrenching. Brad wondered whether we had failed just as we got started. Dave worried about paying rent. We had long discussions about the future of the business, including whether or not to continue.

But we did have billable projects. We no longer had to spend our time managing people and had figured out where our bread was buttered. Results were good enough in February to calm our nerves and even better in March. Just as important, we had learned some crucial lessons and settled on a very different idea about how we would move forward with the business. The experience of hitting bottom and the lessons we learned became deeply ingrained in our brains and our company culture as we more methodically and progressively built the firm.

Fast-forward thirty years, when we were in the midst of writing this book, and Dave was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He encountered a passage that said the highest mountains rise from the sea, and that fact is “inscribed…on the walls of their summits.” Because of our experience at Feld Technologies—and many times since—we knew immediately that this had to be a chapter in the book. We imagined the solace and instruction it might have offered us to have seen (and understood) this quote, to have read a short essay like the one in our chapter Hitting Bottom, where the starkness and promise of the situation are presented in black and white, or to have heard Walter Knapp’s story of the crash and rebirth of Sovrn, a genuinely disruptive company.

That is how we wrote most of the chapters and how this project began. In reading Nietzsche, we noticed ideas that reminded us of situations, questions, and concerns that frequently arose in our entrepreneurial and venture investment experience. Nietzsche had a way with words, and we found that some ideas were nicely encapsulated and phrased. We started playing with expanding upon his pithy aphorisms and gathering stories from entrepreneurs, and it clicked.

Feld Technologies never became a disruptive company, despite our ambitions. It plateaued at around $2 million in revenue before we sold it in 1993. Because we had built a solid foundation for a certain kind of success, we never again hit a deep low point, and consequently never again had the painful opportunity to rethink our premises. This point, too, is covered in Hitting Bottom and illustrates why we did not just skip Nietzsche, write some essays, and assemble some entrepreneur stories. Nietzsche—sitting or walking alone, in pain, almost blind—thought deeply and managed to share these thoughts with the world. We tried to follow his lead, thinking hard and pondering additional angles and situations to which the quote might apply. We want you to do the same, as you keep in mind that Nietzsche’s works have been highly influential throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

In business and entrepreneurship literature, inspiration is sometimes more helpful than instruction. Though there is plenty of how-to information in this book, we aim to give you food for thought from a different perspective. We address issues of leadership, motivation, morals, creativity, culture, strategy, conflict, and knowledge. We push you to think about what you and your enterprise are made of. We expect you to question and ponder these ideas, not just put them into action. If we are successful, you will sometimes get angry and at other times feel pride. At times you will wonder what you really know, and at other times you will charge forward. We hope that the combination of Nietzsche’s colorful language, our elaborations, and some stories from entrepreneurs will offer you intellectual, emotional, and entrepreneurial inspiration.

Nietzsche was not a fan of commercial activity or businesspeople. He saw the former as crass and the latter as lacking nobility. However, we suspect that if Nietzsche were alive today, he would view entrepreneurs differently. He adored intensity and fervor, deeply valued those who create things, and wrote at length about “free spirits” who do not feel bound to tradition or cultural norms. Nietzsche viewed his mission as the “revaluation of all values,” and he intended to disrupt the entire moral tradition of Europe in the late 19th century.

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:

It is not sufficient to know how to play well; one must also know how to secure a good hearing. A violin in the hand of the greatest master gives only a little squeak when the place where it is heard is too large; the master may then be mistaken for any bungler.

Our translation to contemporary English is:

In other words: Performing well is not enough; the audience must experience the performance well. If the venue has bad acoustics, even a great violinist sounds terrible. A virtuoso can be mistaken for a novice.

Our essay in the book discusses the importance of a speaker having empathy for the audience, not just in terms of the content but also in the communication medium. For example, is the phone connection clear? If you have an accent, are you speaking slowly enough for your audience to understand? Ben Casnocha’s excellent narrative emphasizes audience engagement and interaction, which is crucial in our era of short attention spans.

This was one of the first chapters we wrote, so it was before the pandemic and the enormous shift toward videoconference and online interviews. In keeping with our view that Nietzsche’s observations are mostly independent of time and technology, it can be applied here.

For example, if you are communicating, selling, interviewing for a job, or promoting a message, you need to make sure you will be heard. Your own preferences for technology platforms can get in the way of a successful meeting if the customer prefers a different system or is not set up on it. If you are getting a message out, using the newest or trendiest technology may draw listeners, but they will not hear the message if the system doesn’t work. Make sure your lighting, Internet connection, and camera angle are appropriately professional. Don’t walk around with your phone while you are on a videoconference unless the call is explicitly casual. 

Feel free to disagree with these particulars, but think through your own version of “securing a good hearing.”

It turns out that Eliot and I are good friends, and I’m pretty patient with new technology, though those who tried to attend our interview may not have been. Eliot decided to try again, but with an upcoming interview posted on his website.

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.

Fred wrote an interesting post titled In-Person vs On-Screen that starts out:

Last week I spent three hours with my six partners in a conference room talking through what we are investing in and why. It was a terrific session and I had more “ahas” in those three hours than I have had in many many months. There really is no substitute for sitting together with your colleagues working things out face to face.

The post describes his thinking around remote, hybrid, and in-person. He talks about his, and his partners, current dynamics. He ends with a strong assertion.

Each company needs to figure this out in a way that works for their team and culture and I believe that there is no “right way” for everyone. But I also believe that in-person interactions remain critical to making better decisions, better products, better cultures, and better companies and so I would encourage everyone, including the fully remote teams, to figure out how to make in-person interactions happen on some regular cadence.

I see this in my own partnership. Several of my partners are regularly getting together in person. While I’m supportive of that, I have no interest in it and would rather continue to be fully remote for now. Fortunately, they understand. We are working on understanding and implementing our own hybrid dynamics that work for each of us and the team as a whole.

While we are privileged to be in a business and an industry where this is something we can explore, I immediately think of Susan Cain’s essential book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. When I read it in 2012, a few puzzle pieces slid into place for me.

I strongly agree with Fred’s statement:

Each company needs to figure this out in a way that works for their team and culture and I believe that there is no “right way” for everyone.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been in numerous “back to the office” conversations. I’ve participated in public discussions about remote vs. hybrid vs. in-office. I’ve talked with almost every CEO and board that I work with about this topic.

I’ve been asserting, like Fred, that this is a custom answer for each company. However, I’m adding a twist. I encourage the CEOs not to let their personal bias drive the answer. For some CEOs, that’s intolerable. For others, it has been enlightening.

I know several CEOs who are desperate to get back to the office. They hate working at home. They struggle not traveling around and being with their team. They are miserable with remote work. So, regardless of what anyone on their team says or wants, they will not have a remote work option. And, in one case that I’m aware of, there is not going to be any semblance of a hybrid option.

I know several CEOs who have let their leases end or sublet their offices. They love working at home. They have no interest in going to the airport. They deeply embrace remote work. No matter what, they are going to be a remote-first company in the future. And, in more than one case, there is no plan ever to rent any office space again.

When you suspend your individual bias, I expect you’ll find interesting and unexpected answers from different people in your company. When you ask them for approaches, you might find some that you hadn’t thought of. Knowing that there is a wide spectrum of desires among your current team, especially after 427 days of Mondays, is an important starting point for figuring out the best configuration for your company going forward.

Over the past year, we’ve seen an increase of people from across the business and political spectrum join the fight against climate change and pledge to support a greener, more sustainable future. Investors are seeking both financial returns and environmental impact and looking for opportunities to partner with ventures that are working to tackle our world’s biggest energy and environmental challenges.

Enter Cleantech Open, the world’s largest and oldest cleantech accelerator for cleantech, climate tech, and sustainability startups. Through Cleantech Open, startups can build their entrepreneurship skills and professional networks, access expert mentorship, and connect with potential investors, partners, and customers. Cleantech Open is currently accepting applications for its 2021 cohort, and you can learn more and apply here by April 18.

Beth Zonis, the Director of Cleantech Open Northeast, and my wife Amy Batchelor met through a mutual connection. They are both Wellesley College alumnae (Amy is a Trustee of Wellesley College, and Beth is Vice President of her graduating class.) They hit it off right away and found a lot of common ground, especially in their shared passions for Wellesley, the environment, and innovation. This led to our foundation (the Anchor Point Foundation) partnering with Cleantech Open Northeast, the northeast region of Cleantech Open, managed by NECEC as the on-the-ground affiliate. 

Cleantech Open is like a mini MBA for startups. Its mission is well aligned with ours, as Cleantech Open is focused on combating climate change, growing the green economy, and improving Environmental Justice through innovation and entrepreneurship. We are staunch advocates for the environment, and we believe that innovation is critical to addressing many of the world’s challenges.

Cleantech Open has a particular focus on incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) values into its program. It is working to increase the diversity of startups, mentors, and partners engaged with the program. In 2020, 63% of the startups in the Cleantech Open Northeast cohort were founded by women or BIPOC leaders. This year, the accelerator plans to offer programming to educate startups on incorporating DEI values into their ventures.

Cleantech Open Northeast is also creating new curriculum content for this year’s cohort to enable startups to measure their greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint to help them build a measurement mindset from the beginning. This is an effort in collaboration with NYSERDA, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

Over the years, many Cleantech Open alumni have progressed to be accepted into other accelerator programs, including Techstars. A few examples of recent Techstars alumni who have participated in both programs are Virimodo, Sunthetics, and SparkCharge.

Virimodo is reducing greenhouse gas emissions in cities by making it simple for buildings to become carbon neutral. Virimodo was a 2018 Cleantech Open Northeast Winner and a Cleantech Open National Finalist and participated in the 2020 Techstars EnergyTech accelerator in Birmingham, Alabama.

Sunthetics is developing software in tandem with electrochemical equipment for more sustainable and efficient chemical manufacturing. Sunthetics was a top 10 team in the 2020 Cleantech Open Northeast accelerator and a participant in the Techstars Heritage Group Accelerator for hard tech.

SparkCharge is making the world’s first mobile and intelligent on-demand EV charging network with a portable, ultrafast charging unit for electric vehicles. SparkCharge participated in the 2016 Cleantech Open Northeast accelerator and Techstars Boston in 2018 and recently had a chance to pitch on Shark Tank, where the company signed a $1 million agreement with Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner.

Cleantech Open is a nonprofit accelerator that takes no equity in its participating startups. This year, Cleantech Open Northeast will award $50,000 in cash prizes, including $10,000 for a carbon sequestration startup that completes the accelerator, and more than $300,000 in goods and services, including incubator and co-working spaces, consulting services ranging from marketing and communications to accounting to assistance on special projects, software packages for startups, and even financial assistance for startups participating in certain states. 

To learn more, register for a Cleantech Open kickoff event between now and the April 18 application deadline. These are great opportunities to meet the Cleantech Open team, entrepreneurs, and mentors. Startups will have a chance to pitch!

Cleantech Open Kickoff Webinar 11, April 13 @ 7:00 PM Eastern, Register here

Cleantech Open Kickoff Webinar 12, April 16 @ 12:00 PM Eastern, Register here

I read On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings by Nietzsche yesterday. It was chewy, but soaked me in an interesting set of ideas about what words mean, along with a bunch of stuff around the concept of truth.

I get a lot of inbound random email where I get asked a lot of questions, so I see lots of questions repeat or get asked in different ways. For example, I continually get asked some version of “How do I get a job as a VC” and point everyone at my partner Seth’s post How To Get a Job In Venture Capital.

This morning, as I was grinding through email, I saw a few questions that could be generally categorized as “Are we in a bubble?” There were different flavors, but if I summarized, it would be:

• Is the public market in a bubble?
• Is VC in a bubble?
• Are SPACs a bubble?

Whenever I see the word bubble, the phrase “Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble” comes into my mind, which I know is not how the Macbeth Song of the Witches goes, but that’s just how my brain works.

Oh – you want a brief interlude for the Song of the Witches? Ok – here it is.

Round about the cauldron go:
In the poisoned entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Sweated venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing.
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat; and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.

Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

If you enjoyed that, now you know why I think of this phrase every time I hear the word bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble, Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

My answer to the bubble question is, “I have no idea, and I don’t care.” I’ve never tried to time the markets. I am not going to ever try to time the markets. Instead, I’m going to keep working on what I’m obsessed about and try to improve each thing regardless of the macro-dynamics.

I went looking for Baboon Blood on Amazon to make my charms firm and good. I didn’t find anything other than a song from Art Zoyd. I did, however, find (and buy) a Baboon Blood flask via a Google search.

For the last several months, I’ve heard or read the phrase “the new normal” 7,354 times. I’ve steadily grown tired of it and now I believe it is an invalid concept.

There is no new normal. We have move forward and get better.

Steve Case wrote a great OpEd recently titled There’s no going back to the pre-pandemic economy. Congress should respond accordingly.

This week, Congress will likely take up the next steps in the economic response to the covid-19 pandemic. If the package is like previous efforts, it will focus on trying to turn back the clock to February 2020: treating the economy as if it were Sleeping Beauty, merely needing to be awakened to be fully restored. This strategy is a mistake: Congress needs to stop solely backing efforts to restore the old economic reality and focus on how to develop a new one.

The Kauffman Foundation recently came out with a mission to Rebuild Better.

Comprised of more than 150 entrepreneurship advocates across the country, the Start Us Up coalition is working to elevate the voices of entrepreneurs so policymakers reverse decades of misplaced priorities that have made it far easier for big businesses to grow than for new businesses to start at all. Our goal is not just to restore the economy, but to rebuild better by ensuring all Americans — especially female, minority, immigrant, and rural entrepreneurs who have historically been marginalized by investors and lenders — can turn their ideas into businesses.

The goal should not be the new normal. The old normal didn’t work for many Americans. The old normal had incredible income inequity, racial inequity, gender inequity, and many other inequities. When I wrote that I’m Fast-Forwarding to 2025, I had this in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t articulate it.

Change is unpredictable, bumpy, impossible to predict, challenging, stressful, and non-linear. But, as humans, all of these things make us incredibly uncomfortable. Often, we want to go back to “the way things were” since that felt safe, or predictable, or even if we didn’t really like it, was at least something we understood.

Going back to the way we were, with some adjustments, is how I interpret the phrase “the new normal.” I don’t think it will work. I don’t think it’s desirable. I don’t think it’s progress.

So many of the leaders I respect like Steve Case and The Kauffman Foundation are being clear about this. They may use different words, but I feel completely aligned with their vision.

I have no interest in a new normal. I’m only interested in something much better across our society that what was the old normal.

I encourage leaders to embrace change. Embrace complexity. Embrace uncertainty. I certainly am.

We are running the Venture Deals Online Course again. Registration is now open and it runs from March 8, 2020 – May 1, 2020. It’s produced by Techstars and Kauffman Fellows.

We’ve run the course six times now and have had over 25,000 people take it.

It’s free, although it’s recommended that you have a copy of our book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. The 4th Edition is out with plenty of new and improved stuff.

The course runs for seven weeks with the following syllabus.

• Week 1 – Introduction of key players/Form or join a team
• Week 2 – Fundraising/Finding the Right VC
• Week 3 – Capitalization Tables/Convertible Debt
• Week 4 – Term Sheets: Economics & Control
• Week 5 – Term Sheets Part Two
• Week 6 – Negotiations
• Week 7 – Letter of Intent/Getting Acquired

If you are interested, sign up now and tell your friends who are interested in venture deals.

When I started blogging in 2004, there weren’t many VC bloggers. I followed Fred Wilson and David Hornik’s lead and just started writing what was on my mind about, well, anything that was on my mind.

Today, VC content pieces are everywhere. I’ve become less interested in writing this kind of stuff so my blog has evolved into whatever is on my mind, but a lot less “VC stuff.”

Every now and then I come across a spectacular VC blog post (or article in Techcrunch, or one of the other places VCs now put their content pieces.) As I was procrastinating from what I was working on, I noticed an article titled Mike Volpi on the art of board membership.

It’s a spectacular article. Go read it now. I particularly like the topics he went after.

• Nature of the relationship
• The mirror
• Context
• Network
• What happens in between
• Availability and relevance
• Delivering a message that can be heard

When I wrote Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors with Mahendra Ramsinghani, we tried to include constructive thoughts about how venture-backed boards work and how to improve them, along with plenty of examples. As I’ve been on some great, ok, and terrible boards (and have been an effective, mediocre, and ineffective board member), I find clear articles like Mike’s powerful as I reflect on how I act as a board member.

I ever get around to writing a 2nd Edition, I plan to reach out to Mike and see if I can include some of this. In the meantime, I leave you with his powerful, and well said ending.

Board membership is a privilege and a nuanced responsibility that can have a transformational impact on businesses. Sometimes investors, independents and entrepreneurs forget this. Entrepreneurs should expect a great deal from their boards — not as blind supporters but as true copilots. Likewise, board members should not view board membership as a list of icons on their LinkedIn profile, but as a subtle yet massively impactful role they play in the creation of great businesses. When these relationships function properly, the two parties become true partners in the entrepreneurial journey.

I’ve noticed a degradation in presentation styles when displaying slides on a screen. This is starting to become a pet peeve of mine, so feel free to ignore me or tell me to get over myself if you disagree with this advice.

Assume a conference room with a large screen TV (or two) on the wall at the “front” of the room. The conference table – often a long rectangle – has chairs along the side perpendicular to the TV. The classical “head of the table” is at the far end facing the TV.

Why in the world would the presenter sit anywhere other than in one of the chairs at the end of the table closest to the TV?

Assume the TV is just showing slides. Don’t you want everyone in the room looking at you and the slides?

Assume there is video conferencing. In most cases, the slides will dominate and the video conferencing participants will be in small windows on the screen anyway. And, when they are looking at their computer while you are presenting, they will mostly see the slides anyway.

The only time this doesn’t apply is when there isn’t a presentation. When you are trying to engage the people on the video conference in the room during the meeting, and there is nothing being presented on the screen, the pet peeve that I have doesn’t apply.

In the world of paper presentations with no video screens, it made sense for the presenter to sit in the middle of one of the long sides of the table to engage the whole room. But, when there is a screen with stuff on it, position yourself near the screen so the people in the room can look at you and the screen at the same time.

The phrase “frog in a blender” was in my head all afternoon. Earlier in the day, one of my partners described a situation as the cliche-ish “boil a frog slowly” and I responded with “We’d all be better off if we just put the frog in a blender.”

That generated grimaces.

I couldn’t find any “Will it Blend” for frogs, but I found the next best thing – Pickled Pigs Feet.

It doesn’t have quite the same rhythm, but you get the idea. As I hummed the song I made up to the phrase “Frog in a Blender”, I figured there must be a real song named this. There is, it’s awful, and the lyrics are horrifying, but whatever. My song is much better.

As I was driving home, working on the second verse, I flashed to a conversation with a friend I had a few months ago.

He said, “How do you eat a shit sandwich”? I responded with “Gross – no idea.” He said, “Quickly.” After I chucked, he said, “Ben Horowitz told me that.” So, I’m going to attribute that one to Ben Horowitz, which fits nicely with some of his anecdotes about shit in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

I like to be as deliberate as I can about decisions. I try to make them quickly, but with a reasonable amount of data and critical thinking. Sometimes this works, other times it doesn’t. When I reflect on the things that have caused me the most pain, it’s when I let a shit sandwich sit in my refrigerator for a while, looking at it every day when I get a kombucha. Or, when I wake up one day and realize that I’m the frog that has been boiling slowly.

I wonder if eating a shit sandwich quickly is the same as putting a frog in a blender. Both are pretty awful, but it seems like the best approach is to get it over with quickly.