Foundry

At Foundry Group , we often talk about our thematic approach to investing. Steve Bell from StartupTrek did a nice job of capturing my perspective in under eight minutes.

I have 2,143 lawyer jokes queued up. Here’s a good one: The devil visited a lawyer’s office and made him an offer. “I can arrange some things for you, " the devil said. “I’ll increase your income five-fold. Your partners will love you; your clients will respect you; you’ll have four months of vacation each year and live to be a hundred. All I require in return is that your wife’s soul, your children’s souls, and their children’s souls rot in hell for eternity.” The lawyer thought for a moment. “What’s the catch?” he asked. ...

Ever since I left home for college in 25 years ago, I periodically get a call from my father that goes something like “Hi Brad, it’s Dad. I’m having trouble with my computer. Can you help me?” I fondly remember many long calls with my father where the exchange went as follows: *Brad: “Ok, now get to a DOS prompt.” **Dad: “I’m there.” **Brad: “What does it say?” **Dad: “C colon.” *Brad: “Ok, type C colon backslash D O S” ...

It could happen before you expect it. I read a lot of science fiction and have been fantasizing about the opportunity to jack into cyberspace for a long time. We are getting one step closer with our latest investment in EmSense.

We announced Our Investment in Topspin Media today. My partner Ryan McIntyre has a long post up titled Topspin, Baby! that describes the history of how the investment came together over the past ten years. Ian Rogers – the CEO of Topspin who was profiled in TechCrunch a few weeks ago in the article Ex-Yahoo Music GM Ian Rogers Launches Topspin Media has a nice a post up on the Topspin blog titled Old Friends, New Opportunities. ...

Larry Nelson from w3w3.com has an interview up with my partner Seth Levine . The interview is called Is an Advisory Board or Advisors Really Necessary? but the first half of the interview is about Seth’s view of Foundry Group and his partners (e.g. me, Jason, Ryan , and Chris.) Listen and find out some magic secrets – or just hear what Seth thinks. As a special bonus Seth has some good ideas about advisors and advisory boards.

Over the past few months we’ve been posting about the “themes” we invest in at Foundry Group over on our Foundry Group blog . I thought – with the most recent announcement of our investment in Smith & Tinker (our most recent human computer interaction (HCI) investment) – it was worth reviewing our current themes. For a view on how we think about themes, start with our post What Is “Thematic Investing?" We then cover four of our current themes: ...

Today we announced that Foundry Group has joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. We’ve contributed 1% of our carried interest (the functional equivalent of 1% of our equity) to the Community Trust Endowed Fund of the Community Foundation Serving Boulder County . When I co-founded the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCO), we explained what we were trying to accomplish in the post titled Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Encourages Early Stage Giving*.* Fifteen months later, with the addition of Foundry Group, we now have 19 member companies. ...

By the time you read this I’ll be in New York (right now I’m on a plane.) If you follow me (or any of my partners) on twitter , you will quickly understand why a Boulder entrepreneur recently referred to twitter as the “Foundry Group location / travel finder.” We travel plenty. My partner Chris Wand just wrote a post titled Is “Geography” a Cliché in Venture Capital? Unlike many VCs who prefer to invest close to home, we view the United States (and Canada) as our oyster. Take a look at Chris’ post to understand why. ...

The newest blog post up on the Foundry Group web site is titled What Is “Thematic Investing*?"* In this post, we try to describe more deeply what we mean when we say “we are thematic investors” or “we like horizontal stuff.” “Our themes tend to be horizontal in nature and are often based on an underlying protocol, standard or market trend that we believe is on the cusp of widespread adoption that has the potential to drive a cycle of innovation and company creation for at least a five to ten year period. We try to focus on themes and their underlying technologies that are ready to be rolled out to consumers or the enterprise and are well beyond the science-experiment phase. ...