Venture Capital

In addition to our own funds, we are investors in a number of other early-stage VC funds as part of our Foundry Group Next strategy. Yesterday, in one of the quarterly updates that we get, I saw the following paragraph. “Historically, the $10 million valuation mark has been somewhat of a ceiling for seed stage startups. But so far this year, we’ve seen that a number of companies, often times with nothing more than a team and a Powerpoint presentation, have had great success raising capital north of that $10 million level. Furthermore, round sizes continue to tick up, with many seed rounds now in the $2.5 million to $4.0 million range.” ...

The idea of product/market fit has been around for a long time. And, while founder/market fit is a newer concept, it turns out to be just as important. Recently, Beezer Clarkson at Saphirre Ventures wrote a post titled Raising A Fund? 9 Questions That Help Get You To GP/LP Fit . If you are a GP raising a fund, you should go read this post right now. In it, Beezer goes through, in depth, the top questions she recommends you ask an LP to determine GP/LP fit. ...

One of the things humans are bad at is remembering the past and incorporating the lessons they learned from difficult experiences. I’m sure there’s a philosophical word for this, but I’ve now heard the phrase “this time it is different” so many times that it doesn’t register with me as a valid input. I woke up this morning to Howard Lindzon’s post R.I.P Good Times (Said Sequoia in October, 2008) and Nobody Knows Anything pointing to David Frankel’s tweet: ...

Kauffman Fellows and Techstars are once again running the Venture Deals online course . https://youtu.be/RWUx5qm-xrg This time it runs from May 6th to June 26th. We’ve now had over 10,000 people take the online course and have been delighted to meet or email with a bunch of them over the past few years. If you want to learn how to be smarter than your lawyer and your venture capitalist, sign up for Venture Deals now . Yup – it’s free!

I regularly get asked by other VCs about how we do our offsites. When we started Foundry Group in 2006, we had a very deliberate quarterly process in an effort to learn all about each other and become highly effective at working together. For the first three years, we were disciplined about the timing and process, used an outside facilitator , and always spent one night away together as a group. This was intense and rocky for the first few years, as we had to work through a lot of stuff as individuals and as a team, even though we had all been working together since the early 2000s at our prior firm. ...

Announcing the Greater Colorado Venture Fund ! I am proud to share that the Colorado Venture Capital Authority (VCA), in conjunction with the Office of Economic Growth and International Trade (OEDIT), has selected the Greater Colorado Venture Fund to steward the state’s rural venture capital allocation. Following a competitive application process, the state will be funding an initial $9.1 million of a target $15 million venture fund to be invested in startups across 54 eligible Colorado counties. This fund will be a cornerstone in the state’s larger initiative to support entrepreneurs in smaller communities in Colorado, an effort I have been heavily involved in . ...

In my post recently titled Does VC Fund Differentiation Matter? several people commented on some variation of “people” as the key to everything. I don’t view people as differentiation. I view them as the price of admission. Amy just walked by, read this over my shoulder, and said: “I don’t know what that means.” Hopefully, by the end of this post, it’ll be clearer … Yesterday I talked to several VCs or entrepreneurs considering becoming a VC. I didn’t know any of them – these were random intros from different people that I knew. I didn’t have an agenda for each call. I was just curious and felt like meeting a few new people yesterday. ...

I was on the phone with an old friend last week. We were talking about a few things around a negotiation, and he said something profound. “I just want things to be fair and reasonable.” I loved this phrase. I learned this value from Len Fassler and Jerry Poch in 1993 when they acquired my first company. I had never bought, sold, or invested in anything up to that point. My partner Dave and I were clueless about selling our company, so it would have been easy to take advantage of us. When I reflect on the deal that Len and Jerry offered us, it was fair and reasonable. There wasn’t much of a negotiation as they knew what they were willing to pay for a business like ours. Instinctively, we knew their offer was fair and reasonable. ...

Over the years, I’ve been in many multi-party negotiations. I don’t know the maximum number of participants in a single negotiation, but I’m sure it’s greater than ten active negotiating parties in a transaction. I don’t mean the number of entities participating in the transaction, but the actual number of active negotiating entities. The best way to figure this out is to count the number of different law firms involved in the transaction. ...

I don’t believe that one starts an apology with the sentence “The past 24 hours have been the darkest of my life.” In my world, the apology is to another person. It’s not a tone setting exercise, or a plea for sympathy, for the one making the apology. I was fuming after seeing the public apology on Axios from Justin Caldbeck . I could be wrong, but it felt like it was written by a crisis management PR firm. I spent most of Friday evening angry and upset. Embarrassed by the behavior of some men. Proud of the women who broke their silence about the abuse they had been on the receiving end of. But mostly just ashamed of myself for not doing more about the issue of sexual harassment in our industry. ...