Today Techstars announced that it has acquired UP Global, including the organization’s Startup Weekend, Startup Week, Startup Next, and Startup Digest programs. This is great news for entrepreneurs everywhere. Both organizations have a deep seated community-centric ethos that aims to accelerate the pace of innovation through community-focused, entrepreneurial-led business creation. UP is now in 600 […]

Amy and I had a wonderful week off the grid in Paris. No phone, no email from Friday night 5/8 when I boarded the British Airlines flight in DIA until Friday morning 5/15 when we decided to turn stuff on and just lay around the hotel all day getting reading to go home. I’m always […]

Scott Maxwell of OpenView Partners had an awesome post up this morning titled The Truth About VC Value-Add. Go read it – I’ll still be here when you get back. You may recognize Scott’s name – I wrote about him in my post When VCs Don’t Bullshit You. The next person on the list of supporters is Scott […]

I’m hanging out with Morris Wheeler and his family for a few days in Cleveland. I first met Morris through my friend Howard Diamond, currently the CEO of MobileDay (which I’m on the board of). Both Morris and Howard are extraordinary Techstars mentors, so I was motivated this morning to knock out another post in my Deconstructing The Mentor Manifesto series […]

Following is a guest post from Zack Rosen at Pantheon about his experience shadowing Jud Valeski, founder and then-CEO of Gnip for a day in 2012. Behind the stories of most first-time venture-backed CEOs building startups and attacking markets at breakneck speed, there is usually a tight network of mentors and peers showing them the ropes […]

In 1995 I made a seed investment in a tiny company called Harmonix founded by two guys, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy. After one meeting with them I knew I wanted to be part of their journey and made one of my early $25,000 angel investments. The journey they went on as founders and a company was […]

“We have product/market fit.” “We are searching for product/market fit.” “We are raising this financing to find product/market fit.” “Our customer traction demonstrates product/market fit.” Product/market fit. It’s a wonderful phrase, thanks to Marc Andreessen, Sean Ellis, Steve Blank, and Eric Ries. But it also one of the most overused, and inappropriately used, phrases that […]

I spent the day yesterday at the Disney Accelerator meeting with each of the teams and then had dinner with the CEOs and a lead mentor for each company. While I’m proud of all the Techstars programs, some of what I heard yesterday, especially around mentor engagement in the Disney program was remarkable. Our premise when we […]

I know many entrepreneurs who feel that VCs have played them, gamed them, deceived them, or bullshitted them. But this doesn’t only happen to entrepreneurs. VCs play this game with VCs all the time. One of our deeply held beliefs at Foundry Group is that there is no value in bullshitting anyone. We screw up […]