I received the following email earlier this week from an exec at a company that I am on the board of.  He sent it out to his entire company.  I thought it clearly described the different between panic and urgency and explains why – in a business context – panic is useless, but urgency is […]

Today’s special guest post is from Sarah Reed of Lowenstein Sandler PC.  Sarah is a good friend and collaborator with my partner Jason on the NVCA Model Legal Document task force.  She also has a wicked sense of humor.  After sitting through ten days of meetings hearing a variety of VC-lingo tossed around as though […]

I’m sitting in the quiet zone in the airport lounge at MPLS so I’m not allowed to talk on my cell phone or listen to stuff on my laptop.  But you can! ReadWriteWeb posted an interview with me that Alex Iskold did – it’s titled People in Tech: Brad Feld, Foundry Group (nice SEO btw – […]

I’m not a macroeconomics guy – never have been, never will be.  I don’t watch CNBC, Bloomberg, CNN, or even Fox News.  When I was on the board of several public companies, I used to hit refresh on my My.Yahoo home page about 371 times a day – I no longer have a My.Yahoo home […]

Pete Warden has a good post up titled Google, Yahoo and MSN Mail APIs.  In it, he points at the various “sort of APIs” that are “sort of public.”  Later that day, in response to Pete’s post (not really) Google released the Google Apps Email Migration API.  Progress.  Deva Hazarika – who runs ClearContext – […]

Creating companies is hard.  Most fail.  Overnight success is rare (my favorite “overnight success stories” are the ones that take 10+ years, like iRobot or Harmonix.)  While strategy plays a key part in the outcome of an entrepreneurial venture, the fundamentals matter a lot.  Take the following parable that I got from a friend recently. […]

One of my portfolio companies recently put together a short video for a recent company meeting.  The video consisted of a series of questions for each board member and a few key advisors and clients.  One of the questions was “what could they improve?”  Following is my answer: The pretzels were tasty.

I got the following note the other day from a friend: After reading your latest post on Board Room Rules, I started thinking about the pressures that entrepreneurs experience starting, growing and managing start-up companies (whether it’s their first company or their fifth.) So I wonder if you as an investor/board member/partner/cheerleader have ever had […]

Several weeks ago, I brokered a meeting between two of my portfolio companies.  One of them is relatively mature, has a good sized customer base, and a great set of products.  The other one is very young, is a recent investment, has some great technology, but is just now bringing it to market. The business […]