Blog

I’m so confused. I suppose that’s what you get when you hibernate from all things public for two years, then pick your head up and try to figure out the best way to engage with the world again. When life was simpler, I just posted to my blog at feld.com . You could subscribe by RSS or email (via MailChimp). It automatically tweeted a link to the post. When Medium became a thing, I used a WordPress plugin to cross-post there until it stopped working. Eventually, I grew tired of having the same context appear on Google twice – once under my blog and once under Medium, so I deleted my Medium account since I wasn’t using it for anything else. ...

I got an email from Matt Blumberg this morning with the above image that said, “We have been blogging for 19 years. I can remember sitting together above Super Liquor futzing with Typepad like it was yesterday.” “Super Liquor” is Superior Liquor in Superior, Colorado, which was on the first floor of the building off of Hwy 36, which was my office at the time. There was also a pizza restaurant on the first floor. ...

I just spent the last 30 minutes writing a blog post around a simple phrase that I like. I built out my thought process around it, used a handful of examples, and then filled in some additional ideas. I was proofreading it when I decided to go try to find the original source of the phrase. The first page of Google’s results surprised me. There was nothing on the phrase I liked, but there was a wall of vitriol and controversy around a phrase that is close but had a few different words in it. When I read a few of the articles, I quickly was able to tie it back to something someone at Breitbart said. And then I vaguely remembered the controversy around the phrase. ...

My partners Chris Moody , Seth Levine , and Lindel Eakman are all blogging right now. My other two partners, Ryan McIntyre and Jason Mendelson have blogged in the past, ut took a break in 2017. Also, the Foundry Group blog is always active, with occasional thought pieces but mostly updates on initial financings both for companies and other funds that we invest in. So, I thought I’d point you at Moody, Seth, and Lindel’s blogs (and some posts) in case you are interested in following more of what we are doing at Foundry Group. ...

I took the last two weeks off from blogging. It was a nice vacation. While I try to blog every day, I don’t have a daily ritual like Fred Wilson does. Fred and I have talked about this a few times – for him, it is meditation, discipline, and ritual. I’ll let him say it in his own words. “But I’ve come to realize that the daily post, and its quality or lack thereof, is not really the thing. It is the ritual, the practice, the frequency, the habit, and the discipline that matters most to me.” ...

We have some entertaining news to share with you today. We have recently registered with the SEC and are now considered Registered Investment Advisors. Did we do this so that we can have cooler business cards? No. Did we do this because our back office was lacking in purpose? Heck no. We had to, per the SEC rules. And the reason you ask? Well, we can’t tell you that or we could possibly break some other SEC rules. So for now, just accept that your friendly neighborhood venture capital firm is now subject to a lot of new and stimulating paperwork. ...

Two words: Mattermark Daily When I started blogging in 2004 I think I was the third VC blogger after David Hornik * and Fred Wilson (if you were, or know, of another pre-2004 VC blogger, please tell me so I can update my historical recollection.) I remember lots of people asking me why I was doing it. I heard plenty of trash talk from other VCs, especially second hand, such as “He doesn’t have enough to do”, “He’s not spending his time doing his job”, or “What a waste of time.” I didn’t care, as I was doing it – like Fred often said – to help me think out loud in public, learn about different things, and get a conversation going around topics I was interested in. In retrospect, it was also helping me “practice writing” and without all the practice, it’s unlikely I would have ever gotten in the rhythm of writing a book a year. ...

I’ve decided to try something new on this blog. Rather than using up full posts for short announcements, I’ve added a new block for announcements at the top of the home page. It’s in orange, will generally be only a few lines, and include a link. Since these are just blog posts being formatted differently, they will show up in the RSS feed and the daily email. In addition, there is a page in the Archives for the announcements. ...

As my newest book, Startup Opportunities: Know When To Quit Your Day Job , has begun shipping on Kindle (order now and give me feedback, leave a review) I’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately. Startup Opportunities took 18 months to write and most of the slowness was me, not my co-author Sean Wise. It was an interesting struggle to get done which I’ll write about at another time. ...

Every few years I update the look and feel of my blog. This year is a significant upgrade, both on look and feel as well as the entire back end infrastructure. In the past six months, I’ve started to notice complexity creep into everything in our world. While design is still front and center for many developers and entrepreneurs, I’ve gotten tired of the overwhelming UIs, confusing UXs, and immense complexity under the hood. It’s kind of like a calendar that just keeps getting stuff added to it – all of a sudden you are busy for all of your waking hours with meetings, and have no time to really get any work done. ...