Q&A on Startups, DevOps, and Agile

Raj Bhargava (CEO of JumpCloud ) and I have been talking about how startups can leverage DevOps and Agile more. We created a conference on DevOps last year for our portfolio companies and it was a huge hit. DevOps is a movement that we are deeply interested in from multiple perspectives. It’s integral to almost all of the companies we invest in and many, especially in our Glue and Protocol themes, are DevOps driven companies. ...

April 8, 2014 · 1 min · Brad Feld

A DevOps Tent Big Enough for Everyone

My partner Ryan McIntyre says that any company doing business on the web should be practicing some form of DevOps . One of the biggest trends in tech today is DevOps, which is closely tied into Agile, Cloud, PaaS, and SDN. If you remember Gene Kim’s guest post on the importance of DevOp post , or recognize some of the investments we’ve made in our Glue and Protocol themes that are focused on DevOps, such as JumpCloud and VictorOps , this will be a familiar topic. ...

March 11, 2014 · 2 min · Brad Feld

Defining DevOps Through Conversation

Last week our portfolio company, JumpCloud – who is deep in the DevOps market with their automated cloud server management product – hosted the first annual DevOps conference here in Boulder. It was a huge success – we had over 200 people show up and engage in a full day of deep discussions on DevOps. We are huge fans of the DevOps movement. Similar to how we got involved in the Agile movement early with our investment in Rally Software , we are long on DevOps with investments in companies such as JumpCloud , VictorOps , SendGrid , Pantheon , Authentic8 and others. We see DevOps instantiating the lean startup culture throughout an organization. DevOps promotes short cycle times, automation, and deep integration across a company with the goal of innovating quicker and more effectively against customers’ needs. In short, we view it as a cultural methodology that increases the odds of success for a company. ...

October 30, 2013 · 3 min · Brad Feld

JumpCloud – Jump to the Next Level of DevOps

Two of the themes we love to invest in are Protocol and Glue . We’ve especially been interested in companies that make software developers and DevOps lives better. Some examples include SendGrid, Urban Airship, VictorOps, Pantheon, MongoLab, and Cloudability. To that end, Raj Bhargava and I created a company called JumpCloud late last year (our eighth venture together). After being involved in hundreds of technology companies, we know that young and fast growing technology companies have little time to devote to the details of managing their server infrastructure. Often, there is a perception that things are fine, until they aren’t. And then much pain ensues. ...

October 2, 2013 · 2 min · Brad Feld

What Do Tijuana and Minneapolis Have In Common?

We believe great companies can be created anywhere. When we started Foundry Group, we hypothesized that 33% of our investments would be in Colorado, 33% would be in California, 33% would be “everywhere else”, and 1% would be on Mars. We still haven’t done the Mars one, but we remain optimistic about the possibility. Today we’ve announced that we’ve made new investments in LeadPages (a company in Minneapolis) and 3D Robotics (a company in Tijuana, San Diego, and Berkeley) . They were joined by our friends in Boulder at VictorOps (across the street from our office) who just raised a $6.5m financing . ...

September 26, 2013 · 1 min · Brad Feld

Why Every Company Needs A DevOps Team Now

An increasing number of companies we are investors in are focused on DevOps . A year or so ago I read an early draft of a new book titled The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win . I really enjoyed it and asked Gene Kim, one of the authors to write a guest post on DevOps. He wrote it a while ago and it has sat in my draft queue waiting for the perfect moment to emerge. That moment is now. Following is a guest post on DevOps by Gene Kim , Multiple Award-Winning CTO, Researcher, Visible Ops Co-Author, Entrepreneur & Founder of Tripwire. ...

July 8, 2013 · 11 min · Brad Feld