Entrepreneurship

At the end of each day, I encourage you to reflect on whether you spent your day on “signal” or “noise.” Let me explain. Recently, I wrote a post titled Managing Priorities . In it I talked about the idea of P1’s. My weeks start on Monday morning so my P1 for the current week (which ends in about 20 hours since I usually get up at 5am on Monday morning) is to get a draft of the new book I’m writing with Jason Mendelson to our publisher (Wiley). That’s it – one P1 for the week. Of course I did a ton of other things last week, including spending two days at Blur doing an HCI brain soak, working on closing a new investment, working on two M&A deals, having a few board meetings, giving a few talks, meeting with a bunch of people, and having a few enjoyable dinners with friends. But every morning when I woke up I thought about my P1 (the book) and every night before I went to bed I thought about whether or not I had made progress on it. ...

As my partners at Foundry Group know, every time I hear the word “marketing” I throw up a little in my mouth. I hate traditional marketing and have always resisted it early in the life of a new company. Fred Wilson has a phenomenal blog post up this morning titled Marketing . Among other things he demonstrates his mastery of marketing by sending me an email this morning pointing me to the post and saying that he’s channeling me knowing that it’ll likely inspire me to blog something about it and link to his post, increasing the chance that he’ll be the first Google result for the search “Marketing” (he’s already #6 for marketing VC ). ...

I’m at the end of day three of another very intense, but enjoyable and satisfying week. I’ve been in Seattle the past two days and am headed to LA for the next two days before finally making it home after being on the road for the past two weeks. As I was getting ready to go to bed in order to wake up in time to make my 6:40am flight, I was rolling my one remaining priority for the week around in my head. I was thinking to myself, “two down, one to go.” And I realized I have been using a construct of “three priorities a week max” for a long time. ...

On Tuesday, I spent the day at TechStars New York. After spending Monday in Washington DC for the launch of the TechStars Network, it was really fun to spend the day and go deep with the first TechStars NY class. By the time I got to NY on Monday night I was exhausted. My day started at 5am with email, followed by a run, a few conference calls, and then the big announcement at the White House. Several other meetings followed with a final event at the Case Foundation. David Cohen and I then hopped on a train, cranked on emails and interviews all the way to New York, and then I finished the night (after some more email) with a one hour lecture by Skype to a class of San Diego based students. ...

On Monday I was at the White House to help announce the Startup America Partnership . As part of this, TechStars announced the TechStars Network, an affiliation of TechStars-like programs across the country along with our commitment to the Startup America Partnership to help 5000 experienced mentors work with 6000 entrepreneurs to create 25,000 new jobs by 2015. For an awesome description of Startup America, please read Aneesh Chopra’s (the United States CTO) post on TechCrunch titled Startup America: A Campaign To Celebrate, Inspire And Accelerate Entrepreneurship . By the way, I think it is awesomely cool that the CTO of the United States blogs on TechCrunch! ...

I feel strongly that the one of the important elements of building a sustainable entrepreneurial community over a long period of time is for the entire existing entrepreneurial community to be extremely welcoming to young college graduates. For the folks with a knee jerk reaction to call me ageist, please note that I said “one of the important elements …” There was a solid article yesterday in the Northern Colorado Business Reporter titled College grads make their own jobs. If you follow this blog, follow TechStars , or have read Do More Faster, you know that I have put a lot of energy into the Boulder entrepreneurial community, but have also spent a lot of time helping other entrepreneurial communities that I invest in (such as Seattle, Boston, and New York.) And, like Caine from Kung Fu , I’ve recently been wandering around the US (next week – Upstate New York ) spreading my views, philosophy, and advice on creating and sustaining entrepreneurial communities. I continue to study and think hard about the dynamics of entrepreneurial communities around the US and believe that there are at least 100 cities in the US that can have strong, significant, healthy, 20 year plus sustainable entrepreneurial communities. ...

It’s time for Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged to start up again. In case you don’t know what this is, I moderate a monthly interview series each semester with Brad Bernthal . We co-interview successful entrepreneurs – most of them local (Boulder / Denver). These interviews are done Charlie Rose style (one can dream) and generally last an hour followed by some Q&A. On Monday 1/24/11 from 6:30 – 7:30 in ATLAS Room 100 at CU Boulder we’ll be interviewing Pete Sheinbaum. Pete is currently CEO of The Mandelbrot Project, a company that Foundry Group funded about a year ago. Prior to this, Pete was the CEO of DailyCandy from 2000 until the company was acquired by Comcast Interactive in 2008. Pete and I have become close friends over the past few years as he’s spent a lot of time working out of our offices along with engaging deeply as a mentor in TechStars . ...

After writing Do More Faster with David Cohen, I have deep appreciation for the effort involved in writing a book. After reading a bunch of entrepreneurship books, I’ve decided there are three categories: (a) autobiographies, (b) consultant roadmaps, and (c) practitioner stories. I like the practitioner stories best, followed closely by autobiographies. I do not like consultant roadmaps and have decided I won’t read them anymore. Bill Draper (officially William H. Draper III ) has written a gem called The Startup Game . It’s a mix of practitioner stories with some autobiography mixed in. Draper is one of the original VCs – his father (William Henry Draper, Jr. ) started Draper Gaither & Anderson, one of the first VC firms on the west coast that coincidentally was the first firm to use a limited partner (LP structure). His son, Tim Draper , started Draper Fisher Jurvetson . And William III started several firms, including Draper & Johnson, Sutter Hill Ventures , Draper Richards, and Draper Internationa l. Yup – lots of Drapers, but they’ve all collectively accomplished some amazing things. ...

I spent the day in Seattle yesterday, starting off with an awesome early morning run along the ocean near downtown and ending the day walking back with some folks from a bar at UW in a freak Seattle snowstorm. I spent time with four different companies yesterday – two that I’m an investor in (BigDoor and Gist) and then two others that I’m working on interesting things with. As I went from meeting to meeting, I reflected on the tempo of the Seattle entrepreneurial community and how it feels like it has really come alive in the past few years. ...

I just had an exchange with an entrepreneur that I don’t know. It went something like the following via several emails over the course of a week. Entrepreneur: I’m working on something really amazing that I’m looking for funding for. Can we get together to discuss? Me: Can you send me a short email overview so I can tell you whether or not it’s something we’d be interested in exploring? I don’t want to waste your time if it’s not. ...