We Just Led A $10 Million Round in Spare5

A few weeks ago I reposted some great advice from Fred Wilson for pitching entrepreneurs: “Fundraising is simple: find investors that get excited about your company.” Our experience with Spare5 and their experience raising money from us, where we just led a $10 million Series A Financing together with Madrona Venture Group and New Enterprise Associates, fits this quote perfectly. Matt Bencke, Spare5’s CEO, had a conversation last November with Jason. I remember Jason walking into my office and saying that he’d been thinking about something like this for a while and was super excited about how Matt was describing what Spare5 was going to do. Within a few days, Ryan, Seth and I also spoke with Matt and his co-founders and agreed to participate in their $3.25M Series Seed round . ...

August 26, 2015 · 2 min · Brad Feld

The One Trillion Reasons To Rethink How Higher Education Funding Works

Last night at dinner I got into a conversation with Greg Gottesman about the trillion dollars of student loans outstanding in the United States. Greg pointed me to this awesome TEDx Talk that he did recently on the topic. I just watched it – if you are interested in higher education in any way it’s worth 12 minutes of your life to watch it right now. I’ll still be here when you finish. ...

August 14, 2013 · 3 min · Brad Feld