Pantheon

Every year or two I refresh the formatting on this website along with a few others that I help manage and generate content for. I work with a great firm called Valet that I really like and everything is hosted on Pantheon , so the process works smoothly for me. In addition to the refresh on Feld Thoughts, I also just refreshed Venture Deals (which used to be Ask the VC) and Startup Revolution . Amy and I also recently put up a website for the Anchor Point Foundation (our foundation). And, Seth and Micah did a big refresh on the Foundry Group website. ...

Use of HTTPS (which stands for HTTP Secure) has grown from 13% of the top one million websites to 19% in the past year . With major media sites such as NYTimes.com joining the movement, now over half of all web requests are served securely to the browser. Two years after the launch of Let’s Encrypt, this is fantastic progress. In this new era of state sponsored hacking and fully professionalized cybercrime, it is heartening to see engineers get seriously organized and tackle something on the scale of securing the entire web. ...

This morning, Mapbox announced a $52.55 million Series B financing. We’ve been on a wonderful ride with them ever since we led their first financing – a $10 million round – in October 2013 . Let’s start with the simple stuff. My partners and I have a massive founder crush on Eric Gundersen, the CEO of Mapbox. My partner Ryan McIntyre was introduced to Eric by another CEO we’ve backed, Zack Rosen of Pantheon . I remember Ryan raving about Eric and pushing me to squeeze in a meeting before I had to run out of town one day. ...

Following is a guest post from Zack Rosen at Pantheon about his experience shadowing Jud Valeski, founder and then-CEO of Gnip for a day in 2012. Behind the stories of most first-time venture-backed CEOs building startups and attacking markets at breakneck speed, there is usually a tight network of mentors and peers showing them the ropes of company building. That’s certainly been my experience at Pantheon—we likely would not exist if not for the crucial help of James Lindenbaum , Adam Gross , Steve Anderson , Ryan McIntyre , Brad Feld , and all of the advisors who have assisted us on our journey. ...

When your website crashes on launch day it really sucks. It’s ridiculous to me that that still happens today as a regular course of business. Every time a marketing team works with a web design firm, there is the usual painful and broken handoff between the outside agency and the technical operations of the client which culminate on launch day. So many things have to go right for your launch to be flawless: server configuration, load testing, and deployment. For our portfolio companies, this requires diverting senior DevOps engineers to ensure things go right, which of course comes at the expense of delivering and operating their product and even then there are no guarantees. ...

You may noticed from prior posts that we’ve had a difficult time at Foundry Group managing our growing portfolio of WordPress sites . We are not alone. You would think that by now, managing websites would be a solved problem, but that’s just not true. Talk with any professional marketer about their websites and two things will become clear: 1) websites are absolutely central to how digital marketing gets done and 2) websites are a giant pain in the ass. ...

Following is a guest post by Zack Rosen , co-founder and CEO of Pantheon . Pantheon is building “A big badass platform that will run 30% of the Internet.” They are making it easy for professionals to build, launch, and run websites. Pantheon is one of the Silent Killers in our portfolio – and I’m immensely proud of the progress they are making and excited about their future. This post was an internal email to the Pantheon team following a major feature release (Multidev ). When I saw it, I asked Zack if I could post it on my blog as an ode to all startups. Many of you are out on the frontier, and I thought Zack captured the essence of it in his message to his team. ...