VC

On Monday, June 1st, I told Amy that I wanted to engage deeply in helping eliminate racism in the United States. I’ve been involved in gender inequity issues since I joined the National Center for Women & Information Technology board in 2005 shortly after it was formed. 15 years later, I’ve learned an enormous amount about gender, especially in tech, and while I am nowhere near finished on that particular journey, I feel that I understand and can be helpful in my role as a male advocate (or “male ally”) in eliminating gender inequity in tech and entrepreneurship. ...

I regularly get asked by other VCs about how we do our offsites. When we started Foundry Group in 2006, we had a very deliberate quarterly process in an effort to learn all about each other and become highly effective at working together. For the first three years, we were disciplined about the timing and process, used an outside facilitator , and always spent one night away together as a group. This was intense and rocky for the first few years, as we had to work through a lot of stuff as individuals and as a team, even though we had all been working together since the early 2000s at our prior firm. ...

Given my role in the world, I say no a lot. I get hundreds of unsolicited emails a day, often asking me to get together, invest, or look at something. Lots of VCs and execs who I know simply ignore and don’t respond to these emails. I’ve always tried to at least respond to them unless they are clearly a mass email. A long time ago I learned how to quickly identify what I don’t want to spend time on, which I wrote about in 2009 in my post titled Saying No In Less Than 60 Seconds . As time has passed, I’ve tuned this filter more, as the volume of requests has gone up. ...

Over the years, I’ve been in many multi-party negotiations. I don’t know the maximum number of participants in a single negotiation, but I’m sure it’s greater than ten active negotiating parties in a transaction. I don’t mean the number of entities participating in the transaction, but the actual number of active negotiating entities. The best way to figure this out is to count the number of different law firms involved in the transaction. ...

I’m on the receiving end of a lot of reference calls. I try to be thoughtful and direct in my responses, but I’m increasingly annoyed by the generic nature of the questions. Over time, I’ve developed an approach to doing reference checks, and my approach actively avoids asking any of the following questions. How did you get to know Person X? What is your relationship to Person X? What were Person X’s different roles? How does Person X rank concerning leadership ability? How does Person X rank concerning analytical ability? What about Person X’s vision and ability to communicate it to others? Was Person X well respected by the people he managed? What are Person X’s strengths? What are Person X’s weaknesses or areas for development? Would you hire Person X again? If so, what size company? What other questions should I have asked? Are there any things you would want to know if you were me? I don’t know which VC or Private Equity firm first came up with this list of questions, but like many elements of a term sheet, they seem to have been passed down from generation to generation. ...

On Saturday night I got on a plane and flew to the other side of the planet, where I am now. I’m in Melbourne, finishing my coffee, getting ready for one last meeting here before I fly with David Cohen to Adelaide for the day. When I left, I had the voices and energy of 25 people in my head. Last Thursday evening was the beginning of the second Reboot VC Bootcamp at my house just outside Boulder. ...

I had lunch recently with a founder. We were talking about current and future board configuration for his company and he said “Up until this point, all my board seats were simply for sale. Whenever a new investor showed up, they wanted – and got – a board seat.” I loved the phrase “board seat for sale.” It’s exactly the opposite of how I think about how to configure a board of directors, but I recognize that it’s a default case for many VCs and, subsequently for many entrepreneurs and companies. ...

Each quarter Cooley does a VC market update. This quarter they interviewed me as part of it on Quarterly VC Update: Brad Feld on the State of Venture Capital Investing . The full Cooley Q3 report includes a bunch of data and trend graphs which I encourage you to go take a look at. The interview with me follows. Based on Cooley data for the quarter, how does your experience in the market compare? Similar/different? The tone of Q3 felt like a continuation of Q2 with summer vacations tossed in. The existential freakout that occurred in January and February seemed like the distant past with the lingering hangover being a clearer focus on valuation and overall funding needs from new investors. While there are a few clear trends in the data, such as lower valuations for Series A through C rounds and more flat rounds, the overall changes from Q2 is not dramatic. ...

My partner Lindel Eakman wrote a post a few days ago about his transition from Austin to Boulder and a really helpful one about how to work with him titled A Human User Interface….with lots of quirks . This prompted me to poke around for other content from the limited partner (LP) side of the LP/VC/entrepreneurship universe. I think the first LP blogger was Chris Douvos who periodically puts up an instant classic post at Super LP . I fondly remember a meeting with Chris in NY at the end of the day when we were raising our first Foundry Group fund. I was tired and dragging a little from the fundraising, but Chris’ energy and enthusiasm around VC picked me back up in advance of dinner. He didn’t invest in our fund, but he made a strong impression on me. ...

Signups are open for the second Reboot VC Bootcamp happening January 19-22, 2017 . It will – once again – be at my house in Longmont, Colorado. If you are interested, here are some reactions to the first Reboot VC Bootcamp .