If you are feeling some December blues, or even depression, don't fight it. Instead, do something for yourself. Be reflective. Let the emotions exist. And be encouraged that, like me, you can get to a better place, but it can take time.
Brad Feld
I'm a strong believer that you can build great companies in time of both greed and fear. But you have to be paying attention and operating under the right assumptions. You don't have to believe history repeats itself, but you should accept that history rhymes.
I have a long history with Kansas City.
While I'd like to be able to simply do all of my financings with a handshake or, possibly, on a napkin written in crayon, I also wish I had a herd of unicorns surrounded by rainbows, a balanced U.S. government budget, and agreement on how to address the debt ceiling issue.
If you aren't going to make your revenue plan, it's unlikely you'll make your EBITDA or Net Income plan. You don't even have to get complicated and look at Gross Margin or more derivative metrics - if you are off in Q1 and have any sort of growth expectations , you are going to miss for the year.
St. Louis has a great startup scene and a vibrant business community.
By definition, as a company scales rapidly, it adds people quickly.
Some Sundays, I read it quickly - other Sundays, I savor it. I generally spend most of my time in 'The New York Times Book Review,' 'Sunday Business,' 'Sunday Review,' and 'The New York Times Magazine.' I turn all the other pages, only stopping when I find a headline that interests me.
The first thing that any city that's trying to create a startup community or an entrepreneurial ecosystem that's vibrant should do is get rid of the idea that they're trying to be like Silicon Valley.
There are two great fictional TV series about technology and the computer industry that each have now had three seasons. The one everyone knows about is 'Silicon Valley.' The lesser-known one is 'Halt and Catch Fire.'
While I've had plenty of ups and downs, dealt with my share of failure, and struggled through emotionally difficult periods, I'm fundamentally an optimist.
I was afraid people wouldn't take me seriously, or would stop respecting me, if I talked about how bad I was feeling. The only people I talked openly about it with was my business partner, Dave Jilk, and my girlfriend - now wife - Amy Batchelor. They were amazingly supportive, but even then, I was deeply ashamed about my weaknesses.
Boulder is a very smart community.
If you sell a physical product, you have a lot of Q4 upside and unpredictability, but now you have to manage your cash to get to Q4 so that you can invest in building inventory to over-perform.
I hope more cities engage with immigrant entrepreneurs the way St. Louis has - it's a great model.
I've been using email since 1983. I started with MH and Rmail, then cc:Mail, then Microsoft Mail, with Compuserve mixed in. Eventually, I ended up using Pine for non-Windows stuff and Outlook for Windows stuff. For a while.
As I continue to believe that innovation and entrepreneurship are the key drivers to our economic future, it's frustrating to hear such little cogent discussion around it.
St. Louis is a good example of a vibrant city. Having stayed in a hotel in 2011 overlooking Cardinals stadium when they won the World Series, their fans definitely show up loud and proud.
I'm always fascinated by the dedicated monitors in a hospital. Non-standard cables, funny button shapes, odd LED colors, and lots of extra controls.
December used to be very difficult for me. For many years, I fought the transition to the new year, was generally exhausted at the end of the year, and just wanted to hide. I described myself as a 'cranky Jewish kid who felt left out by Christmas.'
For a long time, I've ranted against naming your startup community 'Silicon Whatever.' Instead, I believe every startup community already has a name. The Boulder startup community is called Boulder. The L.A. startup community is called L.A. The Washington D.C. startup community is called Washington D.C.
If you're in a city where there's no clear startup community, the goal is not raise a bunch of money to fund a nonprofit; the goal is not get your government involved. The goal is start finding the other entrepreneurial leaders who are committed to being in your city over the next 20 years.
I wish more LPs would blog to help VCs and entrepreneurs understand them better.
I feel like an email cross-dresser - I use a Microsoft product on my Apple product to access my Google product.
Ultimately, the goal is to use acquisitions to compress time on product development and get people on the team, especially in senior roles, who can help build out areas of the company they have experience in.
A rite of passage in America when you turn 50 and have good health insurance is a colonoscopy.
Kauffman Fellows is not necessarily for people just entering the venture industry but for experienced VCs looking to accelerate their growth. The program is centered around established innovation leaders - if you are looking to grow and become a better investor, you should think about doing this program.
I watched my parents act as completely equal partners in their relationship, and as a son to a woman I respect immensely, I never thought of gender inequality as a child.
I wonder if, as the tech to deliver content continues to evolve, we will start seeing the one season / 6-8 hour show that ends at a peak moment rather than is cancelled because it sucks.
That's the problem with so many organizations around entrepreneurship. They're driven by metrics that don't matter.
Governments spend all their time trying to get big companies to relocate their headquarters, and they end up subsidizing the move with tax breaks. And companies that relocate their headquarters are often not meaningful job creators.
I think one of the brilliant parts of our democracy is how resilient it is. We are each allowed to have our own beliefs and, as long as we follow the rule of law, we can express them however we'd like. This is a unique characteristic of the best democracies and one I value tremendously.
In 2016, you no longer have to be in Silicon Valley to launch a successful startup. Colorado is home to many.
My initial desire to blog came from something that's always been my approach to investing - I'm a nerd, and I love to play with the technology, and part of my approach has really been to understand things both at a user level and at a reasonably deep tentacle level.
I read a lot of science fiction and biography - these are my two favorite genres. My favorite science fiction writers are Hertling, Suarez, Gibson and Stephenson, but I enjoy many others. I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.
While I'm a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker.
Over the years, I've been involved in many business crises. I qualify this, since my crises have never involved life and death or the survival of the human race. But they are still crises.
I regularly see leaders change what they say because they get bored of saying the same thing over and over again. It's not that they vary a few words or change examples, but they change the message.
'Sunspring,' the first known screenplay written by an AI, was produced recently. It is awesome. Awesomely awful. But it's worth watching all ten minutes of it to get a taste of the gap between a great screenplay and something an AI can currently produce.
My wife is a writer. She grew up in Alaska. She told me she was moving to Boulder and that I could come with her if I wanted to. We were married at the time, so I chose to come with her.
On a daily basis, I pay almost no attention to the macro.
My view was, if I didn't like Boulder, I'd keep going west, except I never really wanted to live in the Bay Area.
While it's trendy to outsource your accounting to a third party, once you hit a certain size, it's dangerous.
If the crisis lasts moments, rapid action is critical. But if it's simply the beginning of a broader issue, especially one where the root cause isn't known yet, the worst thing a leader can do is act immediately.
The super awesomeness would be a portable teleportation machine that I could take with me. I go wherever I want, and then I can go from there to wherever I want. Instantly. Without having to go through TSA. One can wish.
The pitch should be very clear about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and why I should care. If you can cover those things quickly and precisely, it's easy for me to decide whether I want to spend more time with you or not.
I'm not deeply involved in politics, but about 25% of the people I interact with in politics went to law school.
I think 'Shoe Dog' by Phil Knight is the best memoir I've ever read by a business person.
If you don't have a VP Finance on your team reporting to you, do yourself, your team, and your investors a favor and go hire one right now.
One of the consistent characteristics of the tech industry is an endless labelling of technology and approaches.
