VCZealots

Rework is Brilliant

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:41 GMT

I just read Rework, the new book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals. It’s fantastic. If you are starting a business, or thinking about starting a business, or running a business, or breathing air, this is a book you should read.

There are an endless array of “startup books” to choose from. Most suck. Many are ego trips for successful entrepreneurs. Others are self-help books from entrepreneurs that haven’t been successful, but are trying to be successful as entrepreneurial self-help book writers. Very few are useful, authentic, or powerful.

Rework nails it on every dimension. I was annoyed during the first chapter since the book started out with the typical “bootstrap your business rather than raise money from clueless investors” screed that Fried is famous for. While I strongly agree that is one way (my first company was started with $10 and that was all the money we ever raised), it’s not the only way and I get tired of hearing polarizing rhetoric around this.

It turns out that was Fried and Heinemeier’s way of getting my attention. Rather than passively rolling into chapter two, I was fired up. And then, in the style of Gary Vaynerchuk, they Crushed It (another awesome book, BTW). I was glued to my couch for the next hour as I pounded my way through the book. It’s a collection of short essays and cool drawings built around one liners that everyone running a business should ponder. As a bonus, they have a great essay on four letter words and why “fuck” and “shit” are not ones you should be concerned with. And, in a demonstration of their mad skills, they have an awesome attack ad for the book.

I spent most of today grinding through another draft of “The Tao of TechStars”, a book that David Cohen and I are writing based on lessons we’ve learned from TechStars. After reading Rework, I’m hopeful that we’ve written something as good, and as important, as what Fried and Heinemeier have written. Time will tell.

Hint To Startups – Use Your Domain In Your Email Address

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:37 GMT

On a daily basis, I get an email from someone at a seed-stage startup where their email address does not include their website URL. For example, I just got an email from joesmith@gmail.com for his company CoolThing.

I wouldn’t have thought of this except for I’m deep in the proofreading of a book that David Cohen and I are editing called “The Tao of TechStars.” One of the essays in the “Working Efficiently” section is written by David, titled “Don’t Suck at Email”, and talks about this.

Specifically, David says:

“Another way that founders suck at email is by sending email from a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or other generic account. Every time you send an email like this you’re missing a branding opportunity for your company. Send and receive email from your company domain so you don’t suck at email.”

Joe’s email to me should have been from joe@coolthing.com. There are so many reasons this is better than joesmith@gmail.com, including the simple reason that the chance of me associating “Joe” with “CoolThing” in two weeks is much greater than the chance of me associating “Joe” with “Smith” and then with “Coolthing.”

Now, I know some of you out there will say, “but Feld, you use brad@feld.com instead of brad@foundrygroup.com for your email – what gives?” Ah, the irony of some things in life (although brad@foundrygroup.com works just fine.)

Blur is Coming

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 11:08 GMT

I’ve been hinting about a new conference that we’ve been working on with Eric Norlin that complements Defrag and Glue. Eric is about to launch it and the splash page for the Blur Conference is up.

If you are familiar with Defrag and Glue, you know they are built around two of Foundry Group’s themes (Protocol and Glue respectively). Blur is being built around our Human Computer Interaction theme, but with a twist. Instead of simply being able to “see cool stuff up close”, our goal with Blur will be to create an environment where you can actually use and work with this stuff. We’ll have user-oriented demos, hackathons, and tons of crazy shit no one has ever seen before.

Plus, we’ll give away a lot of cool toys, have a ton of smart people who are working on the next generation of HCI in one place, and have some fun surprises. And we are doing it in an environment that is especially tuned for a conference like Blur.

I’m incredibly excited about what Eric has put together for this year’s Glue Conference (as I wrote about the other day). He’s setting a high bar for Blue, where the goal will now be to have a few brains explode! Get ready – it’s never dull around here.

Readings: Oil, Lawyers, Math, Niall Ferguson, Big Lebowski, etc.

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:46 GMT

Milberg Lawyers Leave Jail, Hit Links, Slopes; Reflect on Life (Source)
Consumers Buy More Efficient Refrigerators, but Keep the Old Ones Humming (Source)
Will reclusive mathematician accept $1 million prize? (Source)
Niall Ferguson interviewed by Consuelo Mack (Source)
Roger Ebert revisits The Big Lebowski, adds to his list of Great Movies(Source)
South Sudan’s road to oil-dependent independence (Source)
More Saudi Oil Goes to China Than to U.S. (Source)

Stephen Roach vs Paul Krugman: I'm an Economist! I'm an Umpire!

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:57 GMT

Oh yeah? Well, abacadabra. I'm an umpire!
- Bugs Bunny ( Transylvania 6-5000)

Last night Stephen Roach on Bloomberg Television proposed taking a baseball bat to Paul Krugman for his recent comments about getting tough with China over its currency polices. Lovely to see how decorous things are in the peaceful world of economics, what with everyone agreeing on so many universal truths. Or not.

MIT Entrepreneurship Review

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:46 GMT

A week ago the MIT Entrepreneurship Review launched. Today it’s up on MIT’s home page.

The MIT Entrepreneurship Review is a new online publication about entrepreneurship that is produced and written by MIT students dedicated to analyzing trends in entrepreneurship at MIT and beyond. I’ve been involved with some of the folks behind this and I think they are doing an outstanding job. If you are interested in entrepreneurship, I’d add this to your must read list.

Gist Acquires Startup Weekend Project Learn that Name

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:25 GMT

Gist just announced that they have acquired Learn that Name and incorporated it in the Gist iPhone app.

There are a lot of fun connections here for me. For starters, as many of you know, I’m an investor in Gist. If you haven’t tried it – or haven’t played with it for a while – give it a shot. The evolution of the product over the last six months has been remarkable as it gets better every two weeks (the Gist teams’ release cycle).

The iPhone app has been out for a while and is a killer. I’ve seen the Android app – it’s equally cool and useful. Each of them connect up to the Gist service that lives in the cloud and connects together all of your contact information, builds an implicit social network based on your email traffic and friends lists, and surfaces a variety of content (including news as well as real-time stuff) for your contacts.

Learn that Name was a Startup Weekend Seattle project from a few months ago. Andrew Hyde, who is the community manager for TechStars, created Startup Weekend and I attended the first one in Boulder. It has become an amazing worldwide phenomenon that is now run by Clint Nelsen and Marc Nager. So – that’s linkage two for me.

The idea for Learn that Name came from Eric Koester, a lawyer in Cooley’s Seattle office. Eric has been super helpful on the Startup Visa initiative as well, working on an ABA brief for us that will hopefully be officially approved soon. Who said that lawyers weren’t a force for good in the world? So – that’s linkage number three.

TechCrunch’s article gives a little more history on the deal and how the proceeds (yes – there are proceeds) are being split up among the team members that participated in the Startup Weekend project. I know that at the very first Startup Weekend that I attended in Boulder there was a hope that some of these projects would spin out and either get commercialized or acquired. I’m proud to be involved in one of the first ones to have this happen. Oh – and Learn that Name when played within Gist’s iPhone app is a lot of fun.

Readings: China, Ireland, Water, Traffic, CDOs, etc.

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:12 GMT

China and Germany unite to impose global deflation (Source)
Water - The right price can encourage efficiency and investment (Source)
Ireland’s Epic Boom and Bust (Source)
Postcard From a Guangzhou Traffic Jam (Source)
Harvard undergraduate’s readable and useful thesis on the CDO meltdown (Source)
BRICs rally slows amidst highest valuations since 1995 (Source)

The Glue Agenda Is Getting Awesome

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:14 GMT

I love the conferences we help sponsor (Glue and Defrag). Eric Norlin is a genius at putting together a specialty technology conference. He gets amazing people to attend, curates the content meticulously, isn’t afraid to try new things every year (and have some not work), and just keeps at it with single minded commitment. He also totally gets why to do these things outside of the bay area – there’s a completely different tempo (and magic can happen) when people really commit two days of their life to a conference.

The 2010 Glue Conference is a few months away (5/26/10 and 5/27/10). Instead of happening in Denver, Eric is doing Glue at the Omni Interlocken Resort on the outskirts of Boulder. For a taste, here are some of the speakers:

Michael Barrett, CISO, PayPal
Professor Eric Brewer, creator of the CAP Theorem
Chris Hoff, Dir. of Cloud Solutions, Cisco
Ryan Sarver, Dir. of Platform, Twitter
Jonathan Ellis, Lead on the Cassandra project

Some of the sessions that are finalized include:

The Cassandra Database: Inside Twitter's Choice
What's up with OAuth/WRAP?
5 Things I Hate about your API Terms of Service
The Apache Cloud Stack (Hadoop, HBase, Zookeeper, etc)
App PaaS vs. Enhanced Cloud System Infrastructure
Inside MongoDB: the internals of a NoSQL database
Understanding User-managed Access

Take a look at the fuller speaker list and agenda if you want, but beware that it moves around a lot. If you register for Glue now you can get an additional 10% off the early bird price of $525 if you register by 4/2/10 and use the discount code “twit1” (full price at the door is $695). As a special bonus, CloudCamp at Denver is happening the day before Glue (5/25/10). CloudCamp is free, but only 98 tickets are left.

Sign up for both of them now. I’ll be there for the whole shebang, along with my partners at Foundry Group. Plus, May in Boulder is just awesome. And be on the lookout for an announcement soon about a third conference that you’ll have to really focus on (yeah – inside joke – but you’ll appreciate it.)

Shimel Blogs on Open Source

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:33 GMT

My long time friend Alan Shimel has been blogging up a storm on Network World (if you want to hear any amusing story, ask him about the first time he met me.) When Alan started writing his column for Network World he asked me for introductions to a bunch of our portfolio companies that were using open source. Alan is a tough critic and calls it like he sees it so while I knew there was no guarantee that he’d go easy on the companies, I knew that Alan would do an even handed job of highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. I also know that everyone I invest in values any kind of feedback – both good and bad – and they work especially hard to delight their customers so any kind of feedback will make them better.

Earlier today, Alan wrote an article on Standing Cloud titled Seeding the Cloud with Open Source, Standing Cloud Makes It Easy. On Monday, Standing Cloud released their first version of their product (called the Trial Edition) which is a free version that lets you install and work with around 30 open source products on five different cloud service providers. It’s the first step in a series of releases over the next two quarters that Standing Cloud has planned as they work create an environment where it is trivial to deploy and manage open source applications in the cloud. Alan played around with Standing Cloud’s Trial Edition, totally understood what they are doing, and explained why the Trial Edition is interesting and where Standing Cloud is heading when they release their Community Edition at the end of April.

Alan’s also written several other articles about companies in our portfolio recently, including the open source work Gist has been doing with Twitter and a great review of the Pogoplug and how it uses open source.

I believe I’m one of the people that inspired Alan to start blogging a number of years ago. Through his personal blog Ashimmy, the blog he writes for Network World titled Open Source Face and Fiction, and the blogging he does on security.exe (his company CISO Group’s blog), Alan is one of my must read technology bloggers. And he’s often funny as hell, especially when he gets riled up. Keep it up Alan!