Brad Feld

Month: May 2014

This week is Boulder Startup Week 2014.

If you have read my book Startup Communities, then you know Andrew Hyde was the founder of Boulder Startup Week. After a hiatus of a few years, he’s back this year as one of the organizers of BSW 2014.

I’m around all week. Following are the events I’ll either be attending or speaking at.

Wednesday (5/14)
– 8am – 9am: Boulder Open Coffee Club
– 10am – 1130am: Startup Politics: Who Needs It: I’ll be doing a panel with Congressman Jared Polis.
– 3pm – 4pm: Jane Miller InterviewI’ll be interviewing Jane about her new book, Sleep Your Way to the Top (and other myths about business success) that is the second book being published by FG Press.

Thursday (5/15): 8am – 9am: Controversy of Diversity

Come join me for some or all of these. And have an awesome BSW 2014!


Whenever a company gets acquired or goes public, there is often a fancy closing dinner. It’s usually at a nice restaurant in a private room. The wine is expensive and the toasts are many. The people in the room are the founders of the company, the executives, the board members, other major investors, the lawyers who worked on the deal, and the investment bankers – if any were involved.

I’ve been to more of these than I can remember. They were fun at first, but now they feel strange to me. The group celebrating is often a very small subset of the people who were involved in helping the company reach its success. I can have a exotic, over the top dinner with friends anytime I want, so it often feels like a burden to me to do yet another fancy dinner. If I’ve been deeply involved in a company, I always look around the room and notice at least one key person missing. Enough time has passed that the celebration seems a little stale.

As Boulder Startup Week kicks off today, I woke up thinking about how many people lead, and contribute to, the Boulder Startup Community. This magic of this place is not top down control, a singular leader, or a grand plan. Instead, it’s the organic beauty of a messy network of people, all who are contributing their own talents and energy, in an ongoing, continuous effort around entrepreneurship.

Kind of like how Twitter grows and evolves. Twitter’s acquisition of Gnip is a big deal for Boulder as it brings one of the most interesting and creative companies in the world to our town as Gnip will serve as the foundation for the first Twitter office in Colorado. This is a #BoulderWin.

So, instead of having a closed, inward facing closing dinner for Twitter’s acquisition of Gnip, a bunch of us in the Boulder tech community are throwing a celebration on the evening of June 4 at the Boulder Theater to welcome Twitter to town. We’ll have food, drinks, entertainment, and lots of mingling with folks in the Boulder Startup Community.

Tickets will be available for purchase the week of May 19 with proceeds going to Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. And, as Gnip was a member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, there will be a special gift that night.

Come celebrate with me the hard work of the 90 people who helped make Gnip a reality.


Every entrepreneur has a mom. Take a look at a few of the Techstars moms and, as a special bonus, some childhood pictures of me and my brother Daniel.

My mom – Cecelia Feld – has had an enormous influence on me in so many different ways. She’s an artist, so from a very young age I was exposed to an endless stream of creative activities. She is serious and disciplined about her art, so when I was in school, I knew she was unavailable between 9am and 5pm because she was working in her studio. While it would have been easy for her to call it quits early to hang out with her kids, her focus on her craft was a notion she planted deep in my mind early and carries through my belief system, impacting how I approach my craft.

Mom is incredibly generous of spirit, especially when I’m being difficult as a son. I’m sure I annoyed the shit out of her as a kid (and continue to as an adult) with my endless questions, exploration, openness, and unwillingness to be passive about things. I never felt anything from her but unconditional love. Sure – she got angry sometimes, was comfortable disciplining me when I crossed a line, but she always did it in a way that I learned from it, never felt threatened (physically or emotionally), and always closed the loop with me after so that the lesson she was trying to convey was learned.

She’s a thinker. She loves to read. She loves to explore new ideas and new places. She loves to try new things, especially when they are part of her craft. I remember her getting excited about digital photography a while ago, learning Photoshop – and I mean REALLY learning Photoshop – which is no picnic. What she can do with it is magnificent.

I learned about loyalty, compassion, and love from my mom. Her relationship with my dad continues to inspire me. After 50 years of being married, they are still deeply in love.

My mom is cool. When I was in high school, she drove a Corvette. She’s always had crazy curly long hair, which is the inspiration for my crazy curly long hair. She knows how to hang with people of any age. She’s funny as hell without trying to be. And she has an endless edgy contemporary style in everything she does.

Mom – you are awesome. Happy mother’s day. Thanks for putting up with me.


Just now Fred Wilson posted an Open Internet Letter to the FCC that my partners and I at Foundry Group signed on to. It came together in the last 24 hours and was driven by our friends at Union Square Ventures.

If you are a VC and are interested in signing on before we file this formally with the FCC, please send me or nick [at] usv [dot] com an email.

Help us avoid the fast lane / slow lane / no lane problem on the Internet that the new FCC proposed regulations may create, which we strongly believe will stifle innovation, inhibit competition, and limit interest in new startup activity.


If you are an founder or employee of a public company, repeat after me:

I am not my stock price.”

This is one of my favorite Jeff Bezos quotes.

It’s easily to get bummed out when your stock price drops. I believe the emotions follow the +1/-5 rule. Each time it goes up, you get one unit of happiness. Each time it goes down, you get -5 units of happiness.

Think about that for a second. If you look at the stock price every day the market is open, you’ll look at it about 250 times a year. Let’s assume that your stock is higher at the end of the year, but that on 125 days it goes up, and 125 days it goes down. You’ll have +125 happiness for the up days and -625 happiness for the down days. Even though your stock price is higher at the end of the year, you’ll have -500 happiness points.

Now, in the above case, if you only look at your stock at the end of each month, you’ll have 6 up days and 6 down days. That’s +6 – 30 = -24 happiness points. Still unhappy, but less so.

If you look at the stock only one time at the end of the year, you’ll have +1 happiness points.

Lesson: Don’t look at your stock price. Run your business. Work in your business. Do amazing things. Build value. Derive your happiness from the amazing things you are doing for your customers, the great people you work with, and the mission that you are on. Oh – and all the great things in the rest of your life outside of work.

Remember: You are not your stock price.


My friends at Harmonix are running a Kickstarter campaign to bring back Amplitude, one of their classic games. It was originally done in the early 2000’s for the Sony PS2. This campaign will bring it up to date for the Sony PS3 and PS4.

It was all started by an online post from someone named DumpLord420. Watch the Kickstarter video to hear the backstory and see what they are doing. And, if you are a video game, or Harmonix, fan boy (or fan girl), some Harmonix love is just a few Kickstarter clicks away.


Yesterday when we were having Comcast issues in downtown Boulder, I thought about how slow the Internet speed at my office was. For several hours, it was 0 Mbps down and 0 Mbps up (0/0) until I gave up and tethered my iPhone to my computer and used Verizon LTE for the rest of the afternoon.

When I got home, Pandora had trouble starting up on my CenturyLink connection, which Speedtest showed was 2/0.5. So I switched over to my other ISP at home, Skybeam, and got 9.5/2.5. This morning CenturyLink is showing up as 8.5/0.75. Recognize that this is my actual speed, not what I’m paying for and could theoretically get. For example, on Skybeam I’m paying for “up to 15/3.”

At my office, on Comcast, I usually get 75/25. But even that feels slow after hanging out at my Google fiberhouse in Kansas City and getting 800/? (I don’t remember what the upload speed was.)

And yes – as a consumer, I’m spending a ton of money for all of this Internet connectivity.

Fred’s post from yesterday – The Fast Lane, The Slow Lane, and The No Lane – got me thinking. When the SOPA/PIPA issue came to a head, the most effective way to help people understand the potential implications was to blackout the Internet for a day.

What if we did the same by Demoing the Slow Lane for a day. Algorithmically, all sites could slow themselves down dramatically, demonstrating what performance might look like over a 1/1 pipe. Or even a 0.5/0.5 pipe. I’m no server expert, but it looks like Apache has a setting called mod_ratelimit that does bandwidth throttling for client connections. And I’m sure some intrepid readers could quickly come up with elegant solutions to this.

Let the world see “Waiting for”, “Connecting”, and “Buffering” show up in their browser continuously throughout the day. Explain what is going on. Then click a button to bypass the Slow Lane and get normal connectivity.

Instead of everyone getting tangled up in the legal question of what “net neutrality” means, consumers can see what could happen if / when ISPs can decide which companies get to use their fast lanes by paying extra and who is relegated to the slow lane.


Dane McDonald, the CEO of FG Press, took my 3D Robotics IRIS drone out for a spin around Boulder and the surrounding area. His three minute composite video is beautiful, and just the beginning of some fun drone exploratory imagery.

And yes, he got at least one gratuitous non-Boulder mountain snow shot in there. Enjoy!


There’s an amazing amount of bad activity going on in the world of tech right now. It’s predictable – when things start going well the switch flips from fear back to greed and all sorts of craziness ensues. One of the things I see appear is a steady stream of crap aimed at innovators. Patent trolls are an easy one, but heavy handed regulatory activity by incumbents and random lawsuits around acquisitions are also part for the course.

I was going to write about how the FCC’s potential action on net neutrality could seriously jeopardize Internet innovation, but Fred Wilson beat me to it (he’s got an east coast time advantage over me) with a phenomenal post titled The Fast Lane, The Slow Lane, and The No Lane. I love the phrase “permissionless innovation” as well as the way Fred describes the issue:

“But that period of “permissionless innovation” is likely to come to an end soon if we all let it. The FCC has responded to a court ruling by proposing a convoluted set of rules that will allow fast lanes, slow lanes, and what’s even worse, no lanes. The FCC’s proposal will allow the telcos and cable companies that provide the last mile connection to your home or office to prioritize some bits over others. That’s how they create the fast lane and the slow lane. It also allows discrimination in which they can decide not to allow your bits through at all, creating a “no lane”.”

Go read Fred’s post The Fast Lane, The Slow Lane, and The No Lane and then hit the back button to continue here. I’ll wait.

If you wonder who is driving this, it’s the telcos and cable companies who control the last mile. Please don’t pretend that you are surprised.

But that’s just one category of bad activity that falls in the “incumbents trying to use government regulation to control their industry and suppress innovation.” Nothing new here – it’s been going on since the beginning of time.

A different version of this popped up last week. If you recall, a month or so ago Facebook announced that it was buying Oculus Rift for an eye popping $2 billion. Amazing and congrats to everyone involved in Oculus Rift. I’ve long been a John Carmack fanboy since I first played Doom and realized id Software was based in Mesquite, TX, near where I grew up. I’ve always loved his hacker spirit, amazing ability to do things no one else could envision, and willingness to open source a lot of his work to lead the way for others. So I thought it was pretty awesome when he went to be CTO of Oculus Rift to pursue the next generation of virtual reality software.

Now, I don’t know John, I’m not an investor in Oculus Rift, or Facebook, or Zenimax, but I wasn’t particularly surprised when Zenimax decided to assert that it owned part of Carmack’s brain. You can read an enormous amount of chatter about the situation, and form your own conclusion, but mine is that Zenimax is a bad actor here. Given that Zenimax wouldn’t let Carmack pursue any virtual reality work while at Zenimax resulted in the logical conclusion that he’d leave and do something else. Asserting that whatever was in his brain while employed at Zenimax belongs to Zenimax is nonsense. There’s a phrase for that: “intellectual slavery” and it’s not one I support.

If you are interested in this situation, here are some good links to understand what is going on and being asserted.

Now that I’ve been clear about what I think, I’m curious what you think.