I have 2,143 lawyer jokes queued up.  Here’s a good one:

The devil visited a lawyer’s office and made him an offer. "I can arrange some things for you, " the devil said. "I’ll increase your income five-fold. Your partners will love you; your clients will respect you; you’ll have four months of vacation each year and live to be a hundred. All I require in return is that your wife’s soul, your children’s souls, and their children’s souls rot in hell for eternity."  The lawyer thought for a moment. "What’s the catch?" he asked.

Now some of my good friends are lawyers and several of my very best friends are ex-lawyers.  You probably know one of them – my partner at Foundry Group – Jason Mendelson. … Read more

Ever since I left home for college in 25 years ago, I periodically get a call from my father that goes something like "Hi Brad, it’s Dad.  I’m having trouble with my computer.  Can you help me?"  I fondly remember many long calls with my father where the exchange went as follows:

Brad: "Ok, now get to a DOS prompt." Dad: "I’m there." Brad: "What does it say?" Dad: "C colon." Brad: "Ok, type C colon backslash D O S"

sound of dad typing way more than seven letters Brad: "Dad, what are you typing" Dad: "I thought I figured it out, but now it’s asking me to Abort, Retry, or Ignore" Brad: "Hit Control C" Dad: "Ok" Brad: "Now type C colon backslash D O S"

And this… Read more

It could happen before you expect it.  I read a lot of science fiction and have been fantasizing about the opportunity to jack into cyberspace for a long time.  We are getting one step closer with our latest investment in EmSense.… Read more

We announced Our Investment in Topspin Media today.  My partner Ryan McIntyre has a long post up titled Topspin, Baby! that describes the history of how the investment came together over the past ten years.  Ian Rogers – the CEO of Topspin who was profiled in TechCrunch a few weeks ago in the article Ex-Yahoo Music GM Ian Rogers Launches Topspin Media has a nice a post up on the Topspin blog titled Old Friends, New Opportunities. 

Oh – and there is that really cool Billboard cover and article.

As a special bonus, Ryan blogged the text from The Declaration of Independence yesterday.  This seemed somehow fitting when you consider what Topspin is planning to do for music artists.… Read more

Larry Nelson from w3w3.com has an interview up with my partner Seth Levine.  The interview is called Is an Advisory Board or Advisors Really Necessary? but the first half of the interview is about Seth’s view of Foundry Group and his partners (e.g. me, Jason, Ryan, and Chris.)  Listen and find out some magic secrets – or just hear what Seth thinks.  As a special bonus Seth has some good ideas about advisors and advisory boards.… Read more

Over the past few months we’ve been posting about the "themes" we invest in at Foundry Group over on our Foundry Group blog.  I thought – with the most recent announcement of our investment in Smith & Tinker (our most recent human computer interaction (HCI) investment) – it was worth reviewing our current themes.

For a view on how we think about themes, start with our post What Is "Thematic Investing?"  We then cover four of our current themes:

• Human Computer Interaction
• Implicit Web
• Glue
• Digital Life

We also put up a post titled Did Darwin Skip Over Email? explaining our desire to find another investment on our long standing theme around email (and SMTP).  We are also continuing to… Read more

Today we announced that Foundry Group has joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.  We’ve contributed 1% of our carried interest (the functional equivalent of 1% of our equity) to the Community Trust Endowed Fund of the Community Foundation Serving Boulder County.

When I co-founded the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCO), we explained what we were trying to accomplish in the post titled Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Encourages Early Stage Giving.  Fifteen months later, with the addition of Foundry Group, we now have 19 member companies.

To everyone that has supported and/or participated in EFCO, thank you!  If you are a founder or an employee of a Colorado-based company (or venture capital firm) that is interested in participating in EFCO, just drop me an

By the time you read this I’ll be in New York (right now I’m on a plane.)  If you follow me (or any of my partners) on twitter, you will quickly understand why a Boulder entrepreneur recently referred to twitter as the "Foundry Group location / travel finder."

We travel plenty.  My partner Chris Wand just wrote a post titled Is “Geography” a Cliché in Venture Capital?  Unlike many VCs who prefer to invest close to home, we view the United States (and Canada) as our oyster.  Take a look at Chris’ post to understand why.

For perspective, the geographic distribution of our first six investment is two in the bay area (Zynga, Gnip), two in southern California (Oblong, Memeo), one in Boulder (… Read more

The newest blog post up on the Foundry Group web site is titled What Is "Thematic Investing?"  In this post, we try to describe more deeply what we mean when we say "we are thematic investors" or "we like horizontal stuff."

"Our themes tend to be horizontal in nature and are often based on an underlying protocol, standard or market trend that we believe is on the cusp of widespread adoption that has the potential to drive a cycle of innovation and company creation for at least a five to ten year period. We try to focus on themes and their underlying technologies that are ready to be rolled out to consumers or the enterprise and are well beyond the science-experiment phase.

To make this concrete, some examples of

[]<-‘Foundry Group Raises $225 Million Early Stage VC Fund’

If you recognize the syntax above, you’ll recognize the first programming language I ever used.

10 PRINT “Foundry Group Raises $225 Million Early Stage VC Fund”

That would be the second language I coded in.

program FoundryLaunches(output);    begin     WriteLn(‘Foundry Group Raises $225 Million Early Stage VC Fund’);   end.

And that would be the third. These three examples are minor derivations of everyone’s first program – also known as “Hello World” – written in APL, Basic, and Pascal for the non-nerds among you.

Last year I co-founded Foundry Group with four partners – Seth Levine, Jason Mendelson, Ryan McIntyre, and Chris Wand. In the fall we closed our first fund – a $225 million fund aimed… Read more

I love it when companies I’m an investor in use an acquisition strategy.  My good friend and long time co-investor Fred Wilson calls it a "venture rollup."  It’s very different than a traditional "rollup" or "consolidation" (which is typically revenue based.)  Fred described it really well when talking about NewsGator’s acquisition of FeedDemon in 2005.

When he (Feld) finds a sector where he’s early in the development of the market, he gets in, figures it out, builds a management team, and then gets busy convicing others to join the party. That’s the play book for the venture rollup.

Todd Vernon – Lijit’s CEO – talks about why BigSwerve is important to him.  While BigSwerve is a tiny company (the founder Raj Bala and some outsourced developers), they’ve done… Read more

We recently made another Foundry Group investment in the Zynga Game Network.  Brad Stone wrote a great article about Zynga in the NYTimes about it titled More Than Games, a Net to Snare Social Networkers.

One of my co-investors – Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures – wrote a nice overview of how he came to make this investment.  I vividly remember seeing my long time friend Mark Pincus’ name pop up as the author of Texas Hold’em on Facebook one day over the summer and thinking "hmmm – what’s Mark up to?" 

In six months Mark has put together a remarkable company.  In our first conversation about Zynga, Mark explained his vision of social gaming to me.  I’ve been a long time… Read more

I love when we find magic technology that just does what it is supposed to.  That – plus a handful of amazing people – are the underpinnings of the investment we just led in Memeo.  My partner Ryan McIntyre – who joined the board – has a detailed post up titled Foundry Group Invests in Memeo.

I’ve been searching for brainless backup and sync software for a long time.  I’ve never been happy.  I am now.  I’m using Memeo to keep five Vista machines (going on seven) in sync and it just automagically happens.  Oh – and my server is a Mac – how fun is that?

We did a couple of other investments in Q4 of last year that we’ll be writing about soon, along with what… Read more

An interview with my partner Jason Mendelson is up on the web.  Jason gives some hints about what Foundry Group will be doing.  Look for more after the holidays.… Read more