Every quarter, without fail, a bunch of articles appear talking about the venture capital industries investment pace as a result of the PWC MoneyTree report.  I used to get calls from all of the Denver / Boulder area reporters about my thoughts on these – that eventually stopped when I started responding “who gives a fuck?”

A few days ago I got a note from Steve Murchie about his new blog titled Angels and Pinheads.  I’m glad Steve is blogging about this as he’s got plenty of experience and thoughts around the dynamics of angel investors – some that I agree with and some that I don’t.  Regardless, my view is that there more there is out there, the better, as long as people engage in… Read more

There were some great comments on my post from Sunday titled Being Syndication Agnostic.  One of them was from Kevin Vogelsang – he asked the following question:

What are the downsides to syndicating a round of financing for the entrepreneur/startup (assuming the relationship with all investors is a good fit of course)? By syndicating a deal, the entrepreneur gains access to a larger network. This seems to be a big positive. However, there must be downsides (less attention, more interest groups, etc.) Love to hear more on the topic.

While there are plenty of downsides, I’m going to take on five common ones in this post. 

Too Many VC’s on the Board: Most VC’s want a board seat when they invest in a company. At the early… Read more

Bijan Sabet started it with a great post titled We Gotta Do A Deal Together and Fred Wilson followed with an equally great post titled Trading Deals, A Lost Art?  I’m going to try to add to the mix with this post by describing our strategy at Foundry Group around syndication and explain a little of where it came from.  Please read both Bijan’s and Fred’s posts as it’ll provide a lot of context for this one.

At Foundry Group, we describe ourselves as syndication agnostic.  Specifically – we are delighted to work with a syndicate of other investors and we are equally delighted to invest by ourselves.  Another way to say this is that we are indifferent as to whether or not we have… Read more

Three of my VC friends (Santo Politi, Mark Suster, and Kate Mitchell) were on Fox Business’ Capitalist Ad”Ventures” series.  The underlying theme of this segment was the characteristics of entrepreneur that VCs look for.

Fox doesn’t seem to have embeds, so you’ll have to use this URL to watch “The Future of Venture Capitalism”.

While Santo, Mark, and Kate weren’t the maniacal crazy people (although I’m sure some will argue that), they were clear about the ones they are looking for.  Nice job gang!… Read more

VCs say a lot of stupid things.  I’m guilty of it plenty and whenever someone calls me on it I try to acknowledge and change.  One that I try really hard not to do is say “my company” when referring to companies I’ve invested in – I think it’s one of the most annoying things a VC can say.

I was talking to a VC the other day about a few companies he had invested in.  By the third time he referred to one of the companies as “my company” (as in “My company is working on X”, “My company would like to talk to Company Z about thing Y”) I felt myself starting to react.  I didn’t really have a relationship with this VC, but I knew that he… Read more

Mark Suster, a partner at GRP Partners, has an outstanding post up this morning titled VC Seed Funding is Dead, Long Live VC Seed Funding. Mark started blogging recently and has quickly turned into my second favorite VC blogger (after Fred Wilson) – if you don’t subscribe to his feed, you should.

Mark just did his first seed deal, a $500k investment in a company called Ad.ly, and his post is a long essay on how he’s thinking about seed investing these days.  He makes the appropriate warning (and differentiation) between VC investors who view seed investments as “options” on future rounds (e.g. they toss a little money in and then generally ignore the company until the next financing) and “active seed investors” (like First… Read more

It’s Tuesday, so that means – well, I’m not sure what that means.  But I do know that if you want to watch me on video, following are three choices.

First up is Episode 10 of TechStars: The Founders – Crunch Time.  Special guest appearances from me, Paul Berberian, the Zenie Bottle, and the printer from Office Space.

The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 10 "Crunch Time" from Andrew on Vimeo.

Next, a panel from the Twiistup 6 event in Los Angeles last Thursday starring me, Dave McClure (Founders Fund), and Andy Sack (Founders Co-Op).  Note Dave obsessively checking TweetDeck throughout the event to make sure everyone is catching and retweeting his creative use of the word “fuck” (NB – I think… Read more

Yesterday, I wrote about the new VC Blogger Network powered by Lijit.  A handful of VCs emailed me asking to be added to the network (which has been done).  There’s no time limit so if you are a VC and want to join, just email me.

In the mean time, I neglected to mention a super cool site called Venture Maven.  Greg Galant and several others put this together – it’s a great aggregation of VCs who tweet – both individually and by firm (quick – name all the firms that have 100% of the partners tweeting).  If you are a VCtweeter and are not on the list, wander over now and add yourself.

And, as the bonus round, go check out Twittorati

The meme of “Free” is one again making the rounds.  I expect it reignited when Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (available on Amazon for $17.81) quickly followed by Malcolm Gladwell’s semi-scathing review in the New Yorker titled “Priced to Sell.  Is Free the future?”  (I kind of feel like Gladwell wimped out on the review, even though I like Anderson’s point of view better than Gladwell’s.)  This then created a predictable tussle in the blogosphere, the kind of which I find tedious and dull, so I avoided the rest of it.

Over the weekend I saw two more blog posts on this meme.  The first – by Fred Wilson titled Freemium and Freeconomics – is clear and well written (and free). … Read more

I say “no” all the time.  I could start keeping track of the number of times I do it a day, but I’d guess it’s a minimum of 10 and occasionally over 50 times a day.  When I type that, my first reaction is “no way, there’s no possible way I say no more than 50 times a day”, but when I think a little more, it definitely happens sometimes.

One of my goals is to be accessible to anyone that reaches out to me.  Another goal is to minimize the amount of time I spend on things that I either (a) don’t have an investment in, (b) won’t have an investment in, or (c) don’t have an interest in.  Basically, I want to “optimize my accessibility”.  This ebbs… Read more

It blows my mind how many people think they can treat entrepreneurs and other investors poorly and think that it won’t come around to negatively impact them some time in the future.

I had two interactions last week with companies around a particular VC investor.  I’ve worked with them in the past and had a crummy experience.  I have a “fuck me once” rule where I’ll always give someone a second chance, but I’m wary and – if I have a second bad experience – I’m done.

When this VC came up in the first conversation, I couched my feedback with the appropriate disclaimers (e.g. “it might have just been me.”)  Interestingly, several other people around the table expressed much stronger negative feelings about this particular investor.  I noted that.… Read more

I’m psyched that my friends at Spark Capital have launched Start@Spark, their new seed program.  In their post Why are we doing this? they explain:

“So, this must be a terrible time to fund a start-up company. Correct? Au contraire. This may be the best time in the last 8 years to start a company. While capital is scarce, the tectonic plates continue to shift creating major rifts. The walls are coming down and the barriers to entering new markets are falling along-side.

We don’t expect the economic woes to evaporate soon; however, we are long term investors. We are looking forward to what will happen in 4 years rather than in the next 4 months. We see a clear opportunity to partner with talented entrepreneurs who

I’m really enjoying writing my print column for Entrepreneur Magazine.  It’s a different kind of writing than my blogging and exercises different mental muscles.

This month’s article A VC’s Biggest Flaw: Arrogance is out (both on the newsstands and the web).  Amy told me this is her favorite one so far as it includes a number of people she’s met: Mr. Know-It-All and several of his cousins. 

I hope you enjoy reading the articles as much as I enjoy writing them.… Read more

I caught the tail end of SXSWi (showed up yesterday and gave a speech sponsored by the Canadian Consulate) and am hanging around today for some night time music entertainment as the music part of SXSW. It’s pretty cool to watch Austin shift from “nerds” (the SXSWi gang) to “hipsters” (the SXSW music gang); while the music scene is not my thing (I’m a nerd), it’s highly entertaining to observe this species in action.

On Monday night I co-hosted a meeting at the Governor’s Mansion in Denver with a group of about 20 significant Colorado entrepreneurs (and a few academics, government people, the Governor and State CIO, one other VC, and two CxO’s of a large Denver-based “ICT” company).  The discussion was around ICT in Colorado and our local entrepreneurial… Read more

As I read the Berkshire Hathaway 2008 Annual Report, a thought kept popping into my mind that had also come up over and over again while reading Bogle’s Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life.  “Be an investor, not a speculator.”

As a venture capital investor, I have a long term time horizon on my investments.  Since I’m investing very early in the life of a company, I’m usually an investor for five or more years.  Sometimes I’m an investor for over ten years.  I’m rarely an investor for less than a year, although it happens occasionally.

I don’t invest directly in the public markets and I haven’t for a long time.  Periodically I end up with a public company stock as the result of the sale… Read more