For a number of years, my partner Jason Mendelson has been teaching an extremely popular course at CU Boulder Law School with Brad Bernthal titled Venture Capital – A 360 Degree Perspective. While it’s a course taught in the law school, it’s (not surprisingly) become popular with the MBA students at CU Boulder.

Brad Bernthal, Phil Weiser (the Dean of the CU Law School), and I have been talking about a new course to complement VC 360 called Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Public Policy. We’ve decided to take a crack at a cross-campus course (law, engineering, and business) that focused on contemporary issues around entrepreneurship, would be a great introduction to any student who wants to immerse herself in entrepreneurship, and would enable us to create some unique content around this topic.

We envision a two hour a week course (over seven sessions) that has a heavy reading, class participation, and writing component. Our goal will be to put this up on the web as well to provide content (and potentially interaction) to a much wider community.

Following is a first draft of a syllabus. I’m looking for two types of feedback: (1) comments on the syllabus and (2) suggestions for web services to use to package this content up for broader distribution.

This one credit course, available to first year law students in their second semester as well as a select number of graduate students in the Business School students and School of Engineering, will explore a set of cutting edge questions around entrepreneurship.  Students in the class will be required to write a ten page paper as well as participate actively in the course (including on a class blog).  Since class participation is a core part of the course (counting for 20% of the grade, with the other 80% based on the paper), any missed class must be made up by writing a 1 page reaction paper.

1. Being an Entrepreneur. Reading: The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Hoffman, Casnocha). Five Minds for the Future (Gardner).

2. Leadership and What Makes a Great Founding Team. Reading: Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup:  (Cohen, Feld). Leadership Lessons From the Shackleton Expedition (Koehn).

3. Building and Scaling A Business. Reading: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Ries).

4. Entrepreneurial Communities. Reading: Startup Communities: Creating A Great Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your City (Feld). Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity 1996 – 2010.

5. Financing Entrepreneurial Companies. Reading: Venture Deals: How To Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer (Mendelson, Feld). Improving Access to Capital for High-Growth Companies (Department of Commerce – National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship)

6. Entrepreneurial Leadership in Government. Reading: Alfred Kahn As A Case Study of A Political Entrepreneur (Weiser). Start-up Nation:  The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (Senor and Singer).

7. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy: Reading: Accelerating Energy Innovation: Insights from Multiple Sectors (Henderson, Newell).

As entrepreneurship in Boulder continues to grow, Boulder Digital Works is offering a new course with Robert Reich (co-founder of OpenSpace, OneRiot, and the Boulder New Tech Meetup) called  StartUp: Learning Entrepreneurism. This is the first BDW course open to anyone in the Boulder community to join BDW’s graduate students.

StartUp begins with the premise that entrepreneurship, rather than being the result of genius and magic, can be learned. StartUp takes the students through the actual conception, development, and launch of an original product or service during the semester. This course puts students inside the mind of the entrepreneur and immerses them in the daily leadership and innovation challenges of the startup environment. While its primary focus is the startup and what it demands, this course is also a clinic in thinking, decision making, and mental agility that will benefit any area of business – not just startups.

Download detailed information and an application for StartUp: Learning Entrepreneurism if you are interested.

Many of the companies that we invest in are the leaders in their respective markets. Often they create the market. Sometimes they appear out of no where and dominate. And sometimes they are in a brutal fight every day with another company or two for market leadership. We don’t care which case it is – we just want to be investors in the companies that are #1 or #2 (and have a chance to be #1) in their markets.

Jack Welch taught us the power of being #1 or #2 in your market many years ago and the VC business reinforces that over and over and over again with relative exit values. The VC cliche is that the market leader gets 50% of the value, #2 gets 25% of the value, #3 gets 10% of the value, and #4 through #263 get the remaining 15%. While these numbers move around (I’ve been in situations where #1 got 90% and in situations where I got lucky and #17 got 25%) they are directionally correct.

Whenever a market leader I’m an investor in is threatened by a competitor, I’ve encouraged them to call a Code Red like they do on ER. In a Code Red situation, every who can is focused on the threat for a short, intense period of time. If the company is less than 10 people, this is easy. But if it is 50 people or more, it’s really hard. And – at 1000+ people, it’s a magic trick to get it right.

When the CEO calls a Code Red, there is often a negative reaction from parts of the organization ranging from sales, development, to operations. Often some people in the organization don’t believe or understand the need for a Code Red. Other times they’ve been through so many unnecessary fire drills in other companies that they don’t believe the Code Red is real. They simply don’t see the same threat the CEO sees. Or they feel undermined by the CEO.

Part of the CEO’s job is to call a Code Red correctly. If you call it every other week, it’s not a Code Red, it’s shitty management and leadership. If you never call it, you’ll one day find yourself no longer the market leader. There’s no right tempo – it’s random, but as with many things you’ll know the moment when you encounter it.

A Code Red can’t last forever. It has to be incredibly focused on the specific threat you trying to address. It has to be clearly communicated across the entire company. It has to be quantitative – once you’ve effectively neutralized the threat, the Code Red is over. This might be in an hour, a day, a week, or a month. But if it lasts much longer than a month, something else is wrong.

I know some people who like to use DEFCON 1 instead of Code Red. I don’t – it’s too nuanced – who cares about the difference between DEFCON 3 and DEFCON 1 – you are in a critical situation. Make it binary.

I know some managers who hate the idea of ever being in a Code Red situation. This is unrealistic view to take in a startup or fast growing company. Once you are a visible leader, people will be gunning for you, imitating you, or coming out with products that disrupt your business. Welcome to being a market leader – own it and when a Code Red occurs use it to propel your business into an even more dominant leadership position to build on. And – for every employee in a company having a Code Red – take it seriously and crush it – the rewards will be quick and obvious and the downside of not dealing with it sucks.

On my run yesterday in Central Park, I was thinking about the characteristics of some of my favorite companies. Suddenly a phrase popped into my head about what ties all of these companies together – they are the silent killers.

When I look at the Foundry Group portfolio, we’ve got a bunch of them in it. They don’t spend a lot of time trying to get written up in TechCrunch. They often aren’t based in the bay area. Their CEO’s don’t run around bloviating about what they are going to do some day.

They just do it. And suddenly they are $10 million, or $20 million, or even $50 million revenue companies. Before anyone has really noticed. Without any real competition. They are the unambiguous and dominant market leader.

Sure – their customers and partners know who they are. Other entrepreneurs, especially ones who work with them in some way know who they are. Smart technical folks know who they are. And the geographic community that they are in know who they are since they are often the leaders of their startup communities.

But they sneak up on you. They don’t waste their time hyping themselves. They don’t run around trying to get VCs interested in what they are doing. Rather, they just do. Their twitter streams are filled with substantive stuff. Their blogs are about their product and how it is used. Their people are everywhere they need to be, and spend almost no time being places they don’t need to be.

These are the silent killers. And I love them.

I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the first time in 1975 when I was about 10 years old. I’ve read it several times over the last 35 years, but probably hadn’t read it in over a decade. My first business partner, Dave Jilk (now the Standing Cloud founder / CEO), gave it to me as a birthday gift last week.

I just read it again and it was as powerful, inspiring, and enlightening as I remembered it. I’m often asked what books I’d recommend to an entrepreneur (especially an aspiring entrepreneur). There are two: Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Whenever we are in the upswing of an entrepreneurial cycle, like we are right now, I start seeing all kinds of weird stuff appear. Random people, who get notoriety for themselves, blow up. The media is aggressively negative presumably in the quest for getting readership. Entitlement behavior runs rampant. The quick buck artists appear. Money becomes a central topic of many conversations. Established companies and government suddenly wake up to the power of innovation and try to co-opt the energy. The word bubble becomes so popular that a bubble builds around using the word bubble.

The great entrepreneurs just keep building their companies. They focus relentlessly on their products, their customers, and their people. They create things that delight, take chances, make mistakes, and iterate as they, and their organizations, get better. They just keep at it and the very best ones shut out and ignore all the noise. And they learn, and learn, and learn.

Just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Young Jonathan realizes he is different and then outcast, but he discovers himself. He then discovers others like him, including his great mentors. He learns, experiments, tries new things, makes mistakes, and learns. And learns. And then he becomes the mentor and teaches other young seagulls to discover themselves. Throughout, he does what he loves the most – he flies, and practices, and learns.

If you are an entrepreneur, take one hour out of your day this week and read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And then spend another hour, alone, thinking about it. I assure you that it’ll be worth the time.

My friend Paul Kedrosky – who spends some of his time as a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation – has a thoughtful short video (as part of the Kauffman Sketchbook series) on where entrepreneurs get their money. While it’s easy to get confused and think that VCs are the center of the financing universe, Paul reminds us that most entrepreneurial companies are funded by the entrepreneur’s savings, cash flow, credit cards, friends, and family.

It’s a creative three minute video with plenty of meat to it.

I love books. I love to read. I realize I’ve had a dry spell – I’ve hardly been reading books at all this fall. That hasn’t stopped them from piling up as my infinite pile of books to read remains – well – infinite.

I gobbled down some entrepreneurship books in the last week. There are a number of great ones coming that seem to have been kicked off by Eric Ries’ dynamite The Lean Startup.

The first one is Walter Isaacson’s incredible biography of Steve Jobs. While I knew many (but not all) of the stories, Isaacson is a total master at putting together a fast paced, thorough, yet extremely readable biography. Jobs is a fascinating, incredible, and extremely complex person – Isaacson captures his essence. While this book is about more than just entrepreneurship, Jobs has had such a huge impact on the computer industry that anyone interested in entrepreneurship must read this book. If you love biography, are intrigued by complex heroic figures, love your Apple products, or are anyone else, I put this book in your must read pile. Yes – I loved it.

The next is Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours. I recently joined the board of Startup Weekend, which I describe as a weekend-long simulation of entrepreneurship. I was at the very first Startup Weekend in Boulder in 2007 and was blown away by what Andrew Hyde – and the Boulder entrepreneurial community – did while creating Vosnap. Four years later Startup Weekend is an international phenomenon that I believe is one of the key activities required in any entrepreneurial community that aspires to grow and develop of a 20 year period. This book helps you understand what Startup Weekend is, how it works, and is filled with stories of people who have gone through it, what they learned, and why it matters.

The last two books are ones that won’t be out until the spring but I had a chance to read galleys of each. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn cofounder / chairman) and Ben Casnocha (who I’ve now been friends with for almost a decade – eek!) have written an important book titled The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. I believe this will be the contemporary version of What Color Is Your Parachute (which – unfortunately – now seems to be a whole series of books – which I put in the “very tired” category.) Reid and Ben take a fresh approach to how one thinks about “career” with a book I expect will be atop the NY Times Bestseller list for a long time.

Finally, Jason Baptiste (OnSwipe CEO – TechStars New York 2011 class) demonstrates his awesomeness with his new book The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital. This puppy is packed with very specific advice about launching a business that come from Jason’s experience with OnSwipe and Cloudomatic. Jason is a great writer – the book is direct, clear, actionable, and fast paced – just like Jason.

Finally, I’d be remiss in my job as a book salesman for Wiley (our publisher) if didn’t mention the book I wrote with David Cohen last year titled Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup as well as the book I recently wrote with Jason Mendelson titled Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. Hopefully you have them and are giving them to every entrepreneur and aspiring entrepreneur you know.

It’s Black Friday. Buy some books!

Today’s “founder hint of the day” is to create an email address called founders@yourcompanyname.com and have it automatically forward to all the founders of your company.

I interact with a ton of companies every day. For the ones we have a direct investment in via Foundry Group, I know each of the founder’s names (although with 40 companies, at age 45 – almost 46, there are moments where I have to sit quietly and think hard to remember them.) For the TechStars companies, especially early in each cycle, I have trouble remembering everyone’s names until I’ve met them. And for many other companies I have an indirect investment in (via a VC fund I’m an investor in) or that I’m simply interacting with, I often can’t remember all of the founders names.

Ok – that was my own little justification. But your justification is that as a young company, you want anyone interested in you to be able to reach you. While info@yourcompanyname.com is theoretically useful, in my experience very few people actually use it because they have no idea where it actually goes. On the other hand, founders@yourcompanyname.com goes to the founders. Bingo.

We’ve been using this at TechStars for a number of years and it’s awesome. I’ve set up my own email groups for many other companies, but this morning while I was doing it for another one I realized that they should just do it. Sure – there’s a point at which the company is big enough where you probably don’t want to have this list go to all the founders, or there are founders that leave, or something else comes up, but when you are just getting started, be obsessed with all the communication coming your way and make it easy to get it.

founders@yourcompanyname.com rules.

I heard a fascinating one-liner the other day that I had knee jerk negative reaction to but when I thought about it more thought was deeply insightful, especially in the context of big established companies vs. new entrepreneurial companies.

A CEO of a very large, successful company said “execution is an order of magnitude easier than opportunity.” In the context of young startups, I often feel exactly the opposite. Opportunity is everywhere, but execution in a bitch.

But then I thought about this a little. For a big company that dominates a market, it’s totally focused on execution. The company is built for execution and, assuming it is built well, just cranks things out. What it cranks out might be inspiring, or it might not be, but it’ll keep cranking things out.

For these companies, finding the new opportunity is really difficult. The company is tuned to defend its turf, not go find new turf. Execution is all about defending market position, maximizing profit, expanding market share in existing markets, and allocating resources. In a few extraordinary cases, this activity is massively inspired, usually around companies that love their products (Apple) or their customers (Virgin). So – for most of these companies, “execution” is easy relative to finding the new opportunities. And many of these large companies don’t focus on finding the next opportunity, or expanding their existing opportunity, until their business hits major headwinds, is in decline, or is massively disrupted. I give you Borders, B&N, and Blockbuster as examples here – awesome at execution until what they did became irrelevant and then it was too late for them to do anything about it (other than maybe B&N, who might pull off their transition.)

In contrast, startups are totally focused on the new opportunity. Assuming they find it, and it’s a big one, execution becomes the main challenge in front of them. Their activity is all about scaling up the organization, hiring people like crazy, building a culture of shipping great product consistently, reacting effectively to early customer feedback, and continuing to evolve their products to meet the new massive opportunity they are going after.

From the eyes of a big company CEO, finding the opportunity is hard. From the eyes of a startup CEO, the opportunity is everything – execution is hard.

My insight is simple: “context matters immensely.” As young companies grow rapidly, they have to focus on becoming execution machines and recognize that at some point they’ll start struggling with identifying the next evolution of their opportunity space. Assuming the opportunity they are going after is massive, this won’t matter for a while. But the execution dynamics will. And when you find yourself executing well, dominating your market segment, and growing quickly, you’ve got to make sure you keep focusing on expanding the opportunity, especially since that’s going to get harder as you get bigger.

One of the jokes in my little universe is that “every time I hear the word ‘marketing’ I throw up a little in my mouth.” I’ve been joking about this long enough that it’s become conventional wisdom that I hate marketing. Yet, if you look at many of our successful investments, they are extraordinarily good at marketing and some people suggest we (Foundry Group, me) are also good at marketing.

Thirty minutes ago, Chris Moody - a long time friend and COO of Gnip – sent me an extremely thoughtful email titled “Food For Thought”. I read it, thought it was 100% correct, and asked if I could reblog it verbatim both as (a) an explanation of how I actually should / do think about marketing and (b) an example of how I learn through direct feedback.

Chris – thanks for taking the time to write this. You nailed it. The way I articulate how I think about marketing will be permanently different going forward.

At this point I’ve probably heard/read most of your basic philosophical points on the various aspects of building a successful business. I agree with most of them of course. However, there is one area where I’ve consistently felt that you have under represented your true feelings and it feels like your general input on the topic has been mostly nonconstructive. I’d like to try to help change that for the good of the broader entrepreneur community (and to make you look even smarter).

The topic is marketing. I have no doubt missed some brillant thoughts you’ve offered to the community and I’m sure you’ve provided countless pieces of good advice to individual entrepreneurs in one-on-one situations. But, the sound bite version I’ve heard from you on a few occasions goes something like this “I hate traditional marketing. Focus on building a great product or all the marketing in the world won’t matter.” When I think about the first time entrepreneur, this response feels particularly unhelpful. And, the second part of the quote could be applied to almost all aspects of a startup business including sales, finance, etc. If you don’t have a great product, none of the other shit matters.

And yet, when I see how Foundry Group approaches marketing and when I look across your portfolio companies, I see a very common thread around how you guys approach marketing. I would characterize the theme as “marketing through thought leadership.” In more basic terms it is expressing marketing ideas via “this is why we are doing what we are doing and why it is important” instead of “hey, look at me.” Have a new product feature? Sure blog about the feature, but spend way more time on why the feature is important to your overall purpose and beliefs.

To illustrate the point, I’ve recently talked to/interviewed a few current/former people from Rally and ReturnPath. When I ask them “what is the most significant thing you did from a marketing perspective to accelerate the business” the answer across the board has been “we focused on being a thought leader in our space.” As you well know that is the same approach we are taking at Gnip and I see it in many of your other portfolio companies too. Not sure it is always a conscience effort by the companies, but it seems to be pretty consistent across the portfolio..

When I think about FG itself I see tons of “marketing activity” but most of it could also be just be labeled: thought leadership. You sponsor conferences around topics that you care about. Your blog post are rich with “here’s why did it and why it matters” instead of “here’s what we did”. In fact, your whole theme based approach is really about thought leadership focused in a few areas. Foundry Group clearly believes that startups have the power to change the world. You guys spend countless time and effort expressing your opinions on this topic. You write books to support your beliefs. If you only talked about what you do with your startups “we invested in x, we sold y”, the conversation would be short and have a limited audience. Instead, you talk about what you believe and why startups matter. As a result, you have built a real following around people that care about the topic.

If I were going to create the Brad Feld sound bite for Marketing it would go something like this “Don’t do marketing. Focus on becoming a thought leader in your space. Talk everyday with your customers, perspective customers, partners, and the world about why you do what you do and why you think it is important. The reality is you can only talk about what you do one or two times before people think ‘got it’ and stop listening. But, if you talk about what you believe and point to countless examples that exemplify your beliefs , you can build real engagement with people who care/believe the same things.”

Not trying to put words in your mouth. Just saying that the actions that I see don’t match the words that I hear and I think there is easy opportunity to change that for the better.