Brad Feld

Month: August 2006

Read the following phrase and think about whether or not you practice it.

You must retain faith that you can prevail to greatness in the end, while retaining the discipline to confront the brutal facts of your current reality.

This is known as The Stockdale Paradox and was publicized by Jim Collins several years ago in his book Good to Great.  I stumbled upon it again in Collins’ monograph titled Good to Great and the Social Sectors.  When paired with one of my favorite Atlas Shrugged quotes – “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever” – it’s a powerful thought.

I see so many people avoid confronting reality, especially in difficult situations.  The more difficult the situation, the more important it is to confront reality.  It’s especially dangerous for an entrepreneur or a leader to avoid confronting reality, since his reality often translates into everyone else’s reality. 

Whenever I’ve been in tough spots or facing impending doom, I start by confronting reality and then work to figure out what I want to accomplish in the context of my current reality.  While failure is occasionally inevitable – or I simply can’t overcome the barrier of whatever reality I am faced with (and subsequently have to chose a new path) – I’ve found that fear and uncertainty evaporates when you confront reality.

While Stockdale never became our vice president, he taught us a powerful lesson.


As we shift into full gear for the 2006 election cycle, I’ve teamed up with TiE-Rockies, VisiTechPR, Jack Tankersley (Meritage Funds), the Bill Ritter (Colorado Democrat Governor Candidate) campaign, and the Bob Beauprez (Colorado Republican Governor Candidate) campaign to put on a Technology Community Forum.

As a state, Colorado has the highest number of technology workers per capita.  As a result, the health of the Colorado technology industry is an important issue to consider in the 2006 election for Governor.  I believe that it’s important to explore where each candidate stands and what their thoughts and plans are for our state government’s involvement in the high tech community.

Jack Tankersley – who is a friend, co-investor in a few companies, and one of the founders of the Colorado venture capital community – is a Beauprez supporter.  I’m a Ritter supporter.  We intend to jointly facilitate a discussion that covers a range of issues and gives each candidate an opportunity to clearly express his point of view as well as respond to questions. 

The event is being held on September 8th at the Brown Palace from 11am to 1pm.  We’ll have limited space for attendees – some by invite only (CEO’s of Colorado tech companies) and some open to the community.  Feel free to email me if you want to be put on the invite list.  I’m planning to do a podcast of the event for folks that are interested and can’t attend.


Tom Evslin has a super post up today titled Daily Key to Success.  In it, he talks about his obsession with all sorts of daily business metrics as one of his keys to success as an entrepreneur.  I completely agree and share his obsession with daily metrics of all kinds, going back to my very first company where we had a program called FT-BIL that I used to see how much we billed out clients each day – by consultant. 

Tom also highlights one metric that he recommends you not obsess over – your stock price (if you are a public company.)  Having spent entirely too much time clicking refresh throughout the day on MyYahoo during 1999 – 2002, I second his recommendation.  Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness also has some great insights into this particularly self-destructive phenomenon.


Amy and I are sushi lovers.  Chris sent us an article from BestLife titled Too Sexy for Wasabi about Masa Restaurant (in the Time Warner Center in New York City) and the amazing experience of eating a meal prepared by Chef Masa TakayamaWow.


FeedBurner is beta testing a new set of functionality – called “Networks” that is planned for a September launch.  I’m coordinating one of the beta Networks – the Venture Capital Network.

A FeedBurner Network is a collection of blogs that fit within a particular topic.  The goal is to create high quality collections of similar types of publishers.  For example, if you are interested in reading Venture Capital bloggers, you currently have to manually poke around to find them.  Some bloggers have taken it upon themselves to compile a list of Venture Capital bloggers (65 – where did all those come from?) and you can use Technorati to find Blogs about Venture Capital.  But – none of these approaches is particularly organized, scales, or is really manageable.

A FeedBurner Network is managed by a coordinator.  At this stage the coordinator is the gatekeeper for the network, although it will evolve so that all members of a network can promote other potential members.  As a result, the content is “filtered and selected” by the network coordinator (and ultimately members) so that there aren’t “fake” Venture Capital blogs as part of the network.  The result should be a higher quality network and a quick and easy way to find “Venture Capital bloggers.”

Obviously, Venture Capital bloggers is a niche network.  However, it has a surprisingly large readership.  I’ve invited 13 VC bloggers into the network at this point and the network already has 46,000 subscribers.  I’m continuing to gradually invite VC bloggers into the network (if you are a VC blogger, haven’t been invited, but want to be in the network, email me) as I make sure all the FeedBurner stuff (remember – this is an early beta) is rock solid.

There are benefits to subscribers:

  • It’s easy to find high quality relevant bloggers / feeds for a specific topic through the aggregation into a Network.
  • There will be a “micro-portal” for each Network – you’ll be able to go to a landing page that lists all the members of the network, selectively subscribe to their feeds, or explore their blogs.
  • You’ll be able to subscribe to the spliced Network feed (for example, here is the spliced feed for the Venture Capital Network).

There are also benefits to publishers:

  • The “micro-portal” will be another place for subscribers to find your blog / feed.
  • You will get new readers as a result of people that subscribe to the spliced feed (this will show up in your subscriber metrics.)
  • Advertisers will be able buy ads in the Network with higher quality advertising that is relevant to the readers of feeds in the Network.
  • You’ll have Network oriented publicity tools (think stuff like “Widget with the latest X headlines in the Network”, or the Banner that I have on the top left of my blog stating that I’m part of the network) which will help cross-promote feeds in the network.
  • You might make some new friends via your fellow Network members.

The guys at FeedBurner have a lot of other ideas about this which they’ll roll out in phase 2 of the Network product at the end of the year.  For now, we’re testing a few networks – Venture Capital being one of them – and would love any and all feedback subscribers and publishers have.


Matt McCall – my fellow board member / investor at FeedBurner – has a helpful post up titled Bootcamp: Show Me the Money.  Matt does a nice job of describing the “Yes, But” type of startup, how VCs typically react, and offers some suggestions.


I’ve been in blog migration hell the past few days.  Simple goal / painful execution.  My blog runs on Movable Type 3.2 on a dedicated server (that happens to be six years old) located in our office.  I’m about to launch a new blog and we decided to upgrade everything to Movable Type 3.3, migrate to a new server, go from flat files to MySQL, switch from static to dynamic page rendering, and set it up so we could host multiple blogs on the same server. 

Sounds easy, right?  We planned it out, tested it, and set up fall back scenarios that we could roll back to if it didn’t work (actually Ross did all the work – I was just the tester.)  The primary fall back was from the new MT 3.3 config with MySQL rendering dynamic pages back to the old MT 3.2 (but without MySQL and with static pages) on the new server in case we had problems with the upgrade.

We froze the content (e.g. no new posts).  We did the data migration.  We tested.  Things seem close enough. We redirected DNS.  Things seemed to work.

A few hours later, after doing a search for something, I realized that the URLs for the individual posts were completely different from the URLs in the previous configuration.  When I found a page of mine on a search engine (Google, Technorati) or another blog that linked back to an individual post, the link was no longer valid.  Ok – that shouldn’t be a big deal – we’ll just figure out the old URL syntax and change MT 3.3’s formatting to it.

Nope.  Spent an hour on it.  Couldn’t figure it out.  Maybe it’s the static vs. dynamic page thing.  Flipped to static pages.  Tried to rebuild the site.  Nope – doesn’t work on the new server – we had tweaked our old server settings so it wouldn’t time out on a rebuild – we can ‘t modify the new server since it’s hosted and our hosting provider is limiting this setting.  Tried lots of other things.  No luck. Ok – downgrade to MT 3.2.  Whoops – that won’t work – static page / rebuild problem.  Tried a few more things.  Nope.

So – we rolled all the way back to the old server (rerouted DNS).  We’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to figure out the configuration problem on the new MT 3.3 / MySQL / dynamic settings.  Still no success (yet).  Ross will figure it out eventually, but for the time being we have to start the migration all over since I’ve decided a couple of days without blog posts is enough.

In contrast, when the latest TypePad upgrade came out (or Rally, or NewsGator Online, or FeedBurner – all SaaS providers), it was seamless and transparent.  When I started blogging in 2004, I used TypePad for a week and then decided to set things up on a dedicated server since I “wanted more control.”  While that was a good idea in theory, my experience underscores the reality of the difference in an upgrade.  In my case, I’m changing three variable – server, software version, and hosting provider.  If I’d been using a SaaS model (e.g. TypePad), I wouldn’t have had to do anything.

At least I get to post new blogs again.


A few weeks ago Witold Rybczynski panned the new extension to the Denver Art Museum (the Hamilton Building) along with two other contemporary buildings in the neighborhood.  I panned Rybczynski’s review two weeks ago and yesterday David Harsanyi of the Denver Post spoke up and criticized Rybcynski’s criticism.  Boys and girls – I implore you to visit this building when you swing through Denver – it is going to be amazing.


Nisan Gabbay – an analyst at Sierra Ventures – has started a neat new blog called Startup Review.  Unlike so many other VC bloggers that pontificate on generic issues around entrepreneurship and venture capital (egads – is that a mirror I see – Amy – please put that down) Nisan is taking a very different approach.  In his words:

Startup Review will be a blog that profiles successful Internet start-ups in a case study format. The case studies will be fairly detailed, analyzing the key factors that made the companies successful, with an emphasis on strategy and product decisions. Each case study will also have sections discussing launch strategy, exit analysis, and links to other good analysis on the company.

Rather than overwhelm us with posts, he’s going to focus his efforts on one substantive case study each week. 

My plan is to publish one case study per week, as I plan to devote
about 10 hours to creating each case study. I am committed to staying
the course, but nothing helps better with motivation than seeing my
Feedburner stats climb – so tell your friends about this blog!

His first case study is Craigslist.  I think this is a great idea for a VC / entrepreneurship oriented blog – hats off to Nisan for tackling this.  If you are interested, subscribe here to Startup Review.

Technorati Tags: vc, venturecapital, entrepreneurship, startups, blogs