Brad Feld

Month: December 2007

Congrats, thanks, and welcome to my friends at Fuser for joining the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.  Fuser is the 11th Colorado company to join this year. 

The Colorado entrepreneurial community support for EFCo far surpassed my expectations this year – a big thanks to everyone that has embraced the idea.  Now that we’ve got a solid base of great companies as part of EFCo, we will really crank it up next year.

If you are the founder or executive in a startup company in Colorado that has raised at least one round of financing (angel rounds count) and you are interested in learning more about Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, drop me an email or visit the EFCo website.


Last week NewsGator announced that it had raised a $12m round led by new investor Vista Ventures and existing investors Mobius Venture Capital and Masthead.  Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder / CTO reflected on the progress from the first $1m investment that Mobius made and Jeff Nolan’s talked about our excitement of getting Lisa Reeves (formerly from SAP Ventures – now at Vista) involved.

I’ve been an investor (via Mobius Venture Capital) from the very beginning of NewsGator.  I wrote a post titled Why Did We Invest in NewsGator? in June 2004 shortly after making a $1m seed investment in the company (mostly in Greg Reinacker and his vision.)  Reading back through it makes me feel simultaneously nostalgic and intensely proud of what the now 75+ people at NewsGator have accomplished.

NewsGator has a variety of products built on top of the RSS platform technology they have created.  We’ve seen great adoption of the NewsGator Enterprise Server (over 100 of the Fortune 2000 are now customers), are seeing rapid growth in our new NewsGator Social Sites product (integration of NewsGator Enterprise Server with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007), and have been blown away by the market success of the NewsGator Widget Framework (over 50 customers added in 2007.)

We took a "go heavy on building the technology" approach at NewsGator and it has paid off nicely.  The expertise within the company around RSS technology is humongous.  We’ve started (but have not limited ourselves to) a Microsoft view of the enterprise and as a result have extremely deep links into SharePoint, Exchange, and Active Directory (along with some of the best Microsoft .NET developers on the front range.)  And we’ve been able to attract incredible product talent to the team which has resulted in an awesome portfolio of integrated products on various platforms including Windows (FeedDemon), the Mac (NetNewsWire), Outlook, and Mobile (name a platform, we’ve got it.)

Lisa Reeves – who comes from the world of enterprise software – understands the potential of a company like NewsGator.  In a universe where many VCs are saying things like "we are only interested in consumer Internet" or "we only want to fund companies with a pure SaaS model", Lisa saw past the nonsense of such limiting thinking and focused on the potential of the overall business.

As a huge believer that the consumer Internet innovations that we’ve seen take front and center stage over the past few years are now ripe for application to the enterprise, I’m rabidly excited about the prospects for NewsGator.


Amy forwarded another 3QuarksDaily article titled Science Debate 2008, and Krauss on Science and the Presidential Campaign.

Did you know that according to a 2006 National Science Foundation Study, 25% of Americans did not know that the earth goes around the sun?  I had to stop and read that twice.

I’m not talking about the age old "evolution vs. creationism" discussion that eventually devolves into a polarizing (and in my mind irrational) religious debate.  I’m not talking about global climate change.  I’m talking about basic science.  How do plants grow?  How do planes fly?  What’s the difference between ice, water, and steam?  What is the relationship between the earth and the sun?

While it’s entertaining to me to consider the notion of having a qualifying science test (say – ninth grade science level) for all voters to be able to vote, I know this isn’t the right path to go down for a variety of reasons.  However, maybe we should give this test to all the presidential candidates.  Anyone up for a "Leave No President Behind" rule?


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.


I’m three weeks into having my Kindle and I love it.  3Quarks Daily’s post Ode to Textuality: Sam Anderson on the Kindle prompted me to write about it.

I’m currently reading Fatal Revenant (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) on my Kindle, along with a handful of doc / pdf files I’ve been forwarding to it.  I’ve got a nice library of stuff queue up and am delighted with the overall experience.  I’ve got a few minor complaints about the form factor and the UI, but the magic of Amazon’s Whispernet makes it 10x more usable than the Sony eReader.

I think the Kindle is analogous to the first iPod.  Prior to the first iPod, there were plenty of MP3 players, but none of them integrated seamlessly with online music (or if they did, the UI sucked and no one could figure out how to get it to work correctly.)  The iPod + iTunes got it right and Apple has been reaping dividends ever since.

Amazon is the natural provider of the Kindle.  100,000 ebooks later and there is actually a good library of titles to choose from (and growing daily.)  So far I’ve been able to find everything that I want, and for $9.99 or less (vs. the $25 that hardback books are going for these days.)

If you’ve got a reader in the family, you’ll delight them this year with a Kindle.  Amazon is taking a big chance with this, and I love it.


I just got a note and pictures two friends – one in Keystone and one in Aspen.  Both said the most recent storms were incredible and the snow in the mountains in fantastic.  The following is from Keystone.

The note from my friend is "We got nailed with snow this past weekend.  One of the top five storms I’ve seen after 15 years of living in Summit County.  We are nearly 100% open and the skiing is great.  Check out these photos from my back yard.  We got about 2 feet in Silverthorne."


2008 Buzzwords

Dec 12, 2007

I hate buzzwords.  They make me nauseous.  I just got an email to the link of The Office 2008 Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast which includes such beauties as search moptimization, wombagging, friendiligence, converstations, social mediation, we-bargaining, greenlashing, shamsparency, credlining, facelifting, blog groveling, world war 2.0, microtubing, and lipsmacking.  I’m going to go lipsmack about buzzwords after I go vomit in my carbon neutral bathroom.  (Thanks Greg.)


If you are a VC firm looking for a summer intern, or an MBA looking for a VC summer internship, Dan Primack and PEHub have put launched their 5th Annual Internship Rodeo.   We regularly get inbound emails asking how to land a job in venture capital.  If you have ever sent me a note like that or are looking for a job, this is one of the best ways to get in the mix.

There are currently 90 listings from around the world (mostly in the US) for summer internships.  If you are a VC or private equity firm that wants to get a listing up, email Dan Primack before the end of the week and he’ll get you listed.  If you are an MBA and are looking for a summer job, sign up on the PE Hub MBA Forum.

There have been plenty of posts about how to get a job in the VC business.  I continue to think that the best one is from my partner Seth Levine titled How to become a venture capitalist.   Seth can now update this with #6 – sign up for the PE Hub MBA Forum and join the internship rodeo.  Thanks Dan, PE Hub, and Thomson for putting this together.  And – no – we aren’t looking for a summer intern, but plenty of other folks are.


When 369 of something suddenly appears, I get excited about the opportunities to do something with it.  When I noticed the 370th new ad network, I realized there were probably a few opportunities to do some interesting things across them.  AdReady – a company I made an investment in a year ago – is seriously kicking ass (if you do any display advertising on Google, Yahoo/RightMedia, or AOL go take a look at them) and their early success reinforced this idea to me.

While I’ll talk more about a new investment we’ve made in this area in a few weeks (yeah – that’s what real journalists call "the tease" or something like that), when I was at Clickable a few weeks ago (not an investment of mine, but a really interesting one by Union Square Ventures and Pequot with the tagline "online advertising made simple") we were discussing the challenges of integrating with some of the existing ad networks through their weak to non-existent APIs.

As a horizontal thinker, the API is my friend.  APIs are hard and often take a long time to get right.  Anyone that has integrated with someone else’s web service knows there are a whole series of things that "should" be part of the next version of the API.  Frustration abounds and the rationalization of "we’ll do this thing that will massively drive user adoption and our services utility when company X finally puts it in their API."

To that, I say "manually automate your API."  Figure out what you want the workflow to be, hire a person, and have them do whatever the API should do, but do it by simply running the other system.  Way back in the land of DOS there used to be neat little script programs (anyone remember the Peter Norton, Paul Mace, or Dan Bricklin tools that did this) that automated your keystrokes.  Your manual API person can do the same thing today with the contemporary versions of these keystroke automation programs. 

By manually automating your API – or creating a manual version of the API you wished the other guy’s web service had – you can immediately drive more value to your users while prototyping – with precision – what the integration points between the two systems need to be.  Yeah – you could get a developer to write a bunch of screen scraping code, but you don’t have any extra developers laying around, plus it’ll break in six days anyway when the other service does a new release.  Just hire a young smart person and give him the mission of figuring out how the puzzle pieces fit together.