In the last seven months, the venture / entrepreneurial world has gone from “the only thing that matters is massive growth” to “the world is going to end.” For perspective, all you need to do is look at a dozen high-flying IPOs from 2020 or 2021 to see that the peak happened just before Thanksgiving.

The private markets lag the public markets. That’s not new. This time around, the lag was about a quarter, as many VCs started to talk about what was happening around the beginning of Q2.

There is no doubt that we are in the middle of, well, whatever you want to call it. “Correction” and “Choppy Waters” is probably a generous phrase for what is going on.

Having lived through this as an entrepreneur in 1987, an entrepreneur and VC in 2001, a VC in 2008, and a VC today, I embrace that this is just part of the entrepreneurial and economic cycle. I also know that many people freak out at this moment. If you’ve never been through this (like I hadn’t in 1987), it can be terrifying. If you are experienced and suddenly find yourself caught flat-footed for any number of reasons, it can be equally terrifying.

I no longer believe in clichés or prognostications such as “make sure you have three years of money in the bank” or “do a RIF quickly and deeply regardless of the situation you are in.” Instead, I think it is crucial for each company to understand its current reality clearly and make rapid and appropriate adjustments. This could mean “do a RIF quickly and deeply or “make sure you have three years of money in the bank,” but there are many other things to consider and do.

I’ve been involved in companies that have used these moments to gain huge market share from failing competitors. I’ve also been in companies that, in these moments, simply failed. I’ve been involved in companies that made adjustments, soldiered through, and came out the other side stronger. And, I’ve invested in brand new companies founded during these periods that ended up creating entirely new categories and extremely successful companies.

I expect that’s the tone of what we will discuss on 7/14 as part of Bolster’s Speaker Series about the VC Perspective on Navigating Choppy Waters. Fred Wilson has been through this many times, and his post on Amy and my 29th anniversary in Staying Positive is a wonderful perspective. Martina Lauchengco and Heather Hiles are long-time operators turned VCs who have also been through many cycles.

Join us on 7/14 @ 3pm ET for a discussion on Navigating Choppy Waters that hopefully will not be full of the same old clichés currently making the rounds.

The post Navigating Choppy Waters appeared first on Brad Feld.

My partner Ryan shared this with me. It’s a 10-minute video showing the evolution from System 0.97 to macOS 13 Ventura. I had an original Macintosh 128K which is now enjoying its retirement at the Media Archaeology Lab. Enjoy!

The post The Evolution of Apple macOS appeared first on Brad Feld.

The 2nd Edition of my book Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors launched today.

My co-authors, Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Bolster, and Mahendra Ramsinghani, were a joy to work with.

While the 1st Edition was a good book, I wasn’t particularly proud of it because I didn’t feel like it was my best writing. We worked hard on this edition, and I now feel like it’s equivalent in quality to my other books.

Effective boards are critical at this moment in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. While I hope this downturn is short, I think it will be long and painful. In either case, highly functioning boards can help startups navigate this moment, while dysfunctional and weak boards can accelerate the demise of startups.

If you have a board of directors, want to have a well functioning one, are a director, or want to be a director, I encourage you to grab a copy of Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors.

The post Book: Startup Boards, 2nd Edition Is Available appeared first on Brad Feld.

Connie Loizos is one of the long-time tech industry writers who I respect. I don’t respond to many interview requests these days, but I’ll always talk to her.

She has a good article today in TechCrunch titled Embrace the down round (it’s going to be okay, maybe). I like the quote she pulled out of me in our conversation.

[Brad Feld] says his “strong belief” that “just doing a clean resetting — at whatever the valuation so that everybody is aligned and dealing with reality —  is much, much better for a company.”

Now, I’m not encouraging anyone to do a down round if unnecessary., especially when many existing investors are currently willing to add on additional dollars at the most recent valuation. If you can do this cleanly, take the money.

Rather, when you have a choice between a financing at a lower valuation and a financing with all kinds of crazy structure to try to maintain a previous valuation, negotiate the best price you can but do a clean financing with no structure.

If you don’t know what I mean by structure, they are terms like:

Multiple liquidation preferences (you’ll start seeing lots of 2x and 3x on new money)Participating preferred on new moneyWeird ratchets (other than the typical weighted average), including full ratchets, on next round financingsAnnual preferred return, including PIK and cash pay on new moneyBlocks on all kinds of things that a new investor should not have blocking rights on

… and a bunch of other things.

Sometimes, given your syndicate configuration, you have no choice but to take structure in a new round. But if you can do a clean financing at a lower price, I always think that’s a better option for everyone (founders, employees, and existing investors.)

While my optimistic personality hopes this downturn/adjustment is short-lived, I fear it won’t be. So, as an entrepreneur, I encourage you to deal with reality.

The post Down Rounds: Deal With Reality appeared first on Brad Feld.

About a year ago, I decided to take a summer vacation from blogging. I didn’t feel like blogging when summer ended, so I extended my blogging vacation indefinitely. I figured I’d wake up one day and feel like blogging again or not. That summer vacation (from blogging) lasted a year.

Initially, I was working on a new book that I got bored of midway through the summer. I put it on the shelf with several other partially completed books. Google Docs now has a surprising number of my started but unfinished books.

Sometime in the fall, Matt Blumberg (Bolster CEO) approached me about doing a 2nd Edition of Startup Boards. Matt and I were on the board together of Return Path, his previous company, for almost 20 years. So when Mahendra Ramsinghani came out with the 1st Edition of Startup Boards in 2013, Matt gave me plenty of feedback on the book. Then, in fall 2021, he correctly suggested that the book needed a significant refresh.

While I always felt the 1st Edition was an important book, I never loved it. Mahendra and I worked hard on it, but I felt like I forced a lot of my writing at some point. Long-time readers of this blog know I had an extended depressive episode in the first half of 2013, and this book was one of the chores that I felt like I just had to get done in that period. Mahendra was kind and patient with me, but I’m sure there were moments when he wanted to scream something like, “Brad, will you just do the writing you said you’d do so we can get this book finished?”

So, we decided to do a 2nd Edition which is now finished and shipping on 6/15. I’m psyched about it. Matt contributed a lot of new content, and I had a chance to rework and refactor the entire book. I had plenty of energy for it, and, given that I’ve written a few more books and thousands of blog posts since 2013, my writing has continued to improve.

Early in the refactoring, we got feedback from several women that the 1st Edition wasn’t very accessible to them because all the sidebars and quotes were from men. So I made a Google Sheet of all the sidebars and quotes, and my brain broke for long enough that I had to go for a walk. So even though I thought I was self-aware and engaged in gender equity in tech in 2013, my actions, at least concerning this book, didn’t match my words.

Subsequently, we replaced about 50% of the sidebars and quotes with new ones from women and people of color. We also changed the pronoun dynamics to use the Singular They, which I am trying to do in all my writing (if you are interested in this topic, Khan Academy has an awesome video.)

Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors 2nd edition launch day is 6/15. If you are interested, pre-order it now.

The post Summer Is Here appeared first on Brad Feld.

Last weekend, just for fun, I hacked together a simple web application called FirstWord. Not exactly sure how to describe it, but it's kind of a trainer to make you a better Wordle player. It grades your first word guess (hence the name FirstWord). So, it's kind of a "word grader".

Wait, what's Wordle you ask? Well, it's all the rage. A simple word game where you have to guess a word in 6 tries, as the game gives you clues about your prior guesses. 

In any case, I built the app in a couple of hours on a Saturday, launched it on a Sunday. In the ensuing 7 days, it took off.  Over 200,000 words were submitted to FirstWord in its first week. Now, even after the initial boost has waned, the app still gets 1,000+ people a day using it. This kind of surprised me a bit, because it's a simple app, built to train you on a word game. 

So, those of you that know me (I'm one of the co-founders of HubSpot), might be wondering:  Why? Why would you spend hours building a simple tool for a game?

Here's some background:

1) I have an 11 year old that's taking an online beginner's Python programming class (on OutSchool). It's a little tricky for him, because he's only in 5th grade and hasn't covered boolean logic, functions and other math fundamentals that are helpful for learning to code. But he's making great progress -- and it brings both him and me joy.

2) What he's building is a very simple racing game (which teaches him about 2D geometry, why random numbers are important, etc.).  But, I thought it might be helpful for him to see the kind of thing one could build in Python -- and  launch to the pubic.

3) Though we didn't go into the details, he got exposed to everything from picking a domain name, "launching" the app, watching Google Analytics (and getting excited by the realtime dots that popped up all over the world), running SQL queries to see how many words had been submitted, etc.

Not bad for a weekend project that took me only a couple of hours to code (and then a few more hours to learn how to deploy the way the cool kids do it). Which brings me to the other reason I did it.

I learn best by doing. By just getting in there, cranking out some code and doing it. There have been a bunch of things I've been interested in learning. And, the tutorials and such only really get you so far.

Here's my partial list (all of which I wound up having to dig into for FirstWord as it exists):  

1) Serverless functions (especially as web apps)

2) Vercel (a great place to deploy serverless web apps with ease)

3) Flask (instead of Django) as my web framework

4) DeSo login (DeSo is a web3 social network with its own blockchain)

And, at the end of the day, I did it because I enjoy programming. I enjoy building things. And, it's nice to build something that my friends and family can enjoy. Most of the time, I'm building business-y apps or personal tools to give myself superpowers.

Some people go to their woodshop on the weekend and build something. I don't have that skill. I code.

Now, I just have to resist the temptation to build my own word game (which FirstWord has sort of already become). Because I really love word games. 

 

 

In the early days of HubSpot, I somewhat accidentally ended up discovering a new approach to freemium that wasn't really freemium.

Here's a short (1 minute 15 second) video clip on what I found that worked brilliantly for HubSpot and helped us drive spectacular early reach.

I was recently on The Hustle's "My First Million" podcast with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri. I'm a fan of the show, so it was a lot of fun to be on as a guest.

One quick apology before we jump in: I try not to be too braggy -- but I balance that with transparency and openness. Sam and Shaan asked me several questions about what it's like to be a billionaire, and I answered them openly and truthfully.  (They did warn me beforehand and gave me the option not to answer).

And, The Hustle team decided that having "billionaire" in the title of the episode will attract more viewers -- so here we are.  :)  In any case, it's a fun episode and we cover a lot of different topics that I'm hopeful you'll find useful.

The Hustle My First Million Episode #197

Frameworks To Become A Billionaire 

 

Full Episode Transcript Below

Sam:        Oh, we're live. Yeah and so -

Shaan:        Okay. And just quick audio check. Are we all good? So we don't have to restart.

Sam:        No.

Shaan:        Is it the right mic?

Sam:        Yeah.

Speaker 1:        That's the right mic. You sound a smidge loud on my end.

Sam:        Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shaan:        Okay. I might just move it further away, or be quieter.

Speaker 1:        Oh, that sounds better.

Sam:        Your camera's crooked. I don't know if you're stopped using the fancy camera?

Shaan:        It's still the fancy camera, but the tripod is not as fancy.

Sam:        Got it. Okay.

Shaan:        Yeah. It's going to trigger every OCD person that watches this [inaudible 00:00:35]. Goddammit, how is he slanted sideways?

Sam:        Okay.

Shaan:        Okay, cool. Go ahead.

Sam:        I don't remember what I was going to say, but right before you came on, I was asking Dharmesh what he listens to. And he says that he listens to us almost every day for the past 60 days.

Dharmesh:        Yeah.

Shaan:        Amazing.

Dharmesh:        Yeah.

Shaan:        Has that changed you? You've probably become a worse person. You seem like a pretty good person. I feel like if you listen to us for 60 straight days, there's going to be a part of your brain that's good, but a part that gets corrupted slightly.

Dharmesh:        I think that's true. That's an astute observation, [crosstalk 00:01:10]. We just have... I won't say like This is not stuff I'm like... You know, looking at retail businesses or... You guys have a wide array of stuff. But I think that kind of thing builds a different muscle group, and I think it's been useful for me. I'll put it to you that way. We're not separated at birth by any stretch, but we have things that the three of us luckily have in common. But there are things that I'm just different... I know it'll come out in the pod. I'm a weird dude.

Sam:        We're we're on now. So -

Dharmesh:        Okay, all right.

Sam:        This is the pod.

Dharmesh:        This is the pod.

Sam:        I have a feeling this might go a little long and I'm okay with that. Shaan, do what you want.

Sam:        But, I, in my world... So I was just hanging out with Hiten Shah yesterday, and your name came up. We were just talking to Nathan Barry the other day, your name came up. Shaan and I are in this text group where people talk about BigClout, your name comes up. Your name comes up everywhere. You got like a spider web. Like you get your hands in all these little things. And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. So this is Dharmesh. Dharmesh is the... You're the co-founder of HubSpot. Is your title CTO?

Dharmesh:        Yes, CTO.

Sam:        Are you active? Like, are you working really hard at HubSpot? How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff?

Dharmesh:        So the answer is yes. HubSpot is my obsession and preoccupation. Anything else that you see me doing, there's probably some diabolical thread that connects it back to HubSpot. There is. So yeah, it's my baby. It's the thing that I spend pretty much all of my non-family time, non-personal time on. So it's fine.

Shaan:        And I just want to describe for people who are not watching. So you should go to the YouTube channel. It's youtube.com/hustlecon and you'll see the videos. But, so here's what I see. So Dharmesh is sitting there, he's got a keyboard, like a piano keyboard to his right. He's got a, I think, a Steve Jobs piece of art behind him. Or is that Lennon or something like that? I can't tell exactly who it is, John Lennon maybe. And you're in this room. Is this where you work on a day-to-day basis?

Dharmesh:        Well, yes and no. So this is my -

Sam:        You're getting tricked, Shaan. You're getting tricked. Listen.

Dharmesh:        This is my living room, but it's a, like a capture a moment in time when the living room was somewhat less disorganized than it usually would be. But it's a virtual background. I've got the green screen and things set up so I can...

Shaan:        Oh okay. That's pretty good. Cause you usually when you have a green screen, it's like half your head also turns into the background and this one's actually pretty good. All right, I'm impressed.

Dharmesh:        I've done a multiple green screen. So I'm sort of surrounded with it. So if I need to twist the camera one way or the other, it's still kind of -

Shaan:        So you're kind of doing the oasis thing that we talked about. You have a virtual background, but the virtual background is not just you on a beach, like a fake situation. It's your actual living room when it's clean and perfect, the way you want it. And you're like, that's what I want my background to be, regardless of the reality of whatever your current situation is. I like that.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:04:19] really cool is that the keyboard itself is actually real. That's not part of the background. So if I [inaudible 00:04:22] you'll see that the keypress makes sounds, it's kind of cool, yeah.

Sam:        So let me do like a very brief intro and an overview of what we're going to talk about. So Dharmesh sent us a list of ideas, we're going to get into them, but I need to give a background here so the listeners entirely understand. So HubSpot today is like a 25 or 30, I don't know whatever the market cap is. So $25 billion publicly traded company. You co-founded it 15 years ago, I think.

Dharmesh:        Yip.

Sam:        Prior to that, you had another startup that you sold for a significant amount of money, we can talk about that. Throughout this whole time, you own, I believe, millions of millions of dollars worth of domains. You bought your wife, as a gift, humanism.com, which we got to talk about. That's pretty funny.

Sam:        You're an angel investor in a lot of different startups, including Coinbase and things like that. You've got your hands in all these different things. According to wallmind or wallstreetmind.com you're worth today 850 million dollars. So you do a little bit of everything in the world of business. Is incredibly fascinating. So I wanted to talk about.. Well, you might be the wealthiest person we've ever had on this podcast. I'm going to ask you questions about that.

Sam:        I don't know

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:05:44], but it's okay. It's fine.

Sam:        We're going to ask you questions about it.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:05:47] it doesn't really matter. And that's the one thing I've learned. We can talk about that too.

Sam:        Well, that's that's okay if it doesn't matter, we're going to talk about it. We're also going to talk about your ideas. We're going to about building HubSpot. We're going to talk about why you invest in what you invest. And we're going to talk about, do you ever invest in non startup stuff? We're going to talk about a lot of stuff. Shaan, what do you think?

Shaan:        Yeah, let's do it. Let's jump in.

Sam:        Where do you want to start? You want to start with... What?

Shaan:        Okay, so here's my question. My question's actually not about Dharmesh. It's actually about Sam. So, I've always wondered this. So you acquired The Hustle. And I hope you could be as transparent as you want here. I think Sam will not care. So I would say DNA-wise, The Hustle is kind of a unique company. Sam's a pretty unique dude that brought into your company. Different DNA probably than the vast majority of employees there. Give me kind of like...

Sam:        Well you too.

Shaan:        I don't know.

Sam:        You're part of the deal too, Shaan. So you're in the boat.

Shaan:        Sure, but he doesn't have to deal with me on a day-to-day basis. So doing that deal and bringing these guys in, are there any interesting observations or any entertaining little stories about either pre-acquisition or post that had to do with Sam and The Hustle? I'm just curious. What's your view on that side of the table? Because I've only been on the same side that Sam's on.

Dharmesh:        Yeah. HubSpot has not done a lot of acquisitions in the past. We've done a handful of them. Pretty much most of them have gone well. The one thing that made this different, I think as you observed, is the DNA of The Hustle is different than HubSpot, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing.

Dharmesh:        So the thing that I was worried about is... Until now I don't think Sam and I have actually ever had a one-on-one chat.

Shaan:        That's okay. This is my therapy session therapy for you guys.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:07:32] therapy for two people, Shaan.

Sam:        Dharmesh and I talk a lot on Slack.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:07:37].

Sam:        We're like buddies on slack.

Dharmesh:        We've actually talked. But the thing I was worried about is that... So, Sam is a kind of what I would think of as a kind of type A personality, just like he's out there, he's hustling [inaudible 00:07:47] the name of the company. Which is fine, but it's just not... Most of the makeup of HubSpot is not that. We're a very... I don't know what the right... It's going to overly stereotype us, but we're not type A. We're like a kinder, gentler, humble, quieter kind of company.

Shaan:        Yip.

Dharmesh:        So that's the one thing -

Sam:        So let me explain it this way -

Shaan:        So Sam would be described as brash. I don't think anybody would ever describe HubSpot as brash.

Dharmesh:        No.

Sam:        Well today, Kieran, the guy I work with, technically my boss. He was like, "You should probably hire someone outside of HubSpot for this role, for your growth."

Sam:        And I was like, "Well, why?"

Sam:        He goes, "I think you're too direct for anyone who works at HubSpot." It's like that. That's an example.

Dharmesh:        I think that was good advice. But, it's worked out well. So there've been... The one minor story I can recall. There was a Twitter back and forth that I think Sam had with Rand Fishkin. I don't know if you recall this Sam, that there was something that was said about VCs or investment or something. And Rand's been a good friend. It was like, Oh, okay well... It's fine. And I'm like, okay. This is like [crosstalk 00:08:52]. not like either party was right, wrong or indifferent, but I know them at least now a little bit, both. But it's been fine.

Shaan:        Okay.

Sam:        Well, in my defense, and even our podcast's defence, our goal is... We will disagree with people, but I hope that it never comes from a place of disrespect or -

Dharmesh:        No it didn't. No.

Sam:        Or trying to hurt your feelings.

Shaan:        But I will say, I do put entertainment first sometimes. So sometimes I will poke the bear for the entertainment value of it when the kinder, nicer, simpler thing to do would be to do nothing or just back away. So I do like to have fun, either on Twitter or the podcast.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:09:30] HubSpot too much. But the one thing I will say, as far as the deal itself, it was one of the better things HubSpot has done. The strategy behind it, I think, is strong in terms of it gets HubSpot into a thing which is where I think the future of SaaS companies is going to be heading. Which is more and more [inaudible 00:09:50] were going to control their own distribution versus renting audiences from other people, and resources.

Dharmesh:        And there's other deals that have been done around the same timeline, but I'm a believer in companies controlling their destiny in terms of distribution versus constantly just buying audiences and renting them from someone else.

Shaan:        See, this is where you should just say, just drop a one line. Be like, "And we got it at a fantastic price." Just to drive Sam crazy for the next seven years. Just leave him constantly questioning himself.

Sam:        Look. Yeah. Could we have sold for more? Definitely maybe. Like that always is a maybe, right? I think that when we sold, HubSpot I felt was undervalued. What was the stock in January? It was worth like $350? Or was it even less? $250?

Dharmesh:        Yeah.

Sam:        I don't remember.

Dharmesh:        Yeah.

Sam:        Today it's 600 bucks. My guests was that I think HubSpot is undervalued. And also, I wanted to create a reputation of someone who was a fair deal maker. I think people will know that if I built something, I sold it, that all parties got a good deal.

Dharmesh:        Right.

Sam:        And so -

Shaan:        Okay. All right. Sounds good. We can switch off The Hustle acquisition. So let's do some ideas.

Sam:        Wait. No, wait. I want to talk about one thing really quick. Let's talk about money stuff?

Shaan:        Okay.

Sam:        Because I told Dharmesh I was going to ask him this. So first of all, is it weird that I know what your net worth is today because it's public information?

Dharmesh:        It's not weird for me, honestly. I'm generally transparent. I believe in the openness of the web. In a sense, it's a publicly traded company. Would I want my bank accounts and all my accounts published on the web? No, but the fact that I'm an executive in a publicly traded company and most of my net worth is in the form of shares.

Dharmesh:        Which you can take the number of shares, which is on the public record and multiply it by the current price and get... Which is probably roughly 85, 90% of my overall net worth, because that's where all my money is, is in HubSpot shares. I don't find that weird.

Sam:        Yeah.

Sam:        Has your life changed as this has accumulated and things got different? You had another company before this, how much did you sell that for?

This blog has decided to take a summer vacation.

I’ve been blogging regularly since 2005 (typical 15 – 20 posts a month.) I’m going to take a break for a while.

Now that The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors is out, I’ve started working on my next book. I’m trying some different stuff with this new book and decided to focus all of my writing over the summer on it.

If you want a hint, I’m taking inspiration from two books. The first is one of my favorite books: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The other is from Michael Lewis’ awesome new book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

Whenever I’m writing a lot, I read a lot, so you can follow along with what I’m reading at Goodreads if you want.

In the meantime, enjoy the summer. I’ll be back in the fall.

The post Summer Vacation appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Since releasing my newest book The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors I’ve been continually getting the questions “Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship?” and “Why Nietzsche?”

Dave and I cover this right off the bat in the book, so I thought I’d toss up an excerpt that addresses the question with part of my own origin story with Dave. It follows.

Nietzsche? For entrepreneurs?

It was the end of January 1988, about nine months since we had embarked on turning Brad’s solo consulting shop, Feld Technologies, into a real business. We were fraternity brothers and close friends and opened our first office directly across the street from our fraternity chapter house in Cambridge. We planned to use smart yet inexpensive software developers to build business application software. We employed half a dozen programmers, most of whom were undergraduates from our fraternity working part-time. We didn’t have any financing except for Brad’s credit card and the $10 with which we had purchased our common stock.

Dave walked into Brad’s office after calculating preliminary financial results for January. Up to this point, we had mostly broken even, but the news was grim: we had lost $10,000 in one month. We had not seen it coming, and it took some effort for us to untangle what had gone wrong. Dave had been spending most of his time managing the part-time developers, who were primarily working on future products, instead of billing hours to clients. Brad had been selling computer equipment, which had low gross profit margins, instead of billing hours to clients. Much of our revenue for the month had come from one highly productive though erratic undergraduate developer, Mike, who was working on a billable client project.

Before we had a chance to figure out what to do, Mike quit, citing a need to focus on his studies. Now we had no choice: we fired everyone, shut down our month-to-month office, sold all the office furnishings, and moved the business to our apartments in downtown Boston. It was gut-wrenching. Brad wondered whether we had failed just as we got started. Dave worried about paying rent. We had long discussions about the future of the business, including whether or not to continue.

But we did have billable projects. We no longer had to spend our time managing people and had figured out where our bread was buttered. Results were good enough in February to calm our nerves and even better in March. Just as important, we had learned some crucial lessons and settled on a very different idea about how we would move forward with the business. The experience of hitting bottom and the lessons we learned became deeply ingrained in our brains and our company culture as we more methodically and progressively built the firm.

Fast-forward thirty years, when we were in the midst of writing this book, and Dave was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He encountered a passage that said the highest mountains rise from the sea, and that fact is “inscribed…on the walls of their summits.” Because of our experience at Feld Technologies—and many times since—we knew immediately that this had to be a chapter in the book. We imagined the solace and instruction it might have offered us to have seen (and understood) this quote, to have read a short essay like the one in our chapter Hitting Bottom, where the starkness and promise of the situation are presented in black and white, or to have heard Walter Knapp’s story of the crash and rebirth of Sovrn, a genuinely disruptive company.

That is how we wrote most of the chapters and how this project began. In reading Nietzsche, we noticed ideas that reminded us of situations, questions, and concerns that frequently arose in our entrepreneurial and venture investment experience. Nietzsche had a way with words, and we found that some ideas were nicely encapsulated and phrased. We started playing with expanding upon his pithy aphorisms and gathering stories from entrepreneurs, and it clicked.

Feld Technologies never became a disruptive company, despite our ambitions. It plateaued at around $2 million in revenue before we sold it in 1993. Because we had built a solid foundation for a certain kind of success, we never again hit a deep low point, and consequently never again had the painful opportunity to rethink our premises. This point, too, is covered in Hitting Bottom and illustrates why we did not just skip Nietzsche, write some essays, and assemble some entrepreneur stories. Nietzsche—sitting or walking alone, in pain, almost blind—thought deeply and managed to share these thoughts with the world. We tried to follow his lead, thinking hard and pondering additional angles and situations to which the quote might apply. We want you to do the same, as you keep in mind that Nietzsche’s works have been highly influential throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

In business and entrepreneurship literature, inspiration is sometimes more helpful than instruction. Though there is plenty of how-to information in this book, we aim to give you food for thought from a different perspective. We address issues of leadership, motivation, morals, creativity, culture, strategy, conflict, and knowledge. We push you to think about what you and your enterprise are made of. We expect you to question and ponder these ideas, not just put them into action. If we are successful, you will sometimes get angry and at other times feel pride. At times you will wonder what you really know, and at other times you will charge forward. We hope that the combination of Nietzsche’s colorful language, our elaborations, and some stories from entrepreneurs will offer you intellectual, emotional, and entrepreneurial inspiration.

Nietzsche was not a fan of commercial activity or businesspeople. He saw the former as crass and the latter as lacking nobility. However, we suspect that if Nietzsche were alive today, he would view entrepreneurs differently. He adored intensity and fervor, deeply valued those who create things, and wrote at length about “free spirits” who do not feel bound to tradition or cultural norms. Nietzsche viewed his mission as the “revaluation of all values,” and he intended to disrupt the entire moral tradition of Europe in the late 19th century.

The post Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship? appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Matt Blumberg has a new book out titled Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams. It’s a follow-up to his previous book, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business.

I’ve been working with Matt since 2000. That year, we merged two companies: Return Path and Veripost. Matt was the co-founder/CEO of Return Path. Fred Wilson was his lead investor. I was the lead investor for Veripost. The two companies did the same thing and were the only two competitors in a nascent category called “email change of address” (Veripost’s original name was IECOA which stood for “Internet Email Change of Address”). They were bashing each other over the head in a non-existent market as the Internet bubble began collapsing.

The founders of each company talked and, in between efforts to decimate the other, agreed it might be worth merging to survive. This guy named Greg Sands at a firm called Sutter Hill had met with both and was interested in the category and encouraged them to merge, at which point he’d fund the combined company. Fred called me and said, “Let’s figure out a deal.” I said, “They are both worthless right now – how about 50/50?” Fred responded with, “I have more money invested in Return Path than you do in Veripost – how about 55/45.” I answered, “Deal.” So for the deal, investors on both sides converted to common, we split the combined company 55/45, Matt became CEO, and Greg led a new Series A financing into the combined company. Twenty years later, we sold the business, a $100 million, profitable company, to Validity. Matt was still CEO. Fred, Greg, and I were still on the board.

Last year, Matt started a new company called Bolster. He co-founded it in partnership with High Alpha (we are LPs) and SVB. Soon thereafter, USV (Fred’s firm – we are LPs) and Costanoa (Greg’s firm – we are LPs) invested. It’s off to a great start. If you are looking to expand your leadership team or board, are looking for a part-time executive role or board role, or are an investor looking for fractional executives to join your portfolio companies, you should become part of the Bolster network right now.

I’ve worked with Matt for over 20 years and have experienced many ups and downs. His hard-won lessons from Return Path show up in Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business.

For lessons from Matt and his Return Path management team, many of who are now execs at Bolster, you want to read Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams. When I saw the outline for Startup CXO, I grinned a wry smile. The book is 132 chapters broken into 11 sections. After the intro, the following sections are written by each exec.

Finance – Chief Financial Officer – Jack SinclairPeople – Chief People Officer – Cathy HawleyMarketing – Chief Marketing Officer – Nick Badgett and Holly EnnerkingSales – Chief Revenue Officer – Anita AbseyBusiness Development – Chief Business Development Officer – Ken TakahashiCustomers – Chief Customer Officer – George BilbreyProduct – Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer – Shawn NussbaumPrivacy – Chief Privacy Officer – Dennis DaymanOperations – Chief Operating Officer – Jack Sinclair

There’s a final part on The Future of Fractional Executive Work with a chapter by a different leader for each area above. Matt’s writing shows up regularly throughout, including an ending chapter for each section titled CEO-to-CEO Advice.

Each chapter is two to five pages long. It’s tons of information, organized well, in tight, bite-sized chunks. For example, here are the chapters in Part Five: Sales by Anita Absey (p. 247-302)

Ch 54: In the Beginning: From Prospect to CustomerCh 55: Hiring the Right PeopleCh 56: Profile of Successful SalespeopleCh 57: Some Myth BustingCh 58: Compensating Sales Team MembersCh 59: PipelineCh 60: Scaling the Sales OrganizationCh 61: Scaling Your Team Through CultureCh 62: Scaling Sales Process and MethodologiesCh 63: Scaling the Operating SystemCh 64: Marketing AlignmentCh 65: Market Assessment and AlignmentCh 66: Expanding Distribution ChannelsCh 67: Geographic ExpansionCh 68: Pricing and PackagingCh 69: CEO-to-CEO Advice

The brilliance of this book is that everyone on your leadership team, including the CEO, should read it and then discuss it. Pick one section each week. At the end of a quarter, the entire team will have discussed all the functional roles, have a deeper understanding of expectations and responsibilities, use a common language for talking about what people are doing, and be able to adapt things to your own company. Also, if you aspire to be a CXO – you can figure out your career path by understanding the whole functioning of the relevant and adjacent departments.

I’m going to encourage every leadership team I work with to take this approach with Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams.

Matt and team, thanks for writing this!

The post Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

15 years ago today, on June 9, 2006, HubSpot was “officially” started. I say “officially”, because unofficially, I had been noodling on the idea of HubSpot for a couple of years with my co-founder, Brian Halligan while we were both classmates in grad school. I picked the June 9th date, because that’s the official date that I graduated and was no longer a student. (Brian graduated a year ahead of me, and I was still working on my thesis).

I don’t have a lot of photos from the early years, because as it turns out, neither one of us are big “photo people”. But, here’s one of us celebrating HubSpot’s 2nd birthday.

In the past 15 years we’ve had a bunch of fun and learned a ton (rhyming unintended, I’m proud of myself for resisting the temptation to try and turn that into a poem). The company has grown significantly from the two founders (and a house plant named Duo) to a globally distributed company with 4,000+ employees that’s publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange with a market cap north of $20 billion.

I thought I’d share some of the lessons learned.

Note: These are in no particular order, because I wasn’t sure what sort key to use.

15 Somewhat Humble Lessons From 15 Years of HubSpot  

Build a diverse team early. Of the many professional mistakes I’ve made, not doing this is one of the biggest -- and the one I most regret. Candidly, back in those days, we didn’t think about diversity -- or for that matter, the broader topic of culture, all that much. But we should have. When you build a mostly homogeneous team, you incur culture debt. And much like financial debt and technology debt, you’ll have to pay it off at some point. But, whereas financial debt can be paid off by writing a check and technology debt can often be paid off by rewriting/refactoring parts of the system, culture debt is much more insidious. It’s really hard to pay it off completely. Try not to take on that culture debt. Your future self will thank you.

Instill a “customer first” mindset and implement mechanisms to foster it. We did pretty well on this. Solving For The Customer has been part of our culture from the early days. We have several mechanisms that help us walk the walk, and not just talk the talk. Examples include having a live customer interview at the start of every company-side, all-minds meeting. We do an NPS survey of our customers -- nothing remarkable there. What is remarkable is that we pipe the live responses directly into a dedicated Slack channel.  Over 1,000 people at HubSpot are subscribed to that channel (on a voluntary basis). We maintain a list of what we call “sharp edges”. Decisions that we made along the way that were not as customer-friendly as they should have been. Every year, we work to try and smoothen out those sharp edges.

Good intent is necessary, but not sufficient. Good execution is what pays the bills. We’ve had this GSD (Get Sh*t Done) attitude since Day 1. We’ve always been very execution oriented. Part of this was by necessity. We didn’t have the luxury of some brilliant invention or non-reproducible that would carry us. We had to push to get through.

Learning culture through osmosis stops working pretty quickly. The degree to which people learn by osmosis about the company culture down as the number of people go up. As early as possible, you need to write the culture and values down. It doesn’t have to be a deck with 128 slides, like HubSpot’s Culture Code (v1 of the deck was 16 slides) -- it can be a single sheet of paper (I hear those still exist), or even a napkin. But you need something. And that something has to be articulated in collaboration with the team. Otherwise, there’s high risk of it just turning out to be words.

Transparency is scary -- but spectacularly effective. It’s scary, because there’s always the risk that someone abuses the trust. But there are many upsides. First, the best people (you know, the ones you’re trying to recruit) value transparency, and the degree to which they value it has continued to go up. Second, transparency is efficient. It makes a lot of things easier when you don’t have to spend hours and hours debating who should have access to what information. It’s why at HubSpot, we share everything with everyone on the team -- and have since Day 1. If I could do it all over again, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Or should I say, HEARTbeat?  (Inside joke, sorry).

More companies die of co-founder conflict than any other cause. To minimize that risk, choose your co-founder(s) wisely. The most important thing is not their skillset -- it’s mutual respect, admiration and dare I say love. (Hi, Brian, love you dude!).  Apologies for the PDFA (public display of founder affection). That’s not usually my style, but I have my human moments every now and then.

Though it’s fun to create a new category, it’s not always necessary. Elon at Tesla didn’t create the electric vehicle category. Tobi at Shopify didn’t create the eCommerce category. HubSpot didn’t create the CRM category. But, one thing we all did do is helped a bunch of people that might not have been experiencing the benefits of that product category before, start to do so.

Note: In our early years, we did create the “inbound marketing” category -- and though that helped us with growth in the early years, it was hard, expensive and risky. I don’t know that I’d recommend it for everyone.  

Believe in your team. If you have an ambitious dream (we certainly did), keep pushing towards it and give your people the autonomy to try -- and sometimes fail -- in the pursuit of it. They will surprise you with spectacular feats of awesomeness.  One thing I’ve learned, is that Brian and I usually have our dreams and wishes come true -- but not always when we want them. Often, things take time. Great ideas can often take years to crystallize into reality. And, it’s not always obvious that an idea is great.

Push yourself and the team to take smart risks. This gets harder and harder to do as you scale, but it’s critical. The natural way of things is to get increasingly risk-averse, because the bigger you grow, the more you have to lose. That’s why, you have to push to make bold bets. They don’t’ have to be bet-the-company scale bets, but they need to have a chance at being spectacularly impactful.

Be rationally generous. Always try to add value before you try and extract it. It’s OK to leave some money on the table. You don’t have to always try and maximize how much of the consumer surplus you capture. It’s OK to let your customers and partners benefit. It’s OK to charge less than the value you create -- or even the value that you could reasonably negotiate.

Avoid cynics -- they are toxic, energy sucking vampires. I’m not talking about skeptics here -- I’m talking about cynics. Skeptics will often push and question and play the devil’s advocate role. But, they do it because they want to make things better. It’s important to have some of those people on the team. Cynics on the other hand are profoundly negative because they don’t believe people/organizations can have good-intent or motives. Deep down inside, they don’t believe the organization will improve or get better. You get bonus points for recruiting smart people that are energy accretive and lift everyone's mood. They'll make you happier too -- life is short.

Your long-term success will be defined by the “systems thinkers” on the team. These are the folks that like to analyze things. They are bothered by unnecessary complexity and love to simplify. They are always looking for leverage (i.e. finding clever ways for seemingly small things that can have disproportionate impact over the long-term). They are pattern-seekers and puzzle solvers. Note: When I say “systems”, I don’t mean just technical systems -- and I”m not just referring to engineers here. This applies across every department and every discipline. Find and foster the folks that think in frameworks and flywheels.

 Most things are learnable skills both at a company level and an individual level.  When someone has “natural talent” for something, all that usually means is that they’ll be able to acquire that skill with less time/energy expended. But, if you’re willing to do the work, you can get pretty good at whatever you choose to do. Even for the company -- acquiring a particular skill (or “building a muscle”, as we say in HubSpot) may be hard, but it’s usually not impossible. You just have to figure out which hard skills are worth acquiring. At HubSpot, we started being really good at marketing and sales. Then, we deliberately decided to invest in making an amazing product. In our early years, we were really good at inside sales. A decade later, we decided to invest in getting really good at freemium and product-led growth.

 Learn as much as you can, from anywhere you can, constantly and forever. Don’t be a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all.  (I got that from Brian, who got it from somewhere else).  It’s tempting to think of ourselves and our companies as these special little snowflakes -- and we are. But that doesn’t mean there is not wisdom and insight we can draw from others and pick the ones that feel like they might work in our business. At a tactical level, strongly encourage people read books. Long ago, we implemented a free books program whereby anyone at HubSpot can get any book that will help them learn and grow. Company picks up the tab. One of my favorite things that we’ve done.

 Align your vectors. Make sure that at every level of abstraction things are aligned. Make sure each person is aligned with others on their team. Make sure each team is aligned with the mission of the company. Make sure the company’s mission is aligned with the interests of the customer. The magic of increasing alignment is that you can get more progress while holding both the number of people -- and their average competency, constant. Let me say that one more time for dramatic effect: You can take the exact same people and keep their skills exactly the same, and get better outcomes, simply by improving the degree to which they are aligned and pointed in the same(ish) direction. I’ve written about this in more depth on this topic here. Aligning Vectors To Optimize Impact.

Phew!  Once I got into flow, the thoughts flowed more easily.  I’ve got more in my head, but will save that for another time. I believe in “release early, release often”.

I reread Enough.: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life by John C. Bogle over the weekend. I’d read it in 2012 and it had a huge impact on me.

If you aren’t familiar with John C. Bogle, he founded The Vanguard Group, is credited with inventing the index fund and is a spectacular writer (every one of his books is worth reading.) He passed away in 2019 at the age of 89, but I expect his legacy will last a very long time.

I was pondering some things that were bothering me, specifically about crypto, but more generally about current themes around investing. I thought I’d revisit Enough. to see if it helped me work them out. I found my answer in Chapter 2: “Too Much Speculation, Not Enough Investment.”

Let’s start with Bogle’s definition of Investing and Speculating.

Investing is all about the long-term ownership of businesses. Business focuses on the gradual accumulation of intrinsic value, derived from the ability of our publicly owned corporations to produce the goods and services that our consumers and savers demand, to compete effectively, to thrive on entrepreneurship, and to capitalize on change. Business adds value to our society, and to the wealth of our investors.

Speculating is precisely the opposite. It is all about the short-term trading, not long-term holding, of financial instruments — pieces of paper, not businesses — largely focused on the belief that their prices, as distinct from their intrinsic value, will rise; indeed, an expectation that prices of the stocks that are selected will rise more than other stocks, as the expectations of other investors rise to match one’s own.

What was bothering me was simple: the narrative around many things has shifted to the far end of speculating. I don’t participate in this particular type of narrative, but I’m surrounded by it. I don’t behave as a speculator. While I invest in many things, I rarely sell anything until there is a “defined exit,” where I have a very explicit internal definition of “defined exit.”

As someone who has held private company stock in companies for longer than 20 years, been in many situations where there were no exit opportunities until suddenly there was an exit, I understand and am completely comfortable will illiquidity. And the idea of an investment.

I’m completely uninterested in speculating. In the mid-1990s, when I had a bunch of money after the sale of my first company, I bought and sold some public company stocks. I got sucked into giving some of my money to a money manager at Goldman Sachs and one at Lehman. They happily traded equities for me, which mostly just cost me fees in the end, although I covered it all with a crazy transaction into a weird Exchange Fund that GS created in 2000. I put a bunch of Exodus stock I’d gotten from the sale of a company into the fund. Exodus went bankrupt, so my contribution to the exchange fund was $0, but when the exchange fund paid out seven years later, I got 1.5x my investment. The only reason I got to play in the exchange fund was I had the GS account where they were trading stocks, and the guy I worked with offered up access to it. Totally random and completely dumb luck as I would have likely held the remaining Exodus stock I had all the way to $0. In hindsight, even writing this paragraph is more reinforcement to me of my ultimate lack of interest in this stuff.

As I watch crypto speculation expand into retail stock speculation, which then gets amplified broadly by zero-fee trading apps that aren’t really zero-fee and watch the SEC tangle itself up trying to figure out how to monitor Twitter and Reddit accounts of high profile people who clearly are playing age-old promotion games, regardless of whether or not there are actual pump and dump schemes behind their actions, I become extremely bored. This boredom has a layer of annoyance coating it, especially given the extraordinary 15 months of Covid we’ve just gone through.

Maybe as sports come back, some of this energy will shift back to sports. Now that proxy betting online has become essentially real cash betting online, even though the laws around this (at least in the US) haven’t really resolved, and everyone online has figured out how to get around all the rules, the speculating can become called “betting” again. Or maybe “betting” will just become speculating. It doesn’t really matter since they are fundamentally the same thing.

Let’s go back to Bogle. “Investing … adds value to our society, and to the wealth of our investors” and “Speculating is precisely the opposite.”

Ask yourself, “Is what I am doing adding value to our society?”

Enough has three sections: Money, Business, and Life. While I found the answer to what was bugging me in Chapter 2, the section on Life is awesome. The three chapters are:

Too Much Focus on Things, Not Enough Focus on CommitmentToo Many Twenty-First-Century Values, Not Enough Eighteenth-Century ValuesToo Much “Success,” Not Enough Character

Bogle completely nails this topic without being preachy, annoying, arrogant, or directive. As writing goes, it’s as beautiful and powerful as it gets. I strongly recommend Enough.: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life, especially if you have enough but don’t realize it.

The post Investment vs. Speculation appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Last week I was scheduled to do a live interview with Eliot Peper about The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche. He opted to use Twitter Spaces and diligently tested it out a couple of days beforehand to confirm that it would work. Nevertheless, we immediately ran into difficulties, and after ten minutes, we decided to bail on the interview and reschedule.

This reminded both me and Dave about our chapter in the book, “Play to the Audience.” Nietzsche says:

It is not sufficient to know how to play well; one must also know how to secure a good hearing. A violin in the hand of the greatest master gives only a little squeak when the place where it is heard is too large; the master may then be mistaken for any bungler.

Our translation to contemporary English is:

In other words: Performing well is not enough; the audience must experience the performance well. If the venue has bad acoustics, even a great violinist sounds terrible. A virtuoso can be mistaken for a novice.

Our essay in the book discusses the importance of a speaker having empathy for the audience, not just in terms of the content but also in the communication medium. For example, is the phone connection clear? If you have an accent, are you speaking slowly enough for your audience to understand? Ben Casnocha’s excellent narrative emphasizes audience engagement and interaction, which is crucial in our era of short attention spans.

This was one of the first chapters we wrote, so it was before the pandemic and the enormous shift toward videoconference and online interviews. In keeping with our view that Nietzsche’s observations are mostly independent of time and technology, it can be applied here.

For example, if you are communicating, selling, interviewing for a job, or promoting a message, you need to make sure you will be heard. Your own preferences for technology platforms can get in the way of a successful meeting if the customer prefers a different system or is not set up on it. If you are getting a message out, using the newest or trendiest technology may draw listeners, but they will not hear the message if the system doesn’t work. Make sure your lighting, Internet connection, and camera angle are appropriately professional. Don’t walk around with your phone while you are on a videoconference unless the call is explicitly casual. 

Feel free to disagree with these particulars, but think through your own version of “securing a good hearing.”

It turns out that Eliot and I are good friends, and I’m pretty patient with new technology, though those who tried to attend our interview may not have been. Eliot decided to try again, but with an upcoming interview posted on his website.

The post Twitter Spaces and Nietzsche appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

 

I’ve decided I’m going to invest $1 million in BitClout the blockchain-based, crypto-currency powered social network that is all the rage (at least within some circles).

If you don’t know what BitClout is, I think my earlier post “What’s BitClout?” is a decent overview.

OK, back to that million dollar thing. To be clear, I’m not buying shares in BitClout (the company). I have it on really good faith that one can’t really do that, and nobody has done that.

Instead of investing in the traditional sense, I’m going to do a combination of the following:

Invest in startups/projects that are building value on and creating value for the BitClout ecosystem. Example: I’ll be investing $100,000 in @bitswap (and here, I mean buying equity/shares in the startup). Invest in $dharmesh (my own creator coin on BitClout). Investing in other creator coin. (This is less as a way to generate a financial return and more as a way to show support for useful content and tools). Hold BitClout (the currency)  itself. Note: A few days from now, the number of BitClout coins will be frozen.

Back to the million dollars. Why have I decided to invest such a large amount (higher than my usual)?

Before I answer, a super-important note: I am not an investment advisor and this is not financial advice. I am not (remotely) suggesting you should do what I did. 

OK, so back to the why...

First, I’ve been a believer in BitClout from the early days. You know, like waaay back in March. I just think the potential for a platform like BitClout is immense. Will it be the one that actually achieves that potential? I don’t know, but it’s the best implementation I know of a blockchain powered, crypto-based social network.

As evidence, one need only look at the momentum.

Momentum in terms of the community on the platform. Momentum in terms of innovation of the platform itself. Momentum in terms of apps and tools being built on the platform.

I also love that BitClout is not just open source -- but also open data. They've released all the code, and if you so chose, you could run your own node and get access to all the data on the chain.

Further, I like how the project team is thoughtful around environmental impact. Just hours ago, it was announced that a recent BitClout update reduces the power consumption by a factor of 10.  

I am proud to announce that the dev community has committed to moving to
a zero-waste consensus mechanism, and that it is taking a major step in
that direction with a new update.

~ @diamondhands

Also, one of the big issues I had with BitClout was how hard it was to actually join and engage. To do that, you needed to own BitCoin and transfer some of that coin into BitClout.com in order to do anything. That's really high friction. Recently, they've removed that friction so that anyone can join BitClout.com without needing to own BitCoin (or even know what it is). 

Finally, it’s partly because the first time I got really excited about the blockchain and crypto-currencies, I invested in a company called Coinbase. And, because I like trying out the products of the companies I invest in, I used Coinbase to buy some BitCoin. That was back in 2015. Coinbase went public earlier this year (2021) and currently has a market cap of over $40 billion.

Over 15 years of investing in over 80+ startups/projects, I've learned to trust my instincts and as long as one acts within ones tolerance for risk. 

The hit you take from many failures is often overshadowed by the handful of successes that turn out to be massive outcomes.

If you want to follow me as I learn and share, you can follow @dharmesh on BitClout.

Hope to see you there and hear your thoughts.

Cheers.

CU’s Silicon Flatirons Center Startup Summer is back!

Startup Summer provides a fantastic experience for college-age students and interns interested in entrepreneurship and the Front Range emerging company scene.

Startup Summer is a free offering that enhances your company’s internship program. Your company hires and pays your intern(s). You can hire an intern out of your own pool of candidates or, alternatively, let us know and we will get you student resumes from individuals who have reached out to us.

This program is free – there is no charge for companies or interns. Now in Year 10, Startup Summer is one of CU Boulder Silicon Flatirons’ most popular programs.

Startup Summer pulls college-age students together on Tuesday nights from 5:30 – 7:30 pm during the summer. Startup Summer students and interns get to (1) meet leaders in the Front Range emerging company community, and (2) build their own startups on the side. More info is available at our website Startup Summer page.

If your company is interested in Startup Summer, please reach out directly to Sara Schnittgrund (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and Brad Bernthal (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) at Silicon Flatirons by Thursday, June 3.

The post Colorado Startup Summer 2021 – Request for Companies appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

“Turn off the TV and go outside and play.”

I expect these are words that have been said in almost every household in America.

Amy and I hit the bottom of the TV barrel last week while watching Army of the Dead. It was so awful it was good. But it was awful.

And … It’s June 1 and I’m done for the summer. No TV until Labor Day weekend. And then, maybe no TV after that.

TV is a weird construct since I can watch videos on my laptop or my iPad. But, that’s a different thing, since they are generally short and a deliberate thing that I’m watching on video, vs. just vegging out in front of the TV watching whatever we found on Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV, or whatever we eventually found surfing around on DirecTV (last night’s movie was Drive.)

While I was totally fried this weekend from the cumulative working and running I had done the preceding few weeks, I would have been better off napping or reading during the movie time. And, while I know there is a new wave of stuff coming out this summer, I’m going to assume that Army of the Dead sets the tone so I’ll wait until the fall in case anything good makes it through and then watch it then.

For now, I’m spending my TV time running, reading, writing, or just enjoying being outside with Amy and Cooper.

Welcome to summertime.

The post No TV Summer appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Most of the quotes we discuss in The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche we found by reading his work, but a few are well-known lines that you may have heard before. This is one, used in our chapter “Monsters”:

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

The quote leads quickly to questions of ethics. In the chapter, we discuss the fact that we each have our own views of what constitutes ethical or unethical behavior in business. It is a line-drawing game – there is no reference that everyone agrees on. The choices have both short- and long-term consequences for both the success of your business and for your own reputation. Further, once you choose an ethical approach, it becomes entrenched in your organization and is difficult to change.

These questions arise pretty much every day in business. It came up for us today with our own book promotion. Our publisher was excited that we had achieved “#1 Amazon Best Seller” status in a couple of categories and produced the graphic below for promotion. The thing is, the categories were things like “Existentialism” and “Philosophy Reference” where overall sales are lower – they are applicable to the book as categories, but not really our target market (for the record, the book is selling nicely in “Entrepreneurial Management”, where it was briefly #2.)

The question is, should we use it, or is it misleading and dishonest?

We expect that most of you will say that of course we should use it, because strictly speaking it is true, and it will help sell the book. A few might agree that it is a little uncomfortable, perhaps preferring that the language be changed a little. Others will say that the question is overthinking a simple thing, and why should one even worry about it?

This is indeed a simple example, and in isolation this is overthinking. It’s not going to show up as a scandal on the front page of the New York Times. But if you never examine such questions, the pressure of competition and the temptation of promotion can be an abyss that gazes into you. Eventually you may find yourself, or people in your organization, saying things like “A lot of people are telling me…” (where have you heard that before?) Such statements are strictly true, depending on one’s interpretation of “a lot.” How is this marketing image different?

Our book asks you to think harder about questions like this, and many others that may not have such an explicitly ethical component.

As another example, Dave wrote this post after a quick back and forth this morning about the issue on email while I was on another call. I read it, make a few light edits, and posted it. One approach would be to just post this. Instead, I asked Dave how he wanted it posted since he was the primary author. As we went back and forth in email (his answer: “Either say we both wrote it or credit me, either is fine. I’d lean toward the first.”) just reinforced our own alignment, while being a nice self-referential example.

And … we both just looked and the book is currently selling at #1 in both “Business Management Science” and “Business Technology Innovation.” Ahhh, that feels better.

The post Monsters appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

My newest book, The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors, shipped today. It’s available on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover. If you are so inclined, go buy a copy today!

I’m particularly proud of this book, as it is a more philosophical approach to entrepreneurship than my other books. I wrote it with Dave Jilk, the co-founder of our first company (Feld Technologies, 1987) and one of my closest friends for 38 years.

The book contains 52 individual chapters (hence the “Weekly” in the title) and is divided into five major sections (Strategy, Culture, Free Spirits, Leadership, and Tactics). Each chapter begins with a quote from one of Nietzsche’s works, using a public domain translation, followed by our own adaptation of the quote to 21st-century English. Next is a brief essay applying the quote to entrepreneurship. About two-thirds of the chapters include a narrative by or about an entrepreneur we know (or know of), telling a concrete story from their personal experience as it applies to the quote, the essay, or both.

Our goal with this book is to make you think, rather than try to tell you the answers. For example, here’s the Nietzsche quote from a chapter titled “Obsession” from the section on “Free Spirits”.

“The passion which seizes the noble man is a peculiarity, without his knowing that it is so: the use of a rare and singular measuring-rod, almost a frenzy: the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to all other persons: a divining of values for which scales have not yet been invented: a sacrificing on altars which are consecrated to an unknown God: a bravery without the desire for honor: a self-sufficiency which has superabundance: and imparts to men and things.”

Our interpretation is:

In other words: A noble man has exceptional passion, but does not realize just how unusual it is: he has high standards for success, enthusiasm for things that others find dull, a sense of what will be valuable in the future, intense but unexplained motivations, courage without the need for praise, and the ability to sustain and revel in this intensity without support from others.

And the chapter begins with:

You may have noticed that this chapter is titled Obsession, but Nietzsche seems to be talking about passion. For several years, Brad has written and spoken about the pitfalls of “passion” in entrepreneurs, distinguishing it from “obsession,” which is a quality he looks for. Dictionaries generally speak of passion as a strong emotion, while obsession is a preoccupation of the mind. We have a hunch that Nietzsche is trying to make a similar distinction here. The word “obsession” did not come into common use until later. Earlier in the text, he says, “What then makes a person ‘noble’?…Certainly not that he generally follows his passions; there are contemptible passions.” It is worth asking yourself whether you are obsessed with your business and the problem it solves for customers or merely passionate about it.

If you intend to disrupt an industry or change the world, you must expect people to see you as crazy, intransigent, and possibly sociopathic. Maybe you are. To sustain yourself and your efforts in such a climate, you must find your drive within. You must know your vision and why it matters to you. Importantly, you cannot feel that its correctness depends on your ability to explain it to others. You must be obsessed.

Each essay from us is two to three pages long, so they are easy to quickly consume and then reflect on. The narratives from entrepreneurs telling their story as it applies to the quote are also a few pages long.

For one more taste, here’s the Nietzsche quote and our interpretation chapter called “Attracting Followers” from the chapter on “Leadership”.

“Men press forward to the light not in order to see better but to shine better.—The person before whom we shine we gladly allow to be called a light.”

In other words: People are drawn to light because it shines on them, not because it shows them the way. A person who makes us shine is someone we gladly call a light.”

I hope this inspires you to get a copy of The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

The post Shipped! The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche appeared first on Feld Thoughts.