Six months ago I wrote When The Big Companies Show Up about Sony releasing their first holographic display and what I thought about that development, given my role as an investor via Foundry and board member in the 40-person purveyor of fine holographic interfaces in Brooklyn called Looking Glass. In that post, I wrote:

“When I ponder my life in 2040, I am confident that I will not be spending 12 hours a day in videoconferences on a 2D display. I’m also not going to have a headset encapsulating my face. I’m ready for my holographic future, and I’m having fun being an investor in a company that helps create it.”

That future is coming fast, and last week I was involved in several discussions about holograms.

The first was with Shawn Frayne, the CEO of Looking Glass, reporting that by the summer they will have shipped a personal holographic display to 10,000 people around the world.

The second was a chat about Google announcing a holographic system of their own at Google I/O. Following is a brief excerpt from one of the articles floating around about that announcement:

“Pichai said “We have developed a breakthrough light field display,” probably with the help of the people and IP it scooped up from Lytro, the light field camera company that didn’t manage to get its own tech off the ground and dissolved in 2018.

Light field cameras and displays create and show 3D imagery using a variety of techniques that are very difficult to explain or show in 2D. The startup Looking Glass has made several that are extremely arresting to view in person, showing 3D models and photographic scenes that truly look like tiny holograms.

Whether Google’s approach is similar or different, the effect appears to be equally impressive, as the participants indicate.”

Needless to say, the Looking Glass community has some strong opinions about this new development.

Will Google or Sony or Looking Glass or some other contender deliver on the full potential of the holographic future we’ve all been waiting for? While my bet is on Looking Glass, this future now feels more inevitable than ever. 

If you’re interested in building out this future with the band of misfits at Looking Glass, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I’ll connect you.

The post Google Enters Hologramland appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

I’ve been thinking about, talking about and working on culture for at least a decade. (Not counting the 15 years I spent being mostly clueless about culture in my first startup).

I've spent hundreds of hours working with the HubSPot team to create the HubSpot Culture Code deck. It has been invaluable for us as we've scaled from a 2 founder startup to a 4,000+ person scale-up with a market cap in excess of $22 billion. Here it is...

Of all the lessons and insights learned from all that tinkering, this is my biggest epiphany:

Culture is a product and your people are its customers.

Said differently, your people/employees are the customers of your culture, which you can think of as a product.

So, every company actually has two products: The one they offer their customers, and the other they offer to their people/employees. 

To explain the thinking here, let’s enumerate some of the ways culture is a product and tips for applying the metaphor to craft more effective cultures that support growth and scale. 

Customer Feedback  / Culture Feedback. Just like you would never build a product without talking to customers, you wouldn’t try and craft a culture without talking to your people, and understanding what their needs are.

Product Is Never Done / Culture  Is Never Done. Just like a product is never “done”,  culture is never “done”. You have to keep iterating. Too many startups make the mistake of thinking their goal is to “preserve” their startup culture as they grow and scale. That shouldn’t be the goal.  The goal should be to evolve the culture/product over time so it continues to meet the needs of the employees/customers. Yes, there are some of your core values you want to hang on to, and you want to keep your startup "spirit", but as you grow, a few things will likely need to be tweaked.

Example: In the early days of HubSpot, nobody had job titles. We thought they were a waste of time. Nobody cared, and we thought they were a waste of time. As we grew, we came to accept that job titles are useful and though the founders may not care, other people do (understandably) care, because there is life after HubSpot (or so we've heard).

Measure/Analyze Product / Measure/Analyze Culture. Just like you would measure and analyze how a product is doing -- based on feedback from customers, you should measure and analyze how your culture is doing, based on feedback from your employees.

Example: At HubSpot, every quarter for many years, we do an eNPS survey (employee Net Promoter Score) that has two questions:  On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you recommend HubSpot as a place to work?  Why did you provide that score?  We then go through *all* the survey responses, and categorize the "bug reports and feature requests". We then report back to the team as to what the patterns were, and what we're doing about them. Some are "Yep, that's a bug -- here's how we're going to fix it."  Others are: "Yeah, we know some people don't like that -- but it works as designed.  Sorry."

Clear Product Omissions / Clear Culture Omissions. Just like it’s important to not just decide what your product going to do, but also what it is not going to do, it’s important to decide what your culture is intentionally omitting.

Product Use Cases / Culture Use Cases. Just like it’s important to understand what the purpose of your product is -- what’s the “Job To Be Done”, it’s important to understand what job your culture is trying to do. Usually, it’s to help people make better decisions, better serve customers and facilitate long-term growth -- but it’s entirely possible your culture needs to serve other use cases.

Product Feature Pruning / Culture Feature Pruning. Just like it’s occasionally necessary to prune features from your product, it’s also necessary to sometimes prune features from your culture. This could be because adoption is low or the value that “feature” is providing isn’t high enough to warrant its carrying cost (and every feature of a product or culture has a carrying cost).

Technology Debt / Culture Debt. Just like you sometimes take on technology debt in order to get a product out the door (“I know this code is a bit messy and slow, but I can live with it, because the deadline is important -- we’ll come back and refactor it later.”), you will also take on “culture debt”. The most common reason for culture debt is you’ve been desperately trying to hire for a given role, you’ve finally found someone that has the experience and skills you need -- but they’re kind of an arrogant jerk. You hire them anyway. So you’ve just taken on some culture debt. The thing to remember is that culture debt is much more insidious than technology debt.  With technology debt, you can cycle back and refactor/rewrite that messy code and hence pay off the debt.  With culture debt, like in our example of hiring a “non-fit” person, you can later let that person go, but that doesn’t completely pay off the debt.  Having that person on the team has planted some toxicity in your company that’s much harder to weed out.
  Product Design / Culture Design.  We spend time designing our products so that they’re easy to use and easy for customers to do the thing they’re trying to do.  No matter how  powerful features matters if the product is so hard, nobody uses those features. Similarly, with culture, you have to design it and manifest it in ways that it’s easy for employees to use the culture.

Shipping Product / Shipping Culture.  We all know that no matter how brilliant a product is, it doesn’t create much value if it never ships and customers never get their hands on it. Similarly, your culture needs to have a manifestation of some sort. You have to “release” it. That doesn’t mean you need a deck with 128 slides, like HubSpot has. It also doesn’t mean you have to release it to the whole world on the Internet. But you do have to get the culture out of the founders’/leaders heads and into some set of artifacts that are usable by employees. This need to ship is particularly important as a company scales and not everyone is one degree removed from the founders.

Product Rewrites / Culture Rewrites. This doesn’t always happen -- but it does happen. Sometimes a product winds up so far off track that the best choice is to scrap it and start over. It’s one of those “last resort” type decisions -- but there are cases when that’s the right decision. For a product, it happens when the product is just not serving the needs of customers and a simple iteration or two is not going to fix it. With culture, this happens if things are just so toxic and dysfunctional that leadership has to rethink it. It’s a painful realization -- but when it happens, it’s often very clear (and also very public -- as we’ve seen with some spectacular culture pivots in some high-flying scaleups before).
 Remember: Culture debt has a higher interest rate and is more difficult to pay down. Tread carefully.

Examples: Does your culture doc help people make hiring decisions? Does it help determine who should be rewarded/promoted and who should be released? Does it make easy decisions unnecessary (because it’s 100% clear to everyone what the “right” decision is), and does it make hard decisions somewhat easier, by at least setting up some guard rails and constraints?

I'll stop there. There are likely more dots to be connected on why culture is a product -- but I'll leave that to you. Would love to hear what ideas you have in the comments.

Meanwhile, do yourself and your startup a favor and be more intentional about culture in your early years. If I could do HubSpot all over again, one thing I would do differently is that I'd have thought about culture, and made investments in culture sooner.

My newest book, The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors, comes out next Tuesday, May 25th.

This has been an on-again, off-again project with Dave Jilk that began in 2013. We were spending the weekend in Keystone with our wives (Amy and Maureen), which generally involved a lot of sitting around reading. Dave was reading On Nietzsche by Eric Steinhart. He read a quote to me and asked if I thought it sounded like an entrepreneur. Dave remembers me saying, “Hmmm, it sure does.” Then we both went back to our books. 

At the time, I knew nothing about Nietzsche. Actually, I knew less than nothing since everything I knew about him was wrong.

Dave is one of my best friends. We met over 38 years ago, on my first day at MIT, right after the freshman picnic, when I ended up in a van that took me to ADP, the fraternity I ended up joining and living at for four years. Dave was a senior, and we became best friends. We started a company that year with Sameer Gandhi and Andy Mina called Martingale Software that failed pretty quickly. Several years later, we started Feld Technologies, which we ran together from 1987 to 1993 when we sold it to Sage Alerting Systems, which later renamed itself to AmeriData Technologies. We kept working together – him as an entrepreneur, me as an investor.

But “business” is only a small part of our relationship. For any close friendship that lasts 38 years, he has a better understanding of me than almost anyone else on this planet (Amy has him beat.) So, theoretically, he knew what he was getting into when we decided to start writing a book together. I expect there was a moment, though, where he shouted at the top of his lungs, “Brad, enough with the fucking commas.”

We made progress in fits and starts. Most of the fits were a result of me getting distracted by something else. Sometimes it was work. Sometimes it was another book that got in the way. Sometimes it was burnout – writing, work, or just general lassitude. Dave hung in there each time, giving me space, moving things forward without me, and then when I resurfaced, quickly kicking back into gear on his end to respond to whatever I was doing.

I’ll write plenty more about the book, Nietzsche, and why we think Nietzsche is so relevant to entrepreneurs, but I want to end with two paragraphs of appreciate for people.

The first is Ryan Holiday, who was an inspiration for me with his book The Daily Stoic. I read a page almost every day. Ryan inspires me at so many levels, but his ability to make stoicism accessible to entrepreneurs has been magical and transformative for many people I know, including me. I’m hopeful Dave and I can emulate even a tiny bit of what Ryan has accomplished, but this time with Nietzsche.

The second is Reid Hoffman. He agreed to write the foreword several years ago when I first told him about this project. He waited patiently, and he produced a brilliant foreword that captures the essence of what we’ve tried to do with the book. In addition, as a bonus, he used Nietzsche’s writing style for some of it. Reid is a great human, and I deeply appreciate his involvement in this project.

The post New Book: The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

I recently nominated James Oliver’s ParentPreneur Foundation for the new Techstars Accelerate Equity Program. Amy and I provided the lead gift of $100,000 through our Anchor Point Foundation. For a detailed look at what the ParentPreneur Foundation does, take a look at Techstars Foundation Empowers Black ParentPreneurs, So They Can Leave A Legacy For Their Children.

Through Accelerate Equity, the Techstars Foundation identifies early-stage nonprofits and ideas to empower and support underestimated entrepreneurs. We then call on the Techstars network to pitch in. The Techstars Foundation will add a 5% match to the total raised at the end of the calendar quarter.

Among other things, James has created a vibrant community for Black ParentPreneurs.

I’ve known James for a while, as we became friends when he started his previous company WeMontage. While I didn’t invest, we talked periodically and emailed regularly. I loved his book The More You Hustle, The Luckier You Get (it’s “pure James”). We connected after George Floyd was murdered, and he mentioned his initial dream of the ParentPreneur Foundation. I immediately jumped in to help.

It has been about a year since that conversation. Since then, a number of friends, including Mark Suster, Fred and Joanne Wilson, Seth Godin, and David Cohen have also supported the ParentPreneur Foundation. It has been awesome to see the progress that James has made. I’m delighted that the Techstars Foundation is including him in the Accelerate Equity program.

If you want to support James or support something I support around racial equity and entrepreneurship, please donate to the ParentPreneur Foundation through the Techstars Foundation.

The post Techstars Accelerating Black ParentPreneurs appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

I’ve been reading hard science fiction lately, along with some actual science. The hard sci-fi includes Dragon’s Egg and Starquake by Robert Forward (wow – awesome) and Nova by Samuel Delany (also awesome). The science includes The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku and Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek.

In between runs this weekend I finished Nova (I was listening to it on Audible), Fundamentals (I was reading it on Kindle), and read most of Starquake (It’s only available in physical form.) I also started listening to Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. The only thing that would have made this weekend better would be a third day to it, instead of the Monday in front of me.

Frank Wilczek is a legendary physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for “for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.” with David Gross and David Politzer. His office at MIT is in the same hallway as Bernard Feld, my MIT namesake (Prof B. Feld, something I never became.) He also happens to be a spectacular writer.

Fundamentals is extremely accessible. After reading Michio Kaku’s The God Equation, I realized that I knew a lot of surface-level physics (and science in general), but there was a layer down, especially from the past 20 years, that was elusive. Kaku’s presented it in a way that one could understand without any deep quantum physics knowledge, so I went looking for more.

Wilczek delivered. The first part of the book, called “What There Is”, has five chapters.

There’s Plenty of SpaceThere’s Plenty of TimeThere Are Very Few IngredientsThere Are Very Few LawsThere’s Plenty of Matter and Energy

It’s brilliant.

As I read hard sci-fi, the entanglement of known science at the time (Nova was published in 1968; The Dragon’s Egg was published in 1980) along with speculation of where things were going (e.g. each book took place far in the future) created a contextual backdrop for me for Fundamentals that helped bring what we know, and what we don’t know, to the surface. Or, more specifically, what we knew (in 1968, 1980) that was right, and what doesn’t seem right anymore because it wasn’t known, or understood.

The shocker is how much is directionally correct. When I read Asimov from the 1950s (I, Robot is a good place to start), or Philip K. Dick from the 1960s (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a good place to start) I have the same feeling. Many details are completely wrong (e.g. how data is stored on auxtape) but others are completely correct (e.g. massive underground data centers). Hard sci-fi takes more risks on this dimension, and both Forward and Delany do an amazing job of both the science and the storytelling.

In the last 20 years, I’ve read a lot more sci-fi than science. That’s a miss on my part. Going forward, my diet will include both. And I hope to someday meet a Cheela. And a Shrike.

The post Book: Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Each morning during the week, after morning coffee together, Amy says, “Ok, time to go eat my frogs.” She’s usually told me about the one or two or three frogs she has for the day, and her statement is a rhythmic part of our morning.

Yesterday, I asked her where that phrase came from. She pointed me at Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, a productivity book by Brian Tracey that she read a few years ago. (Note, a blog reader sourced the original quote to Mark Twain.)

While I haven’t read the book, we are using the phrase a little differently than the motivating language on the Amazon book website.

It’s time to stop procrastinating and get more of the important things done! After all, successful people don’t try to do everything. They focus on their most important tasks and get those done. They eat their frogs.
 
There’s an old saying that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re done with the worst thing you’ll have to do all day. For Tracy, eating a frog is a metaphor for tackling your most challenging task—but also the one that can have the greatest positive impact on your life.

Stop procrastinating is correct, but it’s mostly aimed at a task that is difficult for some reason. And, what is difficult for Amy is different than what is difficult for me, and vice versa.

If you recall my post, Something New Is Fucked Up In My World Every Day, you will see the link between Milarepa and eating frogs, even if demons aren’t involved.

Between Monday and Friday, my work as a VC includes an endless number of difficult things. I say no all day long. I give people news or feedback they don’t want to hear. I deal with conflict, angry and frustrated people, and strange situations that cause emotional pain. Often the pain is from exogenous factors that dramatically influence things, but which we have no control over.

And yes, Something New Is Fucked Up In My World Every Day. I can’t predict when it will show up, but it’s often late enough in the day that I can’t solve it before I stop working. And many of these things extend over many days and have numerous frogs contained within them.

I used to procrastinate on things I didn’t want to deal with. In my 20s and 30s, I’d carry them around with me, waiting for the right time to address them. By the time I hit my 40s, I had stopped doing this with most things and just dealt with whatever came up head-on. When I found myself procrastinating on something difficult, I realized I was avoidant, often passive avoidant, and would go deeper on why I was procrastinating which often helped me understand the thing better. Occasionally, I’d continue to be avoidant, sometimes unconsciously, but the demons eventually showed up, and I had to embrace the lessons of Milarepa to get rid of them.

I still procrastinate, but it’s on things that either don’t have a deadline or things that I’m looking forward to doing. If you’ve written a book with me, you understand this statement well (Ian, I’m thinking of you.)

The frogs? I eat them whenever they show up or first thing in the morning. And, even though I’m a vegetarian, I’ve come to get satisfaction from eating my virtual frogs. So that’s another life lesson from Amy.

The post Eat Your Frogs First Thing In The Morning appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

In February, we announced our investment in Gig Wage. After some entertaining back and forth, I encouraged Craig Lewis, the founder/CEO of Gig Wage, to write up a quick story of how things unfolded, as he remembered them, and I’d post it here. I love founder stories, and origin stories, and always learn something from reflecting on them. So, in Craig’s words …

Two tech guys from Dallas walk into a bar…

Before I met Brad in person, I had known about him because he’s pretty much startup-famous from his books and from co-founding Techstars, but I didn’t know much about Foundry Group. I hadn’t even read any of his books at the time, but I knew I was interested in meeting him.

Brad and I first met at an event two years ago at UTD (University of Texas at Dallas), where he would be speaking. We met at the bar, I had my favorite go-to drink, the “Black American” (my concoction, inspired by a White Russian), and Brad was having water since he doesn’t drink. 

My first impression of Brad was that he’s freaking brilliant. You can tell when someone’s done a lot and is smart from their experience. I figured, ‘this guy’s seen it all from A to Z and has probably seen it from Z to A and then back again.’ And he could have easily been not cool, but he was totally humble and down-to-earth, and we just kind of vibed. When we spoke, it didn’t seem like an investor-entrepreneur thing, just two guys from Dallas talking tech.

Fast forward to about a year later, we had recently received an investment from Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest Revolution.  Entrepreneurs who are part of his portfolio take part in a quarterly book club, where we all read a book and one entrepreneur is chosen to interview the author of the book. I happened to be able to interview Brad when we got an early look at the latest edition of his book Venture Deals. Between meeting Brad and interviewing him, he had set up a few introductions for me, which was cool of him, and when we got to the interview, it was casual, like we knew each other from around and had kind of been in touch before. We did a live webinar Q+A for all of the entrepreneurs in the book club. After getting through all my questions about his book, we ended up talking about entrepreneurship, technology, and venture capital.

That’s when I started to realize that he’s a prolific investor, and I started to understand the Foundry Group a little better, although it didn’t fully click for me until we went through Techstars and I met Jaclyn Hester.  She was able to quickly get up to speed on the company we were building and my vision for Gig Wage. Funny enough, we still didn’t think we were going to do anything, but the managing director for Techstars (who I later ended up hiring) told me that Foundry Group is super legit. Eventually, we connected the dots and realized that my relationship with Brad was just organically building up to an investment from Foundry Group. As it was happening, these events just seemed like different moments, but looking back, it’s obvious that every piece of it mattered and eventually led us to where we are today.

When looking for an investment, it’s more about who wants to invest in us and what steps they take to invest in us than the other way around. We typically aren’t going around reaching out to see whose investments we can secure. What happened with Brad and the Foundry Group came down to them showing excitement for Gig Wage, not by me strategically or intentionally pursuing them by any means. I realized our goals aligned, and that’s pretty much how it happened.

The post The Founder’s Story of The Path To Us Investing in Gig Wage appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

I was talking to a friend yesterday and he said, “Just another Monday.” But yesterday was Tuesday. I asked him what he meant. He said, “Every day feels like a Monday – I just get up and do it again.”

It has been 427 days since I mark the start, for me, of the Covid crisis (March 11th – the first day I stayed home.) As the world, at least in some places, loosens up a lot, people are anxious to get back together in physical form. I see it everywhere around me – dinners, meetings, people in Zoom in offices, background noises, air travel, and endless requests to get together in person.

Fred wrote an interesting post titled In-Person vs On-Screen that starts out:

Last week I spent three hours with my six partners in a conference room talking through what we are investing in and why. It was a terrific session and I had more “ahas” in those three hours than I have had in many many months. There really is no substitute for sitting together with your colleagues working things out face to face.

The post describes his thinking around remote, hybrid, and in-person. He talks about his, and his partners, current dynamics. He ends with a strong assertion.

Each company needs to figure this out in a way that works for their team and culture and I believe that there is no “right way” for everyone. But I also believe that in-person interactions remain critical to making better decisions, better products, better cultures, and better companies and so I would encourage everyone, including the fully remote teams, to figure out how to make in-person interactions happen on some regular cadence.

I see this in my own partnership. Several of my partners are regularly getting together in person. While I’m supportive of that, I have no interest in it and would rather continue to be fully remote for now. Fortunately, they understand. We are working on understanding and implementing our own hybrid dynamics that work for each of us and the team as a whole.

While we are privileged to be in a business and an industry where this is something we can explore, I immediately think of Susan Cain’s essential book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. When I read it in 2012, a few puzzle pieces slid into place for me.

I strongly agree with Fred’s statement:

Each company needs to figure this out in a way that works for their team and culture and I believe that there is no “right way” for everyone.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been in numerous “back to the office” conversations. I’ve participated in public discussions about remote vs. hybrid vs. in-office. I’ve talked with almost every CEO and board that I work with about this topic.

I’ve been asserting, like Fred, that this is a custom answer for each company. However, I’m adding a twist. I encourage the CEOs not to let their personal bias drive the answer. For some CEOs, that’s intolerable. For others, it has been enlightening.

I know several CEOs who are desperate to get back to the office. They hate working at home. They struggle not traveling around and being with their team. They are miserable with remote work. So, regardless of what anyone on their team says or wants, they will not have a remote work option. And, in one case that I’m aware of, there is not going to be any semblance of a hybrid option.

I know several CEOs who have let their leases end or sublet their offices. They love working at home. They have no interest in going to the airport. They deeply embrace remote work. No matter what, they are going to be a remote-first company in the future. And, in more than one case, there is no plan ever to rent any office space again.

When you suspend your individual bias, I expect you’ll find interesting and unexpected answers from different people in your company. When you ask them for approaches, you might find some that you hadn’t thought of. Knowing that there is a wide spectrum of desires among your current team, especially after 427 days of Mondays, is an important starting point for figuring out the best configuration for your company going forward.

The post 427 Mondays In A Row appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

My partner Seth Levine and his co-author Elizabeth MacBride recently wrote an important book called The New Builders: Face to Face with the True Future of Business. It is out and available.

Foundry Group is hosting an open virtual event to discuss the book. Seth and Elizabeth will be moderating the discussion with special guests Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper, Makisha Boothe of Sistahbiz, Colorado Congressman Joe Neguse, and Lorena Cantarovici of Maria Empanada.

Sign up here for the virtual event at May 18, 2021 12:00 PM PT; 1:00 PM MT.

Seth and Elizabeth have spent the past year talking to entrepreneurs all over the United States as they’ve developed their thesis around The New Builders. The Covid crisis has accelerated the growth and development of many high-tech companies, including the largest companies that were recently young, entrepreneurial businesses. But, unfortunately, the Covid crisis has decimated many local businesses and dramatically impacted communities everywhere.

The New Builders are the future of business that will emerge from the Covid crisis, and the book argues for the future of American entrepreneurship. That future lies in surprising places and will rely on the success of women, Black, and Brown entrepreneurs. However, our country hasn’t yet recognized the New Builders’ identities, let alone developed strategies to support them.

Join the conversation about The New Builders with Seth, Elizabeth, John, Makisha, Joe, and Lorena on May 18th.

The post The New Builders: Discussion on 5/18/21 appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Boulder has been our home for 25 years and we love it. Amy and I support numerous local non-profit initiatives through our Anchor Point Foundation. The following video captured my attention this morning and resulted in a bathroom-sized donation to Growing Up Boulder.

Bella and Mads – well done! You can call us Brad and Amy (not Mr. and Mrs.). This is a gift is in y’alls name. Vanessa Schatz – brilliant!

Happy Monday morning. Do something nice for your local community today. And, if you are a Boulder local, consider donating to Growing Up Boulder.

The post Growing Up Boulder appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

I received a lot of positive feedback on my post highlighting the 2nd annual Emerge Virtual 5k Run so …

It’s time for the 10th Annual Happy Smackah 5k Fun Run and Walk.  

This would have been the 11th Annual, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we canceled the May 2020 event. But, it’s back, this time as a Virtual 5k in 2021. You can run it anytime between May 8th and June 8th. Register online!

Amy and I have been long-time supporters of Happy Smackah – a unique “focused giving” event in our community with a unique origin story.  

Happy Smackah originated as a fundraiser for Dan Cribby, a Longmont educator who initially was diagnosed with strep, woke up days later to shoulder pain, and went to the hospital. He was becoming septic and was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis (“flesh-eating disorder”). He was air-lifted to Denver, where, to save his life, they amputated his shoulder, clavicle, and left arm, commonly known as a forequarter amputation. He was kept in a coma and required many surgeries to debride and skin graft his entire torso. 

The community came together to support Dan through his ordeal. While he was enduring his surgeries and treatment, his wide social circle of students, teachers, and parents organized a 5k.  Nearly 700 showed up that day for Dan, and Dan was there too, miraculously, fresh out of the hospital.

The event has continued over the past decade to pay it forward from the Cribby’s. The community nominates an individual facing medical hardship and provides them fundraising support to help with their situation. It also creates a powerful connection through people attending the 5k event, which generally has about 1,000 participants. 

This year’s Smackah is Kaylee Stiffler, a senior at Longmont High School. A caring, clever, and down-to-earth teenager, she was born with congenital nevus, which is essentially a mole or birthmark on any part of the body. Kaylee’s is on her face, covering her cheek, nose, and eye. Four years ago, it started growing, changing, bleeding, and impacting her eyesight. She’s had 14 surgeries in the past five years. The Boulder Daily Camera just wrote a great update on Kaylee and her amazing attitude despite her challenges.  

Together you can help us help Kaylee. Please sign up, find a great place to run or walk a 5K, get outdoors and do it, and prepare for an even better year as we continue to re-open our communities safely.

The post Another Virtual 5K in Boulder As Spring Emerges in Full Bloom appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

In 2017 I helped get the Techstars Sustainability Accelerator off the ground in partnership with The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Amy and I have been supporters of TNC for over 30 years and Amy serves on their global board of directors. The program has been running in Colorado supporting pre-seed to post-seed stage startups at the intersection of conservation and technology since 2018.

This is a unique accelerator, partnering with the world’s largest environmental nonprofit, on a mission to supercharge early-stage startups who are protecting the planet, conserving our natural resources, and creating a world where humans and nature can both thrive.

They have graduated 20 founders (see 2018 class here and 2019 class here) and are taking applications now through May 12th for their next class.

This program invests in the following areas: 

natural-based solutions to climate changeproviding sustainable food and waterprotecting land and water

You can see the full investment thesis at A Tech Revolution For Nature. 

Participating companies receive up to $120K in funding, personalized mentorship from Techstars and The Nature Conservancy, and much more. The program starts in September 2021. Learn more on the Techstars Sustainability Accelerator site.

Following are a few highlights that made recent press from some of the last class of alumni companies:

“Climate change reversal startup Nori raises $4M for its CO2 offsets marketplace” – Geekwire“Propagate Ventures raises $1.5m seed round to help farmers adopt agroforestry” – AgFunder“$2M seed funding round empowers AQUAOSO to further its water risk mitigation tool set for agricultural lenders and landholders” – Intrado 

The Nature Conservancy is deeply involved in giving the startups access to the expertise of the world’s largest environmental non-profit. And Techstars brings a massive network of mentors, investors, and entrepreneurs on a similar journey. 

Applications close on May 12th, so if you’re interested, apply today!

The post Techstars Sustainability Accelerator / The Nature Conservancy – 2021 Applications Open appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

My mom is extraordinarily patient.

Several weeks ago, I bought her a brand new Mac as a mother’s day present. She was using a 2010 Mac, and it was time for her to use one that didn’t have an endless spinning pinwheel of Mac slowness on it.

I had it sent to me, although there’s a whole story in just that. I set it up, downloaded and set up all the apps she used, installed all the new stuff she needed to manage her passwords from now on, connected iCloud, and tidied and buffed it. Then, I figured we could use Zoom’s remote control, so I thought all I’d need to do was ship it to her, spend a few hours with her walking her through everything, and she’d be in great shape.

I can be so naïve. And, since I’m no longer young, I don’t qualify as young and naïve.

She and my dad got it, set it up, and connected it to the new LG monitor I’d gotten her along with the Anker USB extender. Cables and connectors – lots of them. It’s kind of remarkable how hard Apple makes the transition from devices (iPad – different cable, 2010 Mac – different cable, 2020 Mac – different cable, connect old external hard drive – different cable.) So many cables.

Eventually, it worked and, after walking through giving Zoom access to the right things on the Mac (click on the little lock in the bottom left; now check the box next to Zoom; no, the one next to Zoom. Yes, Zoom in the window to the right of the lock…) I was able to connect remotely.

Day 1 was fine. We spent three hours Sunday afternoon going application by application. I copied all the files on her external hard drive (which she lovingly calls “her Toshiba”) to the new Mac. I enabled iCloud to upload all the files to the cloud, and we spent a bunch of time discussing why that would probably take a few days over their slow internet connection, but then everything would be on her computer and in the cloud. We tested all the apps to make sure they were pointed at her documents as a default so she could find them. We went through the approach with the new password manager, which means she has three different passwords, one for her Mac, one for iCloud, and one for the password manager. But, once she has these three memorized, she won’t have to keep the rest of her passwords for all her individual apps “somewhere.”

We had a short discussion Monday night to refresh a few things. Last night was the first day of working through the list she’d made during the day of issues and questions.

We spent three hours on issue #1. Passwords.

It should have been simple. I foolishly made the Mac and iCloud passwords the same, figuring that would be easier for her. But, after Apple let me do that, it eventually told her she couldn’t have them be the same (hours later) and prompted her to change the Mac password. She wanted the Mac password to be a different one, so I assumed all I needed to do was change the iCloud password, then the Mac password and all would be good.

Two-factor authentication slowed that down. She has an Android phone, and the authentication is on her iPad, but that took me a while to figure out. I think we entered a different TFA code a dozen times over the course of three hours on her iPad. Then, I thought we were all set, but suddenly the Mac password didn’t work. And just like that, we were logged out of the computer, and Zoom was disconnected.

150 minutes of misery ensued. At the two-hour mark, I said, “just ship the Mac back to me, and I’ll start again.” Mom really didn’t want to do this or have to start from scratch, so I pressed on with a full password reset using iCloud. But, of course, the iCloud password was now no longer working. I have a feeling that Apple, in the background, invalided both of them somehow, but what really happened is still a mystery to me. The big hint was the endless “You have been locked out of …” message on iCloud and the regular prompts on the Mac to use iCloud to reset your password. Um – ok.

And, you guessed it, Zoom wasn’t able to connect us while she was logged out of her Mac, so this ended up be me dictating what to type, with her taking screenshots of her Mac screen and texting them to me since she was an on Android phone and we couldn’t simply Facetime.

Eventually, I figured out that I could reset her iCloud password on her iPad, which was still logged into iCloud (thankfully, I didn’t say “log out all devices from iCloud” when prompted over and over again. So we did that (more screenshots), we then did a full password reset on the Mac using iCloud (I never knew that was possible) and re-entered a new Mac password.

Three hours later, she got back into her Mac. We were exactly back where we started. Except now she was getting a message that the Mac couldn’t log into iCloud. Launch Zoom. Connect. Grant remote access. System preferences. Apple ID. Log out of iCloud. Log back in. Reboot (oops – bye Zoom). The bad message was still there.

Well, at least she can get back into her computer.

I’ll take on that last error message again tonight. And try to get to item #2 on her list. Maybe.

We all know the current approach to passwords and security is completely busted, but I just lived three hours of how incredibly broken it is.

And, before you say “just use the Touch ID,” neither of our fingerprints work. It’s not just Apple, it’s Clear, Global Entry, and the fingerprint process for a money transmitter license, so there must be something genetically wrong with us. Plus, I’m pretty sure that would have just made it worse somehow.

Mom – thanks for not chucking the new computer out the window and going back to your old one.

The post Password Insanity appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

My long-time business partner Seth Levine has written a book with Elizabeth MacBride titled The New Builders: Face to Face with the TRUE Future of Business. It’s extraordinary – buy a copy now!

For many years, Seth has been frustrated about the entrepreneurial narrative around the White male tech founder. He’s been active as an investor and philanthropist around entrepreneurship in rural Colorado and with organizations, such as Entrepreneurship for All, that are focused on accelerating economic and social impact in communities nationwide through inclusive entrepreneurship. He’s been exploring this and investing both in the US and other places globally, including Africa and the Middle East.

Pre-Covid, he started working on The New Builders with Elizabeth MacBride. They made good progress, and I remember saying hello to Elizabeth in our conference room after she and Seth had taken it over for a few days of writing, back when we met in conference rooms. As the Covid crisis began, they started writing a series of OpEds that got a lot of play, including To save the US economy, policymakers need to understand small business 101, and Communities across America rush to save Main Street as federal relief for small business stalls. These articles foreshadowed what they were digging into as part of their research for The New Builders.

Seth and Elizabeth obliterate the myth of the White male tech founder. Through detailed history, current stories, and many interviews, they bring life to new businesses started by Black, Brown, Female, and Older people. These entrepreneurs, including immigrants, are the next generation of business owners. Post-Covid, they will be key to redefining our economy.

While this group of founders and business owners may not get the same press that tech entrepreneurs get, they profoundly impact their local communities. Their efforts are foundational to the health, development, and growth of American cities, enabling a future where people have the economic freedom to pursue their passions. 

Seth and Elizabeth have issued a powerful wake-up call for America with The New Builders. It’s time to see, understand, and value the next generation of business owners.

The post Book: The New Builders appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Boundless Immigration, a company we’ve been investors in since they spun out of Pioneer Square Labs venture studio, raised a $25 million financing last week.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I’ve been involved in and advocating for legal immigration since 2010, when, with a half dozen other VCs and entrepreneurs, I co-created the Startup Visa initiative. Since then, I’ve been involved in many immigration-related activities, including the Global EIR program, a docu-drama called For Here or To Go, and direct involvement in helping many immigrants to the US get their visas and green cards.

When PSL started ideating on Boundless, I was lucky to be at the PSL office and participate in one of the extended sessions. I introduced them to Doug Rand, who I’d worked with during the Obama administration on several things, including Startup America and the USCIS EIR program. Shortly after, I met Xiao Wang, the entrepreneur PSL recruited to be the founding CEO of Boundless.

Working with Xiao and the team he’s built has been incredibly rewarding. In early 2017, the US government posture toward immigration took a strong negative turn, and from that point forward, Boundless faced massive headwinds at every turn. Rather than complain or fold up shop like several of their early competitors did, Boundless focused on a long-term vision of being the best possible resource for legal immigration into the US. As a result, their business grew with extremely high customer satisfaction while navigating the endless changes and stresses coming from the US government around immigration.

Last summer, Boundless acquired RapidVisa and significantly expanded its business and types of visas that it could support. Whenever a company acquires a similar-sized business, tough choices ensue as the two companies are integrated. The teams at Boundless and RapidVisa made these choices deliberately and thoughtfully, setting Boundless up for growth from a more meaningful base.

With the new Biden administration, the US government’s posture on immigration has shifted again. As a result, Xiao now finds himself as the CEO of the largest company in its category, with huge tailwinds after navigating and surviving four years of headwinds. I’m excited to be part of the next phase of Boundless’s journey.

The post A Boundless Ally To Immigrants appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

It’s time for the 2nd annual Emerge Virtual 5k Run produced by Rise Against Suicide (formerly Second Wind Fund of Boulder County). It’ll be from 8:00 am to Midnight MT on Sunday, May 2, 2021. Amy and I are helping underwrite it as we did last year and I just signed up to run it.

Rise Against Suicide provides access to funded counseling services for at-risk youth struggling with suicidal ideation in the geographic areas included in Boulder Valley School District and St. Vrain Valley School District. Youth up to the age of 19 who are at elevated risk for suicide, uninsured, or underinsured are eligible for funded counseling services through Rise Against Suicide. The organization receives referrals from private and public elementary, middle and high schools, community social workers, psychologists and mental health professionals, hospitals, and mental health facilities. Within hours of receiving a request for help, at-risk youth can be connected with qualified, private therapists. This immediate response is unique to Rise Against Suicide. 

The mental health crisis has been dramatically accelerated as part of the Covid crisis. Now, more than ever, communities need to engage with and help support organizations that provide mental health related services. Recently, this challenge has been particularly acute with children our community given the unique stressors of the Covid crisis.

The Emerge Virtual 5k Run is free to anyone, but also provides an opportunity to give financial support to Rise Against Suicide. Please join us.

The post Run With Me To Help Prevent Youth Suicide appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Dear Discord: Please go public and stay independent instead of being acquired. Love, Brad.

I’ve become a huge Discord fan and user of the past year. I’ve got many daily reference points from products that I use for real-time communication channels: Slack, Telegram, Signal, iMessage, Zoom, Voxer, Mighty, and of course, email.

An increasing number of my group communications is on Discord. There was a ramp-up on Slack several years ago across organizations, but I find it noisy, not terribly easy to navigate, and tiresome for various reasons.

In contrast, Discord is much easier and feels much more vibrant for dynamic communities. This then leads to lots of 1:1 comms across organizations, which until recently was really difficult with Slack, which is now sort of, but not completely, fixed since Slack rolled out Connect.

I stopped using Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn for any real-time comm stuff a while ago. While my iMessage is noisy, it’s calmed down a lot given wiring up some other stuff to the right channels.

I continue to believe that Zoom has a massive disruptive opportunity to obliterate Slack. Still, it’s clearly not a priority for them, and all that might now be irrelevant given Salesforce + Slack along with the Salesforce / Zoom relationship.

That brings me back to Discord. While it would be a smart move for Microsoft to acquire Discord, it would likely pin Discord into a particular segment of Microsoft given Teams along with Microsoft’s functional separation between their gaming business and their corporate business. I know nothing specific about the Microsoft / Discord discussions, but I expect it was primarily, if not entirely, on the gaming side of Microsoft. This would eliminate what I expect is Discord’s most interesting current vector, which is cross-organization collaboration within either affinity groups (communities) or for corporations with their customers.

I fantasize about having one app that deals with all the different sub-apps. Right now, that’s called “my computer” since I have to deal with many different apps. If the promise of APIs really came true, or if XMPP had worked out, or if Trillian had become a thing, this might have happened. But, as with most things in tech, the walled garden takes over when the revenue and profit imperative takes over in the context of monetizing users.

Real-time everything is broken right now. Yeah, it works at an application and network-level (quite brilliantly, and much better than 20 years ago), but it sucks at a user level.

There is so much to do here. Ironically, at least from my perspective, we need more companies (e.g., Discord – stay independent) rather than fewer companies working on this right now.

The post I’m Glad Discord Isn’t Being Acquired appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

The best businesses are data-driven and metrics-driven. Instead of simply tracking top-line metrics, every person in the organization understands their role, how they impact the business metrics, and how this impacts its larger goals. 

One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is fooling themselves into thinking they are metrics-driven because they are good at reporting high-level and often lagging metrics. Companies that achieve breakout success and longevity have a much deeper and richer understanding of their business’s nuances.

This work is hard, and while there are endless short-form posts about this on the web, there are few in-depth, comprehensive resources to help business builders figure this out. 

Consequently, I’m excited about a new book called LEVERS – The Framework For Building Repeatability into Your Business, a collaboration between Amos Schwartzfarb, Trevor Boehm, Cody Simms, and Troy Henikoff. The book is a play-by-play series of frameworks that any company can use to become data and metrics-driven.

I love how the book takes the mystery out of finding repeatability by putting forward simple-to-follow instructions. However, even though the instructions are easy, the work isn’t. 

Each of the authors has experience both as a founder and an investor. Amos Schwartzfarb is currently Managing Director of Techstars Austin, before which he’s helped to build six companies to nearly $1B in exit value. Cody Simms is presently SVP of Climate and Sustainability at Techstars, before which he was a Partner and SVP on Techstars’ investment team and was Techstars’ first Managing Director in Los Angeles. Trevor Boehm was formerly Program Director at Techstars Austin and Impact and then Managing Director at the Techstars Amazon Alexa Next program. And Troy Henikoff was formerly the founding member of Techstars Chicago and is now General Partner at Math Ventures.

Every entrepreneur and CEO should read LEVERS. It’s stage agnostic and will help you with at least the following things.

I highly recommend getting your copy of LEVERS – The Framework For Building Repeatability into Your Business today.

The post Book: LEVERS – The Framework For Building Repeatability into Your Business appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

On my run to Boulder on Saturday, I listened to The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. My run was about four hours long, which was roughly the time it took to listen to this spectacular book. The quick summary from Wikipedia follows:

Kaku explores the history of unification theories of Physics starting with Newton’s law of universal gravitation which unified our experience of gravity on Earth and the motions of the celestial bodies to Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics and the Standard Model. Kaku dubs the final Grand Unified Theory of relativity and quantum gravity The God Equation with an 11-dimensional String theory as the only self-consistent theory that seems to fit the bill.

I knew a bunch of the history Kaku covered, but he did it in a clear and beautiful way that built up to a bunch of contemporary theory that I couldn’t have explained prior to listening to the book. M-theory is still a complete mystery to me, but at least I understand the linkage to Trisolarans and their sophons a little better.

This morning, I had an email from Tom Keller pointing at a recent APOD from 4/16/21. It was additive to my experience running on 4/17 and listening to Kaku’s book.

Explanation: Light rays from accretion disks around a pair of orbiting supermassive black holes make their way through the warped space-time produced by extreme gravity in this stunning computer visualization. The simulated accretion disks have been given different false color schemes, red for the disk surrounding a 200-million-solar-mass black hole, and blue for the disk surrounding a 100-million-solar-mass black hole. That makes it easier to track the light sources, but the choice also reflects reality. Hotter gas gives off light closer to the blue end of the spectrum and material orbiting smaller black holes experiences stronger gravitational effects that produce higher temperatures. For these masses, both accretion disks would actually emit most of their light in the ultraviolet though. In the video, distorted secondary images of the blue black hole, which show the red black hole’s view of its partner, can be found within the tangled skein of the red disk warped by the gravity of the blue black hole in the foreground. Because we’re seeing red’s view of blue while also seeing blue directly, the images allow us to see both sides of blue at the same time. Red and blue light originating from both black holes can be seen in the innermost ring of light, called the photon ring, near their event horizons. Astronomers expect that in the not-too-distant future they’ll be able to detect gravitational waves, ripples in space-time, produced when two supermassive black holes in a system much like the one simulated here spiral together and merge.

You know nothing Jon Snow.

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