French startup Qarnot unveiled a new computing heater specifically made for cryptocurrency mining. You’ve read that right, the QC1 is a heater for your home that features a passive computer inside. And this computer is optimized for mining. While most people use laptops, back in the golden days of computer towers, you could heat a room with a couple of desktop computers. And heat is… Read More
SolarisBank, the Berlin-based “banking platform” co-founded by fintech company builder Finleap, appears to be on quite a roll. Read More
Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit about geography as it pertains to IT and IT-enabled services. That includes healthcare IT. Our audiences are focused on IT-enabled services. One core algorithm...
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Wyoming, a wide-open state with plenty of free wind power, is continuing to be a surprising leader in cryptocurrency legislation. To wit: their recent passing of H.B. No. 0070, a bill that allows the sale of “open Blockchain tokens” to be exempt from regulation and money sending legislation. These tokens are very specific in their use and would more commonly be called… Read More
Fishbrain, the Sweden-made mobile app and social network for sport fishing, is disclosing $13.5 million in Series B funding. The round is led by B Capital Group, the VC fund founded by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, with participation from SoftBank Ventures Korea, and existing investors Northzone, and Industrifonden. Read More
Sramana Mitra: The numbers that you quoted like $1 million to $2 million investment in a $5 million round, from the universe that we operate in, people are not ready to raise a $5 million round...
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Geniac, the London-based startup that provided an “office as a service” for small and medium-sized businesses, is soon to enter the deadpool. Read More
Researchers estimate the global IT Business Management (ITBM) sector to grow at more than 20% annually over the next few years. The industry was estimated at a $2 billion market back in 2016. IT...
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I regularly get asked by other VCs about how we do our offsites.
When we started Foundry Group in 2006, we had a very deliberate quarterly process in an effort to learn all about each other and become highly effective at working together. For the first three years, we were disciplined about the timing and process, used an outside facilitator, and always spent one night away together as a group. This was intense and rocky for the first few years, as we had to work through a lot of stuff as individuals and as a team, even though we had all been working together since the early 2000s at our prior firm.
Around 2010, as we started to feel like we had hit our stride working together as a team, we shifted from a facilitator driven model but maintained our quarterly rhythm. Recently, after adding Lindel, Moody, and Jamey to the team, weâve shifted back to a facilitator driven model in an acknowledgment of the value of really learning each other and now becoming a highly effective team of seven, instead of four.
I think a regular offsite rhythm is critical for every VC firm of any size (including solo GPs, where the offsite can include either the whole team or a few of your key LPs and advisors.) While Iâm sure there are different approaches that can work, when I reflect on almost a dozen years of our offsites, I think the approach, combined with the simplicity, has served us extremely well.
So, in case itâs useful, following is our approach to offsites.
Facilitator:Â For stretches of time, especially early on in our working relationships, or during any rough patches, weâve used an outside facilitator. If you want a referral to anyone, just email me.
Close to Home:Â We try to avoid the offsite becoming a boondoggle. We keep it close to home and relatively modest. Many of them are either at Jasonâs house, my house, or a hotel in Denver. Occasionally weâll go to a resort in Colorado Springs (a two hour drive). Once every few years weâll combine it with a trip somewhere (New York, Chicago) just to change the atmosphere a little, but even then, other than a fancy dinner somewhere, itâs on the modest side. But we never do offsites at the office (I mean, itâs an offsite after all.)
At least a full day:Â We start first thing in the morning and finish with dinner. We often spend the night together (for many years Seth, Ryan, and I had assigned bedrooms in Jasonâs house.) We schedule a second day â if we end early, we have time to catch up on things, including stuff that came out of our discussion.
Rotating leadership: When there were four of us, each of us led the offsite once a year. During the stretch we are in through the end of 2018, which is using a facilitator to help us wire up the next level team of the seven of us, Iâve been the leader so there is some consistency of approach. The leader is a lightweight leader, just making sure the offsite happens with an agenda, as youâll see in a second.
Crowdsourced agenda around two topics:Â Like many things in our world, we develop the agenda collaboratively and continuously. A month before the offsite, the leader shares a Google Doc with logistics and a skeleton agenda. We then fill it out, rarely exceeding a page. There are two primary segments: (1) our portfolio and (2) our relationship. By using these as the driver, we can go deep on a number of different issues, including our overall strategy. We try to keep the agenda high level and have a section called âOther Things to Discussâ which allows us to put up anything tactical on anyoneâs mind. The leader curates the agenda and we finalize it the week before the offsite.
Portfolio: We have lots of different approaches to this, but itâs essentially a deep dive on a portion of the portfolio. The leader chooses the approach, which is often a brand new one, so we donât get into stale rhythms. My historical favorite is the use of index cards with company logos on them. The leader shuffles the cards (our entire active portfolio, which is now a lot of cards) and turns them over one at a time. Whoever is on the board is not allowed to speak â they have to listen as the other partners reviews the portfolio company. Once the non-board member partners have talked about what they think is going on at the company and what we need to focus on, the board member gets to weigh in. Since our model is that everyone works on everything together, this is an incredibly insightful approach at two levels: (1) the company info and (2) our level of internal communication about the company. It also reinforces the value of being vulnerable to your partners â itâs often really hard to sit quietly and listen to the details without jumping in and trying to steer the conversation or inject your point of view into the mix. A more recent approach that I loved (that Seth came up with) is to start with a portfolio value assessment by company. We put an X-Y graph up on the wall with the Y-axis being amount of work (high to low) and the X-axis being the value to the fund of our ownership in the particular company ranging from $0 to $225m (where a company returned the fund.) We each put the index card for the company we were responsible for up on the wall in the place we think it belongs. We then discussed the entire portfolio for each fund, which generates a lot of discussion and calibration (including moving a lot of index cards around, since if we did the exercise blind, weâd all have different views.)
Ourselves: We either address the question âHow Are You Doing?â (which is personal and professional, internal or with regard to others in the partnership) or do a set of facilitated exercises. We often start with a Red/Yellow/Green check-in. We orient the discussion around each person and take our time, rather than rush through updates. If there are conflicts between people, they surface quickly since we are all tuned to talk about struggles we are having, rather than focus on the awesomeness of how great our universe is. Each of us approaches this with our soul wide open â the starting point is trust, vulnerability, authenticity, and other words like that. While âHow Are You Doing?â is a simple question, it opens the door wide for a variety of things, and the conversations that have ensued around one person have often generated a richness of discussion that lasts hours and often involves tears and other surprising emotions.
Obvious but important meeting rules:Â No phone. No email. If you have to go to the bathroom, go. We always make sure there are snacks in the room. Donât interrupt. Listen with both ears; talk with one mouth. We build 30-minute breaks into the agenda so we can catch up, and, more importantly, breathe and stretch during the day. Thereâs usually a chance to exercise before dinner.
Dinner is a critical part of things:Â On some occasions, we have a meaty topic to discuss that we save for dinner. On others, we use it to heal our relationships and remind ourselves that even though we have plenty of conflicts and struggles, we are best friends. We usually do this in a private room somewhere so we can take the conversation wherever we want to go.
We try not to rush. We are gentle with each other, reminding ourselves that a key value of Foundry Group is brutal honesty delivered kindly. And we always remember that oneâs individual truth may not be âthe truthâ and itâs important to be willing and able to explore what happened, or is happening, in a particular situation, instead of simply what you think happened.
Finally, we are always trying new things, so if you have stuff you do in offsites that are different, or additive, to our approach, toss them up in the comments.
Also published on Medium.
Sramana Mitra: If you do that capital efficiently and exit into a large company with the channel that has all those different verticals that they can access, you could conceivably broaden that...
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Mark Hasebroock is Founder at Dundee Venture Capital, based in Omaha, Nebraska. The firm invests in the Midwest, likes small, capital-efficient deals and are open to early exits.
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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Padmaja Ruparel was recorded in December 2017. ...
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Sramana Mitra: The question is more about trends. In the companies that you’ve seen, what are people working on that are interesting? Sunil Bhargava: It’s extremely broad. We have companies in the...
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According to a market report by Zion Market research, the global identity and access management market is estimated to grow at 12.5% annually over the next few years to $15.92 billion by 2022. The...
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The hyperbolic headlines are once again accompanying the articles about Silicon Valley. A Sunday NY Times article titled Silicon Valley Is Over, Says Silicon Valley kicks off what I expect is another wave of this. It references a recent Wired article titled Everyone Hates Silicon Valley, Except Its Imitators,
Go read them all and then tune back in here. Iâll wait.
Buried deep within the NYT article is an admission. âComplaints about Silicon Valley insularity are as old as the Valley itselfâ followed by an anecdote about Jim Clark moving to Florida during the dotcom era. Blink twice if you donât know who Jim Clark is; blink once if you downloaded Netscape from an FTP site somewhere when it was still called Mosiac. And, blink three times if you realize that Netscape is now owned by Oath, which is a subsidiary of Verizon, which is headquartered in New York, and is the merger of Bell Atlantic (Philadelphia), NYNEX (New York), and GTE (which, awesomely, bought BBN, created GTE Internetworking, spun it off as Genuity after the Bell Atlantic merger, which was then acquired out of bankruptcy by Level 3 (Broomfield, Colorado â adjacent to Boulder) which is now owned by CenturyLink (Louisiana)). Blink four times if you are still here and followed all of that. Kind of entertaining that Netscape led us to Monroe, Louisiana.
Now, go read Ian Hathawayâs post titled Silicon Valley is Not Over. He nails it.
Dan Primack waded in with a tweet.
The âSilicon Valley VCs moving to the Midwestâ story is a bit like your friend saying after a vacation to a tropical island: âI might just quit my job and live there forever.â
Itâs not happening.
â Dan Primack (@danprimack) March 5, 2018
Itâs worth clicking through and reading the comment thread. Itâs delightful.
Silicon Valley is not over. Over 100 years since its notional inception, itâs a fascinating and amazing ecosystem. But itâs also not the only place you can create technology companies. Iâm sitting in a hotel in New York and, according to a recent article from Bloomberg, New York Will Never Be Silicon Valley. And Itâs Good With That.
The real story is that you can create startups, and thriving startup communities anywhere. Imagine the NYT article was titled âIn a Moment of Introspection, Silicon Valley VCs Realize That There Are Tech Startups Outside of Silicon Valley.â Nah â that wouldnât get as many clicks.
Also published on Medium.
Sramana Mitra: Very much in alignment with the philosophy we practice here is capital-efficient entrepreneurship. We encourage our entrepreneurs to bootstrap as much as possible and do things with...
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The co-founders behind Centrifuge have previously created an essential company with Taulia. Now, they want to do it again, but on the blockchain. Taulia is a supply-chain financing company. It has raised over $150 million and moves billions of dollars per day. 97 out of the Fortune 100 companies use it to improve liquidity when it comes to accounts payable. Let’s say you’re a… Read More
Over the past decade, there has been a ferocious rise in the freelance economy in the United States. Millions of people today work on platforms ranging from Uber and Lyft to Taskrabbit and Fiverr, accepting what are usually short-term tasks that can be completed efficiently and repeatedly. While these casual jobs have been the focus of intense scrutiny about their pay structures and work… Read More
Everyone knew the MoviePass deal is too good to be true — and as is so often the case these days, it turns out you’re not the customer, you’re the product. And in this case they’re not even attempting to camouflage that. Mitch Lowe, the company’s CEO, told an audience at a Hollywood event that “we know all about you.” Read More
Alan Chiu is Partner at XSeed, a seed-focused venture fund based in Silicon Valley. Alan talks about the level of risk his firm is willing to take and under what circumstances.
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