Scaleworks, a private equity firm based in San Antonio, Texas, apparently couldn’t wait until after the holidays to share the news of its latest purchase. The firm announced it was acquiring Keen IO in a Medium blog post yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and neither company was available for comment beyond the blog post, but Keen has raised close to $30 million since it… Read More
Sramana Mitra: What else is tricky that is worth discussing that people can learn from? Jason VandeBoom: I think it’s really trying to find that optimal speed of growing. Just in the last 12 months...
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Molekule, a San Francisco-based startup with a sleekly designed molecular air purifier started as an immigrant dream twenty years ago and ended up being named one of Time’s top 25 inventions of 2017. The inventor Yogi Goswami came up with the idea when his baby son Dilip started having a hard time breathing the air around him. Dilip suffered from severe asthma but no air purifier at… Read More
December 22, 2017
As we start spinning up Defy Ventures in Colorado, we are doing a Business Coaching Day at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado. Itâs one of our first Defy Colorado events and Governor Hickenlooper will be joining us for the day.
There will be around 80 Entrepreneurs-in-Training. While we were planning on having spaces for 50 volunteers, weâve already filled over 40 of them before even talking about the program so there are only a few spaces left.
If you are interested, the event is happening on February 8th, 2018 from 9:00 am â 4:30 pm.
For a taste of what the experience is like, watch the video above or go to my post Understanding Privilege â My Experience in Prison.
Also published on Medium.
“I have FOMO for the future”, says Sam Lessin. That’s why his startup Fin is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter. For $1 a minute, 24/7, Fin gets your digital chores done. Message, email, or speak a request and a real person… Read More
What a challenging, exhilarating year it has been for women everywhere, starting from the women’s March on Washington to former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s eye-opening and now famous blog post to the #metoo movement that has swept the country, washing dozens of sexual predators out of their powerful roles in the process. All the while, women in tech have been driving their… Read More
I started a literary group about a year ago focused on serious literary works. We call it Caravanserai Literati. I have always been passionate about literature. This endeavor, however, is a return to...
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Mattermark, the site for startup and company data, is shutting down its own business after selling in a disappointing outcome to FullContact.In a document obtained by TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Danielle Morrill wrote that “common stockholders will not be receiving anything in this deal.” In other words, Mattermark employee shares are worthless.It was just last year that… Read More
More than a year and a half ago, I wrote about Coach, a startup offering tools for tutors and other freelancers to make money and operate their business online. Since then, the company has shifted focus in a big way, and it recently announced that it’s raised $3 million in seed funding. It’s got a new name, too — Podia. Read More
Despite repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate this week, health insurance startup Oscar Health expects to pull in nearly $1 billion in revenue and enroll a quarter of a million members in 2018. The revenue prediction first reported in Axios and signups are quite a feat for the insurance company meant for the digital age. Read More
When Nailab (Nairobi Incubation Lab) opened its doors seven years ago in Kenya, it wanted to be the Y Combinator for Kenya, Nailab CEO Sam Gichuru told me. In order to accomplish that goal, Gichuru realized Nailab would need a lot of money, which it did not have at the time. That’s why it initially began as a co-working space. Read More
This book was a delight. I started reading it earlier this year, caught up quickly (I started in July), and then mostly read a page each day when I was in the bathroom in the morning. I let it unfold slowly, reading the daily quote and Ryan Holidayâs (and Stephen Hanselmanâs) thoughts on the quote, and then rereading the quote.
I was near the end so I finished it off last night. I smiled when after I read the December 31 meditation.
Stoicism is fascinating to me. While I donât categorize myself as anything and try to resist being put in boxes, I like to take elements of different philosophies, religions, approaches, and styles and weave them into the fabric of me. As I was reading The Daily Stoic I found many ideas that spoke to me.
Iâve known Ryan from a distance for a while. We ended up at a dinner together at either SXSW or CES a number of years together and I remember an interesting and engaged conversation. For a while, I subscribed to his monthly Reading List email but in a fit of unsubscribing from everything, I unsubscribed.
I just re-subscribed.
Several times a year, I send a book (or two) to all the CEOs in our portfolio. I sent this one out this fall. Iâve heard back from a few that they enjoyed it, and Iâm hoping that most of the CEOs are at least dipping into it.
If youâve heard any of the names Zeno of Citium, Chrysippus, Cato the Younger, Seneca, Epictetus, Hierocles, or Marcus Aurelius, then youâve heard of at least one of the famous Stoic philosophers. If youâve studied any of them, you are in for a treat with this book as it presents Stoicism in a unique and very accessible way.
For a taste of the kind of quotes Holiday and Hanselman riff off of in the book, take a look at the fun Brain Quotes pages for Marcus Aurelius and Seneca.
The book starts with a quote every day on January 1st. Youâve still got a few days to grab a copy from Amazon and start the year out with a daily dose of Stoicism.
Also published on Medium.
Taplytics is announcing what it calls its “Intelligent Experience Cloud,” bringing together products for A/B testing, messaging, analytics and more To a certain extent, this is just new branding for existing Taplytics tools, highlighting the fact that the Y Combinator-backed startup has expanded beyond mobile A/B testing by launching a full suite of products to help businesses… Read More
While I enjoy a good biography of a historical figure, I love autobiographies of living people. They are hit or miss â either awesome or awful.
Sam Zellâs autobiography Am I Being Too Subtle? was awesome. I was sent a copy by an editor at Penguin Group who sends me books, presumably that he thinks Iâll like. While this was in my infinite pile of books, I grabbed it randomly last night and polished it off tonight.
If youâve never heard Sam Zell talk, hereâs a recent short clip of him talking about entrepreneurship and a few other things.
I donât know Sam Zell. While I only have second-degree connections to him, Iâve known of him for a while and I spent an afternoon touring his apartment in Chicago as part of a Wellesley Art Tour that he graciously opened his house for. So I had a little sense of him.
Whenever I read an autobiography, Iâm always curious about the tone the person takes when talking about themselves and what theyâve learned over their life. When itâs consistent with the view I have of the person from a distance, I value the content more, regardless of what the content is. In this case, Zellâs personal reflection mapped pretty well to my impression of him over different short snippets of content from the last 20+ years.
I loved hearing the history of his entrepreneurial evolution, from his origin story in his early 20s to current time 50 years later. Heâs had massive successes, but also some very big blunders along the way. While heâs gotten lots of criticism for specific failures like the enormous take private (via a leveraged buyout) â and subsequent bankruptcy a year later â of the Tribune Company, he doesnât dodge his mistakes in this book. He takes the good with the bad and has a mantra of never taking himself too seriously, which he calls âthe Eleventh Commandment.â
â⦠the Eleventh Commandment acknowledges that weâre all human beings who inhabit the world and are given the gift of participating in the wonders around us â as long as we donât set ourselves apart from them.âÂ
Of course, he followed this section by talking about the two stately, well-fed ducks that have their own heated pool and live on a deck outside his office in Chicago.
His love of his early partner, Bob Lurie, who died in 1990 at age 48, really stuck with me. It had an emotional tenor that is similar to my feelings for my partners.
Most autobiographies have some self-deprecation in them, but it often stands out as awkward â almost like the writer was following the autobiography-101 script which says âmake sure every now and then you sprinkle in some self-deprecation so you feel more authentic to the reader.â While there were plenty of self-deprecating and even cringe-worthy moments in the book, Zell wove them in with style.
I read autobiographies for the stories, not for historical truth. The stories in this one were great.
Â
Also published on Medium.
Use of HTTPS (which stands for HTTP Secure) has grown from 13% of the top one million websites to 19% in the past year. With major media sites such as NYTimes.com joining the movement, now over half of all web requests are served securely to the browser.
Two years after the launch of Letâs Encrypt, this is fantastic progress. In this new era of state sponsored hacking and fully professionalized cybercrime, it is heartening to see engineers get seriously organized and tackle something on the scale of securing the entire web.
Even a few years ago I would have been skeptical this would be possible. Until very recently, setting up HTTPS meant purchasing and managing certificates and configuring them correctly to work with your web server. This is a non-trivial effort and many people and companies didnât bother with it. This was especially true with the long tail of websites, but also included many major ones.
The drive to HTTPS the web did not happen by accident. It is akin to an old-fashioned barn raising but on a global scale, organized by engineers with good intentions to protect users, and ensure that the web remains a vibrant and trusted ecosystem into the future.
A few things had to come together for securing (HTTPSâing) the web to become reality:
The global internet security community had to get serious about this problem. With Google now stiffly penalizing the SEO of non-HTTPS sites, and Chrome and Firefox escalating browser warnings, website owners are rapidly supporting security.Certificate management had to become cheap and easy. We have Letâs Encrypt to thank for that.Website technology providers had to make HTTPS a turnkey experience. This is happening now.When you bring up Feld Thoughts in your browser, you should see something like the following:
Pantheon, one of our portfolio companies, hosts my website and made this happen, in zero clicks. With Pantheon, HTTPS just works out of the box and they are now providing HTTPS (powered by Letâs Encrypt) for all 200,000 of their websites, free of charge. Even better, it is powered by their new Global CDN, with over 30 points of presence and the most sophisticated Drupal and WordPress caching technology available on the market.
I am happy with what the Pantheon team has built. They didnât cut any corners:
HTTPS is available for free as a turnkey service for all plan levelsBecause this feature is deeply integrated into their CDN, you donât pay a performance penalty for deploying HTTPSTheir CDN speeds up pageloads by 50% to 300% by caching full page content (traditionally almost impossible to achieve with dynamic CMS systems)When you load your website, do you see the happy green box of Secure âhttpsâ? If so, nice work! If you donât, do your website visitors a favor â email your website developer and ask them to help you set it up.
If they tell you it is too much work and/or too expensive, then you should look into changing hosts.
Also published on Medium.
There arenât many similarities between the workplace of an NFL football player and that of a tech entrepreneur. My body doesnât get pounded each week. Decisive critical thinking and typing speed are valued more than the last time I ran 40 yards in under five seconds. In both places, though, competitiveness and operating at peak performance are prized.
But what if someone falters? Or a friend or family member needs help? Over half of all humans will experience a major mental health challenge in their lifetime. This includes the VC listening to a pitch or the linebacker staring down a receiver.
Few of us show this in the workplace. Even though many of us struggle at one time or another, needing help is not part of our cultural norms as founders, entrepreneurs, and investors.
This is why I took notice when the NFL Players Association recently spoke up for mental health.
Last month, each player in the league received a âThe World Needs You Hereâ bracelet as part of the NFLPAâs partnership with Active Minds around their Your Mind, Your Body, Your Health initiative. Some of the fittest men on the planet are now wearing it to acknowledge that everyone â their friends, family, even themselves â struggle with depression, anxiety, or another mental health issue.
I was recently introduced to Active Minds by my friend Jeremy Shure and then introduced to the Executive Director, Alison Malmon by another friend, Chris Schroeder. Alison recently moved to Boulder from the east coast, so we got together. Endorsements by Jeremy and Chris mean a lot so I wasnât surprised when I had a spectacular first meeting with Alison. Iâm delighted that sheâs now living in Boulder.
Active Minds is a premier nonprofit working with young people to change the way mental health is talked about. The NFL players are sharing the message that mental fitness is just as important as physical fitness. And just like an NFL player who has an ACL injury that needs expert treatment and time to heal, the same is true for a mental health issue.
When people with a platform â celebrities, football players, me, you â are open about mental health, the stigma lessens. In the more than 500 high schools and colleges where Active Minds works, this has been happening for the last 15 years. Students with influence are changing the conversation about mental health among their peers and networks.
It takes only a few people, and then a few more people, to be open, authentic, and transparent. If you are interested in joining the #NeedYouHere movement,
Also published on Medium.
December 16, 2017
Iâve decided to stop serving on non-profit boards.
I used to have a rule that Iâd only serve on three non-profit boards at a time. I let this get out of control and found myself on eight non-profit boards with a commitment to join a ninth one.
During our Q4 vacation last month, Amy and I talked a lot about this. I realized that I wasnât enjoying the non-profit board service, even though I deeply enjoy my personal engagement and support of the organizations Iâm on the boards of.
There was an intellectual conflict here that Amy and I spent a lot of time discussing. Our philanthropic work is important to us. However, the actual board service part of it, while fulfilling to Amy, is not fulfilling to me.
Itâs also very time-consuming. While most of the boards only meet four times a year, each board meeting is three hours long. If I include another two hours for reviewing materials in advance and travel, thatâs 20 hours per year per board. For eight boards, thatâs 160 hours/year. If I only worked 40 hours/week, thatâs four weeks of work. While I work a lot more than 40 hours/week, the five hours per board meeting is probably low, especially if I physically travel to a board meeting.
My conclusion was that I could be just as impactful to the non-profits we support â and in some cases even more so â without being on the boards. Instead of consuming my time with board meetings, Iâll engage directly with the CEOs and Executive Directors of these non-profits in ways that are specifically helpful to them. Iâm already doing this in many cases, so itâs not a direct re-allocation of time, but rather a huge time saving on my part, which allows me to more focused â and more enthusiastic â about the work Iâm actually doing.
Iâve now talked with all the CEOs/EDs of the non-profit boards I used to serve on. They all understand my perspective and, in most cases, are supportive and excited about the change in my involvement. As my goal is not to withdraw from the things Iâm involved in, but to increase my impact by shifting my focus and activities, the feedback was good positive reinforcement to me.
Also published on Medium.
December 14, 2017
Amy and I love to read. For a number of years, Iâve recorded everything I read on Goodreads. When I write a blog post reviewing a book, I usually (but not consistently â¦) repost it on Goodreads and occasionally remember to post it on Amazon. Regardless, the definitive log of what Iâve read is on my Goodreads Bookshelf.
Last year Goodreads started doing a fun compilation of all that a user read in the past year with their Year in Books summary.
My goal for this year was to read 100 books. Iâm at 73. The year isnât over yet and I typically read a dozen or so books in the last two weeks of the year so weâll see where I actually end up.
Iâve always been a high rater of books. Instead of 1 to 5, I almost always rate in the 3 to 5 range. I do this because if I donât like a book while Iâm reading it, I stop, and donât log it.
Not surprisingly my three top genreâs are non-fiction, fiction, and biography. In the fiction category is a lot of science fiction. Iâm not sure where the categories came from but in 2018 Iâll do a better job of shelving my books by actual category.
22,201 pages is a lot of pages to read. For perspective, thatâs about 60 pages a day of reading. My reading between Kindle and physical book is probably 75% Kindle / 25% physical. When I reflect on Amazonâs impact on my reading (which includes Goodreads), itâs pretty remarkable.
My goal in 2018 will again be 100 books.
Also published on Medium.
December 13, 2017
An adapted essay from Noam Cohen new book The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball showed up several weeks in the New York Times in the article Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend. Itâs an important one to read slowly and carefully as there are several key points in it.
In the last week, two early Facebook execs made remarkably critical statements about what they were involved in helping create. It started when Sean Parker talked with Axios about how Facebook exploits human psychology.
âI donât know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and ⦠it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ⦠It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what itâs doing to our childrenâs brains.â
Then, the other day, Chamath Palihapitiya gave a talk at Stanford Graduate School of Business where he said:
âI think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society worksâ
A decade ago at my MIT Sloan 20th Reunion, I gave a lecture where I said that âprivacy was dead, we just donât know it yet.â I had no idea how prescient that statement would be, but even in 2008, I had a deep unease that we had no real idea what the next decade would bring.
Itâs here. When Web 2.0 began in the mid-2000s, there was incredible enthusiasm about how technology was going to change everything. Googleâs âDo No Evilâ mantra was on everyoneâs lips as a rallying cry for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to âchange the worldâ and âmake a dent in the universe.â Twitter was becoming the worldâs town hall and helping facilitate revolutions like the Arab Spring.
Amy and I were sitting in front of our computers on Sunday working on some stuff. During a pause, we started talking about how different things are from when we first started dating 28 years ago.
I woke up thinking about that this morning. Now that the five most valuable companies in the world are tech companies (Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook with Tencent and Alibaba coming on strong) and the total market cap of cryptocurrencies also being in that league, itâs hard to deny the extreme influence of these companies on our society. As I sit at my desk, typing on my Apple Computer into WordPress in a Chrome browser, listening to music I asked Amazon to play throughout my house, well, you get the idea.
The blog post title is a rhetorical question, so Iâll let you answer it in the comments if you want â¦
Also published on Medium.
December 11, 2017
We have just hours. The FCC is about to vote to end net neutralityâbreaking the fundamental principle of the open Internetâand only an avalanche of calls to Congress can stop it. So we decided to help âBreak the Internetâ on our sites. You can also support on Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube or in whatever wild creative way you can to get your audience to contact Congress. Thatâs how we win. Are you in?
More info here.
Also published on Medium.
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