It’s your job to improve your team

At this year’s NVCA meeting, my partner Jason Mendelson (who was the chair of the event) interviewed Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter. Dick is an awesome CEO, awesome human, and awesome interviewee. Among other things, he’s hilarious, and PandoDaily wrote a fun summary of the interview in the...

Brad Feld

Searching for a better way to make airline reservations

I travel constantly – at least 50% of the time and sometimes as much as 75% of the time. My partners at Foundry Group all travel a lot – think 100,000 miles per year for each of this.. We committed to this when we started Foundry Group as our strategy was to invest across the [...]...

Brad Feld

What is the appropriate time horizon of a financial model for VCs?

Q: When building a financial projection model for a pitch to VC’s, should you include future rounds of funding in the model or simply show what measurable goal you are trying to achieve with the current round you are seeking? A (Brad): It depends on the stage of the company. But first, it’s impo...

Brad Feld

One of our investors just closed shop. What should we do?

Q: What is the best path to take if a VC which has invested in my company closes down, but we have not exited and are still operating profitably ? What happens to the LLC entity that was formed at the time of investment? Do we ask the VC for our shares back or buy [...]...

Brad Feld

Small experiments, often

This post first appeared in the WSJ Accelerators series titled The $100,000 Experiment in response to the question “When should you make a substantive change to one or more parts of your business model?” During the past few years, the word “pivot” has become one of the most overused words w...

Brad Feld

What costs are considered reimbursable to the founders of a startup company?

Q: What costs are considered reimbursable to the founder of a start-up company?  More specifically, if the founder has been boot-strapping his company since inception, and he agrees to a series a term sheet with a VC firm, are the operational costs incurred by the founder between this time and the ...

Brad Feld

If you can’t explain what you do in a paragraph, you’ve got a problem

Here’s an email exchange that I had in the past 24 hours with an entrepreneur. Remember, I try to answer all of my emails and be responsive to any inquiry – this was a random one (which I get between 25 and 100 a day). Entrepreneur: I just wanted to touch base with you and [...]...

Brad Feld

Reward early feedback with features

I’ve invested in hundreds of companies that have started from scratch and I’ve been though some crazy number of product launches, especially if you include all of the TechStars companies I’ve been involved with. These alphas, or betas, or v1.0 or v0.1 launches are exciting moments as they sign...

Brad Feld

All CEOs should be an outside director for one company

This week I had two meetings with CEOs of companies we’ve recently invested in where the question of “what is an ideal board meeting” came up. I’m writing an entire book on it calledStartup Boards: Reinventing the Board of Directors to Better Support the Entrepreneur so it’s easy for me to...

Brad Feld

Guidelines for interviewing at startup

My long time friend Chris Moody, president and COO of Gnip, has offered to write some guest posts on management – we’ll call the series Moody on Management. In addition to being an outstanding early stage / high growth executive, Chris has made a study of management in startups and is extremely...