Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 22, 2011

Marc Andreessen recently wrote a long article in the WSJ which he asserted that “ Software Is Eating The World.” I enjoyed reading it, but I don’t think it goes far enough. I believe the machines have already taken over and resistance is futile. Regardless of your view of the idea of the singularity, we are now in a new phase of what has been referred to in different ways, but most commonly as the “information revolution.” I’ve never liked that phrase, but I p

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 6, 2011

If your company is interested in joining Startup Summer, please email me and I’ll get you plugged in. Startup Summer, a new program from Startup Colorado , will bring hard working, passionate college-age entrepreneurs to Boulder to work as summer interns for startup companies. We are looking for a total of 30 Boulder-based early-stage companies to participate as we are going to try to accomodate 30 students from around Colorado in the first year.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 9, 2011

Let’s put this in the category of “pet peeves” around things that are obsolete. One of my goals as a VC is to help create companies that cause obsolescence of existing products, companies, and industries. As a result I think about what’s becoming obsolete all the time. I don’t just think about this in the specific areas that we invest in, but in all aspects of my life.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 5, 2011

If you’re a regular reader, you know about my interest in the quantified self and exercise. You also know my struggle with losing that “last 20 pounds” which I’ve finally decided I am going to do once and for all. As part of this, I’m using a new program called Retrofit which was created by Jeff Hyman, a long time friend and entrepreneur, and some of the leading weight loss experts in the country .

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 26, 2011

As many of you know, I’ve been involved in advocating for the Startup Visa since the idea was first conceived in the fall of 2009. While it’s frustrating to me that some leaders in Congress are much more interested in trying to jam through bills, such as SOPA and PIPA, that fundamentally censor and undermine the structure of the Internet, rather than support entrepreneurs and the corresponding jobs that get created by creating a Startup Visa, I’m optimistic and hopeful that log

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 12, 2011

Recently my partners and I spent some time discussing three of our recent investments – Spanning , Yesware , and Attachments – which are each applications built on top of Google Apps. Specifically, they are built for Google Apps and available in the Google Apps Marketplace or the Chrome Web Store. Each company is going after something very different.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 27, 2011

It’s that time of year again. Everyone that publishes content and is looking for link bait is publishing a top 10 list of 2011. I’m getting asked daily to contribute – I finally decided to create a blog post so I could simply refer to it instead of saying “sorry – I hate top 10 lists, count me out.” 10. They are boring as shit. 9.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 7, 2011

I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the first time in 1975 when I was about 10 years old. I’ve read it several times over the last 35 years, but probably hadn’t read it in over a decade. My first business partner, Dave Jilk (now the Standing Cloud founder / CEO), gave it to me as a birthday gift last week. I just read it again and it was as powerful, inspiring, and enlightening as I remembered it.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 17, 2011

James Altucher is brilliant. Everyone on the planet should buy a copy of his new book I Was Blind But Now I See right now. You’ll likely hate some of it. Other parts will annoy you. Still others will seem simplistic, counterproductive, or just plain odd. But every page will make you think. I met James for the first time at Defrag this year. Eric Norlin invited him.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 19, 2011

Tonight’s book was Everything Is Obvious* which was cleverly subtitled *Once You Know The Answer with a special bonus subtitle How Common Sense Fails Us by Duncan Watts. And yes – for those of you keeping track at home, I didn’t read a book last night; I was working on mine instead. I enjoyed this book. As I was reading it, I kept coming up with alternate titles like Everything is Bullshit, The Macro is Irrelevant, Humans Don’t Reason Well, Common Sense Fucks Us Up, Pred

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 29, 2011

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the importance of a company announcing a financing in the absence of any other activity. “Dear World: We Just Raised $X From Investors A, B, and C.” Ok, but so what? In my book, there is only one real reason for this – to a ttract new potential employees : “We’ve just raised $X and are hiring 20 people including types A through types Q – see our jobs page at jobs.companyname.com and apply now.” Unfortunately, ve

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 5, 2011

I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the great things about the Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem. Over the past five years it’s been awesome to see things really blossom. But there are always problems of some sort. And we have a few here in Boulder which – in the spirit of helping understand how entrepreneur ecosystems work over time – are worth pointing out and talking about.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 29, 2011

Now that it’s winter time, I’m spending more time on my treadmill. While I run naked when I’m outside (no headphones, no music), I find running on a treadmill to be mindnumbingly dull. Pluck my eyeballs out, swallow them, then poke my fingers in my ears and pull out my cochlea, and then punch myself over and over again in the face until FAKEGRIMLOCK comes and rescues me from myself kind of dull.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 31, 2011

I’ve been obsessively tracking data about myself since 2009. The most visible data I track is on Daytum which includes Miles Run (by location), Books Read (by type), Airplane Flights (by carrier), and Nights In Town (by city). I also track all of my running data (most recently on RunKeeper and SmashRun ) and all of my health data (including what I eat) on Fitbit.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 22, 2011

I hate Christmas music. Hate, hate, hate. Call me Grinch Feld. I don’t care. It just makes me want to poke knitting needles in my ears to stop it. Amy and I were in City Market grocery shopping the other day and at some point I had to go outside and scream. It felt good enough that I was able to go back in the store and finish buying greek yogurt and vegetables.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 27, 2011

As entrepreneurship in Boulder continues to grow, Boulder Digital Works is offering a new course with Robert Reich (co-founder of OpenSpace, OneRiot, and the Boulder New Tech Meetup) called StartUp: Learning Entrepreneurism. This is the first BDW course open to anyone in the Boulder community to join BDW’s graduate students. StartUp begins with the premise that entrepreneurship, rather than being the result of genius and magic, can be learned.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 14, 2011

Many of the companies that we invest in are the leaders in their respective markets. Often they create the market. Sometimes they appear out of no where and dominate. And sometimes they are in a brutal fight every day with another company or two for market leadership. We don’t care which case it is – we just want to be investors in the companies that are #1 or #2 (and have a chance to be #1) in their markets.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 1, 2011

Today is my 46th birthday. I’m hanging out with a bunch of friends and family, enjoying their company, and reflecting on the past year. 45 was a good, but intense year. Lots of ups, a few downs, and much learned. Following are some of the things I’m chewing on as I start being 46. Mortality : I’ve had a lot of reminders of mortality lately.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 25, 2011

Jason Silva is a total stud. Every time he does another amazing video ecstatic metapattern rant” on Vimeo , he tweets me about it. Here’s his lastest. TO UNDERSTAND IS TO PERCEIVE PATTERNS from jason silva on Vimeo. Here’s what’s so amazing about this to me. I don’t think I know Jason. Maybe we’ve met once – I don’t know.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 23, 2011

Our friends Dick and Jane have decided to disband their company. The last two months had been tough for Dick and Jane – each of them felt the other wasn’t living up to their commitments. Praveena was working hard on the product, but as she observed the tension mounting between Dick and Jane, she started answering calls and emails from the recruiters who had been hounding her since she left her previous job.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 16, 2011

My grandfather had a stroke when he was 80. He lived another three years, trapped in his mind. Whenever I saw him, I think he recognized me, but he couldn’t really speak and had trouble reacting to anything I said to him. He was clearly very frustrated, and often angry – not at me, but at his inability to communicate. I’ve always imagined that inside his mind he knew everything that was going on, but he just couldn’t get the words out.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 25, 2011

I don’t celebrate Christmas. So my Christmas eve’s are chinese food and a movie (also known as “Jewish Christmas”) and Christmas day is usually spent in front of my computer writing after sleeping late, followed by a run, a nap, and another movie. This morning I slept until around 10am. Amy and I watched Hanna last night and I had a bunch of bizarre dreams as a result.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 4, 2011

Last week we announced our investment in Awe.sm. It’s squarely in our Glue and Protocol themes and is similar to investments we’ve made in SendGrid (for transactional email infrastructure) and Urban Airship (for push notification infrastructure). Oh – and the founders – Jonathan Strauss and Laurie Voss are – well – awesome.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 30, 2011

I’ve generally ignored the mainstream media during the original US financial crisis and the more recent European financial crisis. My lack of interest in mainstream media (TV, newspaper, and magazines) – especially about non-tech related stuff – is well known. The last domino to fall was when I finally stopped listening to NPR a few years ago.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 20, 2011

I’m a big fan of the CLEAR card and the CLEAR service. When it first launched, I got it immediately and used it wherever it was available. Fortunately this included Denver, New York, and San Francisco. If you don’t know of CLEAR, it’s a biometric card that you use in the exclusive CLEARlane at airports to bypass the security line.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 19, 2011

If you are looking to be in on the ground floor of a hot, new mobile startup based in Boulder, now is your chance. We’ve funded a new company focused on the business conferencing / collaboration market that uses a unique mobile approach. Our co-investors including Google Ventures, SoftBank Capital, SoftTech, and a few prominent angels. The team is led by an experienced entrepreneur who I have worked with in the past and he’s built a dynamite founding team.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 26, 2011

Saturday’s book was Hostage: London by Geoffrey Household. Actually, it was Thursday, Friday, and Saturday’s. Normally I’d knock off a 240 page Crime Thriller in an evening. But this one was different. It was written in 1978, set in London, and written by a British writer. The writing style was very 1970′s British, the geography was unknown to me, the politics were bizarre and confusing, and the character development took about 80 pages before I actually understood who wa

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