Feld Thoughts

MAY 18, 2012

I’ve been writing about boards of directors some lately – both changing my behavior as well as thinking out loud as I explore reinventing how boards work for the book “Startup Boards” that I’m working on with Mahendra Ramsinghani. All fit in the context of continuous communications as I believe three things about early stage companies and their boards. 1.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 6, 2012

The Founder’s Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman is another book that belongs on every entrepreneur’s bookshelf. It’s excellent. I met Noam for the first time last week when I was at HBS. I was on a panel of VCs (me, Mike Maples Jr., Kate Mitchell, and David Frankel) talking to a room full of HBS alumni who are VCs. Noam and I had exchanged several emails over the past few months and he sent me a review copy of the book but it got lost in my infinite pile of books to read.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 8, 2012

Yesterday I sent emails out passing on participating in two seed rounds for companies I really like. They had lots of investors trying to invest and each company was competitive with two other seed stage companies we’ve seen in the past 30 days. All are exciting, all are working on something that we like, and all of them are at the starting line with different strengths and weaknesses.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 21, 2012

I judged Lean Startup Machine Boulder yesterday afternoon. I had a blast and thought the program was really impressive. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into and usually protect my weekends pretty aggressively from stuff like this so I can spend time with Amy and recover / catch up from the week but for some reason Trevor Owens (Lean Startup Machine CEO) and Ray Wu convinced me to come out and play.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 22, 2012

Chris Moody , president and COO of Gnip, is back with a guest post in his Moody on Management series. Following are Chris’ thoughts on negotiating compensation with a prospective employee. Enjoy and comment freely! In my last post, I provided a few tips for job candidates when interviewing at a startup. This week I wanted to cover a simple process for hiring managers to follow when communicating with candidates about salary requirements.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 12, 2012

Over the past year, I’ve been systematically trying to change the way the board meetings work for the companies that I’m on the boards of. I’ve done a bunch of experiments and continue to learn what works and what doesn’t work. Ever since I started investing in the mid-1990′s I’ve been exposed to a concept called “board observer rights.” When we did investments at Mobius Venture Capital, in addition to a board seat, we always got board observer rig

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 15, 2012

This morning I had a gritty, sweating, damp, dirty run down Bowery through Chinatown and back. It was a short run – only 30 minutes and my coach’s note for me was simple and clear: “One of those “throw away” runs that mean a lot to long term fitness improvement.” So I did it. I’ve never run down Bowery. I’ve done the East River many times and ended up under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge, but I don’t recall ever seeing them from the top.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 20, 2012

If you are a developer, I encourage you to carve out an hour and watch TechStars CEO David Cohen’s presentation at RailsConf 2012 (30 minute presentation and outstanding 30 minutes of Q&A). He starts out with the assertion that “developers are the new investors” - how could you not be interested in hearing more about that? David and I wrote a book last year called Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup and this is his riff to a room full of developers

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 20, 2012

Today’s post is a guest post from my friend Nicholas Napp. We first met five years ago and while I’ve never invested in anything he’s done, I’ve tried to be helpful along the way. Nick is currently running a company called MoveableCode and has a great Kickstarter campaign going for his latest product Incantor (Magic Made Real).

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 29, 2012

Over the weekend, Kwin Kramer, the CEO of Oblong , wrote a great essay on TechCrunch titled Hey Kids, Get Off My Lawn: The Once And Future Visual Programming Environment. He starts off with a great Mark Twain quote. “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” Mark Twain, ”Old Times on the Mississippi”.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 26, 2012

On my run this morning along the Charles River, I decided I was finally recovered from my 50 mile run on 4/7/12. The end of my run brought me by the Hatch Shell and I smiled, even though it was muggy, cloudy, and there were too many people around. I’m now sitting in the Ritz Bar (they now call it the Taj, but that doesn’t work for me) a few hours later with Amy doing some writing while she reads.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 24, 2012

Sphero is now available in some Brookstone stores around the US. There’s a handy map on the Sphero site and I’ll include a list at the bottom of this post. Occasionally one of you, dear blog reader, will ask if you can do anything for me. I usually say something like “just do awesome things” but this time I have a request. If you live near one of the Brookstone stores with a Sphero , go check it out.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 23, 2012

Man does Eric Norlin know how to put on a conference. And, as a bonus, he’s got an awesome soundtrack and mindblowing trailer for the Glue Conference that Fake Grimlock would love. Here’s a taste of what’s saturating my brain. Shit My Could Evangelist Says, Just Not to the CSO by Chris Hoff, Juniper Networks. Foragers, Farmers, Forks & Forgers: On Software, Patronage and Craft Brewing by James Governor, Redmonk.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 5, 2012

Jason and I got an email this morning that said the following: Hi Jason and Brad, Just wanted to thank you for writing the book ‘Venture Deals’ The advice in the book seriously helped my startup get a great term sheet on the table on Friday. We get an email like this often. They come in different forms – some are longer than others – but they always have the same message. “Thank you for helping me.” And that feels awesome.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 14, 2012

tl;dr – Yes. I’m on the all@company.com list for a number of the companies I’m on the board of. CEOs and entrepreneurs who practice TAGFEE welcome this. I haven’t universally asked for inclusion on this list mostly because I hadn’t really thought hard about it until recently. But I will now and going forward, although I’ll leave it up to the CEO as to whether or not to include me.

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