Feld Thoughts

JULY 30, 2012

On August 9th, TechStars in Boulder will wrap up with their annual Demo Day investment event. If you’re an active investor and are interested in attending, send me an email and I’ll get you an invitation. It’s always amazing to witness how the teams transform in three short months and this program has been no different. This year, we have everything from internet-of-things companies to travel, enterprise software to consumer devices, and platforms to crowdsource plays.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 16, 2012

Last week my friends at FullContact announced a new paid vacation policy and wrote a post about it titled Paid Vacation? That’s Not Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Paid, PAID Vacation. FullContact will now pay an employee $7500 to go on vacation. The rules are simple: You have to go on vacation. You have to disconnect entirely (no phone, no email). You can’t work.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 4, 2012

I started off my morning by reading the Declaration of Independence. I never get tired of reading it or pondering what was going on at the time. It’s hard to transport myself back to July 4th, 1776 but it’s pretty remarkable to think about what was going on that caused 56 people to sign this brilliant document and in one moment start our country on amazing course over the next 236 years that have had a profound impact on the history of the world.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 2, 2012

My first business partner, Dave Jilk, emailed me our original partnership agreement for Feld Technologies. It’s one page. We incorporated a month later as an S-Corp. It cost us $99 to do this – I remember using an organization called The Company Corporation - we called an 800 number, gave them some information, and the documents were automatically generated and filed.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 3, 2012

I’ve just spent a month in Maker Mode. It’s been a powerful month and prompted a few posts like Have You Fallen Into The Busy Trap? which generated lots of feedback as well as deeper responses from posts like Do We All Work Too Much? And Do We Really Have a Choice? Amy and I are talking about this almost every day as we work on our book Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship With An Entrepreneur.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 31, 2012

The title of this post “Work diligently, work intelligently, work patiently and persistently” is a powerful line from S.N. Goenka that is part of magnificent blog post by Ben Casnocha titled Reflections and Impressions from a 10-Day Meditation Course. On July 18th, Ben wrote a post titled Something I Think I Could Fail At: 10 Day Silent Meditation Program , promptly went to Northern California Vipassana Meditation Center , and went off the grid for ten days.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 23, 2012

I’ve written a lot in the last year about how fast Gnip is growing and how they continue to lead their industry. Many of Gnip ‘s customers and partners are in the bay area and they have decided to begin adding people in San Francisco to better support those clients. They’ve just posted their first position in San Francisco to help manage and grow existing customers.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 10, 2012

I’m a huge believer in TAGFEE. But I also respect confidentiality. Every company approaches this differently and it’s important to recognize which context you are in. Following is an example from an email I got (on the all@ list) from a company I’m on the board of (and yes – I checked to make sure I could post this.). You know what they say about flattery, right?

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 8, 2012

Marathon #22 is in the books. I ran the Missoula Marathon today in 4:48:00. It’s my first marathon since the American River 50 Mile Race and it put the demons from the 50 miler firmly in my rear view mirror. I was a little nervous going into this one as my longest run since the 50 miler was only 12 miles (last weekend). I’ve been running consistently up in Keystone the last month, but shorter distances because of the altitude (9000 feet), the hills (lots of them), and the trails (mos

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 27, 2012

The phrase “it comes with the territory” is one my dad said to me when I was a kid. I can’t remember the context in which I heard it for the first time, but I internalized it to mean that whenever you are trying to do something interesting or amazing, there will always be people who try to tear you down, lob random insults at you, or just do and say things that make no sense to you.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 27, 2012

Let’s end Friday on a high note. The recipient of our first Random Act of Kindness in support of my marathons is now cancer free! If you go out this weekend, do a random act of kindness. Buy the meal for a young couple in the same restaurant you are in. Tip 50% instead of whatever you normally tip. Do something unexpected for someone you don’t know.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 5, 2012

Yesterday at 4:57pm I hit send in Gmail and submitted the final draft of my newest book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneur Ecosystem In You City to my publisher (Wiley). I’ve still got two more revision cycles – one in a few weeks when I get the final copyedited version and then one last review of the page proofs but the book is done.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 23, 2012

This morning we announced that we have just led a $3m investment in Modular Robotics. I’ve joined the board and am psyched to now be an investor in two Boulder-based robotics companies – ModRobotics and Orbotix. In the spirit of “show” vs. “tell” (which everyone in TechStars has driven into their brains over and over again) here’s a short three minute video that shows how ModRobotics first product – Cubelets – works.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 19, 2012

I just joined the Internet Defense League. Think of it as the cat signal for the Internet. You’ll see a signup at the top of this blog, or just go to the Internet Defense League site. If you are so inclined as I was, please donate to the launch of the cat signal. Our goal is to help protect the Internet forever from bad laws, monopolies, and bad actions.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 30, 2012

My shift from manager hours to maker hours is officially over. I’ve learned a lot the past two months about how I work and the challenges of trying to both shift to maker hours as well as be effective in a blended manager / maker world. I started out in June with a hard shift to maker hours. I only scheduled calls between 1pm and 4pm – the rest of my time was unscheduled.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 14, 2012

Dave Jilk, my partner in Feld Technologies, recently dug up a bunch of old stuff. I blogged one of the documents recently - The Simple Formal Beginnings Of Feld Technologies - and have a few other fun ones coming. Today, let’s look at another example of a contract that we signed in the context of “keeping it simple.” Over the seven years we were in business, we used a very simple form we referred to as a “Professional Services Agreement.” This was the document tha

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 28, 2012

I’m not a huge sports fan – in my house I’m the sports widow during football season since Amy is a total football fanatic (although she’s pretty down on the new Broncos quarterback.) So – I sit downstairs with her while she watches sports and I bang away on my computer. We are watching the Olympics today. I always get sucked into the Olympics especially individual sports like swimming, tennis, and track and field.

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Email 112

Feld Thoughts

JULY 18, 2012

Today on Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals you can get three months of SEOmoz PRO for only $99 dollars. Normally three months of PRO service is $198, so this deal saves you $99. If you’ve been wondering about how to effectively manage your SEO and monitor your social media, today’s Amazing Deal will get you going and at low, low, price (ok – I couldn’t resist – I just love to say low, low price.).

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 18, 2012

Yesterday’s post on Searching For A Collaborative Writing Tool elicited some great feedback and suggestions from y’all. It was super helpful and I’ve got a lot of things to try. For now, Amy and I are working in Google Docs (which was a suggestion from a few of you) but there are a couple of neat tools that I’ll definitely play around with.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 17, 2012

Oblong is one of the most amazing companies I’ve ever had the honor to be involved with. We invested in them in 2007 when they were four people building on the incredible research and ideas of John Underkoffler. Today they are almost 100 people strong, have shipped an awesome set of products, and are on a path to fundamentally change the way we interact with computers.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 24, 2012

If you are a web developer in Boulder who does stuff with APIs, I encourage you to join our friends at Singly on Thursday 7/26 at the Bitter Bar from 5:30 – 8:30. They are building an organic network of friends and evangelists around APIs and looking to have a conversation with anyone interested. Several Foundry Group companies who are API-centric will be there including FullContact and SendGrid are co-sponsoring the event and helping to promote it.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 13, 2012

It’s 2012 and the “contact information problem” is getting exponentially worse. I’ve personally been struggling with this for 20+ years since I remember going from a custom database we built at Feld Technologies (in DataFlex) to Act! to try to manage the contacts across the company. While all the technology has changed, the problem has gotten substantially worse, as every web-based and mobile app now has some kind of contact info associated with it.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 17, 2012

I’ve finished writing the book Startup Communities: Building An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City (a solo effort) and am now deep into Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving In A Relationship With An Entrepreneur which I’m writing with Amy. I’m looking for a great collaborative writing tool for a book. I used Scrivener on a solo basis for Startup Communities – it’s outstanding for the first draft.

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