Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 15, 2013

I’ve been thinking a lot about Aaron Swartz the past few days. I didn’t know him, but knew of him and have a lot of friends who knew him. I’m still processing it, especially the dynamics around his suicide, and expect I’ll have plenty to say in the coming weeks about depression and entrepreneurship. In the mean time, I thought the USA Today article, Activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide sparks talk about depression , by Laurie Segal, is particularly good.

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 13, 2013

This first appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s Accelerator series. A few our entrepreneurial heroes work on more that one company at a time. Steve Jobs (Pixar, Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, Greylock). And we regularly hear of entrepreneurs who are working at companies that acquired their first company who are now working on new companies while still at their acquirer.

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 16, 2013

I joined my first board of a company other than mine in 1994 (NetGenesis). Since then, I’ve sat on hundreds of boards and been to a zillion board meetings. I crushes my soul a little to think of the number of board meetings I have sat through that were ineffective, poorly run, or just plain boring. I guess that’s part of the motivation I have in writing Startup Boards: Reinventing the Board of Directors to Be Useful to the Entrepreneur (the next book in the Startup Revolution series

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 18, 2013

If you are reading this on Friday, 1/18/13 I’m probably doing one of a couple of things right now. The three most likely are sleeping, laying on my couch reading next to Amy , or just hanging out with her. There’s a chance I’m on a run or having some adult entertainment with Amy (different than hanging out). Or drinking something from my Vitamix monster smoothie maker.

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 14, 2013

Techstars (Photo credit: Wikipedia). TechStars New York City has just been a great program. With close to 200 awesome mentors , investors, and seasoned entrepreneurs that roll up their sleeves and dive in, it’s no surprise that we’ve already seen an exit from the 2011 class , and the average company raises over $1.5M after the program.

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 15, 2013

A bunch of the companies we’ve invested in were at CES 2013. Modular Robotics , the makers of Cubelets , were at the Eureka Village (where Startup America was). The first thing I had to do when I got to CES was a panel for Startup America so the Modular Robotics booth was literally one of the first places I stopped after getting to Las Vegas.

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 17, 2013

Every year in December and January I go through the same cycle for all the boards I’m on. It’s the annual bonus, next year bonus plan, option grant refresh cycle. For many management teams, especially in rapidly growing, or mature companies, it’s an important part of their existence as culturally we’ve oriented compensation, bonuses, and future compensation around an annual cycle.

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