Feld Thoughts

APRIL 6, 2021

Then I was deep in SPACland and lots of deals and financings. This book is phenomenal, both as the story of Twilio with the underpinning of Jeff’s management philosophy. Yeah, I took a company public on January 4th, but then January 6th happened.

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Feld Thoughts

JUNE 11, 2021

We didn’t have any financing except for Brad’s credit card and the $10 with which we had purchased our common stock. Dave had been spending most of his time managing the part-time developers, who were primarily working on future products, instead of billing hours to clients. Dave worried about paying rent.

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Feld Thoughts

JUNE 9, 2021

” So for the deal, investors on both sides converted to common, we split the combined company 55/45, Matt became CEO, and Greg led a new Series A financing into the combined company. .” I answered, “Deal.” Twenty years later, we sold the business, a $100 million, profitable company, to Validity. Matt was still CEO.

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Feld Thoughts

SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

Last Tuesday, while I was enjoying a week off the grid, AvidXchange announced they had raised a $225 million financing led by Bain Capital Ventures. This was an atypical investment for us as we participated in the financing through our Foundry Group Select fund. The post Who Just Raised A $225 Million Financing in North Carolina?

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Feld Thoughts

MARCH 15, 2015

Headquartered in San Francisco, AppDirect makes it easy for businesses to find, buy, manage, and monitor cloud services from a central location. Well, not always, and the process of managing multiple cloud services can be a mess. The post AppDirect Is Hiring After Closing a $50 Million Financing appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

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Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 26, 2016

Bill Browder’s Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Amy and I just finished watching The Night Manager on Amazon, which was based on John le Carré novel by the same name.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 17, 2010

Standing Cloud , which makes it easy to deploy and run apps in the cloud, recently closed a $ 3m financing led by Rich Levandov at Avalon Ventures. These are folks who are helping businesses launch and maintain not only websites but the software they use to run and manage their business.

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Cloud Programming Partner Finance 109

Feld Thoughts

APRIL 12, 2021

A critical learning about a company’s leadership is whether or not employees trust and respect their senior-most manager. The exception is the employees in finance (the red box) who all believe the company is completely f *d. Yet, asking this question directly often doesn’t get a great answer.

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Feld Thoughts

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

Corporate law: In Germany, most companies in general and most VC-financed companies are structured in the legal form of a “Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung” (GmbH). Often, this integration results in VC-financed GmbH companies having little to do with the GmbH as envisaged by the law.

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Feld Thoughts

MARCH 24, 2017

Foundry Group is best known for our investments in startups, but our vehicle currently investing in other venture funds, Foundry Group Next, is off to what we believe to be a great start and I wanted to share an update about it by talking about our new investment in a fund managed by Founder Collective. It starts with the people.

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Founder LP Technical Review Seed Stage 75

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 16, 2019

The budgets also have huge variability after financings, when suddenly the budget gets recast given the new money in the bank, or the constraints against hiring are removed and costs increase suddenly, even if this is only to “catch up” with the budget that was underhired to. Some companies are excellent at managing this process.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 28, 2020

Every startup is unique, unpredictable, and unstable, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be managed for success, provided it’s the right kind of management. The same is true of every startup community. That’s the subject of Brad’s book, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.

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Feld Thoughts

JUNE 5, 2013

In the “everything that is old is new again” category, the master of transparency, and likely the originator of “ open book management “, is Jack Stack. I remember meeting Jack and hearing him talk at the very first Birthing of Giants event created by Verne Harnish in 1991.

Finance 156

Finance Revenue Startup Management 156

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 20, 2012

Yesware just announced a $4 million financing. The whole CRM thing is for sales managers who want to actually track what the salespeople are doing. Now that Yesware has nailed the use case with the seed financing and has a serious user ramp happening, it’s time to go after Outlook. I’ve joined the board.

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 8, 2016

While I have still have plenty of public equity, it is through either index funds, equity fund managers that I have a long term relationship with, or a few companies that I invested in when they were private companies. The first finance course I took at MIT was 15.401: Finance Theory I and was taught by Stewart Myers.

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Feld Thoughts

AUGUST 26, 2013

It includes author Amanda Steinberg, founder and CEO of DailyWorth; Margaret Neale, management professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business; and Michele Weslander Quaid, chief technology officer (federal) and innovation evangelist at Google. The speaking line-up for the day is really outstanding.

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Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

My friends at Standing Cloud have closed another $3 million financing from us ( Foundry Group ) and Avalon Ventures. Specifically: Standing Cloud provides a seamless application layer for cloud providers, making application deployment and management fast, simple and hassle-free for their customers.

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Cloud Java PHP Open Source 148

Feld Thoughts

JULY 9, 2013

They decided they wanted to join forces, Fred and I cut a deal over the phone in 5 minutes , and Greg Sands (at Sutter Hill at the time) led a financing round that set a price for the combined company. Part V: Managing Yourself So You Can Manage Others. Twelve years later Matt is still Return Path’s CEO.

Startup 141

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 7, 2016

His personal struggles as a leader and a manager. The thread of financing the company, especially through the first decade, was just incredible. The thread of financing the company, especially through the first decade, was just incredible. His momentary conflicts about whether or not the struggle was worth it.

.Net 76

.Net Finance Revenue Equity 76

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 15, 2016

This can be fine, but often isn’t when there are challenging issues that involve founders, financing, execution, or conflicts. The CEO can learn how to build and manage the board and get value out of board members beyond the classical dynamics around an investor board member.

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Sales Seed Stage Early Stage Finance 70

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 21, 2014

The course will demystify venture capital deals and startup financings and give both first-time and experienced entrepreneurs a definitive guide to secure funding. Alex Iskold , the new Techstars New York Managing Director asked me to talk about “Top Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make.”

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New York Venture Capital Programming Finance 139

Feld Thoughts

OCTOBER 7, 2015

Basically, Harmonix tried to go out of business every year between 1995 and 2005 and just managed to fail at that, always coming up with a new revenue deal or a small amount of financing to stay alive before it became an overnight success in 2005 with the original launch of Guitar Hero. Magazine long form story titled Just Play.

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Colorado Angel Investor Boston Finance 70

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 14, 2012

I’ve managed to get in a solid four hours of writing on my Startup Communities book each day and will have a full draft to circulate to a small group of people on Saturday. So far I’m pleased with my shift to Maker Mode this summer. That said, it’s f **g hard. So hard I can barely believe it.

New York 136

New York Finance Metrics Email 136

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 14, 2016

The day after the election, Alex Iskold (Techstars NY Managing Director) wrote a great post titled Dear Founders, I Commit to Double My Support For You and Your Startups. Work even more closely with the founders to help them with their financings. Help founders drive up revenue, achieving profitability and independence.

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New York City New York Programming Founder 70

Feld Thoughts

MAY 12, 2012

Early in the life of a company, this often seems manageable. But after several rounds of financings with new investors, I’ve often found myself in board meetings with ten or more people. I think the most I’ve ever seen was about 25 people in the room for a board that had five board members.

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Venture Capital Finance Management Partner 132

Feld Thoughts

AUGUST 12, 2011

When we were last with Dick and Jane on Finance Fridays, our fearless entrepreneurs were figuring out how to split up their founders equity and account for an investment from Jane. It required a small investment of time and money to get QuickBooks up and running, but it was a manageable distraction from building SayAhh’s core product.

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Balance Sheet Forecast Cap Table Early Stage 136

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 27, 2012

Today one of our portfolio companies, LinkSmart , has come out of stealth mode and unveiled its product, Total Link Management and $4.7M in financing led by Foundry Group. This publisher then runs a never-ending fire drill with their sales, SEO and yield management teams to fulfill those obligations with their advertisers.

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Feld Thoughts

MARCH 11, 2010

Monday night, I’ll again be the co-host of Entrepreneurs Unplugged where we will be interviewing Tyler Tysdal, the Managing Director of Mantucket Capital. Brown & Sons, focused on corporate finance and mergers & acquisitions. We’ll start at 6pm at the CU Boulder ATLAS center. He began his career in investment banking with Alex.

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Private Equity Entrepreneur Merger Cofounder 94

Feld Thoughts

SEPTEMBER 19, 2013

On 4/1/11 Yesware had a vision, a crappy prototype (that we threw away immediately after the financing), and a huge obsession around a vexing problem that no one was addressing effectively. When I reflect on the journey of Yesware over the past 2.5 Yesware has now shifted from the startup phase to the scaling up phase.

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Denver Portfolio Leadership Finance 130

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 14, 2018

Examples would be “an acquisition” or “a financing” or “an IPO.” .” While this is a high-level list of things not to do, it can be on multiple dimensions. I like to start with things that often are optional, but consume a lot of time and energy.

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Acquisition IPO Metrics Finance 145

Feld Thoughts

JULY 25, 2016

If you don’t know what this list is, ask your VP Finance. If you outsource your accounting, hire a VP Finance. Those are the easy ones. Let’s keep going. Make a list of every SaaS-based license you have. Now, consider how many different overlapping things you are using.

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SMS Database Finance Portfolio 70

Feld Thoughts

SEPTEMBER 20, 2013

Financing ipo JOBS Act s-1 sec twitter' And while there will always be a huge amount of noise around the process, especially for high profile companies like Twitter, at least there will be a clearly defined timeframe for all the pre-IPO noise.

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SEC IPO Investment Bankers Valuation 142

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 6, 2013

I don’t manage to do this every day, but I try. Kinvey went through TechStars several years ago and while we didn’t participate in their venture financing, I love the company and especially the CEO Sravish. I was filling up his gas tank a little each day.

DC 160

DC Boston Finance Community 160

Feld Thoughts

AUGUST 30, 2011

An Inside Look at BigDoor’s Venture Funding is going to be me, Keith Smith ( BigDoor CEO), and Andy Sack ( Lighter Capital , Founder’s Co-op , and the TechStars Seattle Managing Director). Both are good friends of mine and have really interesting philosophies about startup funding.

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Cofounder Seattle Equity Valuation 112

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 4, 2020

We are hopeful that this new wisdom will lead to better, more flexible, more adaptive, and more useful analytical models, across finance, medicine, sports, risk, and so on. We think that making this state visible and manageable will be one of the keys to investing moving forward. It will be less different than many pundits expect.

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Artificial Inteligence Aggregator New York Technology 149

Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 13, 2017

The focus of each person is on a specific functional area (finance, marketing, sales) and traditionally scoped. Naturally, you will have a product or engineering leader for Product, you will have a sales, marketing, or operations leader for Customer, and you will have a finance or admin leader for Company.

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Leadership Engineer Finance Sales 70

Feld Thoughts

JULY 11, 2010

Over the past 24 months, a deplorable activity in the money management business came to light. And Amy and I are huge advocates of campaign finance reform. It got the name “pay to play&# , but was just another form of bribery. Now, don’t misunderstand me – I think pay to play is grotesque.

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SEC Pay to Play Colorado Campaign 133