Feld Thoughts

FEBRUARY 9, 2011

I’m at the end of day three of another very intense, but enjoyable and satisfying week. I’ve been in Seattle the past two days and am headed to LA for the next two days before finally making it home after being on the road for the past two weeks.

Management 143

Management Seattle 143

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 22, 2015

If you are a technology product manager in Colorado, take a look at the new Colorado Product group. The first meetup is on 4/2/15 and features a talk from Adit Vaidya, Product Manager for Facebook Groups. The post 4/2/15: Colorado Product Management Meetup appeared first on Feld Thoughts. Announcements'

Colorado 70

Colorado Management Product Technology 70

Feld Thoughts

AUGUST 25, 2016

Over the past four years, they’ve systematically executed on their vision, building a contact management platform that touches all aspects of the problem. The post FullContact Continues Its Journey To Solve The Contact Management Problem appeared first on Feld Thoughts. Along the way they built a sizable business.

Management 70

Management Acquisition Revenue Technology 70

Feld Thoughts

JULY 20, 2011

I’ve recently discovered two awesome tools for helping me manage my contacts in Google Apps. One is a TechStars Boulder company called Rainmaker and the other is a Paris-based company called Kwaga that has an app called WriteThat.Name. I’ve got a large address book in Gmail (> 11,000 contacts).

Management 137

Management Database Social Network Email 137

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 19, 2014

You may noticed from prior posts that we’ve had a difficult time at Foundry Group managing our growing portfolio of WordPress sites. You would think that by now, managing websites would be a solved problem, but that’s just not true. In our portfolio of startup companies, following is how websites usually get managed.

Hosting 139

Hosting HTML Bandwidth Portfolio 139

Feld Thoughts

OCTOBER 2, 2013

After being involved in hundreds of technology companies, we know that young and fast growing technology companies have little time to devote to the details of managing their server infrastructure. Think of JumpCloud as taking over server maintenance, management, monitoring, and security once the provisioning tools have done their thing.

Bandwidth 127

Bandwidth Security Cloud Cofounder 127

Feld Thoughts

AUGUST 25, 2020

The fund is managed by university students participating in HBCUvc’s Fellowship programs. She asked me to support the expansion of HBCUvc’s VC Lab and Fund. HBCUvc is seeking to expand its VC Lab and Fund program that invests in Black, Indigenous, and Latinx entrepreneurs building technology companies.

Technical Review 100

Technical Review Due Diligence Syndicate Syndication 100

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 4, 2014

Management ceo founders leadership management' .” It’s just like my relationship with Amy. We are both all in. It’s so powerful – in good times and in bad times. The post The Duo appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Cofounder 131

Cofounder Leadership Partner Founder 131

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 11, 2021

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. We no longer had to spend our time managing people and had figured out where our bread was buttered. Dave worried about paying rent. But we did have billable projects.

Common Stock 70

Common Stock Europe Boston Software Developers 70

Feld Thoughts

JULY 8, 2013

manageability, scalability, reliability, security, and so forth). It’s a novel written in the 1980s about a plant manager who has 90 days to fix his cost and due date issues or his plant will be shut down. Entrepreneurship business Cloud Computing DevOps management Wall Street' This means that technical debt starts to increase.

Phoenix 175

Phoenix Software Review Technical Review Cofounder 175

Feld Thoughts

OCTOBER 8, 2013

Wikipedia reminded me – it’s another Peter Drucker creation from The Practice of Management. I have a deeply held belief that a manager cannot “motivate behavior.” Management bonus compensation drucker MBO' The quantitative, performance-based bonuses are about rewarding outcomes.

Stock Options 146

Stock Options Technical Review Leadership Equity 146

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

For three years management has been trying to fix the problem, and the fix is always “just around the corner” It’s broken at every level, from the week-long deployment processes, the 50% failure rate for deploys, and the inability to scale the service. operates at seven 9s reliability. deploys in 30 seconds.

Agile 134

Agile Software Developers Software Development Architecture 134

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.

Founder 75

Founder LP Technical Review Seed Stage 75

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 19, 2010

We were working on a logistics project with a management consulting firm for one of the largest retail companies in the world. The folks from the management consulting firm did all the design and analysis; we wrote the code to work with the massive databases that supported this. One of our software engineers wrote all the code.

Fractional VPE 142

Fractional VPE Fractional CTO SQL Database 142

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 11, 2010

Designate one person in charge of managing the hackathon. The Hackathon manager should come up with an easy way to manage the team list (hint – wiki). The hackathon manager is responsible for coordinating all of this, including the mechanism for judging. Here’s how: Pick a date during the quarter for the hackathon.

Software Review 138

Software Review Wiki Continuous Deployment Agile 138

Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 21, 2015

Every major new service is managed separately. Accounts to AWS or Google Compute Engine or Office 365 are managed separately. Github is managed separately. Google Apps are managed separately. Every SaaS app is managed separately. Oh wait, are they managing your Mac? Logins and passwords everywhere.

Security 70

Security Software Review Management Engineer 70

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 18, 2017

Until very recently, setting up HTTPS meant purchasing and managing certificates and configuring them correctly to work with your web server. Certificate management had to become cheap and easy. Even a few years ago I would have been skeptical this would be possible. We have Let’s Encrypt to thank for that. This is happening now.

Caching 70

Caching Security Green Global 70

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 9, 2021

For lessons from Matt and his Return Path management team, many of who are now execs at Bolster, you want to read Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams. I’ve worked with Matt for over 20 years and have experienced many ups and downs.

Fractional CTO 195

Fractional CTO Cofounder Startup Lead Investor 195

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 28, 2011

Jason Mendelson, Managing Director, Foundry Group. Craig Eisler, General Manager, Kinect for Windows. Michael Mott, General Manager, Microsoft Games Studios. Dave Drach, Managing Director, Emerging Business Team. Phil Spencer, VP, Microsoft Games Studios. Anoop Gupta, Distinguished Scientist, Microsoft Research.

Intellectual Property 134

Intellectual Property Common Stock Seattle Cofounder 134

Feld Thoughts

APRIL 20, 2021

Amos Schwartzfarb is currently Managing Director of Techstars Austin, before which he’s helped to build six companies to nearly $1B in exit value. Trevor Boehm was formerly Program Director at Techstars Austin and Impact and then Managing Director at the Techstars Amazon Alexa Next program.

Framework 207

Framework Los Angeles Metrics Chicago 207

Feld Thoughts

MAY 26, 2021

The thing is, the categories were things like “Existentialism” and “Philosophy Reference” where overall sales are lower – they are applicable to the book as categories, but not really our target market (for the record, the book is selling nicely in “Entrepreneurial Management”, where it was briefly #2.). Ahhh, that feels better.

New York 169

New York Lean Reputation Email 169

Feld Thoughts

APRIL 6, 2021

This book is phenomenal, both as the story of Twilio with the underpinning of Jeff’s management philosophy. Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century : Jeff Lawson and Twilio are awesome.

Software 158

Software Software Developers Software Development Portfolio 158

Feld Thoughts

MAY 28, 2015

I remember my friend Ryan Martens sitting down with me and Chris Wand around 2001 and walking us through his idea for changing the how he approached managing the software development process. Ryan had a vision for an integration web-based system to layer on top of all of this to help support and manage the software development process.

Software 70

Software Technology Agile SCRUM 70

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 13, 2020

The post Joint Statement by Colorado High-Tech Companies on COVID-19 appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Colorado 168

Colorado Fractional CTO Silicon Valley Cofounder 168

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 24, 2013

Many of bitcoin’s most vocal proponents see bitcoin as a currency, a replacement for currencies that are created and managed by governments. There’s a lot of overlap between bitcoin fans and folks with strongly libertarian views. I’m deeply skeptical of this set of ideas.

United States 153

United States Software Engineering Government Design 153

Feld Thoughts

APRIL 20, 2023

After my post about the Founder Mental Health Pledge , I received a note from Kari Palazzari, the Executive Director of Studio Arts Boulder , a local nonprofit that manages a community pottery studio. She lamented that very few members of the Boulder startup community seem to take advantage of their programs.

Entrepreneur 157

Entrepreneur Community Programming Founder 157

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

This second kind of seed financing can be a double-edged sword for the entrepreneur and company if not very carefully managed. Company Hygiene Matters – One of the responsibility of a Board of Directors is to regularly discuss financials, burn rate, and cash management.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Feld Thoughts

JULY 22, 2011

With a strong interest in entrepreneurship and technology, he subsequently joined a technology start up project at Orbis Investment Management Ltd, an asset management firm with over USD $25 billion under management.

Finance 135

Finance Congo Chicago Cambodia 135

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 20, 2018

In case you don’t know about Jason, prior to co-founding Foundry Group, Jason was a co-founder of SRS Acquiom and a Managing Director and General Counsel for Mobius Venture Capital. He’s going back home for a special event and I encourage anyone near Detroit to go hang with him. Prior to this, Jason was an attorney with Cooley.

Detroit 74

Detroit Michigan Cofounder Colorado 74

Feld Thoughts

MAY 5, 2021

I set it up, downloaded and set up all the apps she used, installed all the new stuff she needed to manage her passwords from now on, connected iCloud, and tidied and buffed it. She was using a 2010 Mac, and it was time for her to use one that didn’t have an endless spinning pinwheel of Mac slowness on it.

Cloud 224

Cloud Restful Global Security 224

Feld Thoughts

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

In addition, there are the managing directors as executive bodies. In the VC sector, it is common to introduce a third body in addition to the shareholders’ meeting and the management. The shareholders are represented there and usually have voting rights in proportion to their shareholdings.

Germany 165

Germany Liquidation Preference Option Pool Advisory Board 165

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 24, 2021

Today’s book recommendation, for anyone interested in venture capital, is The Business of Venture Capital: The Art of Raising a Fund, Structuring Investments, Portfolio Management, and Exits by Mahendra Ramsinghani. A decade ago, I got a cold email from Mahendra.

Venture Capital 175

Venture Capital Detroit Michigan Framework 175

Feld Thoughts

FEBRUARY 19, 2015

It includes Pantheon’s most developer loved features, their enterprise tools for managing teams and websites en masse, and lessons learned powering 85,000 Drupal and WordPress websites. Pantheon for Agencies gets everyone on the same page with a common set of management and testing tools for clients and their agencies.

Technical Review 70

Technical Review Portfolio Web Design 70

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

For example, “Managing Other People” often ends up in “Bad – Dislike” box when I realize, through my forward calendar review, that I have a set of activities where I’m managing others. To be more specific, I deeply dislike managing others. I can then take specific actions.

Management 105

Management Naming 105

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 16, 2016

Now, ask her to tell you the story of the company, the growth experience, how she built and managed her team, and how she interacted with the rest of the team. Ideally, they participated in growth to a much larger scale, but at a minimum they should bracket these numbers.

Part-Time VPE 70

Part-Time VPE Leadership Engineer Hiring 70

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. I learned this lesson the hard way running a very decentralized business with 70 offices in 17 countries at Aquent. Yet, asking this question directly often doesn’t get a great answer.

Finance 132

Finance Leadership Employee Partner 132

Feld Thoughts

MAY 30, 2019

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Get all the ideas out on the table, but then choose. And then execute like crazy. Finally: Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy audacious goals. Your big hairy audacious goal in wartime is not to die.

Web 140

Web Management Operations Founder 140