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Mentors 6/18: The Best Mentor Relationships Eventually Become Two-Way

Feld Thoughts

Our premise when we started doing branded accelerators with large companies was that we’d get deep mentor involvement from execs at the company we are partnering with. Len and his partner Jerry Poch bought my first company in 1993. Following are two examples from my own life. This took our relationship to a new level.

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My First Experience As A Venture Capitalist

Feld Thoughts

When people ask me how they can become a VC, I point them to my partner Seth Levine’s excellent blog posts How to become a venture capitalist and How to get a job in venture capital (revisited). Feld Technologies was acquired in November 1993. I often get asked how I ended up becoming a venture capitalist.

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No More MBOs

Feld Thoughts

I’ve only worked in what could be considered a “big” company for 18 months (1993 – 1995) and that was the company (AmeriData) that bought my first company (Feld Technologies). At Feld Technologies, we had a very simple bonus program. Each quarter, we paid out 10% of pre-tax profits as a bonus.

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The Simple Formal Beginnings Of Feld Technologies

Feld Thoughts

My first business partner, Dave Jilk, emailed me our original partnership agreement for Feld Technologies. A short letter agreement specifying the equity splits and the boilerplate legal docs were the only legal docs we had until we sold the company in 1993. It’s one page. We incorporated a month later as an S-Corp.

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RIP Len Fassler

Feld Thoughts

We were introduced in the spring of 1993 by Jim Galvin, CEO of Allcom, which had just been acquired by Len’s company Sage Alerting Systems. Feld Technologies worked with Allcom whenever we needed a network installed for a client. As a paternal figure, he was a close second to my father. I loved him deeply.

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Revolution at the Edge

Ben's Blog

Technological revolutions follow a similar psychological dynamic. Marc released Mosaic in 1993. A review of the technology press in 1993 and 1994 reveals that almost nobody believed the Internet would be important. Unlike political regimes, technological rulers are comprised of products rather than people.

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Distilled Moments: Poems By Dave Jilk

Feld Thoughts

Dave Jilk was my first business partner (we co-founded Feld Technologies). We worked closely together for seven years before selling the company in 1993 to a public company called Sage Alerting Systems, which renamed itself Sage Technologies and then finally AmeriData Technologies.

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