Expert insights. Personalized for you.
Why doesn’t Amazon acquire Starbucks? Starbucks has one thing Amazon doesn’t have – over 30,000 physical locations. Sure, Amazon owns Whole Foods, which has about 350 physical locations, but they are large food distribution facilities (e.g. MORE
Yesterday, Josh Felser of Freestyle Ventures wrote a post titled For the Love of Founders and their mental health. In it, he discussed his own struggles with mental health as an entrepreneur. “ Like so many others I just sucked it up, grinded away and punted, hoping for relief down the road. That strategy of denial and repression worked until it didn’t. My founder stress and burnout couldn’t be contained despite my best efforts. MORE
Pandere Shoes is an Alaskan founded and women-owned startup that creates expandable footwear that accommodates a host of conditions such as edema, diabetes, and neuropathy. . I met the co-founder Laura Oden when I was in Anchorage last month to speak at the Accelerate Alaska event. MORE
Amy and I didn’t feel like taking a Christmas or New Year’s vacation this year so we just hung around Boulder, worked, and did our thing. We then decamped to Mexico last week for warmth, sun, beach, and books. MORE
A central theme of science fiction over the past 20 years has been the dystopian future of humans, laying on couches, connected to machines that feed them and process their waste, while they interact with a virtual world. MORE
We are running the Venture Deals Online Course again. Registration is now open and it runs from April 7, 2019 – May 31, 2019. It’s produced by Kauffman Fellows Academy and Techstars. We’ve run the course four times now and have had over 15,000 people take it. MORE
James Oliver, Jr. has written a fun book that is part memoir, part advice, for what he calls Parentpreneurs (entrepreneurs who are trying to raise kids.) He’s got a website with a bunch of history about him, his journey, and the book. MORE
As I often do, I had a long, complicated dream last night. I’ve been fighting off a cold, so let’s call it a fever dream. During the dream, I saw the number 2050 on something. In 2050, I’ll be 84 – an old man by today’s standards. MORE
Earlier this year Amy and I, along with a number of other local friends, supported the rollout of a new organization in Longmont called Entrepreneurship for All (EforAll). MORE
Following is an abridged email that showed up in my inbox recently that caused me to stop and think for a few minutes. I took a look back through your posts before I crafted this email. So much of what you write about is focused on men who are succeeding, that I wonder if you are going to write something about women like Simone Biles. She is doing some pretty amazing stuff on the mat, bars, vault, and beam. I know you support women so I feel a little bad about calling this out but am curious. MORE
My partners at Foundry Group have decided to bring the Helium Network to Boulder. We’ve ordered 50 hotspots and, with your help, will set up a LongFi network throughout Boulder. If you are asking, “What’s Helium?” MORE
I received a Silicon Flatirons email from Phil Weiser this morning in his role as Silicon Flatirons Founder and Executive Director. My partners and I, especially Jason Mendelson, have been very involved with Silicon Flatirons over the past decade. I have a chapter in Startup Communities that uses CU Boulder – and specifically Silicon Flatirons – as an example of a much better way than the traditional approach (circa 2012) for a university to engage with the startup community. MORE
Last week David and I spent some time at the Techstars Sustainability Accelerator in partnership with The Nature Conservancy. Their demo day is happening on October 30th in Denver and you can register here if you’re interested in attending. . MORE
I’ve been a remote worker for many years. As a result, I think I’ve used every flavor of video conferencing and screen sharing going back to Carbon Copy and PC Anywhere. Today’s bell of the ball is Zoom, which has an outstanding video and audio conferencing experience. MORE
I’ve been open about my journey with depression and the importance of addressing and destigmatizing issues around mental health. MORE
I’ve been thinking a lot about gross profit (and gross margin ) lately. Yeah, I know I can be riveting, but stay with me. When I was in Boston a while ago (it was very cold, so it must have been January), I had a wide-ranging conversation with Eric Paley. This was before the IPO Summer of 2019 when all conventional valuation metrics have entered the land of “suspension of disbelief” which is short-term good and long-term well-we-will-see-…-eventually. MORE
This first appeared in the Boulder Community Health Foundation Summer 2019 Magazine in an article titled Taking On The Mental Health Stigma. I started the second week of 2013 in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. Within two hours of arriving, I was in my hotel room, the shade closed, the door locked, and in bed with a pillow over my head. I couldn’t deal with anything at all. Having been here before, I knew I was in a deep depression. MORE
In February 2017 I met Shawn Frayne, one of the founders of Looking Glass Factory , a Brooklyn-based company with ambitions to make holographic interfaces a reality. MORE
In 2011, my now-partner Chris Moody (and then-CEO of Gnip, which I was on the board of) kicked my butt about my endless statements about hating marketing. His thoughts on recasting “marketing” as “thought leadership” appeared on this blog in a post I Don’t Hate Marketing. It remains a great example of one of the reasons I blog, which is to think out loud, get feedback, learn, and iterate. MORE
I’ve always been a vivid dreamer, but I’ve been getting a lot more REM sleep due to the combination of a CPAP machine and the prostate reduction surgery I had last year (solving a “getting older” problem.). MORE
Imagine that when you were a kid, someone told you that your dreams are important for the world and that what you do matters right now. Dream Tank Kids Exploring the Techstars Boulder Accelerator. MORE
When David and I started doing the #GiveFirst podcast , I was told by a long-time podcaster that it takes about 20 episodes to hit your stride. Since then, several other podcasters have told me that the number is actually closer to 100. Given that hurdle, David and I are 20% of the way there. MORE
Amy and I went to see Uncut Gems last night. It was a gem of a movie. Adam Sandler was magnificent. My inner 14 year old loves his puerile movies and when I read the New York Times Magazine article Adam Sandler’s Everlasting Shtick around Thanksgiving I knew I had to see this movie. MORE
I watched HBO’s Chernobyl the past few nights. I finished it last night, took a deep breath, and said out loud to myself, “that was spectacular.” ” One of the final quotes that stuck with me is the title of this post. MORE
David Cohen and I are doing a podcast together called Give First. Readers of this blog likely know that this is the mantra of Techstars and the title of an upcoming book of mine that will be published in 2020. While I’ve been interviewed for many podcasts, I’ve never hosted one before. MORE
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When we started Techstars in 2006 we had one core goal in mind – helping entrepreneurs succeed. While it started as an experiment with one accelerator in Boulder, we now have about 50 accelerators annually around the world funding 500 startups a year. MORE
My partner Lindel pointed me at the Lux Capital 2019 Annual Dinner Talk. I watched it the other day and thought it was one of the best examples of a VC think piece that I’ve seen in a long time. MORE
Jason Mendelson and I recently published the 4th Edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. The book now has three forewords – one by each of Fred Wilson (USV), James Park (Fitbit), and Dick Costolo (now 01 Advisors, then Twitter). The 1st edition had 13 chapters. We are now up to 19. MORE
Techstars was born 13 years ago. There’s a delicious article in the Denver Post that was the launch article of the first accelerator in Boulder titled How TechStars was born from 5/18/07. The photo is fun. MORE
I love chocolate. I love lasers. So it would be logical that I’d love chocolates that are engraved with personalized messages with lasers. I met Jennifer, the founder of Noteworthy Chocolates , in Boston at the Authors & Innovators event. MORE
29 years of nightmares. Over 10,000 nights in a row. That’s hard to fathom. David R. Mellor , the Senior Director of Grounds for the Boston Red Sox Baseball team, experienced this. MORE
I recently met Renata George through a referral from Katie Rae (MIT Engine CEO, previously Techstars Boston MD). Renata told me about a book she was working on called Women Who Venture and asked me if I’d write the foreword. I was honored to be asked to do this. The foreword I wrote follows. MORE
As I was reading The Atlantic article Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World I kept flashing to the end of Anna Wiener’s awesome memoir Uncanny Valley. And it was no surprise to see this article in the Boulder Daily Camera titled Big tech in hot seat at congressional hearing at CU Boulder. Readers of this blog and my book Startup Communities know that I’m a huge fan of AnnaLee Saxenian. She has a great quote in The Atlantic article. MORE
I’ve been a remote worker for 24 years. While I have an office in Boulder, I’m physically in my office for a small amount of time. For many years, this was a function of travel. My investments have always been geographically distributed across the US and I spent the majority of my time between Monday and Friday on the road. I learned how to work in hotel rooms, in other people’s offices, in conference rooms, at coffee shops, and in houses (mine and friends.) MORE
Public Service Announcement: According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the American Astronomical Society, and the US Naval Observatory, today is not the beginning of a new decade. Rather, that would be 1/1/21. If you write software, you’ll recognize that it’s a classic fencepost error. If you are a philosophy major like Amy, you’ll tell me that a decade is “any ten year period of time, starting whenever you want it to.” ” Regardless, happy Julien New Year. MORE
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The phrase “frog in a blender” was in my head all afternoon. Earlier in the day, one of my partners described a situation as the cliche-ish “ boil a frog slowly ” and I responded with “We’d all be better off if we just put the frog in a blender.” MORE
When I wrote the post Every Lie We Tell Incurs a Debt to the Truth I expected to get some feedback. I got more than I usually do (mostly by email vs. blog comments) and much of it was thoughtful. One person pointed to the video I embedded, which I thought was great. MORE
My post The Future Of Work Is Distributed received some good comments. More interesting was the number of direct emails I received back with detailed information about “remote-first” companies and how they did things. There was a distinction in some of these emails between “remote-first” and “multiple geographies.” MORE
If you have an office in Denver, just five miles away from you is a food bank operating out of a warehouse month to month just so it can help anyone who comes through their doors. MORE
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 24, 2020
I’ve always been a vivid dreamer, but I’ve been getting a lot more REM sleep due to the combination of a CPAP machine and the prostate reduction surgery I had last year (solving a “getting older” problem.).
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 22, 2020
When David and I started doing the #GiveFirst podcast , I was told by a long-time podcaster that it takes about 20 episodes to hit your stride. Since then, several other podcasters have told me that the number is actually closer to 100. Given that hurdle, David and I are 20% of the way there.
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Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 27, 2020
Jason Mendelson and I recently published the 4th Edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. The book now has three forewords – one by each of Fred Wilson (USV), James Park (Fitbit), and Dick Costolo (now 01 Advisors, then Twitter). The 1st edition had 13 chapters. We are now up to 19.
Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 13, 2019
I love chocolate. I love lasers. So it would be logical that I’d love chocolates that are engraved with personalized messages with lasers. I met Jennifer, the founder of Noteworthy Chocolates , in Boston at the Authors & Innovators event.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 2, 2020
Why doesn’t Amazon acquire Starbucks? Starbucks has one thing Amazon doesn’t have – over 30,000 physical locations. Sure, Amazon owns Whole Foods, which has about 350 physical locations, but they are large food distribution facilities (e.g.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 9, 2020
I’ve noticed a degradation in presentation styles when displaying slides on a screen. This is starting to become a pet peeve of mine, so feel free to ignore me or tell me to get over myself if you disagree with this advice.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 23, 2020
Yesterday, Josh Felser of Freestyle Ventures wrote a post titled For the Love of Founders and their mental health. In it, he discussed his own struggles with mental health as an entrepreneur. “ Like so many others I just sucked it up, grinded away and punted, hoping for relief down the road. That strategy of denial and repression worked until it didn’t. My founder stress and burnout couldn’t be contained despite my best efforts.
Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 29, 2019
My partner Lindel pointed me at the Lux Capital 2019 Annual Dinner Talk. I watched it the other day and thought it was one of the best examples of a VC think piece that I’ve seen in a long time.
Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 30, 2019
Ryan Holiday’s newest book, Stillness Is The Key , came out at the beginning of October. I ended up with two copies and thought I’d read it over the weekend after they showed up at my house. The weekend slipped by and I didn’t pick it up until mid-day on Thanksgiving.
Feld Thoughts
JUNE 13, 2019
I watched HBO’s Chernobyl the past few nights. I finished it last night, took a deep breath, and said out loud to myself, “that was spectacular.” ” One of the final quotes that stuck with me is the title of this post.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 3, 2020
I’ve been a remote worker for 24 years. While I have an office in Boulder, I’m physically in my office for a small amount of time. For many years, this was a function of travel. My investments have always been geographically distributed across the US and I spent the majority of my time between Monday and Friday on the road. I learned how to work in hotel rooms, in other people’s offices, in conference rooms, at coffee shops, and in houses (mine and friends.)
Feld Thoughts
MAY 9, 2019
David Cohen and I are doing a podcast together called Give First. Readers of this blog likely know that this is the mantra of Techstars and the title of an upcoming book of mine that will be published in 2020. While I’ve been interviewed for many podcasts, I’ve never hosted one before.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 28, 2019
Pandere Shoes is an Alaskan founded and women-owned startup that creates expandable footwear that accommodates a host of conditions such as edema, diabetes, and neuropathy. . I met the co-founder Laura Oden when I was in Anchorage last month to speak at the Accelerate Alaska event.
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 10, 2019
We are running the Venture Deals Online Course again. Registration is now open and it runs from April 7, 2019 – May 31, 2019. It’s produced by Kauffman Fellows Academy and Techstars. We’ve run the course four times now and have had over 15,000 people take it.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 21, 2020
As I was reading The Atlantic article Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World I kept flashing to the end of Anna Wiener’s awesome memoir Uncanny Valley. And it was no surprise to see this article in the Boulder Daily Camera titled Big tech in hot seat at congressional hearing at CU Boulder. Readers of this blog and my book Startup Communities know that I’m a huge fan of AnnaLee Saxenian. She has a great quote in The Atlantic article.
Feld Thoughts
MAY 28, 2019
In February 2017 I met Shawn Frayne, one of the founders of Looking Glass Factory , a Brooklyn-based company with ambitions to make holographic interfaces a reality.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 1, 2020
Public Service Announcement: According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the American Astronomical Society, and the US Naval Observatory, today is not the beginning of a new decade. Rather, that would be 1/1/21. If you write software, you’ll recognize that it’s a classic fencepost error. If you are a philosophy major like Amy, you’ll tell me that a decade is “any ten year period of time, starting whenever you want it to.” ” Regardless, happy Julien New Year.
Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 2, 2018
I received a Silicon Flatirons email from Phil Weiser this morning in his role as Silicon Flatirons Founder and Executive Director. My partners and I, especially Jason Mendelson, have been very involved with Silicon Flatirons over the past decade. I have a chapter in Startup Communities that uses CU Boulder – and specifically Silicon Flatirons – as an example of a much better way than the traditional approach (circa 2012) for a university to engage with the startup community.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 7, 2020
The phrase “frog in a blender” was in my head all afternoon. Earlier in the day, one of my partners described a situation as the cliche-ish “ boil a frog slowly ” and I responded with “We’d all be better off if we just put the frog in a blender.”
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 20, 2020
Amy and I didn’t feel like taking a Christmas or New Year’s vacation this year so we just hung around Boulder, worked, and did our thing. We then decamped to Mexico last week for warmth, sun, beach, and books.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 21, 2019
Last week David and I spent some time at the Techstars Sustainability Accelerator in partnership with The Nature Conservancy. Their demo day is happening on October 30th in Denver and you can register here if you’re interested in attending. .
Feld Thoughts
MAY 28, 2019
Imagine that when you were a kid, someone told you that your dreams are important for the world and that what you do matters right now. Dream Tank Kids Exploring the Techstars Boulder Accelerator.
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 30, 2019
I’ve been open about my journey with depression and the importance of addressing and destigmatizing issues around mental health.
Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 14, 2019
Techstars was born 13 years ago. There’s a delicious article in the Denver Post that was the launch article of the first accelerator in Boulder titled How TechStars was born from 5/18/07. The photo is fun.
Feld Thoughts
JUNE 27, 2019
When I wrote the post Every Lie We Tell Incurs a Debt to the Truth I expected to get some feedback. I got more than I usually do (mostly by email vs. blog comments) and much of it was thoughtful. One person pointed to the video I embedded, which I thought was great.
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 8, 2019
A central theme of science fiction over the past 20 years has been the dystopian future of humans, laying on couches, connected to machines that feed them and process their waste, while they interact with a virtual world.
Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 28, 2019
Amy and I have been watching The Handmade’s Tale. Simultaneously, I’ve been listening to the book on Audible while running. Last night I said, “The Hulu adaptation of the book is really good.”
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 9, 2019
James Oliver, Jr. has written a fun book that is part memoir, part advice, for what he calls Parentpreneurs (entrepreneurs who are trying to raise kids.) He’s got a website with a bunch of history about him, his journey, and the book.
Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 6, 2019
Earlier this year Amy and I, along with a number of other local friends, supported the rollout of a new organization in Longmont called Entrepreneurship for All (EforAll).
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 4, 2019
In 2011, my now-partner Chris Moody (and then-CEO of Gnip, which I was on the board of) kicked my butt about my endless statements about hating marketing. His thoughts on recasting “marketing” as “thought leadership” appeared on this blog in a post I Don’t Hate Marketing. It remains a great example of one of the reasons I blog, which is to think out loud, get feedback, learn, and iterate.
Feld Thoughts
JULY 9, 2019
I’ve been thinking a lot about gross profit (and gross margin ) lately. Yeah, I know I can be riveting, but stay with me. When I was in Boston a while ago (it was very cold, so it must have been January), I had a wide-ranging conversation with Eric Paley. This was before the IPO Summer of 2019 when all conventional valuation metrics have entered the land of “suspension of disbelief” which is short-term good and long-term well-we-will-see-…-eventually.
Feld Thoughts
AUGUST 29, 2019
When we started Techstars in 2006 we had one core goal in mind – helping entrepreneurs succeed. While it started as an experiment with one accelerator in Boulder, we now have about 50 accelerators annually around the world funding 500 startups a year.
Feld Thoughts
DECEMBER 30, 2019
As I often do, I had a long, complicated dream last night. I’ve been fighting off a cold, so let’s call it a fever dream. During the dream, I saw the number 2050 on something. In 2050, I’ll be 84 – an old man by today’s standards.
Feld Thoughts
DECEMBER 5, 2019
If you have an office in Denver, just five miles away from you is a food bank operating out of a warehouse month to month just so it can help anyone who comes through their doors.
Feld Thoughts
DECEMBER 29, 2019
29 years of nightmares. Over 10,000 nights in a row. That’s hard to fathom. David R. Mellor , the Senior Director of Grounds for the Boston Red Sox Baseball team, experienced this.
Feld Thoughts
MAY 7, 2019
In the super cool thing category, it’s always fun to see two companies we are investors in easily put together a demonstration of the integration of their products. Oblong is a master of spatially interacting with 3D data on a 2D display.
Feld Thoughts
DECEMBER 28, 2019
Amy and I went to see Uncut Gems last night. It was a gem of a movie. Adam Sandler was magnificent. My inner 14 year old loves his puerile movies and when I read the New York Times Magazine article Adam Sandler’s Everlasting Shtick around Thanksgiving I knew I had to see this movie.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 6, 2020
My post The Future Of Work Is Distributed received some good comments. More interesting was the number of direct emails I received back with detailed information about “remote-first” companies and how they did things. There was a distinction in some of these emails between “remote-first” and “multiple geographies.”
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 23, 2019
Following is an abridged email that showed up in my inbox recently that caused me to stop and think for a few minutes. I took a look back through your posts before I crafted this email. So much of what you write about is focused on men who are succeeding, that I wonder if you are going to write something about women like Simone Biles. She is doing some pretty amazing stuff on the mat, bars, vault, and beam. I know you support women so I feel a little bad about calling this out but am curious.
Feld Thoughts
DECEMBER 12, 2019
My partners at Foundry Group have decided to bring the Helium Network to Boulder. We’ve ordered 50 hotspots and, with your help, will set up a LongFi network throughout Boulder. If you are asking, “What’s Helium?”
Feld Thoughts
AUGUST 26, 2019
In 2010, David Cohen and I wrote a book titled Do More Faster. It was filled with stories and advice from founders, investors, and mentors from around the first two years of Techstars. This was the first book I wrote. David and I learned the joy and pain of writing a book.
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 30, 2019
I’ve been a remote worker for many years. As a result, I think I’ve used every flavor of video conferencing and screen sharing going back to Carbon Copy and PC Anywhere. Today’s bell of the ball is Zoom, which has an outstanding video and audio conferencing experience.
Feld Thoughts
JUNE 25, 2019
This first appeared in the Boulder Community Health Foundation Summer 2019 Magazine in an article titled Taking On The Mental Health Stigma. I started the second week of 2013 in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. Within two hours of arriving, I was in my hotel room, the shade closed, the door locked, and in bed with a pillow over my head. I couldn’t deal with anything at all. Having been here before, I knew I was in a deep depression.
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