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Recent Articles from Brad Feld
Take the range out of your deals
I was fortunate that two of my early mentors were master dealmakers. They had different styles and approaches so I learned an incredible amount from each of them. Before I […]
Never tire of telling your story
When we raised our first Foundry Group fund in 2007, I did 90 meetings in three months before we got our first investor commitment. By meeting 87, after hearing "no" a lot (we got about 30 no’s out of the first 90 meetings before we got a yes) I definitely had pitch fatigue. But every time I told...
The video-conferencing conundrum
I’ve decided not to travel for the rest of 2013. There are a lot of inputs into this decision, including the fact that I’ve been travelling more than half of […]
Abstainer versus moderator
I love summer – it’s by far my favorite season of the year. While the summer solstice (June 21) is the official beginning of summer, I always view summer as […]
When failure is the best option
I strongly believe that there are times you should call it quits on a business. Not everything works. And — even after trying incredibly hard, and for a long period of time — failure is sometimes the best option. An entrepreneur shouldn’t view their entrepreneur arc as being linked to a single com...
The power of peers
Once again I was reminded of the power for entrepreneurs of spending time with your peers outside of the craziness of the daily schedule. Fifty people invested two days of their life in this event – the feedback I’ve heard so far was awesome. And – for me personally – it was very rewarding.
Say goodbye to signatures
I recently closed a large transaction without signing a single piece of physical paper. It was painless. The entire negotiation was done using email and DocuSign. I’m doing this at […]
Keep government out of the accelerator business
A good accelerator can be run in any city in the world for $500,000. Entrepreneurs with a compelling track record and approach should be able to easily raise, or even provide this capital. As evidence of this, there are already hundreds of accelerators in the U.S., without government funding, bein...
Chairperson, lead director, consigliere?
I used to think every board needed a chair, and early in my investing career, I was often it (or co-chair). At some point I began feeling like the chairperson role in a private company both undermined the CEO and sent the wrong signal to the employees of the company. I preferred that the CEO be th...
Cure the first-quarter blues
Now that we are in March, you should have a pretty good view of how your Q1 is likely to end up. If you are a revenue-generating company, you’ve probably got a formally approved 2013 plan by now (if not, why not?) Your board is paying attention to your performance against plan, and you and your ma...
Board experiments
Recently, I had a magical moment. I’m a huge believer in distributing the board material a few days in advance, having all the board members comment on it in advance of the meeting, and then having the meeting without going through the board material page by page. No death by endless Powerpoint, n...
Who owns your UX philosophy?
I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the […]
