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Recent Articles from Brad Feld
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 […]
I fired my iPhone
There’s some magic peace that comes over me when I’m not constantly looking at my iPhone. I really noticed it after two weeks of not doing it. After a few days of withdrawal, the calm appears. My brain is no longer jangly, the dopamine effect of “Hey – another email, another tweet” goes away. I'm...
Separating economic development fact from fiction
I recently read the following headline in the Boulder Daily Camera: “Phillips 66 to sell 432-acre campus in Louisville.” This was quite a reversal from the headline in the Denver […]
You’ve got one minute to impress me
I strongly believe that a founder should be able to explain what they do in one paragraph. I’m not a believer in the “one sentence mashup approach” (e.g. we are like pinterest + groupon + facebook for dogs). Rather, I like three sentences: (1) what we do, (2) who we do it to, and (3) why you shoul...
A Q3 performance that blew my mind
I recently got an email with a Q3 sales update from a company I’ve been an investor in for a while. They consistently meet or beat their plan and are an […]
Conveners vs. connectors
Government and universities, in my view around startup communities, are feeders, not leaders. Feeders are important, but they are different – and play a different role than leaders. For a startup community to be vibrant and sustainable the leaders have to be entrepreneurs. This is the first tenet...
The power of passionate entrepreneurship
It was the second week of TechStars, and I was doing office hours with each of the 11 teams going through the Boulder 2010 program. I was sitting across the table from Adam Wilson and Ian Bernstein who each looked tired and dejected. In front of them were three slides. I asked them what was wrong....
The dinosaur board
I’ve been writing about boards of directors some lately – both changing my behavior as well as thinking out loud as I explore reinventing how boards work for the book […]
The all@company email list
In an effort to better figure out the startup board dynamic, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of continual communication with board members. The companies I feel most involved in are ones in which I have continual communication and involvement with the company. This isn’t just limited to...
