It's time to focus on what I care about and not let the noise take over my brain.
— Brad Feld
While it's trendy to outsource your accounting to a third party, once you hit a certain size, it's dangerous.
Many people, companies, and organizations are trying to protect the past at any cost. We see this regularly in business as the incumbent vs. innovator fight, but I think it's more profound than that. It's literally a difference in point of view.
While I live a busy life, the pace ebbs and flows.
In 2016, you no longer have to be in Silicon Valley to launch a successful startup. Colorado is home to many.
I have several close friends who are insomniacs. Over the years, I've heard their stories about being up in the middle of the night, completely awake. I see them yawn at 11 A.M. and know that, regardless of what they are doing, they'd probably rather be in bed sleeping. I've always had sympathy for them, but I've never really understood it.
When I think about the books I've written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.
Ultimately, the goal is to use acquisitions to compress time on product development and get people on the team, especially in senior roles, who can help build out areas of the company they have experience in.
I love using a targeted acquisition approach in conjunction with a business that has a clear strategy and strong organic growth.
I love dreams.
In 2013, when Google announced that Kansas City would be the first city in the country to have Google Fiber, I bought a house in the first neighborhood that was being wired up with Google's gigabit Internet.
As I continue to believe that innovation and entrepreneurship are the key drivers to our economic future, it's frustrating to hear such little cogent discussion around it.
St. Louis has a great startup scene and a vibrant business community.
My optimism holds that the good guys eventually come out on top.
Some Sundays, I read it quickly - other Sundays, I savor it. I generally spend most of my time in 'The New York Times Book Review,' 'Sunday Business,' 'Sunday Review,' and 'The New York Times Magazine.' I turn all the other pages, only stopping when I find a headline that interests me.
My weight fluctuates between 205 and 220, depending on how much I pay attention to it.
Kauffman Fellows is not necessarily for people just entering the venture industry but for experienced VCs looking to accelerate their growth. The program is centered around established innovation leaders - if you are looking to grow and become a better investor, you should think about doing this program.
Twitter has always been that refreshing place where I can quickly find out what is going on in my tech world. I follow mostly entrepreneurs and VCs - some who I know and some who I don't know. I have a few companies in my feed. But no newspapers, no magazines, and no mainstream media.
If you don't have a VP Finance on your team reporting to you, do yourself, your team, and your investors a favor and go hire one right now.
Technology doesn't address everything - for example, air travel still sucks.
While we should certainly be investing in our own STEM education, we should take advantage of the thousands of international students who come here to study and are ready to fill these gaps immediately upon graduation.
As an investor, I'm always looking for the next great American company. Who will create tomorrow's Twitter, Facebook, or Google?
Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.
I know a lot of companies that have a very well defined post-acquisition process. However, many of them don't take into consideration the dynamics and personalities of the acquiree. Instead, they assume that everyone will happily be assimilated.
In my world, historical revenue is the least interesting thing to consider in an acquisition strategy. The goal is to acquire technology that is on your product roadmap or people that fit culturally within your organization and help you execute on your roadmap faster.
I especially love right-now sci-fi: stuff that happens in current time but incorporates a scientific breakthrough that is currently being explored.
I can now check Oregon off the 'marathon in every state list.'
In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Kauffman Foundation working with Jana Matthews on 'learning programs for high growth entrepreneurs.'
I hope more cities engage with immigrant entrepreneurs the way St. Louis has - it's a great model.
One of my core values is diversity of everything.
I regularly see leaders change what they say because they get bored of saying the same thing over and over again. It's not that they vary a few words or change examples, but they change the message.
I've been traveling more and feel like I've figured out a comfortable way to do it. The biggest shift is that I spend my traveling time 'in the moment,' I don't over-schedule when I'm somewhere and instead focus on longer time with less people. I also give myself plenty of me time on the road.
When I struggled with a depressive episode in 2013, I realized that I had a glitch in my thinking about my own motivation. I had separated learning and teaching into different concepts.
Anyone who knows me knows I'm a strong advocate for diversity across all dimensions.
I don't read newspapers or watch the news on TV, deliberately to avoid the noise.
For those trying to protect the past, it is a way of retaining power, status, money, a way a life, predictability, comfort, control, and a bunch of other things like that. It is a struggle against the inevitability of change.
While I've had plenty of ups and downs, dealt with my share of failure, and struggled through emotionally difficult periods, I'm fundamentally an optimist.
Immigrants have historically been an entrepreneurial bunch.
I have trouble sleeping maybe one night a year. On that special night, I get up and read on the couch until I fall asleep.
I often get asked how I write so much. As any writer knows, the answer is to write a lot more than you actually publish.
Usually, the first three months post acquisition are up and down. The acquirer and the acquiree are trying to figure out how to interact. The founders of the acquiree are usually tired from the deal process and adjusting to their new reality.
By 2002, I realized that what was classically called a rollup strategy was not generally effective, at least not for me.
Ever since I learned about the concept of garbage collection in 6.001 at MIT in 1984 while using Scheme on HP Chipmunks, I've always thought of dreaming as the same as garbage collection for a computer.
Periodically, at the end of a conversation, someone will ask me, 'Is there something I can do for you?' I used to answer with 'Do something that is helpful to something or someone in my world.'
I have a long history with Kansas City.
St. Louis is a good example of a vibrant city. Having stayed in a hotel in 2011 overlooking Cardinals stadium when they won the World Series, their fans definitely show up loud and proud.
I watched my parents act as completely equal partners in their relationship, and as a son to a woman I respect immensely, I never thought of gender inequality as a child.
When we raised the first Foundry Group fund in 2007, we took over 100 first meetings. We told our story several hundred times. As part of it was a slide called 'Strategy.' I still repeat the elements of that slide regularly, a decade later, as our core strategy has not changed.
On a daily basis, I pay almost no attention to the macro.
I talk often about being intrinsically motivated by learning. It's the primary driver of most of my activity.
