AVC
Aug 8 4:56am
When fundraising gets tougher for startups, the existing investors (insiders) will often provide a bridge loan to the company to extend the runway for getting another round done. There is more of this sort of thing happening in today’s fundraising market and I thought I’d share some of the things I have learned about setting […]
Aug 1 5:00am
Tech:NYC is the industry association for NY’s tech sector. They play a number of important roles and one of them is to educate and inform about the impact of the tech sector in NY. To that end, they launched a valuable resource last month called Innovation Indicators. Innovation Indicators is a dashboard that shows the […]
Brad Feld
Jul 31 3:36pm
Registration is open for the 2022 Q4 Leadership Bootcamp, which is happening in Boulder, Colorado, on Nov 10-13, 2022. Regular readers of this blog know about my long-time (back to 1996) friendship with Reboot co-founder and CEO Jerry Colonna. What you may not know is that several years ago, Jerry and his partner Ali Schultz […]
The post Reboot 2022 Q4 Leadership Bootcamp appeared first on Brad Feld.
AVC
Jul 25 5:56am
We have been watching our portfolio of ~130 technology companies wrestle with this decision for the last two and a half years. Brought on by the covid pandemic and the work from home moment that it created, there has been a sea change in the way that technology companies organize themselves to get work done. […]
Brad Feld
Jul 18 8:16am
Of all the business and technology writers out there, including bloggers, I think the best one, at this moment, is Matt Levine. He’s the only person currently writing on Planet Earth that I find myself reading every word of everything he writes. For the last few months, he has been mostly writing about three topics: […]
The post The Brilliance of Bloomberg’s Matt Levine appeared first on Brad Feld.
AVC
Jul 18 5:02am
Every quarter our firm goes through a process to value our entire portfolio. Those values, on a schedule of investments we publish to our investors every quarter, flow through to our financial statements and capital accounts and establish how much an interest in our partnerships are worth at that time. We have always taken this […]
Jul 10 5:22am
I wrote the post at the bottom and linked here when Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter in late April. I am relieved that Musk has decided he does not want to own Twitter. I never thought he would be a good shepherd of the Twitter network and maybe now we have the […]
Jul 3 5:00am
AVC has been around for nineteen years and it has evolved over the years from a place I’d post multiple times a day to once a day to now once a week. There was a time when there was a vibrant comment community at AVC with many posts getting over a hundred comments and replies. […]
Brad Feld
Jun 30 9:07am
In the last seven months, the venture / entrepreneurial world has gone from “the only thing that matters is massive growth” to “the world is going to end.” For perspective, all you need to do is look at a dozen high-flying IPOs from 2020 or 2021 to see that the peak happened just before Thanksgiving. […]
The post Navigating Choppy Waters appeared first on Brad Feld.
AVC
Jun 27 5:27am
The Gotham Gal and I own five EVs and have been driving electric-powered cars since 2014. I don’t drive gas-powered cars and haven’t for a few years now. We have purchased two Chevy Bolts, two Tesla Model Ss, and one Rivian truck. I love the instant acceleration you get from an EV, I enjoy driving […]
Brad Feld
Jun 23 9:36am
My partner Ryan shared this with me. It’s a 10-minute video showing the evolution from System 0.97 to macOS 13 Ventura. I had an original Macintosh 128K which is now enjoying its retirement at the Media Archaeology Lab. Enjoy!
The post The Evolution of Apple macOS appeared first on Brad Feld.
AVC
Jun 21 5:23am
The last six months have been a challenging time for tech and tech startups. Macro events have weighed on the sector, valuations have come crashing down, revenue growth has slowed (or stopped), and layoffs are happening across the sector. Many of the folks I work with are frustrated. The things that were working in their […]
Brad Feld
Jun 15 10:18am
The 2nd Edition of my book Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors launched today. My co-authors, Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Bolster, and Mahendra Ramsinghani, were a joy to work with. While the 1st Edition was a good book, I wasn’t particularly proud of it because I […]
The post Book: Startup Boards, 2nd Edition Is Available appeared first on Brad Feld.
AVC
Jun 12 5:34am
I have worked in three venture capital firms in the thirty-six years I have been doing venture capital investing. They have all been small partnerships, between three and seven investing partners, where there is little to no hierarchy amount the partners. There are many models out there for building and managing investment firms. They vary […]
Brad Feld
Jun 10 10:36am
Connie Loizos is one of the long-time tech industry writers who I respect. I don’t respond to many interview requests these days, but I’ll always talk to her. She has a good article today in TechCrunch titled Embrace the down round (it’s going to be okay, maybe). I like the quote she pulled out of me in […]
The post Down Rounds: Deal With Reality appeared first on Brad Feld.
Jun 8 11:27am
About a year ago, I decided to take a summer vacation from blogging. I didn’t feel like blogging when summer ended, so I extended my blogging vacation indefinitely. I figured I’d wake up one day and feel like blogging again or not. That summer vacation (from blogging) lasted a year. Initially, I was working on […]
The post Summer Is Here appeared first on Brad Feld.
AVC
Jun 7 7:01am
New York Senator Gillibrand and Wyoming Senator Lummis have teamed up to propose a bi-partisan bill that would shift much of the regulatory oversight of crypto assets from the SEC to the CFTC, acknowledging that these tokens are much more like commodities than securities. The details of the bill will be made public today and […]
May 31 4:05am
Gotham Gives is a public charity that the Gotham Gal and I started one year ago to complement the family foundation that we have been using to make philanthropic gifts for over two decades. A public charity allows us to raise capital from others in addition to our family’s philanthropic gifts. We use this public […]
May 22 4:56am
Back in February of last year, I wrote a blog post with the same title and said this about the asset price bubble we were living in and investing in over the last few years: The big question is how does this end? I believe it ends when the Covid 19 pandemic is over and […]
May 13 3:48am
I blogged about the $1k Project For Ukraine a couple of months ago. Since then over 5,000 families in Ukraine have gotten a $1k gift, no strings attached, to help them survive during this crisis. That is $5mm of direct aid to families in Ukraine. Yesterday, Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, tweeted that he […]
May 11 4:23am
Investing in founder-led businesses is comforting to me. They have the ability to see the forest through the trees and do what is necessary to evolve the business. Two great examples of this are Microsoft in the mid 90s and Facebook a decade ago. Microsoft had spent more than a decade competing and winning the […]
May 9 4:40am
Tech:NYC is launching a new initiative, Tech Year NYC, which helps young people from underrepresented backgrounds get access to careers in NYC’s fast-growing tech sector. Tech Year NYC is a rollup of several existing city programs into a single point of entry and engagement for tech companies and students. The idea is to make it […]
May 1 4:53am
Last week we held USV’s annual Portfolio Summit here in NYC. Every year we invite the leaders of our portfolio companies to come to NYC and spend a couple of days with us and each other. However, we were not able to do that in 2020 and 2021 so this was our first Portfolio Summit […]
Apr 26 4:30am
When I read the news a few weeks ago that Elon Musk had offered to buy Twitter, I wrote this: I continue to believe that decentralization is the right long-term answer for a core communications protocol of the Internet and hope that Elon will think about doing just that once he owns it and is […]
Apr 22 4:52am
It is Earth Day, a day to celebrate our planet and rededicate ourselves to saving it. I plan to walk and ride my bike, avoid cars, and enjoy being out and about in NYC today. But I’d also like to talk about something that is bothering me. The New York State Assembly and Senate are […]