Brad Feld
Early stage investor and entrepreneur for over 20 years. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Currently serves on the board of directors of Gist, Gnip, Oblong, Standing Cloud, and Zynga for Foundry Group. Previously, Brad served as chief technology officer of AmeriData Technologies. Active with several non-profit organizations, Chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and Co-Chairman of the Colorado Governor’s Innovation Council. Nationally recognized speaker, widely read and well respected blogger at Feld Thoughts .com and Ask the VC.
By Brad Feld on March 18, 2010
A week ago the MIT Entrepreneurship Review launched. Today it’s up on MIT’s home page.
The MIT Entrepreneurship Review is a new online publication about entrepreneurship that is produced and written by MIT students dedicated to analyzing trends in entrepreneurship at MIT and beyond. I’ve been involved with some of the folks behind this and I [...]
Posted in Trends & Concepts | Tagged Entrepreneurship, MIT, MIT Entrepreneurship Review
By Brad Feld on March 18, 2010
Gist just announced that they have acquired Learn that Name and incorporated it in the Gist iPhone app.
There are a lot of fun connections here for me. For starters, as many of you know, I’m an investor in Gist. If you haven’t tried it – or haven’t played with it for a while – give [...]
Posted in Business | Tagged acquisition, gist, learn that name, startup weekend, startups, TechStars
By Brad Feld on March 17, 2010
Image by GraemeThickins via Flickr
I love the conferences we help sponsor (Glue and Defrag). Eric Norlin is a genius at putting together a specialty technology conference. He gets amazing people to attend, curates the content meticulously, isn’t afraid to try new things every year (and have some not work), and just keeps at it with [...]
Posted in Trends & Concepts | Tagged CloudCamp, Colorado, conferences, Defrag, defragcon, Foundry Group, Glue, Glue Conference, gluecon
By Brad Feld on March 17, 2010
My long time friend Alan Shimel has been blogging up a storm on Network World (if you want to hear any amusing story, ask him about the first time he met me.) When Alan started writing his column for Network World he asked me for introductions to a bunch of our portfolio companies that were [...]
Posted in Trends & Concepts | Tagged Blog, Cloud Computing, gist, network world, Open source, pogoplug, security, shimel, standing cloud, zynga
By Brad Feld on March 15, 2010
Not long after I posted about Dave Jilk’s experience with the Pogoplug, he started using the phrase “Pogoplug Simple” to describe one of the goals of Standing Cloud. The idea is that technology products should be so easy to set up and use that the experience is vaguely unsatisfying – you feel like you didn’t [...]
Posted in Software | Tagged Cloud, Cloud Computing, Foundry Group, Open source, pogoplug, standing cloud
By Brad Feld on March 15, 2010
One of our internal mantras at TechStars is to “publish your data.” We encourage ever team to do this starting very early in their life. To this day, I still get daily performance reports (I refer to them as TPS reports) from many of the companies that have gone through the program.
Last week, David Cohen [...]
Posted in Business | Tagged Entrepreneurship, startups, TechStars, Venture Capital
By Brad Feld on March 11, 2010
Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons. These are typically day long events where everyone in the company works on whatever cool new ideas they have. On Monday night I got a note from a company I’m on the board of about a hackthon they just completed. [...]
Posted in Software | Tagged agile development, Entrepreneurship, hackathon, Programming
By Brad Feld on March 10, 2010
Today, Amazon’s 1-Click patent was confirmed following a four year re-examination. Amazon now has ownership of a highly controversial and very absurd patent which I hope will only be used defensively. This a classic example of a “business method patent” that should simply not exist. I continue to wait patiently to see what the Supreme [...]
Posted in Trends & Concepts | Tagged Facebook, google, jet pack, Patent, Patents, Supreme Court
By Brad Feld on March 8, 2010
I’ve been an Amazon Associate (Amazon’s affiliate program) for many years. Today I got the following notice in my Amazon Associates account.
and I woke up to the following email.
Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:
We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax [...]
Posted in Business | Tagged affiliate, Amazon, Amazon Associate, Amazon Associates Program, Colorado, Colorado government, hb 10-1193, Sales tax
By Brad Feld on March 8, 2010
One of the great things about living in Eldorado Springs, Colorado is interacting with nature on a daily basis.
Protecting the environment has been a priority of mine for many years. Every now and then I like to call out a non-profit organization that I support that I think does an excellent job of helping protect [...]
Posted in Trends & Concepts | Tagged Colorado, colorado conservation voters, drinking water, environment, Philanthropy
