I pass our neighborhood King Soopers multiples times a day and regardless of the time of day, there is a constant stream of people mourning the ten lives lost on March 22, 2021. Visitors have left countless flowers, heartfelt mementos, and inspiring words. At the center of the ad-hoc memorial is a black and white…
We’re currently on Spring Break staying in a beautiful resort in California overlooking the Pacific Ocean. When our phones started blowing up yesterday afternoon with calls and text messages from friends and family wondering if we were ok, we were initially confused. Once we realized what was happening, we immediately started calling our neighbors and…
The Venture Kills journey continues. After spending three episodes on why you should Never Take Money from a VC, I’ve switched gears to a slightly more serious topic. The focus of the new series is on the building blocks founders should put in place to ensure their companies have a strong foundation for growth. The…
A couple of weeks ago I announced my idiotic plan to launch a YouTube channel. Today I released the third video in a three-part series called “Never Take Money from a VC.” More than a few people have asked why a VC would decide to highlight this topic first. To be clear, my motivations were…
My unofficial bio indicates that one of the goals of my blog is to “help others learn from my mistakes which means I have a near-infinite amount of material to use for inspiration”. This is very true of course, but there is one problem: I don’t love blogging. I find the process a bit tedious…
How have you trained your sales team to talk about your competitor with a potential customer? I see companies take different approaches from refusing to acknowledge the competitor exists to taking every opportunity to throw them under the bus. I think there is a better approach. When it comes to talking about competitors, there is…
After eight weeks of being heads down working with our portfolio companies, I’ve started to come up for air and do some public facing stuff. I was recently on a cool panel at Denver Startup Week where we talked about scaling towards profitability. Another highlight was doing an AMA with David Brown, co-CEO of Techstars,…
When I took my first business trip as a Gnip team member more than 6 years ago, I accidentally brought home my hotel key in my back pocket. My kids were very young at the time & they thought the credit card sized piece of plastic was amazing. They were actually arguing over who got…
Today we announced that I’m leaving Twitter to become a partner at the venture capital firm, Foundry Group. The blog post on foundrygroup.com does a great job explaining the background and context around this decision. Of course, I had to announce the news via a tweetstorm which you can see below. I’ll be back in…
One of the greatest honors of my life was delivering the 2016 Spring Commencement address for Auburn University. The best part was that my niece, Annie, was one of the graduates in attendance that day receiving her masters degree in speech pathology. It was wonderful to experience the whole day together. I knew I was…