Showing posts with label Foundry Group. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foundry Group. Show all posts

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Congrats Brad Feld For Running 50 Miles

How did the guy do it? I am amazed. So impressed. This is so inspiring. Makes me wanna do it.

Brad Feld: American River 50 Mile Endurance Run
I had decided to break the race up into five segments of 10 miles each..... The first 10 miles were easy. I used an 8:2 run:walk pace and held myself back. ..... the “runner drift” settled in a little around mile 15 (where it’s impossible to stay focused on a straight line) and I remember looking up a few times and being startled by a bike heading right at me ...... I took a Gu gel every 30 minutes with water and a salt tablet every hour. At the aid stations I refilled my water, grabbed a few more Gu’s, and ate some pretzels, boiled potatoes and salt, and a dixie cup of coke (yum). ...... By mile 29 it hit me that I’d now run the furthest distance in my life. I went through mile 30 with the thought of “only 20 miles to go.” And this is when it started getting really hard. The segment between 30 and 40 was physically and mentally tough. ..... By the mid-30′s my pace had slowed from 12 minute miles to 18 – 20 minute miles, which became depressing. I only had one really dark mile where I started feeling sorry for myself, but during this mile I got a hilarious txt message from my friend Andy which jolted me out of my dark spot. ...... At mile 41 I met up with my assistant Kelly at an aid station where she joined me for the last nine miles. ...... Somewhere around mile 43 or 44 I started having trouble getting my feet to go where I wanted them to go. ...... There was a short downhill stretch – I took off running with a loud manic scream at the top of my lungs. ....... As we went through mile 48 I realized I might break 12 hours. At 49.25 it flattened out and I sprinted for the finish and came in two minutes and change under my goal. ...... my first non-Gu meal in 12 hours while Katherine and crew drove back to San Francisco to have some “excellent pizza” that they could only find in San Francisco. I called Amy and had a celebratory talk – she had done an awesome job of keeping track of things during the race (due to RunKeeper live) and being my communications director for the day. I dropped my coach Gary a note of thanks and then ate and ate and drank a beer and ate some more. ...... When I got back to my room, I discovered a very lonely second water bottle sitting just where I had left it 14 hours earlier. For the first time all day I had tears in my eyes, but of laughter – at myself.


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Friday, July 09, 2010

To Iran, With Love (2)

To: Brad Feld, Subject: Iran And Me (Digital Ninja/Commando)
To Iran, With Love (1)

Hello Brad. Hello Fred.

I am psyched to be talking to two of my favorite people in the tech community.

Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC
An Immigrant Story For Brad Feld
Fred Wilson: An Unassuming Kind Of Guy
Meeting Fred Wilson In Person
Fred Wilson: A DJ
Fred Wilson: DJ
Fred Wilson's Gift To Me
Fred Wilson's Insight
Fred Wilson: VC
Fred Wilson: A VC

So let me tackle some of the questions after having introduced myself: To Iran, With Love (1). Over the past few days I have paced around a whole lot trying to grapple with as to the best way to present myself.
  • What did I do for Nepal?
  • How did I do it?
  • What can I do for Iran?
  • Why am I asking 20 VCs to put in 5K each in personal money towards this? 
How Did I Do What I Did For Nepal?

I ended up giving a name to the method: nonviolent militancy. Not only are you strictly nonviolent, you are almost all digital. The battles take place on the screen for a big part. But the method is not the message. Unless you have a very high level of political consciousness, unless you have super political instincts, unless your political knowledge is robust, unless you are a disrupter in the best tradition of entrepreneurs, unless you have a firm commitment to the basic principles that underly any democracy movement, you can't do what I did for Nepal. My political credentials were outstanding, and so the technology behind the digital tools I ended up using came to be of service to me. The medium is not the message. On the other hand without the digital medium my work would not have been possible. The Internet allowed me the utter fearlessness that I exhibited at all junctures because it allowed me to be in the safety of New York City without many of the disadvantages of distance. On any given day, I had a pretty good idea of what was going on at the ground level in Nepal. I looked at Nepal from my distance the way an astrophysicist might look at planet Jupiter and do a very good job at it. The distance kept me safe, but it also gave me a certain objectivity, a certain detachment. That helped my work.

It was amazing to me over the course of my work spanning about two years eating into my savings that I was able to meet in person almost all the key political players in the drama in Nepal right here in New York City. I also discovered every little town in Nepal is represented by at least a few people in Queens. If that is true for the poorest country outside of Africa, that has to be true for every country on earth. That is why I have been saying for years everyone you need to spread democracy across the world lives right here in New York City. New York City truly is the capital city of the world. And if I networked hard enough in New York City, I realized I could get to know people who personally knew people in all the political parties in Nepal, in all the human rights NGOs active in Nepal, in all the media houses there.

Dinesh Prasain Tour: Report
Anil Jha, Bimal Nidhi US Tour Logistics
Gagan Thapa Talk In Boston: Two Hours Audio
Gagan Thapa October 22 Saturday 2 PM Columbia University
Sage Radachowsky Interviews Anil Jha
A Day In The Life Of Gagan Thapa
The Man, The Myth, The Legend: Gagan Thapa
Seven Party Forum In Jackson Heights
Krishna Pahadi November 6 Sunday 5 PM
Gagan's Talk In New York
Pahadi Says Goal Is Democratic Republic
Krishna Pahadi At New York University
December 11 Sunday 11 AM Union Square
Dinesh Tripathi In New York
Anand Bist, Troublemaker
My Proposal To The Saturday Symposium At Columbia
Dinesh Tripathi, "Arthur Kinoy Of Nepal"
Symposium At Columbia
February 1 New York Rally Photos
March 22 Event At Columbia

And I worked the phone. I called people in Nepal, in India, elsewhere.

And I worked the email circuit. Every time I received a mass email from some Nepali wishing me a Happy New Year or greetings for one of Nepal's major festivals, I would go ahead and harvest all the emails. And thus I ended up with the largest Nepali mailing list in the world. Someone once said when Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas that if you knew 1500 people in Little Rock, you knew everyone who mattered in Arkansas. Well, those 1500 people for Nepal are all on my mailing list. There are about 8500 people on that list. Featured at the top is an email from the Prime Minister of Nepal, Madhav Nepal.

But the hub of all my work was my Nepal blog: Democracy For Nepal. And my primary data collection method was the wild wild web, the Internet. Anyone could have accessed all the information that I was able to access on a daily basis. I visited the websites of the newspapers out of Nepal. I had a Nepal section on my Google News page.

I was able to cash on the personal contacts I already had, and was able to build. But the Internet was my primary playground. Anyone could have accessed what I accessed, and I feel like anyone anywhere could apply the principles that I applied in Nepal, and intend to apply in Iran. Actually one big reason I want to get involved with Iran is so as to be able to prove what we did in Nepal can be done over and over again all over the world, everywhere where there is no democracy.

I will touch upon those principles later. Let me now get into what precisely I did for Nepal. I helped move the ball at all critical junctures of the peace process.

What I Did For Nepal

When the king of Nepal pulled his military coup in February 2005, the first thing I did was I surveyed the scene. I read all the news I could. I tracked down all my key contacts that had fled to Delhi in the aftermath, including the guy who is now president of Nepal.

Hridayesh Tripathy In Delhi: Good News
Phone Interview With Rajendra Mahato
Phone Marathon: Called Up Delhi
Phone Marathon II

Then I surveyed the political scene. Either the king was going to backtrack and go back to being a ceremonial monarch, or Nepal needed to end the monarchy, become a republic.

Towards a Democratic Republic of Nepal

Now Nepal is a republic, but at that point in time republic was a big word to utter. None of the big democratic parties were for a republic. The king had jailed all their leaders and the parties were still singing the tunes of a constitutional monarchy. There is a term for that: mental slavery, the emotional dependence of the enslaved upon those who enslave them. The king showed signs he wanted to rule in an active way for a few decades. If they can do it in Saudi Arabia, why can't we do it in Nepal, he asked. Well, Saudi Arabia's time too will come.

I recognized there were three poles in Nepal: the royalists, the democrats and the Maoists. The only way to defeat the royalists was to forge an alliance between the other two forces. But that was not going to be easy because the Maoists had been waging a war for 10 years to establish a one party communist republic. They had been physically attacking and killing cadres of the largest democratic parties. How do you do business with them? At that point they had managed to dismantle the barely existent state apparatus in about 80% of the country.

The roadmap I proposed was this. The Maoists were for a communist republic. The big democratic parties were for a ceremonial monarchy. They needed to find common ground, which was the idea of a democratic republic. I sent overtures to the number two Maoist, Baburam Bhattarai. He sent overtures back, but that got him into trouble. The number one Maoist had him arrested by his own bodyguards. Later I appealed for his release, and he was released.

Sought eDialogue with Dr. Baburam Bhattarai
Ideological Overture To The Nepali Maoists
Ideological Overture To The Nepali Maoists (2)
Baburam Bhattarai On A Democratic Republic
Doing Business With Baburam Bhattarai
To: Prachanda, Baburam, Mahara, Badal And The Rest Of The Maoist Leadership
Prachanda's Letter Bomb Of 5/1
Baburam: Prachanda's Best Bet, Litmust Test, And Only Option
Baburam Bhattarai Press Statement

Around this time a fellow Nepali activist based out of New York City sent out an email saying the army in Nepal had had her father disappeared. The danger was real. No wonder most Nepalis in the diaspora tried not to put their names to the cause. They preferred private to public, offline to online. I spoke up at my blog. Her father was released a few days later.

"Urgent: Disappearance Of My Father" by Sarahana Shrestha

Once there was convergence between the Maoists and the democrats behind the idea of a democratic republic, it was time to go all the way and try to forge a strong alliance against the monarchists. It took long months, but finally they all got together behind the idea of holding elections to a constituent assembly.

How To Move Towards A Common Minimum Program?
Seeking Common Ground
Seize The Moment: Match The Maoists
Possible Framework For A Maoist-Democrat Alliance
Major Fermentations In The NC And The UML
Alliance Of Steel
Indian Support For Democrat-Maoist Alliance A Must

Around this time a former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba got arrested. His wife sent me an email.

Gagan Thapa Arrested, Deuba Re-Arrested
Email From Arzu Rana Deuba
Email From Madhav Kumar Nepal
March 22 Event, Deuba In New York
Sushil Pyakurel In Brussels
Deuba At Columbia
Deuba In Jackson Heights
Deuba Off To DC

The Maoists were still at war. Now that some common ground had been found, it was time for the Maoists to lay down the weapon. I proposed something pretty out of the box: unilateral ceasefire. How would the king respond? Could he keep fighting? No, he could not.

Power Does Not Necessarily Flow Through The Barrel Of A Gun: Maoists
Prachanda, Order Your Cadres To Live
After Ganapathy, A Ceasefire
RNA, Declare Your Own Ceasefire, You Have No Choice
Prachanda, Do Not Break The Ceasefire
Irresponsible Response To Ceasefire
For The First Time In A Decade, Permanent Peace Feels Possible
The Maoist Ceasefire: The Devil In The Details
The RNA Could Be Disbanded
The Maoists Could Do More
Militarists Attempting A Doramba Repeat To End Ceasefire
The Army Rank And File Need To Be For The People And Democracy
Prachanda, Extend The Ceasefire By Three Months
Prachanda Audio Interview, A First
Why The Maoists Should Not Go Back To Violence

Around this time I also got impatient with Girija Koirala, the de facto leader in the democratic camp for being the oldest person, and threw my weight behind Madhav Nepal who went on to organize some of the largest one day rallies over the coming months.

Madhav Nepal, Commander Of The Movement
Janakpur Rally, Biggest In Nepal Since 1990

Once the Maoist-Democrat alliance was formed, it was time to go for a mass movement. Here Ukraine in 2004 was my inspiration. The Nepali leaders kept thinking  in terms of a rally here, a rally there, a shutdown here, a shutdown there. From the very beginning I was pushing for a Ukraine repeat, that we needed to come out into the streets and stay out there until the regime collapsed. That is what ended up happening only what happened in Nepal was much much bigger than what happened in Ukraine, and much bigger than anything I had imagined. But this was not a sure thing at all. The Maoists started thinking now the democrats had finally come around to their idea of a final armed struggle and an assault on the capital city. That suggestion I fought tooth and nail. Around this time I also hired a blogger in Kathmandu to video blog all street protests. That proved fundamental. At the time noone was doing that. Those videos got the Nepali diaspora excited. (Umesh, Turn It Into A Business, Mero Sansar Video Clips, Blogger Receives Death Threat, Bloggers Form Union) I also had to fight American tendencies to want to fight the Maoists to the military finish, to see them as the first opponent, we will deal with an autocratic king later attitude: Robert Kaplan Is An American Cowboy.

Non-Violent Militancy, Concerted Global Action
Human Rights to Political Platform to Full-Fledged Movement
eDemocracy, 4S Campaign, 24/7 Vigil For Democracy: Take Over Tundikhel
Streets Filling Up
Major Student Protests
Timi Sadak Ma Utreko Dekheko Chhu (I have seen you come out into the streets - poem)
Pyramid Of 10 In Kathmandu
India-US-EU Need To Provide Logistical Support To The Democracy Movement
Logistics To Bring Down The Regime
Lilamani Pokharel For Continuous Movement
Maoists Should Go Beyond Ceasefire To Peaceful Mobilization
Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests Protests
Democracy For Nepal: Contents 2005
Nepal Needs To Be Hitting The World Headlines: Write To The Media
Baburam Bhattarai May Not Preach Violence To The Seven Party Alliance
Non-Violence All The Way
"Robin Hood Im Internet"
Mero Sansar Video Clips 4
Undeclared Ceasefire, Decisive Movement

This is the gist of the developments leading up to the mass movement of April 2006 when eight of the country's 27 million people came out into the streets to shut the country down completely. Every step can be retraced at my Nepal blog. Here I have provided just a summary. Keeping my work transparent in real time was important to me even back then because I held a strong belief even back then that this work was relevant to many other countries. In April 2006 I came across a blog post by some anonymous member of the Zimbabwean diaspora that asked, why can't we have in Zimbabwe what they just had in Nepal? It was a good feeling for me to come across that sentiment.

In my next blog post I will tackle the other two questions.
  • What can I do for Iran?
  • Why am I asking 20 VCs to put in 5K each in personal money towards this?
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Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Brad Feld

The Founders Visa Movement
An Angel Investor Group Move That Makes Me Vomit
Amazon Fires Its Affiliates in Colorado (Including Me) Because of Colorado HB 10-1193

Bummed Out About Bilski
Take the Time to Acknowledge Management’s Performance
Gearbox’s Smart Ball
Founders 2010 #6: We’re Not Alone
How MIT Could Help With A Different Approach to the BP Gulf Crisis
Risk Takers – Pogoplug and RedLaser
Discovering At Least One Awesome Thing A Day On My Mac


"We're Not Alone" The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 6 from TechStars on Vimeo.


"Risk Takers" The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 5 from TechStars on Vimeo.



Oblong is Hiring
The Magic of Email Conversations
eBay Acquires RedLaser
Startupbootcamp – TechStars Global Affiliate in Compenhagen
Fun and Games with BigDoor

The Wall Street Journal: Blogs: Venture Capital Dispatch:
A Summer Romance Between Founder And Venture Capitalist
a world where many entrepreneurs see venture capital as a necessary evil ..... the tale of meeting Foundry Group’s Feld and how the VC’s unorthodox approach to learning about the company ultimately cemented Smith’s desire to have him as an investor...... Brad intrigued me because he didn’t come across like any venture capitalist I had ever met ..... ‘I’m not going to conform’ persona, and are both passionate to their core about helping startups ........ “The mindset of a typical VC is geared more towards a later stage company that has crossed the chasm and the customer base is beyond early adopters,” Smith told us. “Finding someone that knows you still need to find out where to aim your rocket is very important.” ....... Feld’s process was simple: He wanted to get to know the founders and find that each interaction had been more interesting than the last. ....... When I told him that we didn’t have an investor presentation put together yet he quipped, ‘The last thing in the world I want to see is a f—ing presentation ....... Brad and I spent the next six months getting to know each other, during which Brad and his partners repeatedly drilled us on our thinking, our strategy, our technology and our market approach. We told him we would invite him into the “sausage making” process and he readily donned his hairnet and dove in. ....... Foundry never asked for projections or historical financials. “We talked about where we want to take the product and how we want to serve customers ..... “After we signed a term sheet, I finally asked Brad if he wanted to see our deck. I sent it to him and he said, ‘That scared me.’
BigDoor: Blog: Venture Capital: A Love Story
We quickly concluded that we needed to kill everything we had just spent six months building and go back to the drawing board. Given that we had only two months of cash in the bank at the time, this decision wasn’t an easy one but we felt strongly that it was necessary. ....... Andy has a favorite saying, “We know your plans are wrong, we just don’t yet know how wrong.” ...... changing direction like this meant he was willing to forget every one of those prior promises and start down a new path. ....... we went from 0 users to 8 million users in an afternoon. ....... he wasn’t your typical VC. Brad is an early investor in Zynga the undisputed king of social gaming. ....... we knew that having Brad as a partner would give us a huge amount of credibility with potential customers, so we began stalking him. ...... We mostly went back and forth via email, where niceties were commonly replaced with a raw curiosity of how best to build BigDoor and how we would meet the coming onslaught of demand for our platform. Brad was direct and often told me where he thought I was wrong, which laid the groundwork for me being able to do the same with him. We found some common ground and a fair amount of areas to disagree and challenge each other. We joked about 80’s bands, compared reading lists and shared paranoid rants about how machines will eventually take over the world (they will). But what’s most notable is what we didn’t discuss. Never once did anyone at Foundry ask us for projections or historical financials. We didn’t talk about the deal, valuation or board composition and we never talked about exit timing or how much money they needed to make. Product, customers and philosophy – that’s where we spent our time. ...... On two separate occasions Brad told me he was “out” and wasn’t going to invest. ..... “The word ‘no’ is simply a milestone on the path to ‘yes’.” This emboldened me to go back to Brad and tell him he was wrong and that he was the perfect partner for us. I made no attempt at all to posture or play hard to get .......... This wasn’t done out of desperation – we had multiple offers from other great VCs – we conducted ourselves in a completely transparent fashion because that’s how Foundry was toward us. ......... until one day Brad sent an email that said, “Ok – I’m ready (and psyched) to do a deal.” He then laid out deal terms in one very simple paragraph. I responded with a very long email that ultimately asked for just one change, and he simply responded with “Deal.” That was it, that email exchange was the extent of our term sheet. Instead of grinding us on terms, Brad spent the three weeks from our agreement to closing making introductions for us to potential customers. ....... we’ve never had a deal go this smooth nor have we ever had anyone who was so awesome to work with on the other side of the table. ......... Having great investors isn’t just about warm fuzzies, it should (and does) also result in real customers. ..... as we endeavor to weave the BigDoor platform into the very fabric of the Internet.



Video: Brad Feld On How To Get Funding

A Month of Mac
Rethinking The Laptop
I’ve Failed Over and Over and Over Again in My Life



Swimming At Night
Founders 2010 #4: Let’s Be Honest
Van Gogh’s Starry Night Updated



Who Wants To Be A Tech Star?
Learning Leadership From The Movie 13 Days
Mr. Feld Goes to DC To Talk About Innovation
Founders 2010 #3: Be Fearless. Today.

It is of great interest to me that Brad Feld's most popular blog post is this one: The Founders Visa Movement.

An Immigrant Story For Brad Feld
Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC
Me @ BBC
To: Brad Feld, Subject: Iran And Me (Digital Ninja/Commando)
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