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Author: Brad Feld

When LLMs Collide With Software Development and Economics

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin of SK Ventures wrote an interesting and important essay titled Society’s Technical Debt and Software’s Gutenberg Moment.

The abstract follows. I encourage you to read the full essay.

There is immense hyperbole about recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially Large Language Models like ChatGPT. And there is also deserved concern about such technologies’ material impact on jobs. But observers are missing two very important things: 

  1. Every wave of technological innovation has been unleashed by something costly becoming cheap enough to waste.
  2. Software production has been too complex and expensive for too long, which has caused us to underproduce software for decades, resulting in immense, society-wide technical debt. 

This technical debt is about to contract in a dramatic, economy-wide fashion as the cost and complexity of software production collapses, releasing a wave of innovation.

The post When LLMs Collide With Software Development and Economics appeared first on Brad Feld.

Leading Through Crisis: 96 hours after the fall of SVB

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

On Tuesday, David Cohen (Techstars co-founder/chair) and I did an AMA for Techstars founders about the SVB crisis. The team at Techstars turned it into a podcast for our Give First series.

The teaser from the podcast follows:

The fall of SVB will go down in history as one of those ‘where were you when …’ moments. For David Cohen, he was sitting at a sporting event when his phone began buzzing incessantly. For Brad Feld, he was couch shopping with his wife.

Feld is no stranger to crises and his instincts kicked in quickly.

“I shifted into problem-solving mode,” says Feld.

But then, almost as quickly, the government stepped in and money began flowing. Crisis averted. It was time to reflect.

Listen as Feld and Cohen share insight into what they saw in the VC and startup community, how communication made all the difference and how many came together to support each other.

They also tackle the looming question weighing heavy on founders’ minds: how will this affect the future of startups.

As for the couch? Tune in to find out.

The post Leading Through Crisis: 96 hours after the fall of SVB appeared first on Brad Feld.

Founder Mental Health Pledge

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

Since the middle of last week, there has been extreme stress on founders, startup leaders, and the extended startup community. This stress accelerated on Friday when the FDIC shut down and took over Silicon Valley Bank. By late Friday, anyone who banked with SVB was concerned about … well … everything.

Once it became clear that payroll accounts needed to be funded on Monday to make Wednesday’s payroll, we focused on the immediate short-term to ensure our portfolio companies’ thousands of employees got paid on time. We bank at SVB, so our maneuverability was also unknown, so we searched for what I’d consider heroic options from various sources.

While this de-escalated on Sunday night after the US Government took decisive action, the level of stress and anxiety, especially for first-time founders, was extreme. I had many 1:1 conversations, emails, and messages with our portfolio company CEOs, along with several open Zoom lines where people could ask questions and just commiserate and feel part of a shared community. Much of this focused on addressing the immediate problem. But, many founders told me that just feeling part of a larger community was helpful.

Much will be written about this. Maybe I’ll get around to my version someday.

But, once again, I saw and experienced the extreme stress and anxiety that founders, CEOs, and leaders of startup companies face almost daily. It reinforced the importance to me of continuing to help destigmatize mental health (and mental fitness) issues across the startup community.

Yesterday, (Read more...)

An Investment in Board Diversity

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

Research shows that more diverse teams perform better and are more innovative than homogeneous teams. I’ve written about this before, and it’s covered extensively in my book Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors.

We’ve made this an operating principle at Foundry. We encourage all our portfolio companies to add multiple independent directors and build diverse boards. I believe that boards with too many investors, without operator voices, are not what an early-stage or growth company needs. I’ve been willing to give up my board seat to make room for an independent director (for example, at Bolster.)

A few years ago, I attended a dinner I was invited to in Aspen hosted by Him for Her. I generally dislike these events but walked away impressed. The conversation was exciting and powerful, and I realized it extended my network with people I wouldn’t have otherwise met.

Since that meeting, I’ve become a regular host and supporter of Him For Her, a non-profit organization that aims to accelerate board diversity. Over the next decade, they have a bold goal of dramatically increasing board diversity.

Their approach is simple: they host executive roundtables across the country (remote and in-person) and build curated referrals for board openings for free. 

It works. We’ve received referrals for many companies and seated over a dozen new female board members. 

I’m proud to support an organization that recently celebrated 100 board placements. Him for Her celebrated this (Read more...)

Honoring Cecelia Feld on International Women’s Day 2023

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

Today is International Women’s Day.

Imagine a gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that’s diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated. Together we can forge women’s equality. Collectively we can all #EmbraceEquity.

I’ve been fortunate to have many incredible women influence my life and how I think about gender and gender equity. My mother, Cecelia Feld, is the first of them.

My parents modeled excellent behavior for me as I was growing up. They were equal partners in their relationship. While they were an incredible couple, my mother was independent of my father. She was a leader in her community, unafraid to take on anything and unconstrained by the social norms of the time. As a full-time artist, she was ambitious professionally. She embraced her identity as a mother but also as a woman, a professional, and a lifelong learner.

When I went to college at MIT, which at the time was 80/20 male/female (they’ve made a lot of progress since 1983) and suddenly encountered a lack of gender equity everywhere, at least I had a baseline of what gender equity looked like.

Cecelia has explored working with many different media over the last 50+ years as an artist. She’s always been a photographer and extensively documented her travels with photographs. In honor of her on International Women’s Day 2023, please enjoy photographs of women from a few places in the world that my mother (Read more...)

Gluecon 13: 2023

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

GlueCon will occur for the thirteenth time, on May 24th-25th, in Broomfield, Colorado.

My Foundry partners and I helped Kim and Eric Norlin create Gluecon in 2009 because we saw the need for a developer-focused event to explore emerging technologies around the cloud and APIs. 

The first year that GlueCon occurred, it seemed like nearly every session began with someone defining “what cloud computing is.” In the interim years, dozens of products and startups have launched or used GlueCon as one of the venues for their early premieres. Twilio, Docker, and Kubernetes all appeared on the GlueCon stage long before they were known by the wider tech community. 

GlueCon has always prided itself on being a welcoming community that seeks quality interaction over being lost in a sea of people on an expo floor. We’ve long held GlueCon at the Omni Interlocken — a space that allows the attendees to come together in an informal fashion, making it easy to meet just about anyone you’d like to while at the event. 

It’s always been fun to host a national tech conference in Boulder. In addition to bringing in plenty of people from around the country, we always get focused attendance from a bunch of tech leaders in Boulder and Denver.

Some of this year’s presenters include:

  • KellyAnn Fitzpatrick and Kate Holterhoff from Redmonk
  • Adrian Cockcroft, ex-Cloud Architect (Netflix) and VP (AWS)
  • Dormain Drewitz, VP, PagerDuty
  • Alex Williams (interviewing an industry leader) from The NewStack

Topics cover everything from Observability to WebAssembly (Read more...)

Venture Deals 4e German Edition

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

There have been many different language translations of Venture Deals since it was first published in 2012. The first German translation of Venture Deals 4e is out, and Florian Kreis did an amazing job.

Florian aimed to modify the book as little as possible, even if the relevant passages did not correspond 100% to German best practices but were still feasible to implement. He believes the structures originally developed in the U.S. have become the international standard and are a great role model for Germany.

However, the challenge in revising the book this way is putting these structures into the context of German law. Sometimes, this required minor changes or simply using the correct language. In other cases, it was a lot more challenging.

Following, in Florian’s words, are several examples of things he had to modify more extensively.

Corporate law: In Germany, most companies in general and most VC-financed companies are structured in the legal form of a “Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung” (GmbH). Larger companies often convert to the “Aktiengesellschaft” (AG) later, especially if they want to go public. Both the GmbH and the AG are corporations. In addition, many GmbH & Co. KG companies exist in Germany. They correspond in their structure roughly to a Limited Liability Company (LLC). GmbH & Co. KG companies have decisive tax disadvantages for startups and are, therefore, rarely used in this area. The GmbH has a great advantage in that it can be structured very flexibly. You can deviate from the (Read more...)

Afghan Dreamers at BIFF 2023

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

Amy and I have been sponsors of the Boulder International Film Festival for a while. We’ve also been helping fund documentaries and have received several executive producer credits. Two of these films are in the 2023 Boulder International Film Festival on March 2 – 5, 2023.

Afghan Dreamers is the story of an all-girls robotics team in Afghanistan who risks it all to prove that they can compete against anyone worldwide. Working in secret under Taliban rule, the high-school-aged team members struggle in the face of immense odds and ever-present danger. They single-handedly begin to change perceptions in their entrenched Islamic culture. The film focuses on three team members – Fatemah, Somaya, and Lida – who become role models for the next generation.

I met David Cowan in 1988 when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and I was a graduate student at MIT. We became friends and regulars at Maven’s Deli in Harvard Square. Our first project was Feld Technologies reselling (not very successfully) a software product called DataRoute that David wrote for his father’s law firm. The phrase “Today is the day to route with DataRoute” still hangs out in the dark recesses of my memory.

David has produced several films and called me up when he started working on Afghan Dreamers. He knew I’d be an easy mark for joining in on the film based on my support of women and girls in computing. He did all the work, so I merely provided some money (Read more...)

The MIT Banana Lounge

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

I’ve co-founded or been an early investor in many things. One of my favorites is the MIT Banana Lounge. I will be hanging out there Tuesday afternoon and doing an AMA from 2pm to 4pm.

It began with an email from Zoe Sheill. I met Zoe at PSL when she was an intern the summer before her freshman year at MIT. We stayed in touch, and I went bananas when I got the following email from her on May 3rd, 2021.

… Right now, though, we’re running into a bit of trouble raising the money for starting the banana lounge again in the fall. In the past, we’ve given out about a quarter of a million bananas per semester, and about 76% of our budget is just bananas. The Undergraduate Association funded us in previous years – they are now using their limited money for newer projects now that the banana lounge has gotten a lot bigger (over 15k students would visit the lounge per week). Malte (the student that started the banana lounge 3 years ago), me, and Greg had a meeting a while ago and Greg recommended talking to you as a successful MIT alum and someone also excited about the possibilities with bananas.

After some back and forth, I agreed to provide the needed funding. Zoe responded with:

Our banana guy for 2021-22, I’m so excited! You are saving Banana Lounge. So many students will benefit from this and we are very much looking forward to sharing (Read more...)