Today, ElectNext announced that they had raised $1.3mm to launch a data, analytics and marketing service to bridge the data gap between politicians, lobby groups, and their constituents.  The company provides contextual political data to media properties (Crunchbase for politics) and in turn uses that reach to provide actionable insights for campaign managers.  Brooklyn Bridge Ventures led the round. Describing it that way, however, makes the story a bit neater than advertised.  This business...

There is a growing market out there for content marketing. Not the old fashioned kind where magazine companies would create custom magazines for brands, marketers, and retailers. I am talking about the Internet version in which brands, marketers, retailers and other businesses create blogs, twitter accounts, facebook pages, and the like and then spend money filling those pages with content. Many brands have full time employees creating this content. Others use third parties and even freelancers...

Last Tech Tuesday I wrote about evolving your technology as you grow. As, if not more important, is how you grow your engineering organization. They after all are the ones who need to make the right choices about the technology! Here I have observed three common mistakes: staying flat too long, not investing early on in devops and missing the co-founder to manager transition (if such a transition turns out to be necessary). Most startups begin with just a couple of engineers who tend to be...

I read with interest today that Canada has launched a startup visa program in order to encourage more entrepreneurs to start their businesses in Canada.  This is a wonderful idea, one which the US is contemplating (the US Startup Visa Act is still “in committee”), and I sincerely hope we pass it into law too. In general, every time I have visited Canada I have been thoroughly impressed with the ecosystem for early stage startups. The startup visa law they just enacted is the cherry on top....

As we enter the 5th year of Gluecon, I’m very excited to see it come together. Eric Norlin has been saying year after year that his goal is to make Gluecon “the most technical, developer-focused conference” out there and I love watching him try. You can check out the most recent agenda here, but some of the sessions that are indicative of what Eric’s talking about include: Building a distributed data platform with Node.js, Storm, Kafka, and ZeroMQ An Enterprise Mobile Reference Architecture...

Do you like your Sphero? How about getting one that is 2500x larger than the current Sphero? That’s the new Sphero product – Peacekeeper. Order it today on Indiegogo. Along with some other cool Sphero stuff. The post The Sphero Peacekeeper appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

My close friend Jerry Colonna is giving an extraordinary seminar in Boulder on 4/19 with Parker Palmer called Surviving the Startup Life: The Toll of Merging Identity and Work. Jerry is the best CEO coach I know, a dear friend, and one of the best investors I ever have gotten to work with (we did a lot together in the 1990s when Jerry was partners with Fred Wilson at Flatiron Partners.) Context on the event comes from Jerry’s blog post titled The Hand of A Friend: “A distraught client emailed...

I made a significant life choice this weekend. I decided that in my ample free time outside of Spark, I’m going to try out for the AA Post-Collegiate Handball Circuit. Playing professional handball has been a life long goal of mine. Despite its massive international popularity, it was very hard to find a team near Boston that was willing to run walk-on try outs.  Luckily at a networking event for the Handball Association of America (HAA) last month, I met a member of the Harvard Alumni Handball...

Tonight I am giving a brief talk at a Publishing Point event organized by Susan and Jenny. Here are some notes that I pulled together in preparation, written up as a blog post. At USV one of our big investment thesis is that the internet is resulting in massive unbundling of existing business models and value chains. Newspapers are a great example of this process with different sections, including crucially classifieds, now being unbundled across many different web sites with breaking news on...

VCs, I believe that the purpose of venture investment is to serve entrepreneurs.  Many of us, however, seem to regard investing as some kind of dodge or hustle. We have theories that are the worst kind of popular tripe, our methods are sloppy and our returns are highly questionable. Many of us, fellow VCs, are a poor investors. That is why some entrepreneurs have turned towards an alternative to getting investment from us... Going into business for themselves...   In the past week, both...

The AVC community hasn't done a DonorsChoose campaign since the Gotham Gal and I turned 50 and we raised something like $56k in the summer of 2011. I've been looking for a way to beat that and it has not been easy. That's a ton of money to raise in a month on a blog and hard to beat. But the folks at DonorsChoose and I have come up with something awesome and I am excited to launch it today. For the next month we will be raising money for classrooms in schools that are helping their students...

Find out the best time of day, length of tweet and more.

Knowing when your business is making money.

The Verge has a post up that says the winners of the If I Had Glass campaign are largely Twitter users with big follower counts and links to a list of all winners. Sadly, my twitter account is not on that list. Back on February 20th, I saw the campaign launch and immediately tweeted this out: #ifihadglass I would wear them on the subway too — Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) February 20, 2013 I wasn't joking, although it was a reference to Sergey's subway ride. I will wear my glasses on the subway...

Apple's immense popularity apparently has its drawbacks.

I finished Infinite Jest this week.  I started the book in August (I read a book or two on the side during that time), so it was satisfying to finally check the “read” button on GoodReads profile. It feels like both A) a big responsibility has been lifted and B) I’ve lost an old friend. I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, so I won’t say too much.  But, I was amazed that I had the exact same experience once it was over that some guy blogging for Vice had. It goes something like this order:...

Ricky Van Veen says what you share defines who you are. So I am sharing this talk with all of you.

I am into quotes. Always have been. And one of my favorite things about Tumblr is they have a specific post type for quotes: I find quotes around the web (and mobile) and post them to Tumblr (often with Tumblr's awesome share bookmarklet) all the time. And then they get reblogged. And I reblog quotes I find on Tumblr too. I don't think there is a better place on the web to share quotes than Tumblr. It's one of the many things I love about it. Here's a quote I reblogged from yesterday's...

This post is either brilliant or idiotic. You've been warned... You're on a boat. There's a terrible storm at sea. The boat capsizes, washing everyone overboard except for you and one other person. You're both stuck inside, unable to get out because only the hull is peeking above the water--but the sea is rising fast in the cabin. Your only hope is to break through the bottom of the hull to escape. You find a hammer, but its going to take you a few hours to bash through. Luckily, you've...

After a contentious back and forth, the Gotham City is on the verge of passing legislation mandating paid time off for employees that are not healthy.

Amazon buys book recommendation site Goodreads, LinkedIn improves its search, Wanelo is poised for continued growth and more social-media news.

The importance of trial-and-error, how to envision your ideal future, why you might want to ditch your office space and more: our best tips of the week.

I’m psyched to see Xconomy launch their Boulder/Denver edition. Bob Buderi, Xconomy’s CEO, talks about how it came together in his post Announcing Xconomy Boulder/Denver—7th Region in Our Network. Boulder/Denver joins the other six regions – Boston, Detroit, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle – and is now part of the broad and expanding coverage that Xconomy is providing on business, life sciences, and technology news. I’m especially glad that Xconomy hired Michael Davidson as the...

Ideas that will help you create Tweets that your followers will want to read.

Great ideas do not emerge in a vacuum. The most famous and commonly mentioned example I can think of is Alexander Graham Bell vs Elisa Gray, the two people that raced to file the patent on the telephone. Bell won the race by a matter of hours; but clearly his idea was in the zeitgeist of contemporary technologists if such a big step forward in technology could have been credited differently in a matter of mere hours. Google was no different apparently.  PageRank, the often cited key innovation...

Deciding how much to pay yourself can be tricky. Here's how to determine what you're worth.

Don't let allergies affect productivity, take control of allergens you might not even know are lurking in your office.

A while back I had stopped worrying about bee Colony Collapse Disorder because it had been out of the news for a while. From this morning’s New York Times it seems like I was wrong. Apparently if anything the rate of bee colonies collapsing has accelerated. This could turn into a very serious threat to the food supply for anything that needs pollination by bees which includes many fruits and vegetables. One of the potential culprits here are genetically modified plants that include so-called...

Your customers are only going to remember one thing about your brand. Here's how to make sure your message is memorable.

Getting your product in the hands of celebrities can boost your business, but it takes some planning. Here are three ways to help make it happen.

I have said many times that early stage VC is a lot like baseball, if you get a hit one out of every three times, you are headed to the hall of fame. And if I look back over my career, and also over the track records of the firms and funds I have helped manage, that is pretty much the hit rate I have seen. By "hit" I mean an investment that returns 5x or better. But of course, many of these hits return 10x or even 100x every once in a while. So what happens with the other two-thirds? Well that...

I have said many times that early stage VC is a lot like baseball, if you get a hit one out of every three times, you are headed to the hall of fame. And if I look back over my career, and also over the track records of the firms and funds I have helped manage, that is pretty much the hit rate I have seen. By "hit" I mean an investment that returns 5x or better. But of course, many of these hits return 10x or even 100x every once in a while. So what happens with the other two-thirds? Well that...

Back in the early days of the ATM machine, you could only transact on ATMs operated by your bank. If you were a Chase customer, you needed to find a Chase ATM to take cash out. That, of course, was a pain and the banks recognized it and formed roaming networks. The one I recall best was NYCE, which was formed by NatWest, Chase, Manny Hanny, Chemical, Barclays, Marine Midland, and Bank Of New York. The same thing has happened with mobile wifi networks. If you are a T-Mobile Hotspot customer,...

Our Foundry Group CEO list lit up this morning with a question about CEO coaches and whether they were helpful. My quick response was: I think a great CEO coach can be awesome and not-great CEO coach can be very detrimental. Jerry Colonna is the best CEO coach I’ve ever met or worked with. There are others that I’m sure will emerge from this discussion but make sure you know what you are getting / looking for. Like many of our CEO threads this one filled up quickly with great thoughts and...

Robert Greene, author of 'The 48 Laws of Power,' talks to Entrepreneur.com about how to become a master.

The value of a Bitcoin has grown 900% in 3 months. Really remarkable. How high will it go? It’s interesting to see the correlation between Bitcoin price relative to its Google Trends search volume interest over time. (depicted above) What is a Bitcoin worth? The simple answer is “whatever someone will pay for it.” Which, right now, is over $90. But that answer doesn’t properly value the usefulness of a Bitcoin. I find the user experience of Bitcoin to be incredibly frustrating today, and I’m...