First Round Capital

The importance of an Always Be Learning life

Happy New Year's, everyone!  I wish you much prosperity and love in 2018.

As you may have seen me tweet earlier this week, my New Year's Resolution is to write more.  I truly love writing - to write is to serve, to write is to learn, to write is to meditate.  I'm going to take a different tact this year, though - I'm going to write more frequently and hopefully much shorter.  I like writing longer posts but I'm spending over 70 hours per week on data.world and then some time on our startup investments - and of course I very much care about spending time with my wife and children.  So, in short there just isn't much room for more.  As a matter of fact, in 2017 I resigned from two non-profit Boards (Conscious Capitalism and Entrepreneurs Foundation) that I really love just to create more time for data.world.  Both were painful decisions for me but a startup really needs that type of focus, and I'm truly having a blast working alongside an incredible team at data.world on a very important mission.

I've already got a running list of seven more topics (and growing quickly) that I plan to write about as soon as I can but for now - for my first post in a long time - I want to talk about the importance of having an Always Be Learning mindset and practice. 

Who this new generation of aspiring entrepreneurs are and the new Golden Age of tech (part 2 of 3)

We live in very interesting times. It's 2010 and I'm at a family reunion. We've just barely survived the most cataclysmic global financial crisis in the modern history and one of my cousins asks me, "How can tech be doing so well while the rest of the economy is doing so poorly?". I did my best to answer but the question kept eating at me. I remembered Michael Porter's Harvard Business Review article about the Internet being the sixth force - and how it would disrupt all of the previous five forces cited in his famous strategic model.

Fast forward just four years later and a five-year old company, WhatsApp, is bought for $19 billion by Facebook, a company that itself is only ten-years old at the time but worth a mighty $170 billion. Just two years earlier, when Facebook went public, the media was asking for Morgan Stanley's head - and sometimes Mark Zuckerberg's or David Ebersman's (CFO of Facebook) head - for what was perceived at that time as an overpriced IPO. Except that it wasn't... and any investors that held on to their IPO stock should now be very happy campers.

The critical importance of checking references

I'm shocked that more startups, including their Boards and investors, don't thoroughly check references. That is the subject of this post, and I hope by the end of it you will agree with me that to not check references is both irresponsible - and dangerous.

When I started Coremetrics in 1999, Accel Partners wanted to invest in our Series A alongside Highland Capital Partners. We had already chosen Highland as our lead. We were really impressed with Keith Benjamin in particular and he was joining our Board of Directors (unfortunately Keith passed away in a tragic accident in 2008 as I wrote about in this Bazaarvoice blog post; I think about him often - he was an incredible friend and eCommerce and Wall Street visionary). Accel put forward Arthur Patterson, the co-founder of Accel and a venture capitalist since 1973, to join our Board of Directors alongside me, Keith, and Bong Suh (our independent Director, and a really terrific mentor). As I had done with Keith, I insisted on checking Arthur's references. Most people at Accel were surprised, and I think they thought I was naive at the time - I was a 26-year old CEO and they probably chalked it up to inexperience. And when I called his references, some of them expressed a lot of surprise that I had the moxy to do so. But those references turned out to be very helpful to me, specifically how to best work with him as a business partner. I believe Arthur had more respect for me as a result of being one of the first entrepreneurs to check his references. I couldn't see any other alternative - I deeply loved the business and I wanted to make sure that we fielded the best team possible, and that included our investors and our Board of Directors.

7 lessons learned on the journey from founder to CEO

Two days ago I had the honor of keynoting at the First Round Capital CEO Summit in San Francisco. The event was held at the Jewish Contemporary Museum. During my speech, I promised to put my notes up on my blog and so here they are.

My talk was about the 7 lessons I've learned on the journey from founder to CEO. First Round Capital invested in us when Bazaarvoice was under 10 people; they came in alongside Austin Ventures - where I am now a Venture Partner - in our Series A. First Round has been an incredible partner in our journey from startup to public company. Personally, I think they are the best first round investor in the U.S. with the portfolio to show for it. Josh Kopelman, a fellow Wharton grad, is especially strong and he has helped me many times along the way.

I started off my talk emphasizing that the journey matters most in your transformation from founder to CEO. It is both a beautiful journey and also at times a gut-wrenching one. As Kirk Dando, my CEO coach of four years, says, "the path to heaven goes through the road to hell". This couldn't be more true. You aren't born knowing how to either found a company or be a CEO. You aren't born knowing how emotional this journey can be. But it is a journey that I've cherished and, in my opinion, the most profound journey that one can take in a career. It is a journey that led to me being recognized as Austin's best CEO for the large company category last year. This doesn't mean I have done everything right or that I don't make mistakes (hopefully less of them are repeat mistakes).

To be stealthy or not?

When Brant and I founded Bazaarvoice, we decided to be in "stealth mode" for the first eight months. This was because of the incredible response we were getting from our initial conversations with prospective retail clients as well as several other factors: