Brad Feld

“So many companies talk about increasing the number of prospects at the top of the funnel, but they spend remarkably little time making sure actions are taken - on a daily basis - to make sure these prospects convert into paid users.”

“For a long time, I've ranted against naming your startup community 'Silicon Whatever.' Instead, I believe every startup community already has a name. The Boulder startup community is called Boulder. The L.A. startup community is called L.A. The Washington D.C. startup community is called Washington D.C.”

“I'm an optimistic person, and I tend to bury my cynicism in what I read and the movies I watch. My optimism holds that the good guys eventually come out on top.”

“One of the consistent characteristics of the tech industry is an endless labelling of technology and approaches.”

“If the crisis lasts moments, rapid action is critical. But if it's simply the beginning of a broader issue, especially one where the root cause isn't known yet, the worst thing a leader can do is act immediately.”

“I read a lot of science fiction and biography - these are my two favorite genres. My favorite science fiction writers are Hertling, Suarez, Gibson and Stephenson, but I enjoy many others. I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.”

“When the entrepreneur is obsessed with the product and the company has organized all of its activities around that, it's very powerful.”

“In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Kauffman Foundation working with Jana Matthews on 'learning programs for high growth entrepreneurs.'”

“While the line between stress, deep anxiety, and depression often blurs, most entrepreneurs struggle with broad mental health issues at various points in their lives.”

“A lot of times, when I interact with someone for the first time, I don't want to see the presentation.”

“For those trying to protect the past, it is a way of retaining power, status, money, a way a life, predictability, comfort, control, and a bunch of other things like that. It is a struggle against the inevitability of change.”

“A rite of passage in America when you turn 50 and have good health insurance is a colonoscopy.”

“The pitch should be very clear about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and why I should care. If you can cover those things quickly and precisely, it's easy for me to decide whether I want to spend more time with you or not.”

“My initial desire to blog came from something that's always been my approach to investing - I'm a nerd, and I love to play with the technology, and part of my approach has really been to understand things both at a user level and at a reasonably deep tentacle level.”

“By definition, as a company scales rapidly, it adds people quickly.”

“America's future as the global leader in innovation remains in the balance until our immigration system is fixed. A large portion of a reform package should focus on updating our system to better reflect the business landscape and market realities of the 21st century.”

“Stress on fast growing companies comes from a lot of different places. The one that is often the largest, and creates the most second-order issues, is the composition of the leadership team. More specifically, it's specific people on the leadership who don't have the scale experience their role requires at a particular moment in time.”

“I have shifted my mindset in terms of how companies should... focus on building amazing products. If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial.”

“I've been using email since 1983. I started with MH and Rmail, then cc:Mail, then Microsoft Mail, with Compuserve mixed in. Eventually, I ended up using Pine for non-Windows stuff and Outlook for Windows stuff. For a while.”

“In my world, historical revenue is the least interesting thing to consider in an acquisition strategy.”