The Best Places to Hack

The Best Places to Hack

Over the holidays, a friend and I spent time at his house in Keystone. We had a wonderful time there – his family is from out of town, his house is in a rural part of town, and we were able to spend time hacking. We usually have an occasional affair and I’m always happy to see him, so it was a great time to be back in town and hang out with him.

One of our favorite things in the world is to hack together. It’s a weird combination of nerdy fun and serious business. He’s the founder of two companies and his personal hacker (he’s terrified not to be, right? So I get to work with him and his guys.) I’m a user of a wide variety of software and hardware (mostly web and server side) and have a variety of odd jobs that fall into this category. We spend a lot of time in Colorado and spend a lot of time hacking together.

We had a very deep conversation about how to bring technology to the table that is at the intersection of the entrepreneurial community and the tech / Internet infrastructure. He cited a bunch of places that he thought had enormous potential to improve the entrepreneurial ecosystem, but hadn’t yet figured out how to make them happen. I pointed out a few areas where there was already a lot of activity and he started talking about how he’d like to help.

I’ve been a user of his stuff for a while and have been advocating to a few of my LPs to get their attention to invest early in the company. His house is in a pretty cool part of town and he’s got a nice little office in Keystone. We spent some time hanging out and I brought up a few things to do to help the entrepreneurial community around him. Things like sponsoring early stage companies, making sure he got paid the right amount, helping him get more collaborators, and making sure he got a drop of startup liquid on a regular basis that attracts people to work with him. He also has a bunch of other small businesses that he runs that he’s working on with his partners.

My immediate thought was “how do we get the biggest company in the world to pay attention to this?” He responded with “we need to build a massive infrastructure around this.” That’s a good question.

We are talking about this internally at Foundry Group and I’ve talked to a bunch of the CEOs of the big companies that are interested in investing in this area (even if we’ve kept the response quiet because we aren’t yet ready to release it.) I’ve personally been clear that we need to get into the infrastructure business with our LPs and set up some kind of direct investment function for our portfolio companies. We’ve got a lot of money to burn and our LPs are putting a lot of energy into this – the code, infrastructure, and support already exist. But how do we get the big companies to pay attention to this? How do we get them to understand that we’re a big player with a lot of interests, that we want to be a significant player in their business, and that we’re their LIP?

I’ve seen a lot of “I’m not a big company patient” over the past few years, but this is different. This time, it’s different from being a minor player that’s trying to get by on royalties. I’ve been waiting for a long time for this day.