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Ryan McIntyre

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27
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2017-02-01
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2017-02-01
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1
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  1. “Favorite investment. Yeah, that's a real. That's a real Sophie's choice because, of course, I love all of our investments. I would say, and probably the answer frankly, changes with the recency effect of how much time I've spent with a particular company most recently. But I would say the investment that I'm sort of proudest of and is at a really interesting scale right now is one of the early investments we did back in the 2007 fund, which is SendGrid, again, a developer-focused go-to-market, transactional email for developers. These guys are running at an incredible scale. They send over a billion emails a day. They've been profitable this year, and they're an IPO candidate in 2017. So I just couldn't be prouder of sort of how far that company has come and the scale that they're operating at. And again, it's sort of the standards bearer in many ways for this sort of application infrastructure.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “One that I read the most and enjoy the most and probably read pretty much every article that's linked to is media redefined by Jason Hershorn.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yes, I would recommend working in VC to my son, but I would say don't do it right away. Build a career as a technologist, as an entrepreneur, get real operating experience both in small companies and high growth large companies and really sort of round out your skill set with both technical skills and, frankly, operational ability in small and large companies so that you sort of have a lot more to bring to the table when you do finally come around to getting into the VC business.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Very much keeping my intention, it is in fact inspirational when you think about the founding fathers of the United States in terms of the ideals they were trying to establish in creating perhaps the most successful startup of all time, which is the United States of America.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So, my favorite book, I'm a science fiction nerd, so I would have to say Dune by Frank Herbert, both just sort of in the scope of the universe building that Frank Herbert does there. And it points out, I think, a lot of dangers around sort of the typical messianic story, but also around the dangers of having an economy utterly dependent on kind of one resource or material that's not available anywhere else, right? It's a lot of great parallels to the dangers of having a petroleum dependent society, et cetera. But also just fantastic in its scope on a totally separate note, given the political season, I've been spending a ton of time reading revolutionary war era biographies and histories, and then halfway through rereading the federalist papers. So I would say on the sort of non-fiction side of things, that has been”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, there's absolutely an intersection, and I think in the case of Rowley, it's actually something, Jason and I have been aware of the company for several years because we would see them at the NAM conference every January down in Anaheim. That's the big sort of musical instruments annual.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, I mean, we like to, no doubt, we use our position in the tech industry to maybe play some venues that we otherwise would have no normal means to show up there. So we play at the House of Blues in Chicago, Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, things like that, in sort of tech industry-related events. But again, that passion and that hobby of ours, I find, is kind of my meditation, right? If you're playing live music, if you're rehearsing, that's an activity that forces you to be 100% in the moment. So when you're doing that, there's kind of no room for thinking about the future and past and your worries other than kind of a few seconds ahead, right? And you really do have to be totally engrossed in the music.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “More of a lifelong personal passion, have played guitar for 30 years now, have always played in bands, written my own music. The last 17 years have done that in partnership with Jason, actually. And we've had an incredible amount of fun there as well.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Systems and industries, right? We built server side scripting languages, application servers, ops tools and whatnot. And all of those things have become sort of valid ecosystems and industries in their own right over time. And so that really just informed my thinking as a developer in terms of how important some of these kind of infrastructure type tools are. And then with the birth and emergence of public cloud infrastructure and whatnot, I think it only provided an accelerant to make opportunities like that into sort of very large market opportunities over time. And so in that specific case, I don't think my passion for what's possible there is anything other than an advantage in terms of having insight into what the different infrastructure trends and programming trends may be over time, right? That's, I think, kind of right up my alley, switching gears to the music side, that is much.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's a good question. I think there's two different answers to that. First of all, on the music side, I'll come back to that in a second on the sort of developer-focused tools and ecosystem, you know, API driven, self-serve-driven go-to-market approaches that are exemplified by sort of a lot of the investments I've made at foundry group, be it SendGrid or Mapbox or Pantheon, as some examples there. That for me is much more a direct consequence of what I did at Excite back in the day. I started off life as a software developer, though I haven't written code for money in over 20 years. At this point, but that going through the early phases of Excite where really there was no off-the-shelf internet infrastructure software, Linux was in its infancy. And so we had to build a lot of tools now that are sort of commonplace and have created entire sort of ecosystem.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Mindful of it. I think it's easy to sort of confuse your role in the ecosystem to assign more importance or causality to your actions and successes of your companies than is perhaps warranted, right? I think it's really easy when people are coming to you every day asking you for money when you're, as a matter of course, having to say no all the time to forget that people aren't just hanging out with you because you're a great person and whatnot, but rather you have a very specific role in the ecosystem. But at the end of the day, you need to remember that without entrepreneurs, venture capitalists really have no purpose and that really we're there to serve the entrepreneur and not the other way around. And I think it's easy just because of the dynamics of the job as a venture capitalist to lose sight of that and perhaps have your own.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Look, I think it's easy to sort of use this stereotypical VC personality, you know, the kinds portrayed in Silicon Valley, which, by the way, is a great show and sometimes gets things so right, it is painful to watch. It's an anecdote I heard once upon a time that when the band Van Halen saw the movie Spinal Tap, they didn't think it was funny at all, but rather it infuriated them because it hit too close to home. I think there's aspects of that in the show, Silicon Valley and sort of the archetypes around VCs. But I think at the end of the day, one thing is true is there is no stereotypical VC personality, right? At the end of the day, every VC is different, is a different personality, brings different things to the table. I do think as a VC, though, you have to be unless you're very”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Board member and a venture investor, I want to have exposure to the broader management team at the company and not just the CEO or not just the founder, right? And sort of the more exposure and breadth you have into a team, the better the dynamic will be and the better I as a board member will be able to help or understand what's going on at a particular company.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Very detail oriented, but again, also just knowing your strengths and weaknesses there, obviously Jason with his ex-lawyer superpowers, you can bet we get him involved. And again, this is knowing our sort of strengths and weaknesses as a team whenever there's an IP-related matter, as an example. Of course, we get Jason involved immediately as a small example of that, but also obviously back to our partnership dynamics, our team approach really is let's make sure that we're having the people on the foundry team, having the partners at Foundry pay attention in the areas where they can have the most impact. And so we love sort of working as a team and knowing that our portfolio companies have exposure to all four of us. And it's not just sort of a silo where, oh, this company only knows Ryan or Seth or Jason or Brad. They rather, you know, we want them to have exposure to all four of us much in the same way as”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “People from all sorts of different backgrounds they may have entrepreneurial experience, they may have senior leadership, CEO experience, they may be super techie, they may sort of be able to glance at a hundred-page set of financials and immediately find the one thing to drill down on that's meaningful.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think it's hard to give a blanket answer to that question in the sense that, of course, every board is unique and it's comprised of a team of people who each have their own different strengths and weaknesses. I would say much in the same way we place a premium in our partnership in communication. The bigger thing, I think we all place a premium on is a high level of self-awareness among ourselves and the entrepreneurs and members of management teams that we work with. And I'd say that sort of self-awareness of your own role and dynamics in a team, what you bring to the table, what others bring to the table, knowing where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are, that level of having an extreme level of self-awareness to me is sort of the one of the most important aspects of being somebody who can contribute well and constructively in a team dynamic. And that's certainly the case on a board, right?”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “About that particular company or sector or opportunity and get them involved early on in the process really as a way to work through our thinking and understand what the likely sort of points of skepticism and friction will be in the process. And so we kind of do that as a matter of course now, which is, again, builds a lot of efficiency into the decision-making process as well.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Technically, three of the four need to vote affirmatively to make an investment decision. I think in practice, all of our investment decisions have been unanimous. So I think all of us would take it really seriously if somebody was pounding on the table saying, no, we absolutely should not do this investment. And again, we're in the fortunate position of having opportunities to invest in far more great companies and entrepreneurs than we actually have the capacity to do in any given year, right? We do between seven and ten investments per year, and there's probably 10 times that in terms of companies that we would invest in in terms of the qualities of the teams or the entrepreneurs, but we have to keep a very high bar. So it tends to be the case that when we are evaluating a company, part of our process often is to get the one among the four of us who's most likely to be”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Makes having those hard discussions easier, but you do have to invest a lot of time and energy into making that work particularly on the front end. And I think we had also seen, frankly, to some degree, there were numerous communication pathologies and weird interpersonal dynamics at Mobius. And so we did have a bit of an anti-pattern that we wanted to fix when we were coming into building a firm for ourselves at Foundry Group.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “In the venture world, but that was sort of one of our core principles was building a strong foundation of trust amongst ourselves, being very close, being able to be very efficient in our communication because we have so much runtime and trust with one another. But we also made a commitment that friends shouldn't get in the way of us being able to build a great business together. So when we first started Foundry Group, we would have an outside person come in and moderate 360 degree feedback sessions with us twice a year. So we really spent a lot of time on the front end working hard to get our communication level to a point where we could both communicate efficiently but also communicate unemotionally about our strengths and weaknesses and our partnership dynamics and we disagree all the time. We have heated discussions, but we also it also comes from a place of deep trust, frankly, and that I think that”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I think part of it was we had worked together for seven years at Mobius Venture Capital. And so we had a decent amount of runtime. So even though we were sort of technically an emerging manager or first-time fund when we created Foundry Group, we did have a lot of runtime together and a lot of mutual trust, right? And I think the other thing that is great about our partnership is from the beginning, we were very committed to really sort of building not just a partnership together, but building our lives together, really trying to integrate everything we do, knowing how all consuming, running a venture fund can be, that we needed to do it in a way that felt very natural and true to our own personality. So, you know, one of the things that I'm sort of happiest about and proudest about is that we're all dear friends, right? I know that, obviously, to be relatively unique in”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, and so it wasn't a whole unnatural act or decision when it did come around, but nonetheless, I did have misgivings and just wondering, you know, this is a somewhat contrarian.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “All that being said, I spent my junior high and high school years down in Colorado Springs. I had a brother who went to CU and was living in Boulder. Catherine and I had spent a summer in two thousand two before we had our son living out in Boulder next door to Brad and Amy and just working in the Mobius Colorado office is. So after we had spent that summer, you know, Catherine even remarked at one point, hey, if we were ever to move anywhere, and I know we won't, you know, Boulder would be on the short list of interesting places to go. It's a good start.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yes, it was. I think that interestingly, and both Jason and I moved out to Colorado, and I would say somewhat surprisingly, if you know perhaps me and Jason and our personality types, you might have expected Jason to be more methodical in his thought process about weighing the pros and cons of moving from California to Colorado. And he actually committed to it earlier and easier than I did. Now, I had wife and kid. I'd been there for 17 years. I had been sort of core part of the sort of internet 1.0 entrepreneurial ecosystem. And so I did have concerns about moving to Boulder. My wife and I thought we were Bay Area lifers. And so making that move and leaving quote unquote the center of the tech universe and moving to Boulder was a big change. And so it took me a bit longer, both in terms of convincing myself, convincing my wife, et cetera, to make the move.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Well, I think part of it was as I started making some investments, I really became enamored with the sort of portfolio approach, both from being somebody who has a lot of different interests and I enjoy the context switching I enjoy being able to parallelize, if you will, entrepreneurial efforts and also quite frankly early on after I had done excite, I found it really hard to commit myself to any one particular idea. I had been doing some angel investing, had been advising a host of companies, and really found that sort of being able to parallel process and context with really worked for my interests and personality. And so sort of found my way into being an investor as a result of that.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “With a cheeky Silicon Valley startup. Like I said, I left at the end of 1999 and got into venture, started hanging out at Mobius Venture Capital, which is the firm where Brad and Jason and Seth and I all met. I thought I would hang out there for a short period of time and find another company to start. And instead I found myself becoming really excited about the investing side. I had made a few investments and then in a somewhat sort of unplanned path found myself as a full-time VC. led to us starting Foundry Group in 2006 and fast forward to today. We've all been working together for 17 years and at this point as a 17 year VC I've rendered myself incapable of having any other kind of job.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, well, I started out life in the technology industry as an entrepreneur, so I moved out to California Bay Area in 1989 to go to Stanford as an undergrad. And I met five of my classmates in my freshman dorm. And as we moved on to graduation, decided it would be much more interesting to start a company and work for ourselves rather than someone else. And it was literally that sort of flimsy motivation that ultimately led us to creating search engine excite, which was one of the sort of first wave of successful search engines. We went public in 1996. I stayed on through the end of 99 after we had merged with at home, which was a broadband over cable provider. Ultimately, the combined company met its demise due to, shall we say, the cable companies not really wanting to revenue share this new internet broadband subscription source.”

    2017-02-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source