Brad Feld, Foundry Group

**Nick** (0:06)
Welcome to Origins, a podcast about the money behind the money.
This podcast is created by Notation Capital, a pre-seed venture firm. We invest in amazing technical teams in New York at the infancy of an idea. You can find us on Twitter at Notation Capital. This season is sponsored by our friends at Silicon Valley Bank, a member of the FDIC. SVB is the bank of the world's most innovative companies and their investors, with a dedicated practice for emerging managers. Learn more about Silicon Valley Bank Services at svb.com.
We're traveling on the road. We've got Alex's setup, which is legit. I'm Nick, a partner at Notation Capital. I'm Alex. And we have?

**Brad Feld** (0:58)
Brad Feld, hanging out in Boulder.

**Nick** (1:00)
Thank you for having us.

**Brad Feld** (1:01)
Two guys from New York.

**Nick** (1:02)
Indeed.

**Brad Feld** (1:02)
I just learned how to climb up Sinitas.

**Nick** (1:04)
Indeed.

**Alex** (1:04)
We don't know what we're doing here.

**Nick** (1:08)
Someone will have to rescue us at some point.
Well, thanks so much for having us here. We're excited to do this with you. And we were just talking, spoken at length about your background and history as a founder and entrepreneur. So we'd love to spend a little time over the next 45 minutes talking about your experience as a VC, raising capital for various funds over the years from LPs. And also, we know that you're a very active LP, both personally and now through Foundry, Foundry Next as well. So we're excited to bug you about that.
So I guess possibly a good place to start, we don't have to start here, but possibly a good place to start is how you began angel investing and how ultimately that became your first venture fund, which I believe was Mobius.

**Brad Feld** (2:05)
Yep. So my first company, which was self-funded, we didn't raise any money, I started in 1987, was acquired in 1993 by a public company that was called Ameradata Technologies. And we were one of 40 companies that got bought in a three-year period. We're about the seventh that got bought. And the two co-chairmen, a guy named Len Fassler and Jerry Pak, were very, very active, obviously, acquiring businesses.
That happened at the end of 1993
I worked for them for a couple of years. But in the beginning in 1994, just shortly after we were acquired, I started making angel investments with my own money. And these were $25,000 type angel investments. Between 94 and 96, I did 40 of them.

**Nick** (2:59)
Was there a plan?

**Brad Feld** (3:01)
Invest in smart people doing software tech that I wanted. Now, I knew absolutely nothing about investing.
And we also hadn't taken any money. So it was more me in 1994, I was living in Boston. It was basically at the dawn of the commercial internet. My very first investment was in a company called NetGenesis, which ended up going public in 99, was for a short while worth a billion and change. They were one of the very first internet startups. It was four MIT undergrads who all graduated as they were starting this company.
One of them, the founding CEO, a guy named Raj Bhargava, who is an entrepreneur I've done since then. We've done eight companies together. But I just had this interest as I was still working for Ameridata and investing in helping start all these other companies. Again, almost all internet related, some of them software focused.
And through that three-year period, two things happened. One is I learned an awful lot about investing and I got to work with Len and Jerry who were doing all these acquisitions on some of the acquisitions from a technical perspective, but that allowed me to see from a deal perspective how those kinds of deals worked. And they also invested as angels in some of the companies that I was investing as an angel investor. And there were lots of companies coming to them that were not acquisition targets, but were raising money, and so there was a lot of that activity around that.

**Nick** (4:35)
And so you primarily were investing in Boston, so locally?

**Brad Feld** (4:38)
No, it was all around the country. So from the very beginning, I've been a national investor. When I was working for Ameradata, while our office wasn't in Boston, their acquisitions were all over the world. So I ended up spending a fair amount of time traveling when they were doing acquisitions in different places. I was also very early on, after I sold my first company, I joined a board of a company in San Rafael, a company called SBT Accounting Systems. It was the first board I was on.