Async Founder Coffee Talk

So last week I went to an event hosted by Renegade Partners, one of our terrific investors at Daily and Roseanne Wencek, one of Renegade’s founders, is on our board. And I was saying to Roseanne how much it meant to me to get to talk, even for just a few minutes, to three other startup founders who are part of the Renegade portfolio.

I just get a lot out of spending time with other founders and talking about the challenges of growing a company and getting advice. Venture backed companies at similar stages tend to have a lot of similar things going on, and this is usually the case to a maybe surprising extent, even if the products and customers are pretty different.

I was telling Roseanne that two of the highlights of my year last year were the portfolio company get togethers that two of our other investors, Root Ventures and Freestyle hosted. It’s really hard to get away from the day-to-day work because there’s always a long list of things that are slipping off the bottom of the to-do list.

But I’m always glad when I do take time to spend time in conversation with other founders and relatedly, there are a few friends who are startup founders that I try hard to have regular coffee conversations with. Often I fail and there’s like weeks or months go by — but it’s always worth doing. So with all that in mind, I’m starting an async founder coffee social media experiment.

I’m gonna talk for two minutes or so every day about something that came up in conversation at Daily or with another friend about some startup thing. One of my rules is that I don’t ever give advice. I’m always happy to share my experiences and lessons I think I might have learned — or I should have learned.

But I don’t know enough about anything to tell any other human being what they should do ever. But I often ask for advice. So in that spirit, I’d love to hear in the comments how often you carve out time to meet casually with your peers or with people who are one or two steps farther along the path you’re following.

The music today is from a record called Sparkle Beings by the Angelica Sanchez Trio, Michael Formanek and Billy Hart. The song is called “With (Exit).”