19 Years Ago Today – Brad Feld

I got an email from Matt Blumberg this morning with the above image that said,

“We have been blogging for 19 years. I can remember sitting together above Super Liquor futzing with Typepad like it was yesterday.”

“Super Liquor” is Superior Liquor in Superior, Colorado, which was on the first floor of the building off of Hwy 36, which was my office at the time. There was also a pizza restaurant on the first floor.

I asked Matt if we started on the same day because I couldn’t remember. He said,

“Literally the same day.  We sat at a desk right outside your office in Superior, pulled up our laptops, and taught ourselves Typepad together and created our templates.  Fred had already been blogging for about 6 months, and we had dinner the night before (can’t remember where, think The Med) and decided we would give it a try.  We couldn’t find other good examples of VC or CEO blogs. “

I went and looked at some of those first few posts. Matt’s was You’re Only a First Time CEO Once. Mine included To Blog or Not to Blog (which called out a handful of VC bloggers who started before me), Blog tools – Newsgator and Moveable Poster, TDC (Thinly Disguised Contempt), and my first book review: Free Prize Inside the Radioactive Boy Scout Rate Hikes.

My favorite of those was TDC (Thinly Disguised Contempt).

As was the tradition at the time when new bloggers appeared on the scene, Fred Wilson wrote nice posts linking to each of us. His welcome to Matt was Welcome to the Blog World Matt, and his welcome to me was This Is Going To Be Interesting.

This post wouldn’t be complete without my hat tip to Fred, who, in my view, is the OG VC blogger. His first post was creatively (well – not really) titled MY First Post.

19 years is a long time to do anything. It’s close to my board service record, which ironically was on Matt’s company Return Path with Fred. The ending of Fred’s first post resonates with me today as it did 19 years ago.

“I have no idea if i’ll write a lot in my blog or rarely. I hope its a lot, because i have a lot to say. But we’ll see about that.”