This year’s local election in Boulder is a critical one. The city that we love risks shutting its doors. While the business community in Boulder has contributed immeasurably to the vibrancy, charitable contribution base, economic development, and success of our community, there is a faction in Boulder that feels that our city should stop moving forward and instead should live in the past. This faction believes in a less inclusive Boulder and aims to achieve this goal by literally shutting the doors to our city.

This is what is behind propositions 300 and 301 which are proposed amendments to the city’s charter.   

This faction is well organized and well funded and the slogans make it sound reasonable.  But make no mistake:  the goal is to immediately freeze all development of all types around the city by enveloping the city a bundle of political red tape.  

In the coming days, Boulder residents will be asked to vote on the following:

#300 – Neighborhood Right to Vote on Land Use Regulation

#301 – New Development Shall Pay Its Own Way

These initiatives must be voted down.

While innocuous sounding, the names of these initiatives completely misrepresent their intent and the dire consequences that would result if they are enacted. The truth is that neighborhoods already do have a say in projects that affect them, and developers already do pay some of the highest fees and taxes in the country.  

Effectively, these proposals will create 60+ neighborhoods in Boulder.  Can you imagine what would happen if we had that many homeowner associations that had the power to hold special elections and veto land use changes approved by city council? The smallest of those neighborhoods would be comprised of just 19 houses. That’s not “local control” (which already exists), that’s a deliberate attempt to create gridlock.

These initiatives will immediately freeze important infill development, including affordable housing, transit-oriented development, neighborhood serving retail, social service centers, and day care centers. The city manager has stated that the city will stop issuing permits of any kind for at least six months while they figure out what these initiatives mean and how to implement them. Once they do start reissuing permits, these initiatives will force the city to levy such high taxes and fees that development will effectively stop in Boulder. This will stop our city in its tracks and greatly exacerbate an already expensive housing market.

These measures are opposed by six former mayors, all nine City Council members, numerous former city council members, Boulder Housing Partners, The Daily Camera, and numerous civic groups like Open Boulder, the Boulder Chamber, Better Boulder,  and others.  Open Boulder executive director Andy Schultheiss has called them “among the worst pieces of public policy I’ve seen in almost 25 years of observing and participating in local policy-making.”

It’s critically important that we defeat these measures. To do that we need to get the word out to those in our community who want Boulder to continue to be a vibrant city. The sad irony is that those promoting these measures have the time and organization to put towards pressing their backward and closed agenda while many who oppose it are busy helping keep Boulder prosperous by creating jobs and economic growth.

This is a battle we can’t afford to lose. Please take a minute to help us get the word out. Send it to your friends via email and social media. Urge your neighbors to vote and make sure you vote yourself. With ballots mailed out this week many in our community will be voting in the next seven days (over 50% of ballots are returned within a week of their being sent out).

#keepboulderopen

Seth, Jason, Brad, Ryan

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Below are some suggested tweets or Facebook posts should you chose to share them:

Tweet: i agree with @foundrygroup. 300 and 301 will have devastating effects on boulder. VOTE NO on both! #keepboulderopen https://bit.ly/1ReQamJ

Tweet: i stand for keeping the doors to boulder open. VOTE NO on 300 and 301. #keepboulderopen https://bit.ly/1ReQamJ

Tweet: In Boulder’s upcoming election we’ll decide if we want to live in the past or continue to thrive. #keepboulderopen https://bit.ly/1ReQamJ

 

We are pleased to announce that we have completed an investment in AvidXchange. Based in Charlotte, NC. AvidXchange (Avid) is a leading mid-market B2B payments provider with a complete invoice workflow management solution, enabling its customers to seamlessly handle invoice ingestion and payments to their respective suppliers.

Avid was founded in 2000 and is run by Mike Praeger, a long time friend of Brad’s from when they both lived in Boston in the 1990s. Mike had several entrepreneurial successes before starting Avid and has grown it in the past 15 years to a substantial company on a modest amount of invested capital.

In April, Mike approached Brad about joining his board as part of a growth investment being led by Bain Capital Ventures. Brad provided some advice on the deal but declined joining the board since we weren’t an investor in the company. After several additional conversations, Mike asked if we would be willing to invest if Bain would syndicate some of their investment to us. After a number of discussions, including with members of our advisory board, Matt Harris at Bain (with whom Seth has a long standing relationship), and Mike, we decided to pursue an investment in the business.

Avid offers its customers solutions to ingest invoices of any form and connect to over 100+ ERP/Accounting systems. Through their software, Avid helps their clients analyze their spend and efficiently pay suppliers on the AvidPay network. Avid’s software enables customers to make a paper-intensive 10-day-long process become completely paperless. As a result, the customer’s payment process will take less than three days days at 50% of the cost. AvidPay enables their customers to pay without doing any work onboarding suppliers (Avid handles all of this), monitor payments across all channels, and receive incentive rebates for using electronic payment methods.

Avid is a fascinating example of a large company, growing extremely quickly, that is hidden in plain sight. As the fastest growing technology company in North Carolina, it’s on track to be a very important payment intermediary in the overall financial infrastructure.

When we raised Foundry Group Select, our strategy was to only invest in companies that we already had an investment in. Avid is an exception to this and one we considered carefully. After talking to our full advisory board and receiving unanimous approval to do this investment, we decided to move forward with it.

We are excited about the chance to work with Mike and his team as they navigate the next wave of growth.

We are pleased to announce that we have completed our initial investment in Chewse, Inc. Based in San Francisco, CA, Chewse has created a platform that makes it easy for businesses to order and manage meals for their employees.

The U.S. market for corporate food delivery is over $30 billion a year.  It’s not a new market, but it’s one that is rife with frustrations.  The market is fragmented, with the three largest restaurant chains that supply the corporate market being Subway, Panera and Chipotle with market shares of 3%, 0.8% and 0.05%, respectively.  There are over 11,000 caterers in the U.S. with the top 50 largest controlling less than 15% of the market.

The experience of food ordering is pitiful.  Most of the options involve telephones and faxes.  The person at the company who is responsible for ordering the food has almost no hope of getting everything correct when employees have dietary restrictions.  Each time a food order is desired, the admin must either remember each person’s preferences or ask for the 100th time “are you the one who is allergic to onions, or the one who is gluten free?”  In the end, this is a thankless job that rarely goes as expected, leaving at least some of the employees disappointed and the person who ordered left holding the bag.

Furthermore, there are many restaurants who have capacity and desire to reach corporate clients but don’t know how. They can sign up with a Restaurant Runners-type service, but then have no control over how their food is presented or delivered. As for timeliness, forget it.  And this, again, is all run by phone calls and faxes.

Chewse is building a two-sided marketplace to connect corporate clients with restaurants.  They have created a platform that allows administrators to easily and quickly order food based on the preferences of their employees.  In addition, each restaurant is vetted by the company to ensure that the food is of high quality at each price point.  This means that Chewse has direct relationships with these vendors which ensures that the Chewse menu always has a large list of options.

The company was founded by Tracy Lawrence and Jeff Schenck and we are stoked to work with them.

We are very happy to announce today the closing of our fifth fund, Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. The fund is the same size as our last one: $225,000,000 in limited partner commitments. We are pleased to be working with a great group of investors.

We will continue to do exactly what we have always done: invest in seed and early-stage investment opportunities in the software and IT space that are located across the United States. We’ll also continue to pursue a strategy of Thematic Investing that has served us well over our investing careers.

We very much look forward to working with another group of great entrepreneurs and portfolio companies.

– Jason, Ryan, Seth and Brad

P.S.  For those of you keeping track this is the exact same blog post we used to announce of 2013 and 2010 funds except for this P.S.

We are pleased to announce that we have led a $9 million round in Glowforge, a Seattle-based desktop 3D Laser Printer company.

In 2010, when we invested in Makerbot, the maker movement was just beginning. While 3D printing technology had been around for 30 years, there were no desktop 3D printers. The concept of using an additive process for 3D printing, where you built up a 3D object from continuous extrusion of a material such as ABS or PLA (plastics) was well understood. But this technology had not been brought to the desktop at a $2,500 price point. Makerbot did that and has created an entirely new market segment within the 3D printing industry.

Glowforge is playing into the same trend that made Makerbot successful but in an inverse way. Instead of an additive process, Glowforge is using a subtractive process to create objects. While the additive process is called “3D printing” the subtractive process is generally called “machining” and there has never been a particularly good retronym for it. To date, most subtractive processes still conjure up visions of giant machine tools cutting different materials with very sharp objects or dangerous lasers.

Glowforge has a product that uses lasers to perform the subtractive process. While there are expensive, industrial 3D laser cutters, there are very few inexpensive desktop laser cutters. And they are all positioned as “cutters”, rather than a 3D laser printer, which has a broader range of functionality.

In the same way that Makerbot completely disrupted the 3D additive manufacturing industry, we believe that Glowforge can completely disrupt the 3D subtractive manufacturing industry. In support of our premise, the two leaders of Makerbot – Bre Pettis and Jenny Lawton – have each invested alongside us in Glowforge. We are also joined by our close friends at True Ventures, who were also our co-investors in Makerbot.

We are excited to be working with Dan Shapiro, Tony Wright, and Mark Gosselin, all multi-time entrepreneurs with a broad range of experience. Guys – thanks for letting us join the gang!