Universities have parents' weekends, what about startups?
Starting Next Big Sound out of college, with minimal prior work experience, it just seemed to make sense to invite all our parents out to Boulder to see the house where we were all living, the office, and meet some of the important people that were helping us get NBS off the ground.
I thought it was particularly important for a few of the more skeptical parents that they come see that we weren’t just goofing around in Colorado but had serious, sophisticated investors backing the business.
We settled on a weekend in April of 2010, 7 months after closing our seed financing, and I asked Jason Mendelson if he would make a cameo with the parents when they were in town.
“Cameo?! I’m going to host dinner at my house!”
Saturday night Jason hosted dinner at his beautiful home with the four total Next Big Sounders (including the three founders) and each of our parents, David Cohen and his wife Jill, Mike Platt (our partner at Cooley) and his wife Allison, Brad Feld and his wife Amy, Raj, my aunt Caren and uncle Rod and one of our investors and his girlfriend flew in from San Francisco. Sunday Caren and Rod hosted brunch before a hike.
It was a wonderful weekend and went a long way towards legitimizing NBS with our families for the long years ahead.
“I’ve been investing in companies for 30 years and I’ve never been to a parents' weekend” Brad told me. While it seemed completely normal to me at the time, looking back I can see it was an unusual plan and love that Jason, David, Mike, Brad and everyone there embraced it with such open arms!