Enough is enough

By N.B. | Washington, D.C.

"IF you’d like to have an in-person meeting with venture capitalist Brad Feld," the Harvard Business Review noted last month, "there’s only one place where you can do it: Boulder, Colorado." That's because Mr Feld, who lives and works in Boulder, recently made the much-covered decision to quit business travel entirely.

Boulder is a nice-enough city and Mr Feld is in the business of giving out money to people who need it, so I suspect that what works for him may not work for everyone else. It is a big change for Mr Feld, who used to travel for business 50-75% of the time, according to an account of his decision that he published in Inc. magazine. But he did it, he says, because he couldn't handle one more trip: "I woke up one day in January and realised I couldn’t—and didn’t want to—do it anymore."

Gulliver is a big believer in limiting business travel to when it is absolutely necessary—or when you can fit in some personal travel at the end or beginning of a trip. There's no doubt that if you're losing your mind travelling, you have to put your health first. No company wants someone who can't do their job properly travelling to represent them. But Mr Feld is no dummy, and he's not just benefiting emotionally and physically from dropping the business travel: he's also winning great free publicity for Foundry, his firm. That's not all: in his Inc. column, Mr Feld notes that he now relies heavily on videoconferencing. His company, he notes, has "installed Oblong’s Mezzanine system, which we believe is the future technology for collaborative, distributed work." Clever readers can probably see where this is going: Foundry has a stake in Oblong (which, to his credit, Mr Feld discloses).

So, to review: Feld doesn't have to travel for business this year. He got his name in Inc., HBR, and now the Economist. He won some great publicity for a company his firm backs financially. This is a man who knows how to turn a personal crisis into a business opportunity.