passed away in April of this year<\/a>. <\/p>\nFelice shied away from publicity, so there is little written about her. If she knew I was writing this she would have sternly, flatly told me not to. But she also never got the recognition she deserved, so I\u2019m writing it anyway.<\/p>\n
Before I knew her, Felice had run the main Hill Holiday office in Boston. She told me once that she had worked her way up, starting as a secretary. Advertising agencies then (and, perhaps, now) employ a lot of women, but are run by men. She never told me the story of how<\/em> she scrapped her way up, but knowing her as I did, it was no surprise. She was tough: straightforward and a problem-solver, and unflinchingly business-minded. Every dollar spent had to be justified, every win or loss understood and used to improve. She used this shrewdness to start the post-Hill Holiday chapter in her life, but she succeeded because of another side of her.<\/p>\nSometime in 1996 she convinced the upper management of Omnicom Group, one of the largest ad agency holding companies in the world, that they needed to be in the internet business. This they already knew. But she also convinced them that the way to get into the business could not be by building internally, they had to bring in talent from the outside by buying up the best small internet agencies. John Wren, the CEO, hired her and put her in charge of Omnicom\u2019s sixth, and by far smallest (being one person), division, Communicade. Felice set out to meet internet agencies around the country, identified the best, and talked to them about being part of Omnicom.<\/p>\n
This is when I met her. The best small internet agencies did not want to be bought by Omnicom. They wanted to build billion dollar businesses and go public. They believed they could do this and, in 1997, it would have been a red flag if they didn\u2019t. She started looking around for someone who could handle the numbers part of this and I showed up on her radar. <\/p>\n
Before we met, she sent me a list of internet design agencies and told me she wanted my opinions of them. In the interview she asked me all the standard questions you would ask a finance person and then asked me which of the companies she had mentioned I thought would be the best investments. I laid out a 2-axis competitive diagram and argued that each of them occupied a different niche, so investing in all<\/em> of them would make the most sense. She smiled, because this was exactly her plan. But she was most intrigued by the two axes I had chosen: storytelling (whimsical vs staid) and technology (fireworks vs functional). This was, I\u2019m convinced, what got me hired. Felice wasn\u2019t just a businessperson, she cared deeply about the humanizing (or de-) aspects of technology. For her, the internet was a tool to make communications more human: more personal, more understandable, more interesting. She wanted marketers to tell their stories, not sell things.<\/p>\nThis is not the way the internet went, for the most part, and she chose to leave Omnicom in 1999. The rising tide rose so fast that all the companies we invested in had to scale so quickly that they lost some of that human touch. Perhaps a lot of it. She moved on to other things. We remained friends for another decade before the exigencies of life and diverging interests slowed our correspondence to once or twice a year.<\/p>\n
She was the best boss I ever had. She made me up my game, she insisted on it. I wasn\u2019t really qualified to do the job she hired me for, and she knew it. She helped me make myself better. We must have flown across the country together fifty times in those couple of years, and to and from Europe at least a dozen times. We would sit together and work on whatever we were working on. To be more accurate, we would sit together and work on what I<\/em> was working on. I would explain it and she would improve it. When we got to wherever we were going she would invite me to watch her work, in meetings with people\u2014she knew everyone\u2014where she would charm, advise, network, scold, convince, and evince. She had a natural way with people, they just liked her.<\/p>\nOne reason they liked her was that she never made herself the center of attention. Her philosophy, learned from years in the advertising business, was that her job was to make her clients famous, not herself. But her dislike of the limelight meant that only those who benefited from her work knew what she had done for them. The public plaudits went to those who sought them. She deserves more, so here are a couple of things I want you to know.<\/p>\n
She was one of the key shapers of the early web. She was a king-maker, and the kings she chose were the humanists. Humanist not because they elevated human reason and desires over religion, but because they put people before technology. At a time when so many tech companies built tech for tech\u2019s sake, or for money at the expense of people\u2019s privacy, she insisted that the tech be built for<\/em> people. To the extent that this ethos tenuously survives, she is one of the people who fought for it.<\/p>\nThe New York City tech scene might not exist without her. When we started investing, NYC was not a tech town. We would go to parties in NYC where a very large percentage of the people in the NYC internet industry would show up, and these parties would be in neighborhood bars. Felice was one of the primary encouragers of the NYC internet scene. The NYC companies she chose to back\u2014Razorfish, Agency.com, and Think New Ideas\u2014trained many of the first wave of internet savvy people on the east coast. After Organic opened a NYC office, it seemed like half the internet people in NYC worked for a company she had picked and we had funded. The people trained at these companies made New York an internet hub in the 2000s. Without them, that would not have happened.<\/p>\n
Felice didn\u2019t care much about east coast\/west coast, or even US\/Europe; she thought all companies everywhere should be from the humanist mold. But it matters to me, because New York is where I made my base of operations. As the years have gone by, and the tech scene here has gotten big enough to be considered normal, many people have taken or been given credit for building the biggest tech industry outside of Silicon Valley. Now that she isn\u2019t here to tell me not to, I insist that Felice Kincannon be given a prominent place in that pantheon of founders. She made a difference to all of us, whether you knew her or not.<\/p>\n
I wish I could send her this, even though I know she would be impatient with it. I would want her to know how much I appreciate her because she was my friend. I miss her.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Felice Kincannon was my boss, my mentor, and a friend. She passed away in April of this year. Felice shied away from publicity, so there is little written about her. If she knew I was writing this she would have sternly, flatly told me not to. But she also never got the recognition she deserved, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":245146,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12034],"tags":[85677,137046,19525,1292],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-306179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-angel-investor","tag-felice","tag-kincannon","tag-reaction","tag-wheel"],"yoast_head":"\n
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