Please join Silicon Flatirons on Monday, May 6th at 6:00 PM as Jerry Colonna, executive coach and former venture capitalist, will present a Crash Course on The Crucible of Leadership. This Crash Course provides insight from a successful venture capitalist who has coached some amazing entrepreneurs and CEOs on how to use what he calls “The Crucible of Leadership” to become the leader you were meant to be.
Leading a startup can be an intense, and intensely personal, experience. Mr. Colonna, who has been through the crucible of leadership himself and as an advisor and coach to many CEOs, will provide his insight on how business leaders can look inward to discover and acknowledge the things within them that help and hinder them as leaders. By doing that, rather than by trying to emulate someone else’s leadership style, they can emerge as a more effective leader.
Speaker: Jerry Colonna
Jerry Colonna is an executive coach who uses the skills he learned as a venture capitalist to help entrepreneurs. Previously he was a partner with JPMorgan Partners (JPMP), the private-equity arm of JPMorgan Chase. He joined JPMP from Flatiron Partners, which he launched 1996 with partner, Fred Wilson. Flatiron became one of the most successful, early-stage investment programs in the New York City area. At Flatiron, Jerry was responsible for a wide range of the firm’s investments including Geocities Inc., Gamesville Inc., Vertical One Inc., and The New York Times Digital.
“Jerry, when he was my co-founder at Flatiron, taught me the people side of the venture capital business. And now as CEO coach to a number of USV portfolio CEOs (and many others), he is teaching the people side of the startup business to some of the best entrepreneurs we work with. He is a people person through and through and management is all about people.” Fred Wilson
“Jerry Colonna also wrote an awesome post riffing off of Startup Communities titled The Sarajevo Effect. If you don’t know Jerry, he’s an extremely successful VC (he and Fred Wilson at USV were partners in the 1990’s at Flatiron Partners) who retired from VC in the early 2000s and is now a coach to a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs (including several who I work with). Even though we don’t spend a huge amount of physical time together, I consider Jerry to be one of my closest friends and intellectual soulmate on a number of fronts. We’ve had three great dinners in the last 60 days – two of them in Boulder (he’s living here part time now) – and we spend a lot of the last one (in NY) talking about some of the ideas underlying the thoughts in his post.” Brad Feld
For more on Mr. Colonna, click here.