Brad Feld of Foundry and Techstars joins Nick to discuss Why Foundry Isn’t Raising a New Fund, Lessons from Hibernation, and the Benefits and Drawbacks of a Give First Philosophy. In this episode we cover:
- TechStars’ Evolution and Challenges
- Building Vibrant Startup Communities
- The Philosophy of Give First
- Mentorship and Effective Communication
- Balancing Give First with Personal Time
- Balancing Default Modes: Yes and No
- Managing Overload and Commitments
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The host of The Full Ratchet is Nick Moran of New Stack Ventures, a venture capital firm committed to investing in founders outside of the Bay Area.
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0:17
Brad Feld is back on the show. He joins us today, from Aspen. He’s a founding partner at Foundry and a co founder of TechStars. Brad has invested in companies including Zynga, Fitbit harmonics, Haven, Lee Mapbox and Formlabs, amongst many others. He’s a prolific writer, and recently released his new book give first, which explores how a philosophy of mentorship and generosity can fuel entrepreneurial ecosystems. Brad,
0:43
welcome back. Thanks. Delighted to be here.
0:47
It’s been too long for long term listeners. Brad was, Brad was the 10th guest we ever had on the on on the show back in 2014 and I got to tell you, Brad, I think we went from maybe 600 total listeners, you know, to 6000 after your appearance. So I swim you a lot for helping us kickstart this whole thing from
1:09
Hello, my new 5400 friends. There we go. There
1:13
we go. So Brad’s back, Brad, you know, I would love to start out just with a recap on foundry before we jump into the book. So Foundry has decided not to raise a new fund. Can you talk a bit about that decision and and why you know you’re going to deploy the rest of the current fund and and not do another Sir,
1:36
when we started foundry in 2007 one of our sort of viewpoints and perspectives of what we’re trying to do is not create a multi generational firm. So Seth, Ryan, Jason and I sat down and said, You know what? We’re going to raise the number of funds. We don’t know how many. We’re never going to increase the size of the fund. It’s going to just be a small firm and just us, and one day we’ll decide that we raised our last fund, and that was part of what we told all of our LPs. That was part of our fundraising pitch. That was part of what we talked about. And, of course, 2007 we’re just getting started with foundry, after having, you know, all spent time and work together a Mobius, which had been a spin off from Softbank and affiliated with Softbank going back to when I started, you know, confounded that fund in in the mid 90s or 1996 so we had this starting point now, we raised the fund. Raise the fund in 2010 raised the fund in 2013 and then in 2016 we did something different. We didn’t follow that starting point of we’re never going to add anybody, and we’re never going to raise a bigger fund. So we ended up adding Linda Ekman to our team. Lindell was our largest LP from you TIMCO, and we ended up raising bigger funds. That was really a culmination of two things. One was, personally, I’ve been investing in venture funds going back to 1997 my very first venture fund investment was in Highland capital three, you know, a long, long time ago. And my personal investments in venture funds started off as an, you know, entrepreneur investing in side funds, but then continued. And so I did that a lot, especially as early and seed stage venture started coming back in, you know, 2004 I invested in the first USB fund. You know that Fred, Fred and Brad did 2006 2007 invested in, you know, Josh kappens first fund, invested in Monica’s first fund. So I was doing a bunch of that stuff. And then my partners and I started investing together in funds with our own money. We created an entity that we pulled our capital. And I think by 2015 we’d probably made 200 venture fund investments. And of course, at this point, you know, early stage venture funds are appearing all over the place. You know, every day we’re getting inbound email, and it really turned from a hobby that was quite a good financial hobby, and was a lot of fun and was powerful support of other early stage funds, especially ones that were getting created to something that was, you know, like, it’s very hard when you’re getting, you know, a half a dozen things a week to be discerning about what you’re going to invest in, especially when you know 80% of it is people you don’t know. It might be really interesting, but you have no idea. So we ended up coming up with a strategy that we called Foundry Group next. And in hindsight, we really created a new fund, a new a new, you know, a new new firm. It had some different dynamics around it. We still had, at that point, an early stage fund. So we raised the same 2016 fund, but then we raised this $500 million fund that was investing in venture funds, about 30% of the capital, and then late stage, or not late stage, but Series B, Series C, type later stage, select style deals is what we refer to it as, companies that were now escape velocity and working but still weren’t super expensive. We then sort of built off that for a couple. Years. In 2018 we raised a combined fund that combined those two funds. And I think this was a moment in time where we started trying to think about like, you know, what we were doing long, you know, long, long term. And I was getting to the place where, if we hadn’t done that, in other words, if we had raised only a 2016 fund. You know, I was getting personally to the place where I was ready to say this was, this is my last fund. A lot of things happened between 2018 and we raised a fund that is our 2022 fund. One of the things was we committed to invest that fund, commit that fund over four years. So rlps, unlike a lot of other funds in the 19 and 20 timeframe that got committed in one one year, like the speed just just really sped up. You know, our founder, our LPs, are like, Hey, you guys are raising up at your fund. It’s a small team. Want to make sure you don’t deploy it too fast. And, you know, we’re big believers in time diversity. And so we said, Yep, no problem. Like, here’s the pacing for this size fund for us, and then we held to it. And interestingly, by 2020 and even in 2021 we had a lot of LPs and said, Why are you going so slow? So it’s very confusing, like, there’s a dissonance there. You know, it’s also hard whenever it’s like, well, yeah, you know your funds are, gosh, you’re with. You look at where your funds are. Like, we’re still putting brand new money in the ground, like, We’re still putting money in to companies, like, this is the start of the investment. It’s no, there’s no markups. When you put it into the ground in 2021 or even 2022 that’s new capital that’s starting the clock. It wasn’t popular to be slow at the time. No, no, no. And so that was kind of interesting. But kind of, in this period of time, we spent a lot of time talking about like, you know, what are we, you know, What? What? What’s the trajectory? And we did. We decided to raise another 22 fund in 2022 you know, I was all in on that. You know, Seth and Ryan, who were the other two founding partners, were all in on it. Jason had this point retired. We’d added a few more partners, Lyndall, Jacqueline and moody, and so I think we were all pretty aligned on, you know, let’s do, let’s do a fund together. That’s a 2022 fund. We call it 22 fund. It first close was in 2022 second fund was spring of 23 and we spent, we started deploying it like 22 and at that moment, like we had a decision to make. And we didn’t make the decision the day after we closed the fund, but the decision to make was, are we going to do another fund as a team? And at that moment in time, we let ourselves sit with it for the better part of 2023 knowing full well a couple of things. You know, I knew that I wasn’t going to sign up for another fund. Would I, you know, be comfortable with foundry continuing forward? Of course, you know, if that was the right answer, but I, I’m about to turn 60 now, the last Mobius fund that I was responsible for took 22 years to close down. So, you know, this illusion that venture funds last 10 years is nonsense. And even, well, 12 years, you know, nonsense, I’m still involved as an LP in funds that go back prior to 2007 and yes, there’s a lot of mechanisms that people have that you know, you can say, well, you know, you can sell off the tail to somebody else, or continuity fund and all sort of stuff, as somebody who is not an IRR focused investor, but a cash on cash return focused investor, investor who believes that IRR math is a great a great illusion, especially in worlds of unrealized events, that really the only number that is interesting is at the end of the story, the cash IRR. I think all of those deals that are either continuation funds or tails funds are crappy for LPs and frankly, for a GP, if you’re in a position where you’re in carry cash on cash. Increasing your cash on cash return is a better strategy. You make more money. And so I’m very, very comfortable with the idea that signing up for a fund is not signing up for 10 years, but signing up for a much longer arc than that. And there are a couple of people who are still doing venture and being very active, you know, in their 70s. And I took it to one person in his 80s who’s still very active. I mean, I can be sitting on boards in my 70s, but I’m not going to be an active investor in my 70s if I’m still on this planet. So I had to deal with that. And I think collectively, as the six of us sat around and talked about it over the course of the year, let some time unfold, it became clear that, you know, foundry, as as a firm, that should be our last fund, and we should, we should honor the thing we started with, which is one day we would just decide that it was our last fund, and then just work as hard as we can collectively as a team, you know, for the long tail of that fund. Us to maximize the value to our investors, which include us, and not be wrapped up in we need to have more assets, and we need to have a continuation strategy, and we have to have a this, and we have to have that. But you know that what we did was we invested in a bunch of companies. We had some real impact with some of them. We’ve invested in a lot of funds. I think we have 50 active funds that we’re LPS in. Wow. I like to think that we’ve been a really impactful LP for many of them, you know, Lyndall and Jacqueline, who spent a lot of time on building that portfolio with the support from the other four of us. I think built a really great group. And I think it’s a great group that we all individually have lots of loyalty and affection for, that, you know, will continue to help for a long time, and the returns from that will, you know, will just play out over time. So
10:50
let’s talk about TechStars just for a minute. So they’re getting a reboot of sorts. David Cohen is is back as CEO. You were a co founder of TechStars. Are a co founder of TechStars. What do you think really worked well for TechStars and and what, where did things get off track?
11:10
TechStars is 19 years old, and I think the simplest way I describe it, and I, I took this from Cohen, is it definitely had its awkward teenage years we’ve all had, or we’ve all been teenagers, or we have teenagers like, you know, we made some mistakes, we snuck out at night, we got drunk, we, you know, did some things that hurt some people’s feelings and whatever, like, that’s just, that’s just part of growing up. When we look back, and I’m having dinner tomorrow night with Walt Winchell, who is a longtime investor in TechStars companies who’s been very involved in TechStars from early on. Walt’s a great entrepreneur in Boston, and he and I met through an angel investment we both made in a company called harmonics that created Guitar Hero and then subsequently got bought by Viacom. Created rock band, then the founders bought it back from Viacom, and then we invest, we found reinvested in that incarnation, and then it was acquired by Epic, wow, the unreal people. So amazing journey for Alex and Iran, the co founders of it. And, you know, it’s a, it was a really amazing, powerful and this, the journey being amazing is amazing story, because it was one of the few deals that I’ve been involved in where the earn out actually really paid out. I think the earn out ended up being four or five times more than the face of the deal value. The deal was $135 million deal, but then it had a half a billion dollar earn out, wow. And Walt was remarkable, because he was the shareholder rep, and it was a seven year lawsuit with Viacom to settle the earn out. Of course, we were using money that we got paid for. You know, we got paid up front for deals. So maybe spent 20 million bucks to get the 500 million bucks, whatever the numbers were, something in that order of magnitude. But we really got to know each other really well, and he’s somebody I just learned a ton from. I would consider him somebody that whenever, whenever Walt says something, I’m listening carefully to try to figure out he said, and this is the the answer to the Tech Stars thing. There are what we did. Well, two of them were things that Walt would say to me over and over again, and both of which I think I heard personally but didn’t listen to in the context of that and that David has really re embraced as CEO. One of them is what would say over and over and over to me and to David, and to David Brown, and to anybody who listens, some version of bigger isn’t better. Better is better. And that’s a very fundamental thing that David is focused on right now, which is better, is better, you know, and TechStars, I think quite big. It did. It did. And it got big, you know, in lots of dimensions, and it’s still big, right? I think the number of companies a year that are, you know, TechStars companies at the peak, I think it was like seven or 800 companies a year. I think now it’s probably 250 a year. And 250 a year is like the right kind of number, yeah, you know, in terms of it, but it’s not just the number of companies in absolute it was like in the programs, when the programs were, you know, 10 companies, they were amazing and magical, and then there were 12, and then there were 15, and then there were 20, and not so amazing and magical. And the difference between, you know, finding 10 amazing companies and putting them, you know, through a program, and investing and really getting close to them is different. And I think there is probably for the for the way we operated and what TechStars did that was so incredible for the first, however, many years, with these companies. I think there’s probably a decay curve. That was a geometric decay curve as you keep adding companies. So it was that it was also number of programs. So as the number of programs expand, of course, then you have just a lot more to manage. It’s sort of a complicated thing to manage, but so then the team gets bigger. And so, you know, there came a point during covid Where. We decided to that we were scaling. And of course, this was also, you know, one of the headstakes from covid for a lot of companies, which was that everything was going to be digital. And the opportunity, you know, to scale digitally forever was, you know, infinite. And so, you know, we, we kind of fell into a trap of trying to scale organizationally and build a bunch of infrastructure to scale organizationally, much bigger than we were at that point. And some of the things that we did, I think, were really, really useful long term, but looking back on it, a lot of things that were done in a lot of places, things that happened, were not effective. When David came back as CEO, he hit reset on all of that. So that’s that’s that’s one, one thing we used to do, well, better is better. Better is better. The The other thing, I’d say, that was a real strength of TechStars, which, you know, led to the book I wrote with startup communities. A lot of activities evolved into that, things like Startup Weekend, which, you know, were separate things that ultimately TechStars took over, was this premise that you can build startups anywhere in the world, and this idea that building really vibrant startup communities all over the world was a powerful thing, and a powerful thing for a bunch of network effects that weren’t obvious. So this idea of trying to consolidate all the startups in one place or the line that made me crazy, that caused me to then write startup communities was even in 2010 I was hearing people say things like, you know, if you’re serious about starting our company, you should just come to the Bay Area, because all the great companies in the Bay Area. And I’m like, Oh no, let me give you a list. Yeah, there’s a lot of amazing things about the Bay Area, but let me give you a list of things that are, you know, great companies that are not the Bay Area. Oh, by the way, there are plenty of challenges with the Bay Area. And, you know, you get into geo fights like New York would be like, Oh, well, we’re New York, and, you know, we’re going to be better than the Bay Area. Or you’d be in some random place, you’d be like, we’re going to be the, you know, Silicon Valley of blah. And
16:56
the premise that one location has a monopoly on entrepreneurship is is crazy to me. I mean, there’s a lot of thing, there’s a lot of strengths in the valley, but in the Bay Area, but, well,
17:04
I think it’s just fundamentally invalid. And so in 2012 I think a lot of people wanted it to be an invalid hypothesis, but it was still there was, you know, like, prove it. To me, kind of, what’s the, what’s the evidence of it? I think in 2025 it’s an invalid hypothesis. But what happened as TechStars continued to scale was concentrate activity in less markets and not actually really understand what made the activity in the individual startup community so powerful. And this was the thing. It wasn’t so much concentrating the activity in the markets. That was the ultimate problem. The ultimate problem was that we started consolidating capital. So until about 2015 most of the TechStars programs were that were geographically centric. Were funded by local LPs. TechStars funded so interesting, but these were little funds in the geographies they were in. So there’s a TechStars New York Fund and the TechStars Chicago fund, the TechStars Boston Fund. And again, TechStars was part of that capital that TechStars, the organization had, but the the local LPS were successful entrepreneurs and some of the VCs in the community that wanted to participate, and people would engage as mentors. And what would happen would be that they really wanted these companies in their local markets to be successful, so they put a disproportionate amount of energy because they were the pre seed investors, so disproportionate amount of energy as mentors, and this sort of they were all in it together, like it was a very powerful, you know, feedback loop that then when there was success, that capital stayed in the community. So, you know, there’s store, there’s some good stories, like one of the funds, one of the Chicago funds, returned over 100 times the money. And, you know, like, all the money just went right back to, you know, TechStars has its piece, and all the rest of it went back from local people who are like, Oh, wow, I have this giant box of money that came from this Tech Stars activity in my community. And so it was very tightly woven. So a lot of community pride around what was happening in different markets, Chicago, Boulder, Seattle, you know, some some of these. There’s New York dynamics even in big cities, right? It was just like people cared a lot about it when we started, when we started aggregating the capital Tech Stars into our centralized funds, like it was hard to care, or the caring diminished. Yeah, you still wanted the companies to be successful because, you know, it’s in your community or whatever, but it wasn’t the same dynamic. And so part of David’s strategy is not, you know, let’s go blanket the world with accelerators that was part of the better is better. It’s let’s go back to communities that really want to embrace this model, and let’s run one special 10 person cohort a year and build some really great companies. With those local communities that are long term self reinforcing in those communities. And, you know, to David’s credit, he had the energy to come back in the CEO role and really commit to that for you know, that’s not like a show up for six months and then, you know, find a new CEO. It’s like, you know, founder comes back in and said, This is the thing. And as part of that for me, I told David that I would do anything he wanted to help him. I was on the board, and Foundry has a lot of capital allocated for different parts of TechStars, and it’s bad economic trade. But relatively early on 2010 I gave my founder slack to one of our funds, because we’re starting to invest in TechStars companies more frequently, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable with some conflict dynamics around it. Yeah, it was, again, it’s good for our funds, but you know, and I’m happy I did it like, well, in hindsight, I’m with the benefit of hindsight, I’m still happy that we did that like. I never, I never felt any discomfort when a Tech Stars company was successful or failed, what foundry had invested in but, you know, part of it was interesting, part of the timing of of that in re engagement with with David was and what TechStars was saying that, you know, I was in hibernation. I’ve been pretty public about that. And I said to him that I’m like, I might want to stay in hibernation. I’m enjoying this, not having a public profile, not engaging this way. What, what shifted was, I had written a first draft of this, this book, give first about three years prior, and I’d stuck it on the shelf for a variety of reasons, including, I just really didn’t feel like getting out in the world and talking about it, which is part of writing a book, at least. I think it’s part of writing a book. Like, if you care about the ideas, you’ve got to put some energy into getting energy into getting the ideas out there. And I took it off the shelf about a month after David came back as CEO. And my reaction to reading it, I had a lot of work to do to turn it from what it was into a good, what I considered to be a good book, but I knew what I had to do. But as I read through it, I’m like, there’s some good stuff in here. Like, there’s things in here. I want to, you know, I don’t know how many more books I’m going to feel like writing. This is, this is my ninth book. I want to get some stuff out there that I haven’t, you know, blogged about and talked about, but I really haven’t codified in in long form. And so I did that. And at the end of the year, when I was feeling good about that, I said to David, look, I’m going to spend some chunk of time constrained out and about, happy to be out and about, you know, not just around the book, but also around textiles. So, you know, that’s been the last three, four months. And when Halloween comes, I’ve, I’ve said publicly, I turned back into a pumpkin. And I’m not totally sure what that means yet, but we’ll see.
22:36
Well, tell us about that a bit before we dive into the book. You know what? What prompted the decision to disconnect for a bit? You know, were you were you withdrawing from something, or were you taking a break, or were you moving towards something? You know, was there something you were looking for?
22:53
Yes to all of those. So for me, I knew turning 50 wasn’t that big a deal to me. 5253 some things changed for me. So I had some thoughts around that, you know, I turned 55 coinciding with covid. So I stopped traveling, obviously, for covid, but then after covid, I’m like, I’m done. I’m not traveling anymore. And I was aware of this 60 lingering. And there’s a couple of hot buttons around 60 for me. You know, that are things that I’ve tried to work through in therapy, but I’m, I’m aware of one is my dad retired when he was 60. He’s still around. He’s 87 but that was, that was retirement age. He was a doctor, and he was very deliberate about deciding when he was 60 that was going to retire. And so there are a couple of other things that made it kind of a meaningful marker for me. So that was the thing. Another was I was coming, I would say coming out of covid. I was pretty tired of a bunch of things, not fatigued, like physically tired, but emotionally tired of a bunch of things. I didn’t really have good words for what it was. I didn’t really know why. I didn’t know whether I was just getting older. I was becoming the old guy in the room. I was becoming irrelevant, which was fine, like, I had my own language about that, you know? And I said, Well, I’m becoming irrelevant. I don’t know. Like, maybe I am. Like, I know an awful lot of people that, as they get to be in their 60s and 70s, I look at them, I’m like, I think when I was in my 30s and 40s, and I’m like, you know, I don’t really want to be that guy. So I was, I was struggling with my own, you know, my own sense of of what was important to me. And I was tired of a lot of stuff, right? There was a part of it, for example, which is, I, I was really tired of what I thought was be had become a shtick in the venture landscape that was very disingenuous. And the shtick was that everybody had become, you know, founder first or founder centric VCs. Yes. And you know, my line to founders was, everybody’s founder first, until they’re not, and the day that they’re not as the day that you get fired. And so many VCs use that as their sort of patina, or part of their marketing. And you know, all the content that they would generate around whatever they were doing. And like, you know, I’ll just speak to one in particular that was the opposite of that, who I think may have come up with the ideally, or the statement, was Josh Koppelman. Like, Josh has always been founder first, and he structured his investing strategy and his fund so he could be because he was the founder, like, like he was investing in founders, and that was when, you know, that’s what first round did. And it didn’t mean that he shied away from conflict when there was conflict or hard problems or whatever. But, you know, he was able to think of it purely from alignment a founder’s point of view. And he had deep alignment with that, that philosophy. And you know, somebody said, Well, Brad, you know, I can think of four situations where you were foundry fired founders and you weren’t founder first. And my answer is, yeah, like, you know, we didn’t say we’re founder first, and look at our label. We said, you know, we really care about the relationship we have with founders, and we try really hard to have really constructive relationships. And as long as we support the founder, we work for her. But if we don’t support the founder, for some reason, our job is to try to get back to the place where we support her, and ultimately, as a board member and major investor, we have one tool which is not obviously just fire the founder, but it’s to work with the rest of the board to decide whether it’s under a place.
26:31
So your frustration was with the firms announcing that they were founder first, but
26:36
bullshit around it, the posturing and positioning, and I just use this as an example of 20 things, yeah, where, you know, I could give, I could give 19 more that that were schticks, right? And I say shtick with, I think people know what that is, right? It’s like, you know, the way people present themselves, the marketing nonsense, versus what they truly are. And, you know, do I have any marketing nonsense? And we, of course, everybody does, do I have an ego. Of course I do. Do I make mistakes? Of course, you know, do I disappoint people? Of course, we all do. We’re just humans, right? But I was getting tired of that, the dynamic, and then part of what led from that to me, that I really saw emerge was I have always believed that the hero of this story is the founder period, and that a successful company, in the end, the founder might not be involved, but the founder was the hero of the story. And that as the companies grow, even when CEOs become the leader, understanding who the hero of the story is is really useful. And if it’s a founder CEO. That’s easy when it’s a CEO who has taken over leadership, that CEO can be the hero, but how they approach being the hero is important. And I’ll give again, a positive example from this would be Samir delokia, who’s now at Bessemer. And He came into SendGrid when they’re about 40 million in revenue. And SendGrid had a founder, Isaac, and a couple of other co founders, but Isaac led it for a little while. Then Isaac recruited and a couple of people around the table, including us, recruited a guy named Jim to be the CEO, and Jim did a great job of scaling it up to a certain level, but then hit a wall, and the company was a really good company that was now struggling. It was struggling it was struggling to continue to grow. It had a bunch of, you know, challenges in terms of market position, whatever it’s history, so it doesn’t really matter, but it had some challenges, and eventually Samir was hired as CEO. And Samir is just such a great example of a person who can come into a role like that and not make it about him, and the language that’s used in leadership is servant leader, which I think is good language. I’ve worked with a few people that I would consider servant leaders who are just extraordinary, and Samir being one of them. The interesting thing that happened was he adopted the company’s values and tweaked them a little bit to put his own imprint on them. But then really, as you know, he re accelerated the growth and got SendGrid to a parent where it was a public company. Even though he was the hero of the story, he never made himself the hero of the story. The reason for that rant is suddenly everywhere. VCs are making themselves the hero, the hero. Yeah, and even the VCs, who very clearly talk about how important the founder is and how much the founder drives, created their own arc of hero of the story. And that made me again tired, so I again I am describing random stuff in a box that caused me to feel this way. There may have been some other things, right? And so I just kind of said, You know what? I’ve been having, you know, I’ve been sort of public around a bunch of stuff. I’ve been very active with a couple of ideas. You know, obviously the idea that you could build a startup, can Indian anywhere in the world, and the language I would use is done. Democratizing entrepreneurship globally. I mean, that was something I put a lot of emotional and intellectual energy into, as well as physical traveling around a bunch, you know, I definitely like to think of of myself as somebody, you know, who had put a lot of energy publicly into demystifying how venture capital worked. You know, whether it was through, you know, the venture deals, both venture deals, uh, Jason and I wrote or blogging or talking about it. You know, demystifying mental or de stigmatizing mental health was a big deal for me when I started doing talking about my own struggles more publicly in 2013 and with Jerry colonna and a few others like Dave Morin being proactive around trying to help people not solve a fundamental problem around depression, anxiety, bipolar, mania, whatever, but just de stigmatizing it, saying, Look, you can be very successful and be open about some of these struggles. And by the way, most of us are just big bags of chemicals, and sometimes our chemicals, and sometimes our chemicals still mix. So we all got we all got shit, we all got issues. It’s true. And so let’s just, you know, like, let’s deal with that, rather than pretend somehow that there’s this, you know, this lack of, it’s hard. I did these things, but I was just kind of tired of it. And so that, you know, for me, it was just like one day I said to Amy, you know what? I’m just going to stop doing this. And she jumped up and down and cheered and said, you know, maybe your your inner introvert, can finally get some relief from this. Just last comment on this, I did not unlike me, making a comment of bounding this, coming out of hibernation for six months, and saying, I’m going back in at the end of October, I didn’t make a pronouncement, I’m going to stop blogging. You know, this will be my last blog for a while, because I need to take a break. Because, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Look at me. I’m the hero of my own story, right? We’re all the hero of our own stories. I just stopped. I didn’t need to tell anybody, and that was actually when I look back on it, and a huge relief to just stop. And it gave me time and space to start to try to understand all this stuff that I was feeling that I wasn’t kind of processing very effectively.
32:12
What do you think I mean? Clearly, the book came out of it. The book came off the shelf. What? What else did you find in your time away?
32:19
Well, a bunch of things. You know, I I wrote this down, this idea of what I love versus what I like. I like a lot of things, but I really only love a couple of things, different than people, right? So separate the things from the people. And, you know, spending time with people I love is one of the things I love, and I I described it as I love spending time with Amy, but there’s more. I love spending time with my brother Daniel. I love spending time with my parents. I love spending time pick one of my partners. I love spending time with with Ryan McIntyre. I love spending time with Jerry colonna. I love small dinners. So tonight we’re having dinner with Morris and Morris Wheeler and Joanne Cohen, who’s been very active angel investor. You’re smiling. Looks like you know Morris. I know Morris, close friend for a long time now. And you know Joanne is an aspen for the Aspen art festival. She’s huge into art related stuff. She used to be the curator at the Queensland clinic of their very large art collection, and Amy and I are just going to have a delightful two hours with them, you know, at a restaurant. Just emotionally intimate. I’d had exchange with Howard Lin yesterday, who’s turning 60, and said, I know you hate big groups, but come to my 60th birthday in Vegas, and I said, No, thank you. But you know, in November, when we’re together, how about, you know, Ellen, you me and Amy get together, you know, in San Diego, yep, put on the calendar right now, you know, like, that’s love. So I love that. I love reading. I love writing. And writing turns out to be not just blogs and non fiction. So I love I wrote code commercially until the early 90s. 1992 is when I stopped. Yeah, that’s right, I’ve started writing code again with contemporary tooling. My my tools of choice are cursor, super base and vercel are my back end of choice. I actually much prefer quad over open AI, although we’ll see if the new, you know, five release changes that. And it’s been absolutely fascinating, you know, to use tooling like that to do stuff when you know, I know how to write, I know how to write in Python, I don’t, I never really could do anything meaningful in JavaScript, but I, you know, now I can, and I can read JavaScript just fine, and I somebody wants to play an early version of a game I did. It’s called dinostroids. It’s on the web@dinostroids.com and, of course, it has security holes. So somebody immediately figured out how to make immunity mode mass last forever, and scored, you know, nine. 9 trillion or something like that. Love it, but so so the writing is interesting. I’ve been writing some fiction, fiction, and I’m using, after using Scrivener, no, no, I haven’t done it. I haven’t come out with it yet. After using Scrivener for many years as my tool of choice for constructing a book and then eventually dumping it into to Word or Google Sheet, Google Docs. I now use something called pseudo right, which is for fiction is just unbelievable. And so like, again, finding these very interesting tools that are awesome and experimenting are really fun. And the last is running. I love to run. I love to hike. I love to wander in the mountains alone. So like, as I wander up to 60 minutes, I don’t know whether I have, you know, a day on this planet left or 30 years left, but you know the idea of whatever the third third of life is being really robust and satisfying. And I mean, I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for 40 years. There’s no reason not to continue to do a layer of it. You know, I don’t have another career. I’m not going to be a politician, I’m not going to be a teacher. I’m not going to be, you know, whatever. But shifting the dynamics, and I needed some time and space away to be able to think about how that shift would actually work. Well, good for you. I mean, you’ve clearly earned it. And in a space where people are constantly it just feels like they’re one upping each other. And a lot of these VCs are making it about them. It’s, it’s nice to hear, you know, somebody that’s stepping back from all that, doing the opposite and thinking about what’s really important. Well, you know, thanks. But at the same time, I’m, I don’t what I what I care about and what I feel like. One of the things that I’ve I’ve wandered into with this, is I have a philosophy about life. I have a way of being. I have a set of things that are important to me. I have a value system. I am not really interested anymore. Part of the learning for me is not really interested in judging others on their choice around that, my approach is not the right one. It’s just one. There are lots of different ways to be successful. There are lots of different ways to live life. There are lots of different ways to be fill in the blank of whatever you want. And for me, I have always tried to define my own path with, you know, the input and influence of people I respect. I think one of the things that’s been confusing to me in 2025 is some of the people that I respect are behaving in ways that are very confusing to me around certain things. And so that’s hard to process. Like, I don’t know what to do with that, but I’ve decided that it’s not going to cause me to say, Well, my way is right and your way is not. I don’t give a shit about that. That’s That’s for you to decide, not me. And so I think if, if there’s anything in that last rant, it’s not judgment. I think there’s too much of that in our world. I think too many people, you know, it’s Amy and I joke about politics for a long time, just being some other version of sports ball. Like, do you wear a red shirt or a blue shirt? Well, if you wear a blue shirt, you have to do this. You wear a red shirt, you have to do this. United States, I’m like, You know what? It’s fascinating to live in Colorado. I’m unaffiliated. I’ve been unaffiliated for a long, long time. I probably wear a blue shirt around my value systems most of the time. That’s what I embrace and I support. You know, mostly candidates that wear a blue shirt, but there’s plenty of things that you know, the Democratic Party does it, I think is idiotic. And, you know, I, I personally fear that we’re, we’re sort of living that was, that was, that was, like, the universe trying to say to me, don’t talk about politics on the podcast, A, B, on my end, for anybody listening. Oh, really, yeah, he went away pretty quickly. But, you know, I, I kind of think of some of this stuff, like an aura Boris, right where, like, you have this straight line that’s now turning into a circle and just eating itself. And nobody can actually be rational about anything because of, you know, all the points connecting at the end. But I kind of look at like, No, I I’m not really. I’m interested in engaging with the universe, whatever element of it I engage with in a way that is consistent with my values. And one of them is learning, one of them is being generous, one of them is being kind, right? And you know, whether you can navigate those things against what, then, is the philosophy that I have defined and give first in, you know, business context, maybe that works, or maybe it doesn’t, if you reject it. Yeah, that’s all guys, totally full of shit. I don’t agree with any of stuff. And, you know, look at, look at where he is, and I’m much happier about where I am, awesome. So I wish more people felt that way. But it’s, yeah, I’m good. I was like, I said, as I wish. I wish more people felt that way. Way, but I think that’s a wish in terms of my own internal values, rather than something that’s, you know, like, and the world would be better if I don’t. I don’t actually know if it
40:10
would or wouldn’t. Well, tell us about the book you put it out now is the right time there was a reason to win on the shelf, you know? Why? Why did you want to get the Give, give first philosophy, you know, out into the public,
40:22
yeah, so let me define it, just so it’s clear, because I think that’s important, and it’s important to recognize also that it’s a philosophy, not a religion. You know, religions have rules. Follow the rules, and, you know, you go to heaven or follow the rules, and good things happen. My my life, my funnest, latest South Park joke, because I have loved South Park forever, is what Buddhism is in South Park, which is you follow the rules, and then you die, and you get reincarnated, and you have to follow the rules again, and then you die, and then you get reincarnated again. If you actually follow the rules perfectly, then you don’t have to get reincarnated. I kind of think that’s like, what happens to Kenny over and over again, and he’s probably just fundamentally Buddhist. I don’t know if there might be a South Park episode about that I haven’t seen. I don’t remember it, but as a philosophy, there are no rules to follow. It’s just a set of ideas to incorporate, if you like them, and to figure out how to incorporate them your own way. So then the give first. The definition is that you’re willing to put energy into a system without defining upfront what you’re going to get out. Importantly, it is not altruistic. You expect to get something you just don’t know from whom, over what time period, in what form or in what consideration. And that’s a really important construct. The interesting thing about this book for me is I tried to combine two concepts, and that was one of the things I had to really work on in the six months when I took it off the shelf, because the feedback I got from the 20 or so people that read it was that I jammed these two ideas together, give first and then something called the Tech Stars mentor manifesto. The Tech Stars mentor manifesto is something that David Cohen came up, with some help from John Bradford and I in around 2010 after we’ve been running TechStars for about 100 companies, about 10 programs, and we’ve learned a bunch about what made for effective mentorship versus what wasn’t effective,
42:18
distinguished between advisors and mentors. I think I recall this absolutely.
42:23
Yeah, advisors are paid. Mentors are not. Coaches are paid. Therapists are paid. It’s not give first is not pay it forward. It’s not obligatory. Somebody once did something for me, therefore I must do something for them. Give first is a choice in terms of how you engage with people. The word mentorship didn’t really get used much in entrepreneurship 20 years ago, so it showed up occasionally in big companies as people had a mentor, but mostly it was a mentor who was helping you, helping you navigate your way through this big corporate hierarchy. So the interesting thing that we were sort of figuring out as we went with this, you know, thing called an accelerator that was new. What mentorship was?
43:04
Brad, you you won’t remember this, I don’t think, but when I was raising fund one, I reached out to you and said, Will you be an advisor? And you said, How about
43:12
a mentor? It’s unpaid. I totally anytime
43:16
you could cut and it was great. I was like,
43:19
100% well there and what time, what year was that? This is 2017, or 18, see, so I, at least I internalized, at least I’m internally consistent. So what, what played from that was the Tech Stars mentor manifesto was 18 bullet points. And again, they’re not rules. Don’t follow these 18 things to be a good mentor. It was. Here’s some ideas about how to be effective versus ineffective. And importantly, there are rules that reverse that they’re applicable to the mentor and the mentee. And so the idea of the magical mentor mentee relationship, which I discovered early, relatively early in my career, is when the mentor and the mentee become peers, and the mentor is learning as much from the mentee as the mentee learns for the mentor. And this has been really powerful for me, because many of the people, I think, who consider me a mentor, whether it’s in Tech Stars or other contexts, whether you know it’s labeled that or not, it’s irrelevant. The in these relationships, the ones that are most fulfilling is where I’m learning from them, as well as them learning from me. You know, I’ve heard David. I’ll just use him as an example, because we’re so obviously peers at this stage of life. But there are lots of points along the way where David would just kind of say some version of, gosh, you know, I’m getting so much from from my relationship with with you, Brad, and I just play it back to him. I say, David, like, I’m doing this. I love this because of what I’m learning from being around you and doing it with you and seeing what you do. And like many of these ideas wouldn’t have emerged as ideas that I could do something with until, you know, I saw him executing on them in certain ways that caused me to think about it in a different way. Yeah. Right? So these concepts are all interwoven, right? The philosophy in this book, the philosophy of give first, not a rule, but a philosophy that’s part one. Part two is 18 relatively short chapters on each item of the Tech Stars, mentor manifesto, with a long form description of what we mean by it, an example. Many of the examples are memoir ish, or from my own experience. Some are not, but there’s a lot of from my own experience, because one of the important things in the mentor manifesto is something I learned a long, long time ago, is the best way for people to understand a point is not to say you should do this, but to give them a story from your own experience and to help them navigate through the thought process. Another key one is that as a mentor, you’re just providing data, the mentee should be totally comfortable ignoring your data. You want them to hear your data. You want them to consider your data as a mentor, that’s all and as a mentor, if you expect the mentee to do what you tell them to do, you’re not going to be very effective. You have to view it just as data. There’s another one in there called guide. Don’t control the idea that you’re guiding with your stories and your data. You’re not trying to control you’re not trying to get to a particular outcome. And, oh, by the way, as a mentor, a lot of times you’re wrong. Your data might be an n of one, or you might have extrapolated from the wrong thing, or you might not be understanding the context. So part of the power of that relationship and that approach is that when the mentee does something different and is successful. You’re like, oh, wow, that’s interesting. I just learned something, right? So each of the 18 chapters sort of go about that, and then i i end after the example, I kind of have a thing that ties it all back together. Part three is problems with give. First, every philosophy has problems, yep. And you know, the idea that there aren’t real problems with give first is nonsense. And so I have a section about that, and I try to talk through some of these problems in substantive ways, and what I’ve done to try to deal with them, sometimes effectively, sometimes not. And then the last, the last part I just want to mention quickly is a part called entrepreneurial sadaqa. And sadaka is a Hebrew word that means loosely, righteousness is translated often as charity. It comes from Maimonides sort of created this construct called sadaqa, and he gave the eight, eight levels of sadaqa. And for me, the first level of sadaqa is not some song that Neil sadaka wrote, although his parents probably changed the spelling of his name, tz e when he came to the when they came to the US, or whatever generationally came to the US. But what it what it does is it says is to give someone something before they know they need it, to enable them to then go accomplish something. And for me, like I my reaction to that when I first read that, somebody had pointed me at the eight levels of Sada, and I knew about them a little bit from being Jewish, but I never really read them carefully. That first one sounds like Angel investing to me, and that was kind of like my emotional reaction. I’ve called angel investing for profit, philanthropy for a long time. And the interesting thing that came out of it, for me was this idea of time together, this construct with, you know, 10th century philosophy, like there was something I liked about that I won’t pretend to be anywhere close to as good as Ryan Holiday at this stuff. But, you know, like the the idea that some of these ideas are timeless. Or the notion that some of these ideas are timeless made me feel like it was a good way to wrap up a book about a philosophy that if somebody said, Well, what do you hope to get out of this book? And my answer is, I just hope it impacts some people. Some people see in themselves, you know, some elements of this. Or some people see some things in this. If they say, Wow, that’s cool. I want to include that and how I do stuff. And, you know, I’d like to believe that nothing here is new, not new ideas, just packaged in a way for people in the entrepreneurial landscape, anybody who’s a founder, an investor, interested in participating in companies, or a mentor, or even people working in startup communities would look at and say, Hey, this is additive. This is a good way to think about some of the things I’m doing. So
49:24
there’s a lot of directions we could go in here. Something that comes to mind you
49:29
got, you got 15 minutes more of my life before my my little buzzer goes off and tells me to do the next thing.
49:35
Okay, all right, we’ll try and make it quick. So, so you talked about mentoring and how you’re a data point, right? And the mentee has to take in all these data points. Many years ago, a startup of mine was going through a crisis, big crisis, bigger than most, and I emailed you, and you got on the phone with me that day, and the crisis was with another board member, and. And the founder was listening to this other board member, not because he had the data, but because he had the loudest voice in a very convincing way about him.
50:09
Never before in the history of startups, right?
50:13
So you gave me great counsel at the time. We ended up seeing our way through it. But how do you think about that? Brad, like when you’re a reasonable voice, but there’s somebody much louder, much more passionate with with an opinion that you feel is fundamentally wrong and is going to steer your mentee, you know, in the wrong direction.
50:32
Oh, you know, joke, first time it’s ever happened. I mean, that’s continual. Happens all the time, all the time, and, you know, it’s one of the it’s one of the challenges, I think, especially of investor heavy boards, where the power dynamics get confused between who is actually the one who’s driving the real power dynamic here. And you know, you’ll often see situations where you know you have a board that’s supposed to be functioning as a group, as a team, and all of a sudden, you know, the investor who has the largest shareholdings is behaving in a way that is in their frame of reference, but not actually listening to anybody else. Or you have an investor who might not be the largest shareholder, but just happens to be, you know, a personality type that is, you know, extremely assertive and extremely loud. And, by the way, extremely assertive and extremely loud if that person is a I’ll get the cliche right, strong opinions, loosely held person, that that strong, forceful opinion can be extremely disorienting and confusing, because that person will, you know, not hold on to their opinion. If it’s somebody you know, somebody who is a softer voice. But when they express something, they really feel strongly, and it’s really They’re carefully considered, careful, carefully considering a viewpoint, right viewpoint. That was the word I was searching for. So you told you, forget words. You know you have to know the archetype of the person you’re dealing with, because that’s part of it, too. For me, who is I like to think that I’m assertive, but that I am very comfortable that most of the things I’m saying are data or a hypothesis, and so I think most people are comfortable challenging me or questioning or disagreeing, maybe not all, but hopefully, I don’t think I react when challenge I Don’t think I react negatively in that context. So again, like when I’m in that situation, when I’m on the opposite side, where I feel like somebody is being really assertive about something that is either incorrect or is not really, you know, reading the room, listening to the conversation, understanding what the real issue is, which is actually a bigger, maybe even a bigger, part of the problem, which is somebody, you know, issue a, and somebody responds really forcefully with advice for solving issue B, yeah, right. It’s like, it’s issue a, come on. Like, when we talk about issue a, well, and then forcefully again, you’re not hearing me, it’s really issue B, right? A sales problem, not a product problem, right? That’s right. It’s like, no time out. Like, I’m the CEO here. I don’t have a sales problem right now. I got a product problem when you just listen to me, nope. If you just hired a new enterprise salesperson and fired your sales team and fixed marketing, it would all be great. Or the inverse, like, doesn’t matter about sales at all. You just have to get the product right. If people are pulling it out of your hands, no matter what, it’ll work? Yeah, right, which, especially when you’re getting this with very little nuance, or, you know, as the founder, you lay the CEO, you laboriously put together a board package that you’re pretty comfortable the person that’s making this assertion didn’t read or opened, you know, you gave it to him three days in advance, and they opened just before the meeting, and, you know, spacebar through the pages. I what I try to do in those situations is not fight with the person. I try to extend the conversation. I try to engage around the issue. Where I’m not trying to be a mediator between points of view, but I’m trying to stretch the ideas I’m trying to get out of the A versus B, and try to connect all the pieces together and get the conversation to be broader, different altitude. Yeah, different altitude is actually a real I’ve never I’ve not used that before. I’ll use it get conversation to happen at different altitude. And a lot of times, the altitude is closer to the problem, right? It’s, it’s getting to the root cause of the problem. And in the book, I talk about the five whys as a technique. And, you know, I, I’m sure everybody sat in the room with the person who’s, you know, Mr. Socrates that just ask some questions and you just don’t know where it’s going. I try not to be Mr. Socrates with no point of direction. When I’m asking questions, I try to, like, have a place I’m trying to go guide Yes, and I it’s not always right. I’m always successful in those conversations, but it tends to change the tempo of the conversation. When you know, the bombastic person slows down and takes a pause. Is. And when they slow down and think a lot of times actually, they’ll see that they’re talking about B, not a, or they’ll listen to somebody else in the room talking, and they’ll be like, huh, I never thought about it that way. And they might still become assertive about what it needs to be, but it’s got more tone to it. What I’ve found to be not constructive is when all of a sudden, people get into the equivalent of a battle that escalates or, and my biggest the other side of the the and I, you know, I’ve had plenty of those. And when I see that happening, it’s like, Hey guys, we’re on the same team, you know, take it down. Pause, like we’re on the same team. Okay, we’re all paused. Let’s talk about what the issues are. Not get angry at each other, that whatever emotional emotions, just take over, take it out like the same team. And, you know, I that’s the line. I will, I will, you know, I don’t have to use it that often, but every now and then, something that I’ll blurt out when I feel like people are really being not constructive with each other, the the piece that I regret, I think of my own behavior that I regret in these situations, it’s ineffective, is passive avoidance. And I look back, you know, on 40 years when I look at my biggest thing is that I regret. It’s not the things I’ve failed at. I’ve failed at a lot of stuff and had plenty of success. But when I think about failure, I don’t regret that. That’s just part of the entrepreneurial experience. That’s actually part of trying to create anything. It’s, you know, endless series of experiments, most of which don’t work. And the key is to learn and create new hypothesis and run an experiment. The passive avoidance is, you
56:37
know, the issue is there and you didn’t deal with it. You just don’t
56:41
deal with it. That’s different than active avoidance. You know the issue is there. And you say, You know what? There’s an issue right there. That’s one problem. No, I’m not going to do anything about it, right? That’s active avoidance. Yes, it’s, it’s yours to deal with. I’m not doing anything about that problem. Is a very acceptable way to be in in this world, passive avoidance. I see the problem. I’m just gonna put my head in the sand. I see the problem. I’m gonna go complain to somebody else about the problem. I see the problem. I’m gonna try to address it, but not head on. I’m gonna address it by like, you know, dealing with something else. That’s what I regret. I regret when I was passive avoidance in situations. And yeah, sure, some of the situations I was passed to avoid and didn’t work out fine. So it’s the ones that didn’t work out fine, are the ones I regret. I look at I’m like, Man, if I had actually engaged with how I felt at the time, with the person around the issue, or the company, or the people that still might have failed. We still, I still might have a broken relationship. It still might be whatever, but at least I would have
57:47
tried well, and the founders remember, like the people that really engaged during the hard stuff, oh yeah, that they remember, and they come back to you for, you know, the next one.
57:58
Well, not just founders, I think, I think it’s everybody across the landscape. I mean, whether it’s founders, business partners, co investors, other people like, you know, I think, you know, power impacts how people relate to each other a lot. And so, you know, okay, that’s a thing. Put that in a box. I think reputation, external, reputation matters. And you know, reputation is, let’s say Warren Buffett, Buffett line, built in the decades, destroyed in a minute. Yeah, right. And reputation is not universal. Your reputation, one’s reputation, means different things to different people based on whatever the experiences are and how they view you and what you represent. And then you’ve got this third thing, which is the shared experience. And I think the best fidelity in relationships is the shared experience. And the problem is passive avoidance is a uni lateral version of the shared experience. I’m having a shared experience, but now I’m going to take my part of the shared experience, and I’m gonna that’s that’s a problem, and I’m gonna go wander somewhere else and either not deal with it by burying it in the ground, or deal with it by talking with other people about it. And okay, if I talk to other people to try to figure out what to do, and then come back to you and then deal with it, okay, that’s not passive avoidance. But if I just talk to other people about it, but never come back and deal with it, with you that that’s not that’s not constructive, that’s not a shared experience, even the good lab well, you shared a lot of the goods, but you’ve shared a lot of the the tough stuff too publicly, and it allows people to to have that shared experience. And so you know, I applaud you for that, and appreciate it. Thank you. Look, I think that comes from my own belief that this is a finite experience. The lights go out one day and it’s over, and I get I think my parents were really influential on me, on this concept, in terms of the idea of living life to its fullest while you’re here. And again, I’m not really. My value system doesn’t have to be imposed on anybody else. They should. Everybody should choose their own value system and choose their own beliefs and choose their own whatevers. But part of that, for me, is, like, woven in to this idea of, you know, this, Hey, I’m, I’m killing it. It’s all great. Is just, you know, it’s just such a line of bullshit. Like, no, come on. Like everybody’s got, you know, I mean, I wrote this blog post a while ago, but I love how many people roll it out every now it’s like, it’s the thing that is on repeat, know, in the in the in the thing that random people send me every now and then the blog post, something, something new is fucked up in my world every day. And the key word there being new. I mean, I, by the way, I know what today’s is. Like, I got a, I got a text about it about 30 minutes ago. So it’s, you know, I can. I was just hoping it wasn’t a bee sting on the head. No, no, no, but I can. I mean, I can address it, but I know what it is. I’m like, Oh, great,
1:00:58
sorry. Well, we have way overstayed our welcome here, maybe one final question before we let you go, Brad and something on give first. So, so what advice or feedback would you have for folks that want to live this philosophy but find that the amount of requests coming in can be overwhelming? You know, they’re dealing with burnout. The world has gotten more complex, right? There’s more demands on on your time. I mean, you’re somebody that can relate with this more than most so, so how do you how do you advise people deal with that when they’re trying to live? Give first,
1:01:34
fortunately, part three talks about about this, and then there’s some other stuff woven through it in other parts of of the book, one of the things that I’ve, I’ve tried to do is a combination of modulating my own time around this wall, being very accessible, and then coming up with a set of techniques that don’t put the burden of, I would Say, first and second and third contact on me, so sort of modulating my time. I’ll start with that. Like, this is not spend 100% of your time being this way. It’s spend 10% of your time being this way. Like, you know, it’s, I mean, my my current joke, I need to come up with another one, because I’ve used on too many podcasts now, so people are sick of hearing it, but it’s, fortunately, we’re at the very end of your podcast, so probably all the people listen my podcast, anything our monitor, have stopped listening by now. On five, on 5x speed, the line is somebody will send me, oh, you’re the give first VC, how about you give me 5 million bucks and I’ll give you something back in the future. Like, you know, there’s a lot of everything that’s transactional, that’s part of life. Yeah, part of business. But like, it doesn’t have to be part of everything. And can you have elements of what you’re doing that are not transactional, or can you approach new relationships? And the words I like to use are non transactional, positive, some multi turn right. So, like incorporating that construct into it. So for starters, is it’s not 100% if somebody says, Well, you know that you’re not acting in a give first way in this situation, I’m like, so, you know, you know, I mean, I’m not obnoxious about it. I’ll have a conversation about, well, what do you mean? Why is that important? Let’s deconstruct that a little bit. And it usually gets to, like, this conversation. The other is, yeah, I I get too much inbound. By the way, when I was in hibernation, you know, the decay curve is real, so it’s nice, like, all of a sudden, if you’re not out and about and podcasts and writing blog posts every day and stuff like that, it tells off. You get less. So that was nice for me. You know, part of living in Boulder for a long time and being very visible nationally, is whenever somebody was coming to Colorado, not necessarily to Boulder, but to Colorado that was a founder or an investor, somehow I was, I was like, you know, I get an email, emails find easy to find about getting together. And there was a point in time where, you know, I was getting so many invitations for coffee or a meal that if all I did was say yes, and I, you know, I’m kind of default, that’s all you would do as a nature Well, I drink coffee, I eat food, I go to the bathroom, those would be my that’d my day, which, of course, is impossible. So one of the things technique I learned was when somebody reaches out to me that I don’t know, I give them a very brief assignment that’s relevant to them, reaching out to me, and relevant to what they’re asking about, that won’t take more than 15 minutes to respond to. So I mean, there’ll be things like, if somebody says, I’d love to get together with you for coffee, I’m going to be in, you know, Boulder next week for blah, blah, blah, you know, and has their company name, and I’ll look up at their company, and I see their company so I can see on the web like the thing is, I might send an email back, and I looked on the web, I see, I see your companies this. Can you be specific about what you want to do when getting together around said, Just be specific. 50% of the people never respond. Just drop off. I view that as a blessing, because those 50% of the people are trying to get together with me, for some reason. And I mean, who knows, but it’s probably not something to do with, something that’s going to be productive for both of us. 25% of the people answer the question really well, and I have more context. And you know, we can usually, a lot of times, go back and forth on email without me having to get together. So I can actually start to engage in a relationship without having to get together for coffee, because it was something that I could address that way. They were just starting with, can you get together with coffee? Because that’s what we’ve been trained to do. And we want to, like, engage with somebody. And then 25% of the people I wouldn’t hear from for a couple of days, and then I get something back from them that was, you know, I thought about what your question was, and I actually went and did all this research, and I found these things, and I actually did this, and I’m doing that, and, you know, really appreciate the time and energy, and would it be okay if we, you know, I email you in the future? My answer is, I’m going to actually know this person, right? Because this person’s a doer. And so it allowed me to sort of without filtering, without having a gatekeeper, without having to, like, decide, is this person important or not, or do I want to spend time? Because, like, number one for me, it’s important to be open, like to say but open to randomness. So many really amazing things have happened in my world by just kind of saying yes to stuff, or by engaging with people I didn’t know. A value system of mine is being accessible. Another value is being responsive. And you gave a couple of examples of it with you, right? I’m not an LP in your funds. I don’t like if you said, hey, hey, Brad, what have we done together? You know, commercially, my answer is, I don’t know, you know, but I like you. We spent time together. We’ve developed a friendship, you know, I I like the stuff you invest in. I want to be additive and helpful. You know, it’s easy, when you ask, you know, for a response to something that’s urgent for me to do a quick call. You know, in the context of that, in that 10% of my time that I’m behaving that way, or 20% of my time, maybe I behave that way more than 10% so it’s, it’s understanding those things. But I would say, even with that, like for me, I’ll just sort of, I’ll end on a construct in this that’s been really hard for me, but I’ve gotten I’ve gotten good at it. Used to be very hard for me. I had to learn how to do it, and now I think I’m very good at it, which is moving between default, yes and default. Now, a long time ago, I taught my wife, Amy, how to blow things off and how to decommit to things you don’t want to do. I’ve always been pretty good at when I realized I am truly overloaded, saying, You know what? I’m overloaded. I can’t do this. I really I have to decommit. And I go through phases where that happens. The reason that you that I get overloaded is when I flip into default yes mode. I just can’t say no. I just say yes to everything. And in our in our jobs as investors, by the way, we say no anyway to, like, a lot of stuff. I mean, if I say no 50 times in a row, I gotta say yes. I just, you know, I need to reset my no counselor, because there’s too many, and I need the satisfaction of of saying yes. And so, you know, that becomes, that becomes a thing, you know, that I eat as well. I’ve gotten better at that. And I can, I can sort of flip between default yes and default No, where even with default No, the the answer is not no to everything. It’s that the posture is no, and then I choose very deliberately whether I want to say yes. And when I’m in that kind of a phase, it’s a much less reactive phase. And the last two years that I was in hibernation was very much a default no phase. And I did learn how to be more deliberate about where I was spending my time, because less things came in and and I was able to say no to all the public facing stuff, just no. And so then the stuff I was looking at, I’m like, you know, I’ll engage, I’ll be responsive. But do I actually want to spend time on this? I had time and space to consider that which I really hadn’t. I didn’t have a muscle for it before. Now, now I think I do well,
1:09:01
Brad, I’m so grateful that we caught you at a moment when you weren’t hibernating and and that you’ve been so gracious with your time and with your advice and feedback over the years, with me and, of course, with the audience here. So he’s the he’s the man that wrote good give first, and he’s the man that lives it as well. He’s Brad Feld. And thank you so much, Brad for joining us today. My
1:09:21
pleasure. Nick,
1:09:22
thank you, sir. All right, that’ll wrap up today’s interview. If you enjoyed the episode or a previous one, let the guests know about it. Share your thoughts on social or shoot them an email. Let them know what particularly resonated with you? I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that some of the smartest folks in venture are willing to take the time and share their insights with us. If you feel the same, a compliment goes a long way. Okay, that’s a wrap for today. Until next time, remember to over prepare, choose carefully and invest confidently. Thank. So much for listening.
