November 5, 2025 • 49 mins
What if the cure for founder loneliness isn’t more hustle, but better peers and a new way to mentor? Brad Feld joins us to map the journey from scrappy software shop to mentor-driven ecosystems, sharing how a bootstrapped mindset, structured forums, and a “give first” philosophy can reshape an entire career. You’ll hear about the origin of “We Suck Less,” why owning the full customer experience created trust, and how one room of candid founders at YEO turned isolation into momentum.
We unpack the mechanics of forum and why it works: monthly cadence, strict attendance, and a clear flow from updates to deep dives to questions to lived-experience reflections. Brad explains the crucial shift from giving advice to speaking from experience—an approach that lowers ego, invites equality, and helps the presenter uncover root causes rather than chase symptoms. He also shares how these ideas helped shape Techstars, from the early mentor-driven accelerator model to David Cohen’s Mentor Manifesto, a set of principles that encourages curiosity, presence, and practical generosity without turning mentorship into a transaction.
The conversation broadens into startup communities and the Give First philosophy: put energy into the system without predefining return, and watch value compound over time in unexpected ways. Brad connects these dots with stories from the dot-com crash to global programs that democratized entrepreneurship. And he leaves us with a grounding mantra from a trusted mentor: “They can’t kill you and they can’t eat you.” It’s a sharp reminder that perspective fuels resilience.
Please visit www.internationalfacilitatorsorganization.com to learn more about Mo Fathelbab and International Facilitators Organization (IFO), a leading provider of facilitators and related group facilitation services, providing training, certification, marketing services, education, and community for peer group facilitators at all stages of their career.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
Welcome to the Heart of Business Podcast, sponsored
by International FacilitatorsOrganization, the Marketplace
for Facilitators.
I'm your host, Mo Fatelbob, andtoday I'm very excited to have
with us Brad Feld.
Brad is a renowned Americanentrepreneur, an early stage
investor, a nine-time author,co-founder of Foundry, a venture
(00:33):
capital firm based in Boulder.
And what I most remember aboutBrad from probably 1991, when he
was running a little IT companycalled Feld Technologies, is my
favorite quote of Brad's, whichis everybody in this industry
sucks.
Our goal is to suck left.
Welcome, Brad.
SPEAKER_01 (00:55):
Thanks.
And it's very funny every time Isee somebody that uses the uh
the tagline We SuckLess, that'spublic.
Somebody sends me an email andsays, Isn't that yours?
SPEAKER_00 (01:10):
Amazing, amazing, amazing.
So if I remember correctly,Brad, at the time, uh Felt
Technologies, when you firstjoined the Young Entrepreneurs
Organization before they changedthe name to the Entrepreneurs
Organization, you were doingmaybe a million or two when we
met, something like that?
SPEAKER_01 (01:28):
Yeah, it was a little, it was a little
business.
It was self-funded.
We never raised any money.
I had a partner, a guy namedDave Jilk.
And, you know, we just built itsystematically every year.
We did one primary thing andthen a secondary thing.
The primary thing was we wrotesoftware for uh businesses to
use to help run theirbusinesses.
(01:50):
This is the late 80s, early 90s,back before there were networks,
back before the web and theinternet, even really back
before client server databases.
So the sort of using PCs to runyour business was pretty shaky
back then because the softwaretechnology and the hardware
technology was pretty fragile.
(02:11):
Um, so that was the primarything we did.
And the secondary thing we didwas there were a bunch of
companies that theoreticallyprovided all the hardware
infrastructure.
So they'd sell the hardware andthey provide, they kind of set
up the hardware.
And to the extent that networksexisted, we used these things
called Nobel networks for peoplethat are old like us.
Um, and they'd wire them up andthey'd use actual physical cable
(02:34):
inside office buildings toconnect the computers together.
And that's where the WeSuck lastline came from.
I mean, the those people wereterrible.
And so we would always be theones that were responsible for
it, even though we didn't likeput that stuff in.
So at some point we said, youknow what, we're gonna be
responsible for this stuff too.
And so we started doing the whatbecame called network
(02:57):
integration.
Um, but it was putting, youknow, putting the PCs on
people's desks and connectingeverything together and just
making sure it all worked, sothat then the software that we
wrote for companies to automatetheir businesses would work.
SPEAKER_00 (03:10):
All right, all right, all right.
And that was not your firstbusiness, was it?
SPEAKER_01 (03:15):
No, it was not.
The first couple of companies Idid failed.
So I uh started a company withuh a couple of college friends.
Um uh uh we were freshmen.
Yeah, we were we were allfreshmen except for one who was
Dave, who became my partner atFell Technologies.
And we started a company calledMartingale Software.
(03:36):
And we uh the original idea wasto write uh software for this
new computer that had not yetcome out yet.
It's called a Mac or Macintosh.
And to write software for thatcomputer, you had to write it on
a thing called a Lisa, which wasuh Apple's product that some
people may remember.
Um, and then you'd like have todo like a hundred disk swaps to
(04:00):
put it on the little disks forthe uh uh the Macintosh.
And then you put it in theMacintosh and it would start
running and take a little while,and then a little bomb would
show up in the middle of theMacintosh screen because the
program would crash.
Like that was how you wrotesoftware for the Mac at the
beginning, terrible.
And um, we were gonna write apiece of software that allowed
you to type in numbers into uh agrid, and it would then generate
(04:23):
a graph from the grid.
And uh so we started doing this,and we were all in college, so
we had plenty of other stuff todo.
And of course, when when theMacintosh actually shipped,
there was this product thatshipped with it called Excel
that Microsoft made, where ithad a grid, a spreadsheet, and
you type numbers into it, itmade graph.
We're like, all right, well,that didn't work.
(04:44):
Um, and then I did anothercompany with a guy that was a
client of a company that I hadworked for in the oil and gas
industry, and we did a companycalled Datavision, and that
company built a piece ofsoftware to do cephalographic
analysis.
(05:04):
And if you're wondering what iscephalographic analysis, the
answer is everybody else wastoo.
We had one customer, he got thesoftware for free because he was
the one who told us about thisthing called cephalographic
analysis that was going to bereally important.
It was a way to do facialreconstruction surgery.
And the way they did it at thetime was they took an X-ray and
(05:25):
they, a ruler, and they drewlines on it and figured out the
angles and decided where to movethe stuff on your face around.
And we effectively automatedthat.
So you scan the X-ray into acomputer on a high-res monitor,
and it was a special monitor atthe time, and you like would put
little points on the monitor andit would automatically calculate
stuff.
And so he was our in today'slanguage, he would be our design
(05:49):
partner.
And so uh it was a doctor at uhLC, Louisiana State University.
Remember, nice guy.
I visited him a few times, andwe wrote this pretty cool piece
of software that then nobodybought.
Uh, and so that company went outof business a year or so later.
Uh, and by that point, I hadalready, you know, I'm still in
(06:10):
school at the time, and I nowhave a couple of other clients
that I'm doing this kind ofsoftware for littler projects
while I'm in school, and I justdecided, okay, well, you know
what, I'm just gonna do this bymyself.
And that became FeldTechnologies.
And then when I uh in 1987,Dave, my partner, joined me, and
the two of us really sort ofmarked that as the beginning of
(06:32):
the company for real.
SPEAKER_02 (06:33):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (06:34):
I think so.
But by the time we'd met, weprobably had 15 employees, and
it was between a million and amillion and a half bucks in
revenue.
SPEAKER_00 (06:41):
Yeah.
And and what inspired you topursue entrepreneurship in the
first place?
SPEAKER_01 (06:46):
I never really thought of it.
Like it was never really aconscious choice.
So in high school, well, eventhough I go back further, when I
was uh Bar mitzfood, I got anApple II computer for my bar
mitzvah.
So at the time, all of myfriends, when they would get Bar
mitzvah that era, they would getKrugrams.
(07:09):
That was kind of like the thefancy gift.
You know, you get lots of thesilly little things, a pen and
whatever.
But like Krug Rams were whateverybody wanted.
And um, I had started to, I'dbeen exposed to computers a
couple of years earlier, uh, ayear or two earlier by my dad's
younger brother, a guy namedCharlie Feld, who I still to
(07:29):
this day call Uncle Charlie.
He was the head of dataprocessing at Frito Lay.
I grew up in Dallas.
Frida was headquartered inDallas.
And today the head of dataprocessing would be called the
chief information officer, butat the time they didn't have a
title like that.
Charlie was one of the half adozen people or so that created
that uh profession.
And I I would he would take medown to a data center in uh
(07:53):
downtown Dallas that was afree-to-lay data center, and I
just sit in front of a terminalall day and just play around.
And that was kind of myintroduction to computers, and I
just loved it, it justcompletely absorbed me.
And so when I got bar mitzvah,my dad said, What do you want?
And I said, Uh, you know, uh, Iwant to get a computer.
A computer, okay.
Well, you know, let's go figureout what computer to get you.
(08:14):
And we ended up getting an AppleII computer.
It was before, it was a veryearly Apple II computer.
So it only had 48K of memory,not 64k of memory.
They had this thing called theinteger card that gave you extra
memory.
It didn't have disk drives, itjust had cassette tape.
Like it was really at the verybeginning.
(08:35):
And um uh that was kind of myintroduction.
So between my dad and Charlie,like very early on, there was
this encouragement around it.
So I'd write little pieces ofsoftware on the Apple II.
I did a little checkbook managerfor my dad and you know, some
other things like that.
And um my junior or senior yearof high school, I can't remember
(09:00):
which, my father introduced meto one of his patients, a guy
named uh Eugene Scott.
And um, Mr.
Scott um was uh a wonderful guy.
He had been a head of sales fora couple of the mini computer
software companies and some somevery famous, well-known ones.
(09:24):
And um, there's a guy named SamWiley that had created in
Dallas, Texas, this very largecompany that eventually became
part of or the core of computerassociates, what became computer
associates.
And Mr.
Scott would have lunch with mefor a couple of hours, and we he
just sort of regaled me withstories from what he was doing
in the computer industry.
(09:44):
And he and his son, um uh Davidhad started a company called
Scott Instruments, and they madea product called the VET20.
VET stands for voice entryterminal.
So imagine a thing you put onyour head with a big microphone,
you talk to it, and it connectedto an Apple II, and it allowed
(10:05):
you to talk to the Apple II, andthe Apple II recognized your
speech.
So think of it as what Siri istoday, or what we fantasize Siri
would be if Siri got thingsright all the time.
And um, this was the very firstof that kind of technology.
So they'd uh effectively, I saidDavid, his name was Brian, not
David, Scott.
So they effectively had inventedthis technology, and so they had
(10:27):
an uh office, maybe 50employees, and I would go to
their office and hang out, andthey made their own circuit
boards and you know, they madethey wrote all the software and
like I just the this idea ofcreating it myself, creating it
from nothing, was embedded atthat point in time.
And then the last sort ofexperience like that was my
(10:49):
between my senior year in highschool and my first year in
college, I worked for a companycalled Petcom.
Chris and Helena Aves were thefounders, husband and wife.
And they wrote software for theoil and gas industry.
So in the early 80s in Dallas,Texas, or in Texas, oil and oil
and gas was booming.
Yeah, and everybody wasexploring, you know, digging
(11:10):
holes in the ground trying tofind uh oil.
And uh Chris and Helena came upwith a couple of software
product ideas.
Chris wrote some of it.
He wrote a bunch of accountingsoftware.
He used to be an accountant, sohe wrote a bunch of software on
the now the IBM PC, uh, forkeeping track of all of this.
And I wrote two products forthem.
(11:32):
One that did something calledwell logging, analyzing the
exploration, and the othercalled PC Economics, which was
like an economic forecastingtool for you put a bunch of
assumptions in it would tell youover the next 20 years, you
know, what your cash flows fromthis theoretical thing you were
gonna dig in the ground wasgonna create.
And among other things, theywere magnificent.
(11:52):
I was their first employee.
They grew that company to about20 people before the oil and gas
boom crashed, and all theircustomers went out of business.
Um, but I learned two thingsfrom them.
One, they paid me 10 bucks anhour, but they paid me per hour.
So if I worked 80 hours a week,I got paid twice as much as if I
worked 40 hours a week.
That was kind of easy but cool.
The other, I didn't know whatequity was, but they they paid
(12:15):
me um 5% royalty.
In the oil and gas industry,royalties were what you got.
Uh, they paid me 5% royalty onall the software I wrote that
they sold.
So when I was a freshman incollege, I'd get a check in the
mail.
And the check would have thenumber of hours I'd work
part-time for them duringcollege, uh, you know, times 10,
and then a random number of theroyalties that I'd get, and they
(12:38):
would always substantiate itwith a little letter.
And, you know, I get uh, youknow, 1,500 bucks one month,
another month I get 2,500 bucks.
One month I got a little bitover$10,000, which was a
mind-blowing check to get as afreshman in college.
SPEAKER_02 (12:52):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (12:53):
And I remember taking all my, I lived in a
fraternity with about 60 peopletotal.
I took my other 59 friends todinner at the Chinese restaurant
across the street, and I paidfor dinner, and I still had
8,000 bucks left.
Right.
So very early on, sort of uh Ilearned this notion and had
these experiences with peoplethat were entrepreneurial, that
(13:14):
were creating things from theirown sort of starting point.
And I saw the ups and downs ofit, but I just never thought of
any other thing.
I never thought of getting a jobafter that.
SPEAKER_00 (13:22):
Yeah.
So Feld Technologies, back toFeld Technologies.
Uh, how long was that businessuh running?
And what was the what was thethe culmination, so to speak?
Did you sell it?
Did you shut it down?
What tell us the story?
SPEAKER_01 (13:37):
Well, we ran it for seven years, and in that time
period is when I firstintersected with you.
And so I'll sort of break itinto two time periods.
One was pre uh YEO, BernHarnish, and Mo.
Uh, and the second was post.
The the the end was in aboutyear seven, 1993.
(14:02):
Um uh uh we sold it uh to apublic company.
That was a public company thatwas growing, a little public
company growing very fastthrough acquisition.
The co-chair of though thatcompany were Len Fassler and
Jerry Pack, two people who hadan amazing impact on me.
(14:22):
Uh, Len, who I talked uh aboutuh deeply in Give First, you
know, is the person who I reallysort of learned the most from in
terms of how to be in business.
Jerry, I learned a lot from aswell.
And so both of them wereincredible mentors for me.
But that's that's so that wasthe culmination of the business.
And then I went on and workedwith them for a couple of years.
(14:44):
Um, as they bought morecompanies, I ended up being the
technical guy on the deal team.
I didn't know anything aboutdeals, but I worked with them,
helping them buy companies,essentially helping evaluate
companies from a technicalperspective, not really buy the
companies, but be part of thatteam.
But I was sort of sitting attheir side as they were doing
these deals.
(15:04):
And I also made a bunch of angelinvestments.
I made about 40 angelinvestments with the money I
made from the sale of thecompany between 1994 and 1996,
right at the beginning of therise of the commercial internet.
So I learned how to buy and sellcompanies and I learned how to
make investments in that timeperiod.
But the first half of FellTechnologies, from about 1987 to
1990-ish, 90 or 91, I can'tremember, I would describe as
(15:28):
extremely lonely.
Um, uh, Dave and I didn't reallyhave any peers.
Like we had clients who hadtheir own businesses because our
clients ranged from small to bigcompanies.
But we definitely had, you know,they were different.
They were 40, 50 years old.
They we were in Boston.
So they'd they'd been runningthese businesses for a long
time.
(15:48):
They just didn't feel like ourpeers, our people.
Um, and we would learn fromthem, but it was always a client
relationship, right?
We wanted to always make surethat they were happy as a
client.
So, you know, what can you sharewith them really about the
stresses of being a startup?
Um, and we didn't even have thelanguage for it.
We didn't know what we were, wewere just creating a company.
(16:10):
Um, as we hired people, youknow, we kind of we knew
nothing.
We kind of figured it all out onour own, but it was us figuring
it out by making mistakes.
And it must have been 1990.
I had this amazing experience.
The only, the only informationavailable to us now, and for
somebody in 2025 that's in their20s, you know, like this is uh
(16:30):
you have to like time travelback.
There was no online anything.
The only real physical magazinethat had any utility for us at
the time, and Dave wasn't eveninterested.
He liked to read Forbes andFortune and things about big
businesses and and that sort ofstuff.
And and he was fascinated bythat.
(16:53):
I read that if I was lessinterested.
I read a magazine called Inc.
magazine.
Yeah.
And it was the only thing thatexisted for people that were
running small little companies.
And I read it religiously everymonth when it showed up.
And it, but it felt veryunattainable, right?
It was stuff that felt likethat's like when we grow up and
build something meaningful,maybe we'll be one of those
(17:15):
people.
And I see an advertisement inInc magazine for this thing
called birthing of giants.
SPEAKER_02 (17:21):
Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (17:22):
And um, it has a bunch of requirements.
You have to be under 40, youhave to be a founder of a
company, and you have to havemore than a million dollars in
revenue.
And I qualified for the firsttwo of those three, but I didn't
qualify for the third.
We had like 950,000 in revenue.
And I'm a goody two shoes, andI'm too honest for my own good,
you know, in those situations.
(17:43):
So, like I wrote, I'm whateverthe exact number was, I wrote
that number in the blank for howmuch revenue we had.
And I sent it in, hoping I getin.
We got in.
Years later, I learned from VernHarney.
Uh, I said, you know, Vern, Ididn't, we're talking, I didn't
have a million in revenue.
He said, Brad, we let everybodyin that was even close.
(18:03):
Like, okay, cool.
Um, so I go to this thing, it'sa four-day thing in in uh
outside of Boston at MITEndicott House.
It's sponsored by Inc.
magazine, MIT Enterprise Forum,which I knew.
And that's a keyword, enterpriseform, not MIT entrepreneurship
form, MIT Enterprise Forum.
So again, the language didn'texist.
(18:23):
And then um this thing calledYoung Entrepreneurs
Organization.
And uh I go and I have amind-blowing four days.
Mind blow, absolutely,completely transformative.
I'm all of a sudden, it's about60 people again, like in my
fraternity.
I'm with 59 people that are mypeers.
Now, I'm one of the smallestcompanies there, and I'm one of
(18:44):
the youngest people there.
And there's some people that goon, you know, to be amazing.
Ted Leones, this is one thatpeople may know the name of.
He was running a little companycalled Redgate Communications at
the time that AOL acquired, andhe went on to be Steve Case's
partner at AOL.
But, you know, there was he wasthere as a guy named Um Um uh
(19:08):
what was uh Mark's last namefrom Daymark?
Oh Mark Cohen.
Mark Cohen was there, and he hadthis huge catalog business and a
bunch of other people.
SPEAKER_02 (19:17):
Right.
SPEAKER_01 (19:17):
And so there's they're all this collection of
interesting people.
And we had, you know, four daysthat was not four days of
partying, it was four days ofin-classroom, sort of intense,
with other more experiencedentrepreneurs telling their
stories, a couple of academicthings, a couple of you know,
(19:38):
round table-y type things, andthen lots of hanging out, where
the hanging out again was wewere at this sort of MIT retreat
thing.
So it wasn't like a party thing,it was like hanging out late at
night talking about your woes ofyour business.
Uh, you know, Charles, I foundmy people.
I'm like, wow, right?
And that was like boom.
(19:59):
I went back to Boston and I toldDave, and he's like, Yeah, yeah,
sounds interesting.
He was never really thatinterested in stuff like that.
And I'd heard of this thing,right?
It was one of the co-sponsors,Young Entrepreneurs
Organization.
I think at the time I joinedimmediately, I think I was like
the hundredth person.
It was tiny.
It was tiny.
Tiny.
SPEAKER_02 (20:16):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (20:17):
And I said, I'm gonna start a Boston chapter.
And so I started a Bostonchapter.
And uh all of a sudden, youknow, but with a little help
from a couple of other people,all of a sudden we had a Boston
chapter with 10 or 15 peoplethat then became 20, and 30, and
40, and 50.
Um, I ended up getting veryinvolved with YO uh at a board
(20:37):
level as YO was going up on uhon his very rapid ascent.
Yeah, I got linked into KaufmanFoundation through something at
MIT with somebody named JennaMatthews, who's a longtime
friend now.
And Jenna linked all linked intoYO, loved it because she loved
at the time Kaufman, which wasdoing a lot of stuff around
(20:58):
entrepreneurship, it was allsmall business.
And they really weren't doinganything around this category of
what we started talking about ashigh growth entrepreneurs.
So, like all of these things,this is now the second half of
my fellow technologiesexperiences.
I now have peer group, I haveYEO, I have um, you know, the
these activities that are, youknow, for me a little stressful
(21:20):
financially because liketraveling someplace, you know,
on a company that's we're makingmoney every month.
So, you know, we're doing fineand I'm making a decent amount
of money, but I'm still thinkingabout money in terms of the
trade-offs.
Um, but like it was an easydecision to invest in those
things because it was ended upbeing an invest in me.
And there was the profoundintersection at the time that I
(21:44):
had with you, which I thinkbecame the foundation of so much
of how I think about mentorship,which was as we started the
Boston chapter, you know, okay,Brad, you're now the president
or the head of the Bostonchapter, whatever it was.
Here's the things you got to do.
Number one, blah, blah, blah,blah, blah.
Number two, create a forumgroup.
What's a forum group?
(22:04):
Okay, here's what a forum groupis.
Okay, that sounds kind of cool.
And in the context of what's aform group, okay, now you have
to do form training.
SPEAKER_02 (22:13):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (22:14):
And so there are about 10 of us, a dozen of us, I
can't remember.
Um I'm trying to think of thepeople.
Steve Ransom, Mark Mark McNaka,Mark McNacca was one.
SPEAKER_00 (22:26):
Yeah.
Rich Kivill, maybe.
SPEAKER_01 (22:28):
Rich Kivill for sure was one.
Yeah.
Um, so like there's thesegroups, and I, you know, these
are new people to me too.
They're not people I knowalready.
And we go and we take go on aretreat somewhere, and it's a
three-day thing, and all of us,like, as a we're sort of, and
this is pre-email, right?
So we're calling each othertogether coordinating, and
everybody's like, I don't havethree days, I don't have a long
(22:50):
weekend.
What are we doing?
What is this thing?
What is who is this Mo guy?
Um, and we go and we have this.
I can't remember, it was in anold building, sort of in um Cape
Cod, I think.
Cape Cod somewhere.
I can't, I don't remember.
It was cold, it was in thewinter.
Yeah.
And and it was amazing.
Amazing.
(23:10):
And you have this moment as a asa young person for me, as a
young person who has been alone,but now starting to find, again,
my people, other founders, otherentrepreneurs, other people
struggling with the same thing.
Some people further along thanme, some people at the same
place as me, but all of usfeeling like we're peers
(23:31):
together.
Nobody rating, nobody saying,how big is your business and how
much money you're making?
We tell each other this stuff.
Like it doesn't matter.
It's just, it's part of gettingto know each other, not and
here's how I'm doing, and noneof this.
I'm killing it, kind of crap.
It's like, you know, let's startwith all the things that are
totally fucked up and that I'mfeeling stressed about
professionally and personally.
And you come out of this andyou're like, I'm just not alone.
(23:55):
And then that sets off this arcover a long period of time.
I I really had an amazingexperience in Boston.
I moved to Boulder, Colorado in1995.
I sold the business in 93.
Uh, Amy, my wife, told me uh twomonths before I turned 30, which
was December 95, that she wasmoving to Boulder and I could
(24:18):
come with her.
Uh, we were married, so that wasreally kind of like an
intelligence test, I suppose.
And we moved to Boulder, and weironically, I only knew one
person in Boulder at the time,and that was Vern Harnish.
And he moved away six monthslater, something like that.
SPEAKER_02 (24:33):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (24:33):
Um, and I didn't move to Boulder because of Vern.
In fact, it hadn't reallyconnected that Vern was in
Boulder until we had moved, andthen somehow the two of us were
talking about something.
It's like, oh, I'm here too, andthen get together.
Um, and then sort of from that,I started, I didn't know
anybody.
So, how you know, what's thestrategy for getting to know
people when you move someplace?
(24:53):
You don't know anybody.
Well, I'll start the YU Coloradochapter.
So I started that, and this samekind of experience with like
having a form group and findingpeople and then sort of building
these networks, thoseexperiences were part of the
foundational thing for me aboutbuilding networks and the power
of networks and how that worksalongside this construct of this
(25:18):
really magical thing aroundmentorship called peer
mentorship, which I I give toyou.
Like I learned that from you.
SPEAKER_00 (25:27):
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
And what a pleasure and what anhonor and what uh a long time
it's been that we've been doingthis.
So, for those people that don'tknow what a forum is, Brad, can
you, in your words, talk aboutwhat it is, uh, how it connects
to peer mentorship?
Uh, what are some of the youknow key principles that make it
(25:47):
work effectively uh from yourview?
SPEAKER_01 (25:50):
Yeah.
So it's evolved over time and Ithink gotten um more robust over
time as I talked to EORs todayabout how Forum works.
When we when we did it, I thinkthe the base is the same.
It's a once a month, three-hourmeeting.
It's not social.
(26:11):
Uh generally, we would do it atsomeone's office, and you'd
rotate around so you'd seedifferent people's offices.
It was structured.
So it was important that youalways attend and you be on time
and you be available for theentire three hours.
That was the ground rules.
Um, and I think in each of myforums, we allowed people to
(26:31):
have once a year you could miss,but you had to admit you had to
say in advance you were gonnamiss.
And if you miss twice, you'reout of form.
So it was a pretty prettystrict, like you really have to
be there and show up.
And in both of my forums, peoplereally adhered to that.
Um and you know, as over timeyou'd allow people to dial in,
(26:52):
you know, we didn't have videoconferencing, but you you know,
you let somebody dial in on thephone if it was really like they
had a good reason.
Um the three hours tended to bestructured.
Um, the first part of it uh wasupdates.
And you would each sit and yougo around the room and you give
(27:15):
personal and professionalupdates, and you talk about
highs and lows, and you justtalk, and you had to actually
describe what was going on.
It wasn't like bullet pointlist, but like, you know, here's
the professional positive, youknow, high.
And we each I remember when westarted, I can't remember if
this was always the way we didit, but when we started, we
(27:36):
everybody had a piece of paperand you filled it out for a few
minutes on the piece of paper.
So you had your starting pointfor the first five minutes
everybody wrote versus you'rejust talking off the top of your
head, and then you go throughhighs, lows, personal,
professional, and thengenerally, like there was some
summation.
Go around the room and everybodywould listen to each other.
(27:57):
Don't give feedback, don'tcomment, just listen and really
with attention.
Then we generally from thatwould somebody would say, I
would like to go deep as they'regoing around the room, say, I'd
like to go deeper on this issue.
And it could be a professionalissue or a personal issue.
It could be a higher or a low,it could be some combination of
(28:18):
things.
And oftentimes one person, bythe time you get around the
room, one person would have saidthat, maybe sometimes two.
And we decide between one andtwo to then run a process.
And this is the other half ofform.
So maybe that what I justdescribed consumes an hour.
The other two hours you start,the person that is now the
(28:39):
presenter describes theirproblem or describe or their
issue.
It doesn't need to be a problem,whatever they're wanting to
think through.
And sometimes it would be I'vegot an offer for the business,
I'm having trouble with my myrelationship, I've got a
problematic employee, I'm superdepressed and bored.
Uh I, you know, my uh mother isdriving me batch fit crazy
(29:03):
because of this, that, or theother.
It could be anything.
And the person would justpresent and they'd talk about
what the issue was in their ownwords.
They'd go deep on it, and they'dhave about up to third,
depending on it, 15 to 30minutes to uh to explain.
And you know, people wouldoften, with just the
explanation, as they get deeperand deeper into it, get
(29:24):
emotional about it.
And again, you just sit andlisten.
No interaction, no questions, noanything, but really attentive.
At the end of that, each personwould then, and then we wouldn't
go around the room person byperson, but each person could
talk about things from their ownexperience that related to what
(29:45):
they just heard.
And what they would do fromtheir own experience is not say,
I think you should do this, butinstead, here's an experience I
had that's like this part ofwhat you're describing.
It doesn't have to be the whole.
Or I don't know if this fits,but when you were talking about
(30:06):
this, it made me think of thisexperience I had.
So always again framing it frommy experience.
Um and then uh sorry, that's thelast part.
Before that part, sorry, beforethat part, then you have the
second part was a QA.
So the person presents, and thenthe room, after listening, asks
(30:30):
questions.
And the questions can be anykind of questions around the
context.
So it's leading questions todraw more out from the person.
That then leads to the from myexperience uh part.
And the interesting thing aboutthat was, and when I when I
reflect on some, it was makingme think of one uh one one very
(30:53):
uh poignant moment uh in in oneof my Colorado forums.
The thing the person wasdescribing on the surface, it
would feel like nobody wouldhave had that experience.
But the questions people askedcaused people to realize that
(31:14):
the experience the person washaving had little to do with the
thing they were describing, andso almost everybody had a
completely different lifeexperience that related to the
experience, but wouldn't havecome out without the questions.
SPEAKER_02 (31:31):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (31:31):
And then at the end, the person who's the presenter
has a chance to kind of goaround and address each person
in a you know, whatever way theywant it.
It could be appreciation, itcould be, you know, uh uh
empathy around something, itcould be a specific uh statement
around something.
Um, so that that was the thelong arc.
Person presents, questions goaround the room, each person can
(31:57):
talk from their own experience.
And what I found, I mean, I Idid Boston form for three years,
and then I did the Colorado formfor like seven or eight years,
maybe more than that, eightyears, let's say.
The level of emotional intimacythat gets created within the
first three or four meetings isbeyond any other relationships I
(32:21):
have with anybody other than mybusiness partner, Dave, and my
wife Amy.
And so all this, you know, andthis is not all of YO, this is
just your form group.
So, you know, in Colorado, wehad two forms at the beginning.
Form one was my form.
I can't remember what the otherform group name was called.
And then over time, you know,100 people, you probably have 10
or 15 form groups, you know, itkind of continues to grow and
(32:43):
evolve.
But but that level of emotionalintimacy between people at
different points in theirexperiences, but all overlapping
in under 40, founder of company,more than a million in revenue,
ended up creating a way toengage with other people that
(33:06):
was unlike anything I had donebefore and has turned into a way
to engage with people,especially now.
You know, I'm almost 60.
I'd like to think that many ofthe founders that I invest in, I
can engage with them in thoseways if they are interested.
I don't have to, they don't haveto.
But I'm obviously attracted touh founders who have that way of
(33:28):
being.
And, you know, one of the thingsin several of the larger
networks that I've been involvedin, Techstars being one of them,
you see that in lots of places.
It doesn't have to be with everysingle person, but lots of areas
where that sort of emotionalintimacy uh is part of the
fabric of the relationship.
SPEAKER_00 (33:47):
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
What a did I describe formpretty well?
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
The one piece I would love foryou to touch on, because I think
it also ties into uh your workwith your new book, uh Give
First about mentorship.
I want you to touch on theimportance of speaking from
experience as it relates tocreating that equality.
SPEAKER_01 (34:11):
Well, it's it's uh profound.
I think it's obvious inhindsight, but unfortunately for
so many people, it's notintuitive.
And it's also a little hard froman ego perspective, right?
We all have egos.
Um uh and uh you know you canmodulate your ego in different
(34:34):
ways.
And you know, my my the ego thatsits on my shoulder sometimes, I
look at my ego and tell my egoto fuck off and leave me alone,
right?
Because you know, you makeego-driven decisions a lot of
times, not good decisions.
Um in this context, this idea,if you if you take the two ends
of the spectrum, one is youknow, I've I've had uh whatever
(34:58):
experiences I've had, lots ofsuccessful experiences, lots of
experience of failure, lots ofdifferent kinds of experiences
over the 40 years.
I've been in business in the 60years I've been on this planet,
lots of good and bad.
Those experiences are ones thatare mine, that I can describe.
(35:20):
That's one end of the spectrum.
The other end of the spectrum,imagine, and you know, I like to
say uh my father, my fatherdoesn't do this anymore very
much, but he did it when I was akid.
And I describe it as the fingerwag.
And think of think of thepolitician.
I think uh the the politicianthat does it the most is
probably Bernie Sanders, youknow, the contemporary
(35:40):
politician, where they wag theirfinger at you.
You should, you should, youshould.
This is how it should be.
These declarative statementsabout how things should work,
which might or might not becorrect.
But think about your emotionalreaction to the you should, you
should, you should, when,especially if you're an
entrepreneur or a founder, ifsomebody's telling you you
(36:02):
should, I mean, like some peopleare obedient to that.
Like most people are like, Iwant to do the exact opposite.
Or, you know, their response isto immediately stop listening,
or to say, you don't understandme, or you don't understand my
situation.
So those are the two ends of thespectrum.
And what I found in this notionof engaging, regardless of
(36:23):
experience, regardless of anyattribute, pick your attribute,
just throw it out the window.
Um, in terms of engaging withsomeone, if you can talk to them
from your experience, ratherthan directing them what to do,
uh, telling them what the answeris.
(36:46):
It's not dissimilar to amanagement technique that if
anybody's listening that's evermanaged a team.
If you're trying to get a teamdone to get something done
that's really hard in somecompressed period of time, the
worst way to do it is to tellthem you have to get this done
by this day or you're fired.
(37:06):
Now, there's some leaders thatdo that and are quite effective
at it, but for my frame ofreference, the much more
effective way to do it is to getthe team to commit to getting
the thing done by that time.
And you, as the leader, to say,okay, look, we got these
constraints within theseconstraints.
One of the hard constraints isthe deadline.
Like, what can we get done?
And how can we get it done?
(37:27):
And then working with the teamto get the team to agree that
they're going to get the thingdone by that deadline, then that
team's going to be way morecommitted to doing the thing
with high quality to do, youknow, move heaven and earth to
do it.
So, again, different leadershipstyles.
My own view in this creatingequality is this notion that,
(37:51):
you know, we're all individualswith different strengths and
weaknesses.
And what you're trying to do,whether you're in a pure mentor
relationship, whether you're ina manager relationship, or
whether you're a managee, orwhether you're a mentor, mentee
that still has a one-up,one-down relationship, it's an
old cliche, but you're trying toput yourself in the other
(38:14):
person's shoes.
And the only way to really putyourself in the other person's
shoes is to try to understandthe problem from their
perspective.
And frankly, the only way tocommunicate to someone when
you're trying to understand theproblem from their perspective
is to talk from your experiencewith examples rather than be
(38:38):
directive as to what the otherperson should do.
SPEAKER_00 (38:42):
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
Uh, thank you.
And I love your perspective andyour explanation for that.
And it's just good to hear itfrom somebody else's words who's
been doing this for for a longtime.
And you believe so much in thisprocess, you brought it to
Techstars and have used it tosupport many of your Techstars
uh members.
(39:02):
Uh, maybe speak to that for aminute if you don't mind.
SPEAKER_01 (39:06):
Yeah, there were two things that happened uh early in
Techstars that evolved overtime.
One that was directly in thecontext of Techstars, and then
one that was um emerging fromit.
In the very first Tech Starsprogram, which was we started in
2006, ran the first program in2007 in Boulder.
(39:27):
Well, we with David Cohen, whois the co-founder and the CEO of
TextSe came up with this ideafor this thing that we started
calling an accelerator.
And then pretty quickly startedcalling it a mentor-driven
accelerator.
And the reason we called it amentor-driven accelerator, the
word mentor didn't really existin the fabric of
entrepreneurship much, then itwould pop up every now and then,
(39:48):
but it wasn't really the word.
And what we said is look, we'regonna get a bunch of people in
the Boulder and Denver, youknow, uh uh region who were, you
know, founders or worked withfounders and service providers,
or maybe were investors.
And we're gonna surround thesefounders for 90 days, which was
(40:10):
the length of the acceleratorprogram, with these mentors.
We're gonna call them mentors,and the mentors are gonna spend
time with no commitment of anysort other than willingness to
spend time with these founders.
There's no quid pro quo, therewas no definition, there was no
economics.
It was just gonna beinteresting.
We'll see what happens.
And when we were recruiting thementors, and I most many of them
(40:32):
were people I knew, and some ofthem were from the East Coast or
the West Coast and would travelto Boulder.
And, you know, the way I wouldentice them to come to Boulder,
I said, look, if you come toBoulder, in addition to doing
this Textars thing with us, I'llhave dinner with you.
And if you want me to, you know,wander you around town the next
day and introduce you to a bunchof folks, happy to do that.
So, like it was it was a way tokind of get people to to come to
town.
But people were like, no, itsounds like fun.
(40:52):
Summer, Boulder, awesome, let'sdo it.
In the first couple of years, wewe didn't really know what
mentorship was, but we prettyquickly started seeing things
that were effective and thingsthat weren't effective.
And of course, many of thesethings tied back to form.
Um, because I already had, I wasalready doing form.
(41:14):
I had this intuition about sortof the dynamics around these
things.
Like, you know, it was it wassort of already in my head.
And so we started talking, andand I, and of course, we were
doing, David and I were doing alot of the mentorship with the
individual companies as well.
And then, of course, a lot ofthe people you'd be spending
time with who are mentors, you'dalso be doing mentor-like
(41:37):
conversations about theirbusiness or about, you know, I
was, you know, what uh wheretech service was going to
evolve, or at this point, we hadraised foundries first fund and
sort of what was going on withthat.
You'd have those same kind ofpeer-mentor conversations in
these contexts one-on-one.
By about the fourth year, we nowhad done 10 programs.
We were in a couple of differentcities.
(41:57):
Um, and we'd really learned, Ithink, a decent amount about
what was effective versus not.
And David wrote very quicklythis thing called the Textstar's
Mentor Manifesto.
It was 18 bullet points.
Wasn't rules.
It was not, and if you do thesethings, you will be a good
mentor and get a check mark.
It was not that.
(42:18):
It was one-liners that wereideas for people to think about
in the context of mentoring.
And those one-liners, when Iwrote Give First, I organized
part two of the book aroundthose one-liners, they really
hold up well.
And they don't hold up well ofdo these and you will be a good
mentor.
They hold up well.
And if you think hard about thiskind of abstract idea, it can
(42:44):
help you be more effective.
And if you think about it andkind of don't do it, you're
probably going to be lesseffective.
And so that part of the book isfleshing those out from my own
experience.
Right.
So describing the one-linerswith more depth, um, and and
sort of talking about them withmore depth uh intellectually,
(43:05):
but then using experiences thatI'd had that reflected that
one-liner.
Um, so that was one construct.
The other construct was thisphrase give first, uh, which is
a philosophy, not a religion.
It's something to think aboutand to incorporate into your way
of being.
(43:25):
It's not what you should spend100% of your energy on, but it's
a part of the way that you oneoperates.
And it's a set of ideas aroundit.
And the definition is verysimple: it's that you're willing
to put energy into a systemwithout knowing what you're
going to get back.
You don't define the transactionup front.
It's not altruism.
(43:46):
You expect to get somethingback, you just don't know from
whom, over what time period, inwhat form, and what
consideration.
And by 2012, uh, I had written abook called Startup Communities.
And that book, that phrasedidn't exist before that.
And it talked about the idea ofhow do you how you can create a
(44:09):
startup community in any city inthe world.
And I made this assertion thatany city over about 50,000
people benefited from having astartup community.
And so there's this phenomena asentrepreneurship, which always
existed all around the world.
But now this sort of next waveof entrepreneurship started to
have that.
In that, Techstars was a bigpart of that global
(44:32):
democratization ofentrepreneurship, because it was
not just running programs allover the world, but eventually
started doing startup weekendsuh all over the world and
participating in startup weeksand doing things that were
really global in nature.
And I had this one paragraph inthat book called Give Before You
Get.
And that paragraph, I didn'tthink very hard about it, but I
(44:54):
wrote what was roughly thedefinition.
And I was basically saying,look, if you want to really get
things going, you need to bewilling to give before you get.
Put energy into the startupcommunity without defining what
you get from it.
And in a sort of wonderful uhmoment, about six months later,
Adam Grant, who's a Whartonprofessor of organizational
psychology, came out with a bookcalled Give and Take.
SPEAKER_02 (45:17):
Yes.
SPEAKER_01 (45:17):
And my one paragraph was anecdotal.
It was just the way I write, itwas from my experience.
It was things that, you know,I'd been percolating on.
Adam did like all this researchthat showed basically
substantiated this construct ofbeing willing to put energy into
a system without knowing whatyou're going to get, being a
giver.
And for me, it was another youknow, mind-blowing moment of
(45:39):
like, yep, you know, there'ssome real substantiation for
this.
And that that evolved inTechstars lingo and in value
system into this idea of givefirst, being willing to put
energy into things withoutknowing what you're going to get
back.
SPEAKER_00 (45:53):
I love it.
Two quick questions before wesay goodbye.
Brad Feld, the first yourstoried career, you've done
many, many amazing things.
You look back.
What are you most proud of?
SPEAKER_01 (46:08):
I think I'm I don't think I'm most proud of a
singular thing.
I think I'm most proud, I hadn'tthought of it this way, in
reflecting on how I feel abouthow I've engaged with so many
(46:28):
people.
And I feel like I attribute thatto Len Fastner, in that at Len
passed a few years ago.
Uh, Len and I were incrediblyclose friends and stayed close
through the end of his life,even when we weren't working
together.
And what I saw in Len was justthis great joy in how he had
(46:55):
engaged with others in goodtimes and bad, including me.
And I feel the same way.
Like, of course, I have peoplethat don't like me.
Of course, I've disappointedpeople, of course, I've got some
broken relationships.
Every human being does.
Uh, and I'm okay with that.
Like, I feel like that's part oflife.
But I am very comfortable with awide set of ways, you know, the
(47:22):
way I feel about the way I'verelated to so many people.
SPEAKER_00 (47:26):
Well, my next question was going to be about
who's had the most impact onyou.
And I think Len certainly is onethat came up for me as I was
reading the book.
Uh, I would ask this though.
He did say something that was abeautiful quote that I'd love to
end with, having something to dowith they can't kill you.
Uh, can you give us 30 secondsof what that quote was?
SPEAKER_01 (47:45):
Yeah, the book leads off with a story of a moment
where I'm just in abject miseryat Len's house one morning, sort
of as the internet bubble is uhcollapsing.
And, you know, not just thecompany we were running was all
fucked up, but everything in myworld, of which I was on a lot
of boards and made a lot ofinvestments was a mess.
And he sort of cheerfully comesdown the stairs to his kitchen.
(48:07):
He he sees immediately that I'mlike hunched over the kitchen
table, you know, like lookinglike uh sad sack that morning.
He comes up to me and gives me abig hug after we talk a little
bit, and he says, Brad, theycan't kill you and they can't
eat you.
Let's go to work.
SPEAKER_00 (48:30):
I love it.
I love it.
I love it.
Brad Feld, thank you so much foryour time and for everything
you've done for this incrediblecommunity of entrepreneurs, uh,
both in EEO and the tech stars,not to mention everything else
you have done.
A special thanks to ouraudience.
And as a reminder, that reviewshelp uh people find our podcast.
(48:51):
So please leave a review to helpothers find the show.
And thank you again and have agreat rest of your day.
Welcome to the Heart of Business Podcast, sponsored
by International FacilitatorsOrganization, the Marketplace
for Facilitators.
I'm your host, Mo Fatelbob, andtoday I'm very excited to have
with us Brad Feld.
Brad is a renowned Americanentrepreneur, an early stage
investor, a nine-time author,co-founder of Foundry, a venture
(00:33):
capital firm based in Boulder.
And what I most remember aboutBrad from probably 1991, when he
was running a little IT companycalled Feld Technologies, is my
favorite quote of Brad's, whichis everybody in this industry
sucks.
Our goal is to suck left.
Welcome, Brad.
SPEAKER_01 (00:55):
Thanks.
And it's very funny every time Isee somebody that uses the uh
the tagline We SuckLess, that'spublic.
Somebody sends me an email andsays, Isn't that yours?
SPEAKER_00 (01:10):
Amazing, amazing, amazing.
So if I remember correctly,Brad, at the time, uh Felt
Technologies, when you firstjoined the Young Entrepreneurs
Organization before they changedthe name to the Entrepreneurs
Organization, you were doingmaybe a million or two when we
met, something like that?
SPEAKER_01 (01:28):
Yeah, it was a little, it was a little
business.
It was self-funded.
We never raised any money.
I had a partner, a guy namedDave Jilk.
And, you know, we just built itsystematically every year.
We did one primary thing andthen a secondary thing.
The primary thing was we wrotesoftware for uh businesses to
use to help run theirbusinesses.
(01:50):
This is the late 80s, early 90s,back before there were networks,
back before the web and theinternet, even really back
before client server databases.
So the sort of using PCs to runyour business was pretty shaky
back then because the softwaretechnology and the hardware
technology was pretty fragile.
(02:11):
Um, so that was the primarything we did.
And the secondary thing we didwas there were a bunch of
companies that theoreticallyprovided all the hardware
infrastructure.
So they'd sell the hardware andthey provide, they kind of set
up the hardware.
And to the extent that networksexisted, we used these things
called Nobel networks for peoplethat are old like us.
Um, and they'd wire them up andthey'd use actual physical cable
(02:34):
inside office buildings toconnect the computers together.
And that's where the WeSuck lastline came from.
I mean, the those people wereterrible.
And so we would always be theones that were responsible for
it, even though we didn't likeput that stuff in.
So at some point we said, youknow what, we're gonna be
responsible for this stuff too.
And so we started doing the whatbecame called network
(02:57):
integration.
Um, but it was putting, youknow, putting the PCs on
people's desks and connectingeverything together and just
making sure it all worked, sothat then the software that we
wrote for companies to automatetheir businesses would work.
SPEAKER_00 (03:10):
All right, all right, all right.
And that was not your firstbusiness, was it?
SPEAKER_01 (03:15):
No, it was not.
The first couple of companies Idid failed.
So I uh started a company withuh a couple of college friends.
Um uh uh we were freshmen.
Yeah, we were we were allfreshmen except for one who was
Dave, who became my partner atFell Technologies.
And we started a company calledMartingale Software.
(03:36):
And we uh the original idea wasto write uh software for this
new computer that had not yetcome out yet.
It's called a Mac or Macintosh.
And to write software for thatcomputer, you had to write it on
a thing called a Lisa, which wasuh Apple's product that some
people may remember.
Um, and then you'd like have todo like a hundred disk swaps to
(04:00):
put it on the little disks forthe uh uh the Macintosh.
And then you put it in theMacintosh and it would start
running and take a little while,and then a little bomb would
show up in the middle of theMacintosh screen because the
program would crash.
Like that was how you wrotesoftware for the Mac at the
beginning, terrible.
And um, we were gonna write apiece of software that allowed
you to type in numbers into uh agrid, and it would then generate
(04:23):
a graph from the grid.
And uh so we started doing this,and we were all in college, so
we had plenty of other stuff todo.
And of course, when when theMacintosh actually shipped,
there was this product thatshipped with it called Excel
that Microsoft made, where ithad a grid, a spreadsheet, and
you type numbers into it, itmade graph.
We're like, all right, well,that didn't work.
(04:44):
Um, and then I did anothercompany with a guy that was a
client of a company that I hadworked for in the oil and gas
industry, and we did a companycalled Datavision, and that
company built a piece ofsoftware to do cephalographic
analysis.
(05:04):
And if you're wondering what iscephalographic analysis, the
answer is everybody else wastoo.
We had one customer, he got thesoftware for free because he was
the one who told us about thisthing called cephalographic
analysis that was going to bereally important.
It was a way to do facialreconstruction surgery.
And the way they did it at thetime was they took an X-ray and
(05:25):
they, a ruler, and they drewlines on it and figured out the
angles and decided where to movethe stuff on your face around.
And we effectively automatedthat.
So you scan the X-ray into acomputer on a high-res monitor,
and it was a special monitor atthe time, and you like would put
little points on the monitor andit would automatically calculate
stuff.
And so he was our in today'slanguage, he would be our design
(05:49):
partner.
And so uh it was a doctor at uhLC, Louisiana State University.
Remember, nice guy.
I visited him a few times, andwe wrote this pretty cool piece
of software that then nobodybought.
Uh, and so that company went outof business a year or so later.
Uh, and by that point, I hadalready, you know, I'm still in
(06:10):
school at the time, and I nowhave a couple of other clients
that I'm doing this kind ofsoftware for littler projects
while I'm in school, and I justdecided, okay, well, you know
what, I'm just gonna do this bymyself.
And that became FeldTechnologies.
And then when I uh in 1987,Dave, my partner, joined me, and
the two of us really sort ofmarked that as the beginning of
(06:32):
the company for real.
SPEAKER_02 (06:33):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (06:34):
I think so.
But by the time we'd met, weprobably had 15 employees, and
it was between a million and amillion and a half bucks in
revenue.
SPEAKER_00 (06:41):
Yeah.
And and what inspired you topursue entrepreneurship in the
first place?
SPEAKER_01 (06:46):
I never really thought of it.
Like it was never really aconscious choice.
So in high school, well, eventhough I go back further, when I
was uh Bar mitzfood, I got anApple II computer for my bar
mitzvah.
So at the time, all of myfriends, when they would get Bar
mitzvah that era, they would getKrugrams.
(07:09):
That was kind of like the thefancy gift.
You know, you get lots of thesilly little things, a pen and
whatever.
But like Krug Rams were whateverybody wanted.
And um, I had started to, I'dbeen exposed to computers a
couple of years earlier, uh, ayear or two earlier by my dad's
younger brother, a guy namedCharlie Feld, who I still to
(07:29):
this day call Uncle Charlie.
He was the head of dataprocessing at Frito Lay.
I grew up in Dallas.
Frida was headquartered inDallas.
And today the head of dataprocessing would be called the
chief information officer, butat the time they didn't have a
title like that.
Charlie was one of the half adozen people or so that created
that uh profession.
And I I would he would take medown to a data center in uh
(07:53):
downtown Dallas that was afree-to-lay data center, and I
just sit in front of a terminalall day and just play around.
And that was kind of myintroduction to computers, and I
just loved it, it justcompletely absorbed me.
And so when I got bar mitzvah,my dad said, What do you want?
And I said, Uh, you know, uh, Iwant to get a computer.
A computer, okay.
Well, you know, let's go figureout what computer to get you.
(08:14):
And we ended up getting an AppleII computer.
It was before, it was a veryearly Apple II computer.
So it only had 48K of memory,not 64k of memory.
They had this thing called theinteger card that gave you extra
memory.
It didn't have disk drives, itjust had cassette tape.
Like it was really at the verybeginning.
(08:35):
And um uh that was kind of myintroduction.
So between my dad and Charlie,like very early on, there was
this encouragement around it.
So I'd write little pieces ofsoftware on the Apple II.
I did a little checkbook managerfor my dad and you know, some
other things like that.
And um my junior or senior yearof high school, I can't remember
(09:00):
which, my father introduced meto one of his patients, a guy
named uh Eugene Scott.
And um, Mr.
Scott um was uh a wonderful guy.
He had been a head of sales fora couple of the mini computer
software companies and some somevery famous, well-known ones.
(09:24):
And um, there's a guy named SamWiley that had created in
Dallas, Texas, this very largecompany that eventually became
part of or the core of computerassociates, what became computer
associates.
And Mr.
Scott would have lunch with mefor a couple of hours, and we he
just sort of regaled me withstories from what he was doing
in the computer industry.
(09:44):
And he and his son, um uh Davidhad started a company called
Scott Instruments, and they madea product called the VET20.
VET stands for voice entryterminal.
So imagine a thing you put onyour head with a big microphone,
you talk to it, and it connectedto an Apple II, and it allowed
(10:05):
you to talk to the Apple II, andthe Apple II recognized your
speech.
So think of it as what Siri istoday, or what we fantasize Siri
would be if Siri got thingsright all the time.
And um, this was the very firstof that kind of technology.
So they'd uh effectively, I saidDavid, his name was Brian, not
David, Scott.
So they effectively had inventedthis technology, and so they had
(10:27):
an uh office, maybe 50employees, and I would go to
their office and hang out, andthey made their own circuit
boards and you know, they madethey wrote all the software and
like I just the this idea ofcreating it myself, creating it
from nothing, was embedded atthat point in time.
And then the last sort ofexperience like that was my
(10:49):
between my senior year in highschool and my first year in
college, I worked for a companycalled Petcom.
Chris and Helena Aves were thefounders, husband and wife.
And they wrote software for theoil and gas industry.
So in the early 80s in Dallas,Texas, or in Texas, oil and oil
and gas was booming.
Yeah, and everybody wasexploring, you know, digging
(11:10):
holes in the ground trying tofind uh oil.
And uh Chris and Helena came upwith a couple of software
product ideas.
Chris wrote some of it.
He wrote a bunch of accountingsoftware.
He used to be an accountant, sohe wrote a bunch of software on
the now the IBM PC, uh, forkeeping track of all of this.
And I wrote two products forthem.
(11:32):
One that did something calledwell logging, analyzing the
exploration, and the othercalled PC Economics, which was
like an economic forecastingtool for you put a bunch of
assumptions in it would tell youover the next 20 years, you
know, what your cash flows fromthis theoretical thing you were
gonna dig in the ground wasgonna create.
And among other things, theywere magnificent.
(11:52):
I was their first employee.
They grew that company to about20 people before the oil and gas
boom crashed, and all theircustomers went out of business.
Um, but I learned two thingsfrom them.
One, they paid me 10 bucks anhour, but they paid me per hour.
So if I worked 80 hours a week,I got paid twice as much as if I
worked 40 hours a week.
That was kind of easy but cool.
The other, I didn't know whatequity was, but they they paid
(12:15):
me um 5% royalty.
In the oil and gas industry,royalties were what you got.
Uh, they paid me 5% royalty onall the software I wrote that
they sold.
So when I was a freshman incollege, I'd get a check in the
mail.
And the check would have thenumber of hours I'd work
part-time for them duringcollege, uh, you know, times 10,
and then a random number of theroyalties that I'd get, and they
(12:38):
would always substantiate itwith a little letter.
And, you know, I get uh, youknow, 1,500 bucks one month,
another month I get 2,500 bucks.
One month I got a little bitover$10,000, which was a
mind-blowing check to get as afreshman in college.
SPEAKER_02 (12:52):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (12:53):
And I remember taking all my, I lived in a
fraternity with about 60 peopletotal.
I took my other 59 friends todinner at the Chinese restaurant
across the street, and I paidfor dinner, and I still had
8,000 bucks left.
Right.
So very early on, sort of uh Ilearned this notion and had
these experiences with peoplethat were entrepreneurial, that
(13:14):
were creating things from theirown sort of starting point.
And I saw the ups and downs ofit, but I just never thought of
any other thing.
I never thought of getting a jobafter that.
SPEAKER_00 (13:22):
Yeah.
So Feld Technologies, back toFeld Technologies.
Uh, how long was that businessuh running?
And what was the what was thethe culmination, so to speak?
Did you sell it?
Did you shut it down?
What tell us the story?
SPEAKER_01 (13:37):
Well, we ran it for seven years, and in that time
period is when I firstintersected with you.
And so I'll sort of break itinto two time periods.
One was pre uh YEO, BernHarnish, and Mo.
Uh, and the second was post.
The the the end was in aboutyear seven, 1993.
(14:02):
Um uh uh we sold it uh to apublic company.
That was a public company thatwas growing, a little public
company growing very fastthrough acquisition.
The co-chair of though thatcompany were Len Fassler and
Jerry Pack, two people who hadan amazing impact on me.
(14:22):
Uh, Len, who I talked uh aboutuh deeply in Give First, you
know, is the person who I reallysort of learned the most from in
terms of how to be in business.
Jerry, I learned a lot from aswell.
And so both of them wereincredible mentors for me.
But that's that's so that wasthe culmination of the business.
And then I went on and workedwith them for a couple of years.
(14:44):
Um, as they bought morecompanies, I ended up being the
technical guy on the deal team.
I didn't know anything aboutdeals, but I worked with them,
helping them buy companies,essentially helping evaluate
companies from a technicalperspective, not really buy the
companies, but be part of thatteam.
But I was sort of sitting attheir side as they were doing
these deals.
(15:04):
And I also made a bunch of angelinvestments.
I made about 40 angelinvestments with the money I
made from the sale of thecompany between 1994 and 1996,
right at the beginning of therise of the commercial internet.
So I learned how to buy and sellcompanies and I learned how to
make investments in that timeperiod.
But the first half of FellTechnologies, from about 1987 to
1990-ish, 90 or 91, I can'tremember, I would describe as
(15:28):
extremely lonely.
Um, uh, Dave and I didn't reallyhave any peers.
Like we had clients who hadtheir own businesses because our
clients ranged from small to bigcompanies.
But we definitely had, you know,they were different.
They were 40, 50 years old.
They we were in Boston.
So they'd they'd been runningthese businesses for a long
time.
(15:48):
They just didn't feel like ourpeers, our people.
Um, and we would learn fromthem, but it was always a client
relationship, right?
We wanted to always make surethat they were happy as a
client.
So, you know, what can you sharewith them really about the
stresses of being a startup?
Um, and we didn't even have thelanguage for it.
We didn't know what we were, wewere just creating a company.
(16:10):
Um, as we hired people, youknow, we kind of we knew
nothing.
We kind of figured it all out onour own, but it was us figuring
it out by making mistakes.
And it must have been 1990.
I had this amazing experience.
The only, the only informationavailable to us now, and for
somebody in 2025 that's in their20s, you know, like this is uh
(16:30):
you have to like time travelback.
There was no online anything.
The only real physical magazinethat had any utility for us at
the time, and Dave wasn't eveninterested.
He liked to read Forbes andFortune and things about big
businesses and and that sort ofstuff.
And and he was fascinated bythat.
(16:53):
I read that if I was lessinterested.
I read a magazine called Inc.
magazine.
Yeah.
And it was the only thing thatexisted for people that were
running small little companies.
And I read it religiously everymonth when it showed up.
And it, but it felt veryunattainable, right?
It was stuff that felt likethat's like when we grow up and
build something meaningful,maybe we'll be one of those
(17:15):
people.
And I see an advertisement inInc magazine for this thing
called birthing of giants.
SPEAKER_02 (17:21):
Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (17:22):
And um, it has a bunch of requirements.
You have to be under 40, youhave to be a founder of a
company, and you have to havemore than a million dollars in
revenue.
And I qualified for the firsttwo of those three, but I didn't
qualify for the third.
We had like 950,000 in revenue.
And I'm a goody two shoes, andI'm too honest for my own good,
you know, in those situations.
(17:43):
So, like I wrote, I'm whateverthe exact number was, I wrote
that number in the blank for howmuch revenue we had.
And I sent it in, hoping I getin.
We got in.
Years later, I learned from VernHarney.
Uh, I said, you know, Vern, Ididn't, we're talking, I didn't
have a million in revenue.
He said, Brad, we let everybodyin that was even close.
(18:03):
Like, okay, cool.
Um, so I go to this thing, it'sa four-day thing in in uh
outside of Boston at MITEndicott House.
It's sponsored by Inc.
magazine, MIT Enterprise Forum,which I knew.
And that's a keyword, enterpriseform, not MIT entrepreneurship
form, MIT Enterprise Forum.
So again, the language didn'texist.
(18:23):
And then um this thing calledYoung Entrepreneurs
Organization.
And uh I go and I have amind-blowing four days.
Mind blow, absolutely,completely transformative.
I'm all of a sudden, it's about60 people again, like in my
fraternity.
I'm with 59 people that are mypeers.
Now, I'm one of the smallestcompanies there, and I'm one of
(18:44):
the youngest people there.
And there's some people that goon, you know, to be amazing.
Ted Leones, this is one thatpeople may know the name of.
He was running a little companycalled Redgate Communications at
the time that AOL acquired, andhe went on to be Steve Case's
partner at AOL.
But, you know, there was he wasthere as a guy named Um Um uh
(19:08):
what was uh Mark's last namefrom Daymark?
Oh Mark Cohen.
Mark Cohen was there, and he hadthis huge catalog business and a
bunch of other people.
SPEAKER_02 (19:17):
Right.
SPEAKER_01 (19:17):
And so there's they're all this collection of
interesting people.
And we had, you know, four daysthat was not four days of
partying, it was four days ofin-classroom, sort of intense,
with other more experiencedentrepreneurs telling their
stories, a couple of academicthings, a couple of you know,
(19:38):
round table-y type things, andthen lots of hanging out, where
the hanging out again was wewere at this sort of MIT retreat
thing.
So it wasn't like a party thing,it was like hanging out late at
night talking about your woes ofyour business.
Uh, you know, Charles, I foundmy people.
I'm like, wow, right?
And that was like boom.
(19:59):
I went back to Boston and I toldDave, and he's like, Yeah, yeah,
sounds interesting.
He was never really thatinterested in stuff like that.
And I'd heard of this thing,right?
It was one of the co-sponsors,Young Entrepreneurs
Organization.
I think at the time I joinedimmediately, I think I was like
the hundredth person.
It was tiny.
It was tiny.
Tiny.
SPEAKER_02 (20:16):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (20:17):
And I said, I'm gonna start a Boston chapter.
And so I started a Bostonchapter.
And uh all of a sudden, youknow, but with a little help
from a couple of other people,all of a sudden we had a Boston
chapter with 10 or 15 peoplethat then became 20, and 30, and
40, and 50.
Um, I ended up getting veryinvolved with YO uh at a board
(20:37):
level as YO was going up on uhon his very rapid ascent.
Yeah, I got linked into KaufmanFoundation through something at
MIT with somebody named JennaMatthews, who's a longtime
friend now.
And Jenna linked all linked intoYO, loved it because she loved
at the time Kaufman, which wasdoing a lot of stuff around
(20:58):
entrepreneurship, it was allsmall business.
And they really weren't doinganything around this category of
what we started talking about ashigh growth entrepreneurs.
So, like all of these things,this is now the second half of
my fellow technologiesexperiences.
I now have peer group, I haveYEO, I have um, you know, the
these activities that are, youknow, for me a little stressful
(21:20):
financially because liketraveling someplace, you know,
on a company that's we're makingmoney every month.
So, you know, we're doing fineand I'm making a decent amount
of money, but I'm still thinkingabout money in terms of the
trade-offs.
Um, but like it was an easydecision to invest in those
things because it was ended upbeing an invest in me.
And there was the profoundintersection at the time that I
(21:44):
had with you, which I thinkbecame the foundation of so much
of how I think about mentorship,which was as we started the
Boston chapter, you know, okay,Brad, you're now the president
or the head of the Bostonchapter, whatever it was.
Here's the things you got to do.
Number one, blah, blah, blah,blah, blah.
Number two, create a forumgroup.
What's a forum group?
(22:04):
Okay, here's what a forum groupis.
Okay, that sounds kind of cool.
And in the context of what's aform group, okay, now you have
to do form training.
SPEAKER_02 (22:13):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (22:14):
And so there are about 10 of us, a dozen of us, I
can't remember.
Um I'm trying to think of thepeople.
Steve Ransom, Mark Mark McNaka,Mark McNacca was one.
SPEAKER_00 (22:26):
Yeah.
Rich Kivill, maybe.
SPEAKER_01 (22:28):
Rich Kivill for sure was one.
Yeah.
Um, so like there's thesegroups, and I, you know, these
are new people to me too.
They're not people I knowalready.
And we go and we take go on aretreat somewhere, and it's a
three-day thing, and all of us,like, as a we're sort of, and
this is pre-email, right?
So we're calling each othertogether coordinating, and
everybody's like, I don't havethree days, I don't have a long
(22:50):
weekend.
What are we doing?
What is this thing?
What is who is this Mo guy?
Um, and we go and we have this.
I can't remember, it was in anold building, sort of in um Cape
Cod, I think.
Cape Cod somewhere.
I can't, I don't remember.
It was cold, it was in thewinter.
Yeah.
And and it was amazing.
Amazing.
(23:10):
And you have this moment as a asa young person for me, as a
young person who has been alone,but now starting to find, again,
my people, other founders, otherentrepreneurs, other people
struggling with the same thing.
Some people further along thanme, some people at the same
place as me, but all of usfeeling like we're peers
(23:31):
together.
Nobody rating, nobody saying,how big is your business and how
much money you're making?
We tell each other this stuff.
Like it doesn't matter.
It's just, it's part of gettingto know each other, not and
here's how I'm doing, and noneof this.
I'm killing it, kind of crap.
It's like, you know, let's startwith all the things that are
totally fucked up and that I'mfeeling stressed about
professionally and personally.
And you come out of this andyou're like, I'm just not alone.
(23:55):
And then that sets off this arcover a long period of time.
I I really had an amazingexperience in Boston.
I moved to Boulder, Colorado in1995.
I sold the business in 93.
Uh, Amy, my wife, told me uh twomonths before I turned 30, which
was December 95, that she wasmoving to Boulder and I could
(24:18):
come with her.
Uh, we were married, so that wasreally kind of like an
intelligence test, I suppose.
And we moved to Boulder, and weironically, I only knew one
person in Boulder at the time,and that was Vern Harnish.
And he moved away six monthslater, something like that.
SPEAKER_02 (24:33):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (24:33):
Um, and I didn't move to Boulder because of Vern.
In fact, it hadn't reallyconnected that Vern was in
Boulder until we had moved, andthen somehow the two of us were
talking about something.
It's like, oh, I'm here too, andthen get together.
Um, and then sort of from that,I started, I didn't know
anybody.
So, how you know, what's thestrategy for getting to know
people when you move someplace?
(24:53):
You don't know anybody.
Well, I'll start the YU Coloradochapter.
So I started that, and this samekind of experience with like
having a form group and findingpeople and then sort of building
these networks, thoseexperiences were part of the
foundational thing for me aboutbuilding networks and the power
of networks and how that worksalongside this construct of this
(25:18):
really magical thing aroundmentorship called peer
mentorship, which I I give toyou.
Like I learned that from you.
SPEAKER_00 (25:27):
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
And what a pleasure and what anhonor and what uh a long time
it's been that we've been doingthis.
So, for those people that don'tknow what a forum is, Brad, can
you, in your words, talk aboutwhat it is, uh, how it connects
to peer mentorship?
Uh, what are some of the youknow key principles that make it
(25:47):
work effectively uh from yourview?
SPEAKER_01 (25:50):
Yeah.
So it's evolved over time and Ithink gotten um more robust over
time as I talked to EORs todayabout how Forum works.
When we when we did it, I thinkthe the base is the same.
It's a once a month, three-hourmeeting.
It's not social.
(26:11):
Uh generally, we would do it atsomeone's office, and you'd
rotate around so you'd seedifferent people's offices.
It was structured.
So it was important that youalways attend and you be on time
and you be available for theentire three hours.
That was the ground rules.
Um, and I think in each of myforums, we allowed people to
(26:31):
have once a year you could miss,but you had to admit you had to
say in advance you were gonnamiss.
And if you miss twice, you'reout of form.
So it was a pretty prettystrict, like you really have to
be there and show up.
And in both of my forums, peoplereally adhered to that.
Um and you know, as over timeyou'd allow people to dial in,
(26:52):
you know, we didn't have videoconferencing, but you you know,
you let somebody dial in on thephone if it was really like they
had a good reason.
Um the three hours tended to bestructured.
Um, the first part of it uh wasupdates.
And you would each sit and yougo around the room and you give
(27:15):
personal and professionalupdates, and you talk about
highs and lows, and you justtalk, and you had to actually
describe what was going on.
It wasn't like bullet pointlist, but like, you know, here's
the professional positive, youknow, high.
And we each I remember when westarted, I can't remember if
this was always the way we didit, but when we started, we
(27:36):
everybody had a piece of paperand you filled it out for a few
minutes on the piece of paper.
So you had your starting pointfor the first five minutes
everybody wrote versus you'rejust talking off the top of your
head, and then you go throughhighs, lows, personal,
professional, and thengenerally, like there was some
summation.
Go around the room and everybodywould listen to each other.
(27:57):
Don't give feedback, don'tcomment, just listen and really
with attention.
Then we generally from thatwould somebody would say, I
would like to go deep as they'regoing around the room, say, I'd
like to go deeper on this issue.
And it could be a professionalissue or a personal issue.
It could be a higher or a low,it could be some combination of
(28:18):
things.
And oftentimes one person, bythe time you get around the
room, one person would have saidthat, maybe sometimes two.
And we decide between one andtwo to then run a process.
And this is the other half ofform.
So maybe that what I justdescribed consumes an hour.
The other two hours you start,the person that is now the
(28:39):
presenter describes theirproblem or describe or their
issue.
It doesn't need to be a problem,whatever they're wanting to
think through.
And sometimes it would be I'vegot an offer for the business,
I'm having trouble with my myrelationship, I've got a
problematic employee, I'm superdepressed and bored.
Uh I, you know, my uh mother isdriving me batch fit crazy
(29:03):
because of this, that, or theother.
It could be anything.
And the person would justpresent and they'd talk about
what the issue was in their ownwords.
They'd go deep on it, and they'dhave about up to third,
depending on it, 15 to 30minutes to uh to explain.
And you know, people wouldoften, with just the
explanation, as they get deeperand deeper into it, get
(29:24):
emotional about it.
And again, you just sit andlisten.
No interaction, no questions, noanything, but really attentive.
At the end of that, each personwould then, and then we wouldn't
go around the room person byperson, but each person could
talk about things from their ownexperience that related to what
(29:45):
they just heard.
And what they would do fromtheir own experience is not say,
I think you should do this, butinstead, here's an experience I
had that's like this part ofwhat you're describing.
It doesn't have to be the whole.
Or I don't know if this fits,but when you were talking about
(30:06):
this, it made me think of thisexperience I had.
So always again framing it frommy experience.
Um and then uh sorry, that's thelast part.
Before that part, sorry, beforethat part, then you have the
second part was a QA.
So the person presents, and thenthe room, after listening, asks
(30:30):
questions.
And the questions can be anykind of questions around the
context.
So it's leading questions todraw more out from the person.
That then leads to the from myexperience uh part.
And the interesting thing aboutthat was, and when I when I
reflect on some, it was makingme think of one uh one one very
(30:53):
uh poignant moment uh in in oneof my Colorado forums.
The thing the person wasdescribing on the surface, it
would feel like nobody wouldhave had that experience.
But the questions people askedcaused people to realize that
(31:14):
the experience the person washaving had little to do with the
thing they were describing, andso almost everybody had a
completely different lifeexperience that related to the
experience, but wouldn't havecome out without the questions.
SPEAKER_02 (31:31):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (31:31):
And then at the end, the person who's the presenter
has a chance to kind of goaround and address each person
in a you know, whatever way theywant it.
It could be appreciation, itcould be, you know, uh uh
empathy around something, itcould be a specific uh statement
around something.
Um, so that that was the thelong arc.
Person presents, questions goaround the room, each person can
(31:57):
talk from their own experience.
And what I found, I mean, I Idid Boston form for three years,
and then I did the Colorado formfor like seven or eight years,
maybe more than that, eightyears, let's say.
The level of emotional intimacythat gets created within the
first three or four meetings isbeyond any other relationships I
(32:21):
have with anybody other than mybusiness partner, Dave, and my
wife Amy.
And so all this, you know, andthis is not all of YO, this is
just your form group.
So, you know, in Colorado, wehad two forms at the beginning.
Form one was my form.
I can't remember what the otherform group name was called.
And then over time, you know,100 people, you probably have 10
or 15 form groups, you know, itkind of continues to grow and
(32:43):
evolve.
But but that level of emotionalintimacy between people at
different points in theirexperiences, but all overlapping
in under 40, founder of company,more than a million in revenue,
ended up creating a way toengage with other people that
(33:06):
was unlike anything I had donebefore and has turned into a way
to engage with people,especially now.
You know, I'm almost 60.
I'd like to think that many ofthe founders that I invest in, I
can engage with them in thoseways if they are interested.
I don't have to, they don't haveto.
But I'm obviously attracted touh founders who have that way of
(33:28):
being.
And, you know, one of the thingsin several of the larger
networks that I've been involvedin, Techstars being one of them,
you see that in lots of places.
It doesn't have to be with everysingle person, but lots of areas
where that sort of emotionalintimacy uh is part of the
fabric of the relationship.
SPEAKER_00 (33:47):
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
What a did I describe formpretty well?
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
The one piece I would love foryou to touch on, because I think
it also ties into uh your workwith your new book, uh Give
First about mentorship.
I want you to touch on theimportance of speaking from
experience as it relates tocreating that equality.
SPEAKER_01 (34:11):
Well, it's it's uh profound.
I think it's obvious inhindsight, but unfortunately for
so many people, it's notintuitive.
And it's also a little hard froman ego perspective, right?
We all have egos.
Um uh and uh you know you canmodulate your ego in different
(34:34):
ways.
And you know, my my the ego thatsits on my shoulder sometimes, I
look at my ego and tell my egoto fuck off and leave me alone,
right?
Because you know, you makeego-driven decisions a lot of
times, not good decisions.
Um in this context, this idea,if you if you take the two ends
of the spectrum, one is youknow, I've I've had uh whatever
(34:58):
experiences I've had, lots ofsuccessful experiences, lots of
experience of failure, lots ofdifferent kinds of experiences
over the 40 years.
I've been in business in the 60years I've been on this planet,
lots of good and bad.
Those experiences are ones thatare mine, that I can describe.
(35:20):
That's one end of the spectrum.
The other end of the spectrum,imagine, and you know, I like to
say uh my father, my fatherdoesn't do this anymore very
much, but he did it when I was akid.
And I describe it as the fingerwag.
And think of think of thepolitician.
I think uh the the politicianthat does it the most is
probably Bernie Sanders, youknow, the contemporary
(35:40):
politician, where they wag theirfinger at you.
You should, you should, youshould.
This is how it should be.
These declarative statementsabout how things should work,
which might or might not becorrect.
But think about your emotionalreaction to the you should, you
should, you should, when,especially if you're an
entrepreneur or a founder, ifsomebody's telling you you
(36:02):
should, I mean, like some peopleare obedient to that.
Like most people are like, Iwant to do the exact opposite.
Or, you know, their response isto immediately stop listening,
or to say, you don't understandme, or you don't understand my
situation.
So those are the two ends of thespectrum.
And what I found in this notionof engaging, regardless of
(36:23):
experience, regardless of anyattribute, pick your attribute,
just throw it out the window.
Um, in terms of engaging withsomeone, if you can talk to them
from your experience, ratherthan directing them what to do,
uh, telling them what the answeris.
(36:46):
It's not dissimilar to amanagement technique that if
anybody's listening that's evermanaged a team.
If you're trying to get a teamdone to get something done
that's really hard in somecompressed period of time, the
worst way to do it is to tellthem you have to get this done
by this day or you're fired.
(37:06):
Now, there's some leaders thatdo that and are quite effective
at it, but for my frame ofreference, the much more
effective way to do it is to getthe team to commit to getting
the thing done by that time.
And you, as the leader, to say,okay, look, we got these
constraints within theseconstraints.
One of the hard constraints isthe deadline.
Like, what can we get done?
And how can we get it done?
(37:27):
And then working with the teamto get the team to agree that
they're going to get the thingdone by that deadline, then that
team's going to be way morecommitted to doing the thing
with high quality to do, youknow, move heaven and earth to
do it.
So, again, different leadershipstyles.
My own view in this creatingequality is this notion that,
(37:51):
you know, we're all individualswith different strengths and
weaknesses.
And what you're trying to do,whether you're in a pure mentor
relationship, whether you're ina manager relationship, or
whether you're a managee, orwhether you're a mentor, mentee
that still has a one-up,one-down relationship, it's an
old cliche, but you're trying toput yourself in the other
(38:14):
person's shoes.
And the only way to really putyourself in the other person's
shoes is to try to understandthe problem from their
perspective.
And frankly, the only way tocommunicate to someone when
you're trying to understand theproblem from their perspective
is to talk from your experiencewith examples rather than be
(38:38):
directive as to what the otherperson should do.
SPEAKER_00 (38:42):
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
Uh, thank you.
And I love your perspective andyour explanation for that.
And it's just good to hear itfrom somebody else's words who's
been doing this for for a longtime.
And you believe so much in thisprocess, you brought it to
Techstars and have used it tosupport many of your Techstars
uh members.
(39:02):
Uh, maybe speak to that for aminute if you don't mind.
SPEAKER_01 (39:06):
Yeah, there were two things that happened uh early in
Techstars that evolved overtime.
One that was directly in thecontext of Techstars, and then
one that was um emerging fromit.
In the very first Tech Starsprogram, which was we started in
2006, ran the first program in2007 in Boulder.
(39:27):
Well, we with David Cohen, whois the co-founder and the CEO of
TextSe came up with this ideafor this thing that we started
calling an accelerator.
And then pretty quickly startedcalling it a mentor-driven
accelerator.
And the reason we called it amentor-driven accelerator, the
word mentor didn't really existin the fabric of
entrepreneurship much, then itwould pop up every now and then,
(39:48):
but it wasn't really the word.
And what we said is look, we'regonna get a bunch of people in
the Boulder and Denver, youknow, uh uh region who were, you
know, founders or worked withfounders and service providers,
or maybe were investors.
And we're gonna surround thesefounders for 90 days, which was
(40:10):
the length of the acceleratorprogram, with these mentors.
We're gonna call them mentors,and the mentors are gonna spend
time with no commitment of anysort other than willingness to
spend time with these founders.
There's no quid pro quo, therewas no definition, there was no
economics.
It was just gonna beinteresting.
We'll see what happens.
And when we were recruiting thementors, and I most many of them
(40:32):
were people I knew, and some ofthem were from the East Coast or
the West Coast and would travelto Boulder.
And, you know, the way I wouldentice them to come to Boulder,
I said, look, if you come toBoulder, in addition to doing
this Textars thing with us, I'llhave dinner with you.
And if you want me to, you know,wander you around town the next
day and introduce you to a bunchof folks, happy to do that.
So, like it was it was a way tokind of get people to to come to
town.
But people were like, no, itsounds like fun.
(40:52):
Summer, Boulder, awesome, let'sdo it.
In the first couple of years, wewe didn't really know what
mentorship was, but we prettyquickly started seeing things
that were effective and thingsthat weren't effective.
And of course, many of thesethings tied back to form.
Um, because I already had, I wasalready doing form.
(41:14):
I had this intuition about sortof the dynamics around these
things.
Like, you know, it was it wassort of already in my head.
And so we started talking, andand I, and of course, we were
doing, David and I were doing alot of the mentorship with the
individual companies as well.
And then, of course, a lot ofthe people you'd be spending
time with who are mentors, you'dalso be doing mentor-like
(41:37):
conversations about theirbusiness or about, you know, I
was, you know, what uh wheretech service was going to
evolve, or at this point, we hadraised foundries first fund and
sort of what was going on withthat.
You'd have those same kind ofpeer-mentor conversations in
these contexts one-on-one.
By about the fourth year, we nowhad done 10 programs.
We were in a couple of differentcities.
(41:57):
Um, and we'd really learned, Ithink, a decent amount about
what was effective versus not.
And David wrote very quicklythis thing called the Textstar's
Mentor Manifesto.
It was 18 bullet points.
Wasn't rules.
It was not, and if you do thesethings, you will be a good
mentor and get a check mark.
It was not that.
(42:18):
It was one-liners that wereideas for people to think about
in the context of mentoring.
And those one-liners, when Iwrote Give First, I organized
part two of the book aroundthose one-liners, they really
hold up well.
And they don't hold up well ofdo these and you will be a good
mentor.
They hold up well.
And if you think hard about thiskind of abstract idea, it can
(42:44):
help you be more effective.
And if you think about it andkind of don't do it, you're
probably going to be lesseffective.
And so that part of the book isfleshing those out from my own
experience.
Right.
So describing the one-linerswith more depth, um, and and
sort of talking about them withmore depth uh intellectually,
(43:05):
but then using experiences thatI'd had that reflected that
one-liner.
Um, so that was one construct.
The other construct was thisphrase give first, uh, which is
a philosophy, not a religion.
It's something to think aboutand to incorporate into your way
of being.
(43:25):
It's not what you should spend100% of your energy on, but it's
a part of the way that you oneoperates.
And it's a set of ideas aroundit.
And the definition is verysimple: it's that you're willing
to put energy into a systemwithout knowing what you're
going to get back.
You don't define the transactionup front.
It's not altruism.
(43:46):
You expect to get somethingback, you just don't know from
whom, over what time period, inwhat form, and what
consideration.
And by 2012, uh, I had written abook called Startup Communities.
And that book, that phrasedidn't exist before that.
And it talked about the idea ofhow do you how you can create a
(44:09):
startup community in any city inthe world.
And I made this assertion thatany city over about 50,000
people benefited from having astartup community.
And so there's this phenomena asentrepreneurship, which always
existed all around the world.
But now this sort of next waveof entrepreneurship started to
have that.
In that, Techstars was a bigpart of that global
(44:32):
democratization ofentrepreneurship, because it was
not just running programs allover the world, but eventually
started doing startup weekendsuh all over the world and
participating in startup weeksand doing things that were
really global in nature.
And I had this one paragraph inthat book called Give Before You
Get.
And that paragraph, I didn'tthink very hard about it, but I
(44:54):
wrote what was roughly thedefinition.
And I was basically saying,look, if you want to really get
things going, you need to bewilling to give before you get.
Put energy into the startupcommunity without defining what
you get from it.
And in a sort of wonderful uhmoment, about six months later,
Adam Grant, who's a Whartonprofessor of organizational
psychology, came out with a bookcalled Give and Take.
SPEAKER_02 (45:17):
Yes.
SPEAKER_01 (45:17):
And my one paragraph was anecdotal.
It was just the way I write, itwas from my experience.
It was things that, you know,I'd been percolating on.
Adam did like all this researchthat showed basically
substantiated this construct ofbeing willing to put energy into
a system without knowing whatyou're going to get, being a
giver.
And for me, it was another youknow, mind-blowing moment of
(45:39):
like, yep, you know, there'ssome real substantiation for
this.
And that that evolved inTechstars lingo and in value
system into this idea of givefirst, being willing to put
energy into things withoutknowing what you're going to get
back.
SPEAKER_00 (45:53):
I love it.
Two quick questions before wesay goodbye.
Brad Feld, the first yourstoried career, you've done
many, many amazing things.
You look back.
What are you most proud of?
SPEAKER_01 (46:08):
I think I'm I don't think I'm most proud of a
singular thing.
I think I'm most proud, I hadn'tthought of it this way, in
reflecting on how I feel abouthow I've engaged with so many
(46:28):
people.
And I feel like I attribute thatto Len Fastner, in that at Len
passed a few years ago.
Uh, Len and I were incrediblyclose friends and stayed close
through the end of his life,even when we weren't working
together.
And what I saw in Len was justthis great joy in how he had
(46:55):
engaged with others in goodtimes and bad, including me.
And I feel the same way.
Like, of course, I have peoplethat don't like me.
Of course, I've disappointedpeople, of course, I've got some
broken relationships.
Every human being does.
Uh, and I'm okay with that.
Like, I feel like that's part oflife.
But I am very comfortable with awide set of ways, you know, the
(47:22):
way I feel about the way I'verelated to so many people.
SPEAKER_00 (47:26):
Well, my next question was going to be about
who's had the most impact onyou.
And I think Len certainly is onethat came up for me as I was
reading the book.
Uh, I would ask this though.
He did say something that was abeautiful quote that I'd love to
end with, having something to dowith they can't kill you.
Uh, can you give us 30 secondsof what that quote was?
SPEAKER_01 (47:45):
Yeah, the book leads off with a story of a moment
where I'm just in abject miseryat Len's house one morning, sort
of as the internet bubble is uhcollapsing.
And, you know, not just thecompany we were running was all
fucked up, but everything in myworld, of which I was on a lot
of boards and made a lot ofinvestments was a mess.
And he sort of cheerfully comesdown the stairs to his kitchen.
(48:07):
He he sees immediately that I'mlike hunched over the kitchen
table, you know, like lookinglike uh sad sack that morning.
He comes up to me and gives me abig hug after we talk a little
bit, and he says, Brad, theycan't kill you and they can't
eat you.
Let's go to work.
SPEAKER_00 (48:30):
I love it.
I love it.
I love it.
Brad Feld, thank you so much foryour time and for everything
you've done for this incrediblecommunity of entrepreneurs, uh,
both in EEO and the tech stars,not to mention everything else
you have done.
A special thanks to ouraudience.
And as a reminder, that reviewshelp uh people find our podcast.
(48:51):
So please leave a review to helpothers find the show.
And thank you again and have agreat rest of your day.
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