August 18, 2025 • 18 mins
When I ask small business owners what was one of the keys to their success they always say- not money, not connects but having the right mentor- this is why my guest today is particularly important.
Brad Feld has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. He co-founded two venture capital firms, Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, and multiple companies, including Techstars. Brad has written multiple books on entrepreneurship and venture capital, and started blogging in 2004 before VC Twitter existed. He is also an art collector and long-distance runner.
His new book is called "Give First: The Power of Mentorship".
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-small-business-radio-show--3306444/support.
Brad Feld has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. He co-founded two venture capital firms, Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, and multiple companies, including Techstars. Brad has written multiple books on entrepreneurship and venture capital, and started blogging in 2004 before VC Twitter existed. He is also an art collector and long-distance runner.
His new book is called "Give First: The Power of Mentorship".
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-small-business-radio-show--3306444/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get ready for all the craziness of small business. It's
exactly that craziness that makes it exciting and totally unbelievable.
Small Business Radio is now on the air with your host,
Barry Moltz.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Well, thanks for joining this week's radio show. Remember this
is the final word in small business for those keeping track,
This is now show number eight hundred and forty four. Well,
when I asked small business owners what was one of
the key to their success, they don't say money.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
They don't say it was their connections.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
They always say the same thing, that they had the
right mentor. This is why my guests today is particularly important.
Brad Feld has been an early stage investor in Ounch
Pursons nineteen eighty seven. He co founded two venture firms,
Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, and multi multiple other companies,
including tech Stars.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Brad's written a lot of different.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Books, and he's got an new book out's called Give First,
The Power of Mentorship. Brad, welcome back to the show
from August twenty twenty.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Very happy to be here. Do you know what the
number eight forty four signifies?
Speaker 3 (01:12):
No, what is signifying?
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Well, I just checked with the AIS and it says
it's often seen as an angel number, a cool suggesting,
a message from your angel, or.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
There you go, guys, and you're that guy you know,
so there you go.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
It says, a sign of positive energy, balance and abundance.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
So let's get in, let's do it to it.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So give first? Is it just a pay forward strategy?
Speaker 4 (01:35):
No, pay it forward is transactional. Someone once did something
for me, and so I'm going to do something for
someone else. Give first is a philosophy, and it's very
important to understand it's a philosophy, not a religion.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
A religion you follow a bunch of rules and good
things happen to you.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Maybe maybe, depending on what your religious tradition.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Is, right, maybe maybe A.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Philosophy is a set of ideas that you build into
your own thinking, in your own way of being. It's
not that you have to embrace every aspect of the philosophy.
It's that you want to include some of those ideas
in what you do and so in what today is
an extremely transactional world, especially if you look at leadership
(02:22):
being modeled by, say, or federal government. Right exactly, the
idea of engaging in different kinds of systems non Transactionally,
you're willing to put energy into the system, but you
don't know what you're going to get back. However, it's
not altruistic. You expect to get something back, you just
(02:42):
don't know when, from whom, over what time period, and
what form. So it's very different than this concept of
pay it forward. Somebody once did something for me, therefore
I need to do something for somebody else. It's a
it's a cousin, but they're different.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So is this like in the book you call it
entrepreneurial seducta, which is Hebrew for charity.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Yeah, so sadaka, which you know, for people that don't
know the word Neil Sedaka.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
The musician, it's not it's not him.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
And my guess is his parents' names started with.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
A tz, not s.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
But sort of the idea, the idea of sadaka, it
really uh in in in the sort of Hebrew tradition,
there are different sorts of ways of giving.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
And the interesting.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Thing about it is my Monotys who came up with
the idea of the sort of eight levels of sadaka
in the tenth century. The first level of sadaka to me,
when I read it, sounds a.
Speaker 5 (03:53):
Lot like angel investing.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
It's to give somebody resources before they know they need them,
to help them achieve a goal.
Speaker 5 (04:02):
That's basically the way to think about it.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
And you know, as I was looking through it, it's
not in this notion of charity per se. I think
that's the way it gets abbreviated.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
But this idea of.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Giving is a fundamental part of most religious traditions and
you know, most of our societal traditions over a long
period of time, and in the context of mentorship, for me,
it really just sort of sang like this idea of
a tenth century philosopher mormonodes coming up with this construct.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
It's so relevant today.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
So does mentorship by your definition, always has to be
volunteer and it's never paid well.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Correct.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
I separate between different categories mentors, advisors, coaches, therapists, or psychologists,
like there are different things that can help a person
in different ways, and in a business context, essentially, what
you've got with a mentor is somebody who's.
Speaker 5 (05:01):
Willing to put energy into you and energy into what
you're doing.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
Interestingly, the magic trick of a mentor mentee relationship is
that the mentor and the mentees over time become peers,
so the mentor actually benefits and learns as much from
the mentee as the mentee does for the mentor. That's
very different than an advisor relationship.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
That's transactional.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Advisor's going to help you or your company with this
thing for this compensation. Good thing, but it's different. Or
a coach, where today, especially an entrepreneurship, many founders have coaches,
and the coaches get paid to help the founder develop
some fundamental skills that they might not other have otherwise
(05:45):
have well. At the same time, depending on the coach
helping them helps.
Speaker 5 (05:50):
The founder learn more about themselves.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Interestingly, there's overlap with therapy or a therapist, but therapists
to get a different type of paid relationship. I really
try to separate them. They're all good, they're all additive.
There's not one's better than the other. They're just different
and trying to collect clearly define.
Speaker 5 (06:08):
Mentorship is a different thing.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
And I love in the book how you said that
empathy is so important, because if you read some of
the articles at times and you listen to what Elon
Musk is saying, that empathy is really out these days, right,
that it's a weakness but you talk about how important
it is as a mentor to have that.
Speaker 5 (06:25):
Why is that, Well, maybe two comments.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
One is there's plenty of people in the world A
that have no empathy, and B don't understand the value
of empathy. So you know, if somebody listening is of that, ILK,
I'm not going to try to convince you that empathy
has has value and impact. From my own experience over
the last forty years in business, both as a founder,
(06:51):
as an angel investor's, a venture investor, somebody that's been
involved in running and scaling large companies, approach things, especially
challenging situations, with empathy has proven to be way more
effective and frankly more satisfying for me than doing it
without empathy. And I value it over a long arc
(07:15):
of a career forty years, not a short term single experience.
So I spend a fair amount of time in the
book talking about it. But at the same time, when
I think about contemporary society, I think there's a lot
of people who behave in very empathetic ways and embrace it.
I think there are some leaders who don't. In the
(07:36):
same way, I think that there are some leaders who
believe that every single thing they do should be win lose,
and that they should win and the other guys should
lose and don't really have an understanding.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
Of positive some experiences.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Where both parties benefit, maybe not equally, but they both
benefit from the transaction.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Did you have ever a situation where you mentored someone
but it turned out to be a toxic relationship and
a kind of came back to bite you.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
Oh yeah, yeah, I've had plenty of failed relationships, and
you know, fortunately from where I sit, I think I've,
for the most part, in relationships that have been broken
for whatever reason, I've tried to behave in a way
that was respectful and fair to the other person in
a lot of cases. You know, my view is, hey, look,
(08:25):
you know, even though our relationship is broken, I'm open
if you want to develop, you know, redevelop or work
on the relationship.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
I'm open to that.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
There have been a few where I haven't been where
I just felt like the other person viol violated whatever
my norms were to such a degree that.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
I didn't want to have anything to do with them.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
So, you know, my my description of give first, and
my narrative about my own life over the last forty
years is not Hey, look, how awesome this is. Everything
is great. I mean, you know, the world is challenging.
Human being is challenging. To say, we're all big bags
of chemicals, and some days there are chemicals don't mix properly.
(09:04):
And I have plenty of bad days, and I'm sure
I've hurt plenty of people's feelings, and I've made lots
of mistakes and.
Speaker 5 (09:10):
Had plenty of things that failed.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
But I think that's just part of the experience of
being a human and part of an experience of being
a business.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
How do you, I guess, how do you go about
a lot of the questions I get is how do
you find the right mentor for you?
Speaker 4 (09:25):
Yeah, this is a fun one because it's a really
challenging thing to do, especially for people who are younger.
My simple answer is just engage in things where there
are people who are operating from a perspective of mentorship
or give first, where you know you can tell that
(09:47):
that's embedded in how they're approaching things. Whether it's in
a startup community where that's a cultural norm within the
startup community, you know, or within an organization like tech Stars,
which I co found, where a key essential part of
what we've done over the last almost nineteen years now
is not just invest in over four thousand companies around
(10:10):
the world, but actively, as part of the investment in
the program that the companies are part of, surround them
with mentors.
Speaker 5 (10:15):
Like put yourself in those places.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
The other thing that's important to recognize around finding a
mentor is it's not going up to somebody and saying, hey, will.
Speaker 5 (10:26):
You be my mentor? That's not effective.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
The effective way to get a busy person's attention is
to figure out what they're interested in and do things
that are additive to their world, even if they're in
very small ways, that are in areas that are interesting
to them. You want to start to develop a relationship.
And if the person who you're developing the relationship with
(10:52):
that's experienced and successful and that you sort of view
as somebody that you want to have as a mentor,
if you do things that are additive to their world,
again can be very small, but engage with things that
are interesting to them, all of a sudden, they'll engage
with you. And for the ones that do those are
people where those relationships often turn into mentor relationships. Some
(11:14):
percentage of those people are just not going to be
interested in you. They're not going to respond, or they're
not going to answer your email, or they're going to
brush you off. That's fine, that that's a person that's
just not going to want to engage.
Speaker 5 (11:25):
It's okay, you need to keep looking.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
How do you make I guess make sure I don't
know if the right word, but that the person is
not doing it just to look good, right, that it's
this is like, you know, we're supposed to give back,
and it's performative and things like that, or that maybe
that doesn't matter, Brad.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
I probably put that in the neutral category. I think
if somebody is doing it for performative reasons, uh, you know,
that's that's probably fine from the standpoint of what it's
actually going to translate into how effective their mentorship is
going to be, how the deep the relationship is going
to develop. If it's performative, it probably is limited in
(12:04):
how deep it gets.
Speaker 5 (12:06):
Interestingly, though, I think judging.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
And rating someone's quality as a mentor is really tricky.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
Again, there's not if you read.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
If somebody gets interested in reads this book, what they're
going to see is that one of the key things
about a mentor is that there's no rules and you're
not judged. There's not a checklist. Oh I need to
do this, I do that, I need to do that.
But there are ways to be effective versus ways to
not be effective as a mentor, and we learned a
lot of them in the first four or five years
(12:40):
of tech Stars, going back to two thousand and six.
And one of the things that really was inspired by
David Collen that he came out with in twenty ten
or twenty eleven was something called the tech Star's Mentor Manifesto,
and it was eighteen bullet points of how to be
an effective mentor. Same thing though not rules, just ideas.
(13:02):
And here's an idea that I think people can grab onto.
I'll link two of them together. One of them is
that as a mentor, you're not telling the mentee what
to do. You're simply giving them data. And the most
effective way to give them data is to give them
data from your own experience, to describe a situation that
(13:22):
you think relates to the situation they're in, and to
sort of pok through that situation by providing them data. However,
you have to accept that they might take in your
data and take in five other piece people's data and
decide to do something totally different than what your data
suggests they should do. And that's okay. As a mentor,
(13:43):
you have to continue to support the mentee unconditionally, and
you know when it turns out the thing that they
do doesn't work. Because the vast majority of things people
try to do in startups, our experiments.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Don't don't work.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Right.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
The key is you run the experiment that doesn't work
as a mentor with the mentee.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
You have to learn from it with them.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
That's one of the things that's really cool about being
a mentor is you get to watch somebody else from
the experiment and then you get to see, oh huh,
my data told me A and they did B and
be worked.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
I'd never really considered that before all of a sudden.
As a mentor, you're learning a bunch too.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
You get the two way.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
What about if you get involved where someone is just
a taker? Can that leave to burnout?
Speaker 5 (14:30):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (14:31):
And the boundaries are really important, and part three of
the book talks about that. I've been very open with
my own struggles over the years, over a long period
of time with exhaustion and mental health issues around depression,
and anxiety. Can label it burnout whatever you want, But
in the context of being in a place where when
(14:53):
I look back at a lot of these situations where
I was just physically and physiologically exhausted. So figuring out
how to set appropriate boundaries the taker language is really
fascinating to me. Adam Grant, who's an organization right organizational
psychologists at Wharton about six months after I wrote Startup Communities,
(15:17):
a book I wrote in twenty twelve which had one
paragraph about this idea. It was called give before You Get,
and it was a very anecdotal paragraph. It was just
me saying, look, if you want to really get the
engine of a startup community moving, you've got to get
all of the founders around the startup community and a
geography putting energy into the system without knowing what they're
(15:38):
going to get back. They're going to get something back someday,
but they don't know what it is. They put energy
and put energy and put energy in then the flywheel
starts to turn. Adam wrote this fantastic book called Give
and Take, where actually did this extensive research that shows
that over the long term, givers are more successful than takers,
(15:58):
and he defines givers, not just financially. So he does
a really good job of exploring success in the context
of this way of being. So, of course, there are
plenty of people that are on the other end that
are constant takers. Understanding the boundary and how to set
a boundary, especially if you're in a mentor relationship with
(16:19):
somebody like that's important. It's also interesting, and I think
everybody probably has somebody like this in their life, whether
it's a friend or a family, where the person will
endlessly ask them for just another thing.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
Right. The person just can't it's their bottom.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
They can't not ask, whether it's money or resource, or
spend time with me, or come do this or whatever.
And anybody who's who's dealt with that in a healthy
way knows that, you know, you have to learn how
to say no to some of those things. And so
this is again a philosophy, not a religion. As a mentor,
you're not obligated to spend time with the mentee in
(17:00):
the context of give first, you're not obligated to spend
one hundred percent of your time non transactionally, that would
be ludicrous. Five percent of your time, ten percent of
your time in very specific areas where you're trying to
do something that's new, and you're trying to make progress
against something or something that you really are deeply committed
to and want to see come to bear with a
(17:23):
set of people who you can engage with like these
are places to look by the way, the power of
this philosophy is to allow it to be a positive
feedback loop for you. If it's not feeding you, if
it's not making you satisfied and happy, enthusiastic, fulfilled, successful,
(17:43):
you should question why you're spending your time this way
on a certain time.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, as you said from the beginning, it's got to
be two ways. We'll Brad.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
The title of the book is give first the power
of mentorship. Where can people catch up with you? May
with felve thoughts.
Speaker 5 (17:57):
I'm easy.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
My blog is at fel dot com. That's probably the
best way. I'm on LinkedIn as Brad Feld. I try
to respond to all my email It's Brad Atfeld dot com,
so you know, easy to find me.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Brad.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Thanks so much and thanks everyone for joining this week's
radio show. Remember love everyone, trust a few, and pali
your own canoe. Have a profitable and passionate week.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
You can find Barrymoltz on the web at Barrymolts dot com.
For more episodes of Small Business Radio at small Business
Radio Show dot com.
Get ready for all the craziness of small business. It's
exactly that craziness that makes it exciting and totally unbelievable.
Small Business Radio is now on the air with your host,
Barry Moltz.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Well, thanks for joining this week's radio show. Remember this
is the final word in small business for those keeping track,
This is now show number eight hundred and forty four. Well,
when I asked small business owners what was one of
the key to their success, they don't say money.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
They don't say it was their connections.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
They always say the same thing, that they had the
right mentor. This is why my guests today is particularly important.
Brad Feld has been an early stage investor in Ounch
Pursons nineteen eighty seven. He co founded two venture firms,
Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, and multi multiple other companies,
including tech Stars.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Brad's written a lot of different.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Books, and he's got an new book out's called Give First,
The Power of Mentorship. Brad, welcome back to the show
from August twenty twenty.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Very happy to be here. Do you know what the
number eight forty four signifies?
Speaker 3 (01:12):
No, what is signifying?
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Well, I just checked with the AIS and it says
it's often seen as an angel number, a cool suggesting,
a message from your angel, or.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
There you go, guys, and you're that guy you know,
so there you go.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
It says, a sign of positive energy, balance and abundance.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
So let's get in, let's do it to it.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So give first? Is it just a pay forward strategy?
Speaker 4 (01:35):
No, pay it forward is transactional. Someone once did something
for me, and so I'm going to do something for
someone else. Give first is a philosophy, and it's very
important to understand it's a philosophy, not a religion.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
A religion you follow a bunch of rules and good
things happen to you.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Maybe maybe, depending on what your religious tradition.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Is, right, maybe maybe A.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Philosophy is a set of ideas that you build into
your own thinking, in your own way of being. It's
not that you have to embrace every aspect of the philosophy.
It's that you want to include some of those ideas
in what you do and so in what today is
an extremely transactional world, especially if you look at leadership
(02:22):
being modeled by, say, or federal government. Right exactly, the
idea of engaging in different kinds of systems non Transactionally,
you're willing to put energy into the system, but you
don't know what you're going to get back. However, it's
not altruistic. You expect to get something back, you just
(02:42):
don't know when, from whom, over what time period, and
what form. So it's very different than this concept of
pay it forward. Somebody once did something for me, therefore
I need to do something for somebody else. It's a
it's a cousin, but they're different.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So is this like in the book you call it
entrepreneurial seducta, which is Hebrew for charity.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Yeah, so sadaka, which you know, for people that don't
know the word Neil Sedaka.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
The musician, it's not it's not him.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
And my guess is his parents' names started with.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
A tz, not s.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
But sort of the idea, the idea of sadaka, it
really uh in in in the sort of Hebrew tradition,
there are different sorts of ways of giving.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
And the interesting.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Thing about it is my Monotys who came up with
the idea of the sort of eight levels of sadaka
in the tenth century. The first level of sadaka to me,
when I read it, sounds a.
Speaker 5 (03:53):
Lot like angel investing.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
It's to give somebody resources before they know they need them,
to help them achieve a goal.
Speaker 5 (04:02):
That's basically the way to think about it.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
And you know, as I was looking through it, it's
not in this notion of charity per se. I think
that's the way it gets abbreviated.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
But this idea of.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Giving is a fundamental part of most religious traditions and
you know, most of our societal traditions over a long
period of time, and in the context of mentorship, for me,
it really just sort of sang like this idea of
a tenth century philosopher mormonodes coming up with this construct.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
It's so relevant today.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
So does mentorship by your definition, always has to be
volunteer and it's never paid well.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Correct.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
I separate between different categories mentors, advisors, coaches, therapists, or psychologists,
like there are different things that can help a person
in different ways, and in a business context, essentially, what
you've got with a mentor is somebody who's.
Speaker 5 (05:01):
Willing to put energy into you and energy into what
you're doing.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
Interestingly, the magic trick of a mentor mentee relationship is
that the mentor and the mentees over time become peers,
so the mentor actually benefits and learns as much from
the mentee as the mentee does for the mentor. That's
very different than an advisor relationship.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
That's transactional.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Advisor's going to help you or your company with this
thing for this compensation. Good thing, but it's different. Or
a coach, where today, especially an entrepreneurship, many founders have coaches,
and the coaches get paid to help the founder develop
some fundamental skills that they might not other have otherwise
(05:45):
have well. At the same time, depending on the coach
helping them helps.
Speaker 5 (05:50):
The founder learn more about themselves.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Interestingly, there's overlap with therapy or a therapist, but therapists
to get a different type of paid relationship. I really
try to separate them. They're all good, they're all additive.
There's not one's better than the other. They're just different
and trying to collect clearly define.
Speaker 5 (06:08):
Mentorship is a different thing.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
And I love in the book how you said that
empathy is so important, because if you read some of
the articles at times and you listen to what Elon
Musk is saying, that empathy is really out these days, right,
that it's a weakness but you talk about how important
it is as a mentor to have that.
Speaker 5 (06:25):
Why is that, Well, maybe two comments.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
One is there's plenty of people in the world A
that have no empathy, and B don't understand the value
of empathy. So you know, if somebody listening is of that, ILK,
I'm not going to try to convince you that empathy
has has value and impact. From my own experience over
the last forty years in business, both as a founder,
(06:51):
as an angel investor's, a venture investor, somebody that's been
involved in running and scaling large companies, approach things, especially
challenging situations, with empathy has proven to be way more
effective and frankly more satisfying for me than doing it
without empathy. And I value it over a long arc
(07:15):
of a career forty years, not a short term single experience.
So I spend a fair amount of time in the
book talking about it. But at the same time, when
I think about contemporary society, I think there's a lot
of people who behave in very empathetic ways and embrace it.
I think there are some leaders who don't. In the
(07:36):
same way, I think that there are some leaders who
believe that every single thing they do should be win lose,
and that they should win and the other guys should
lose and don't really have an understanding.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
Of positive some experiences.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Where both parties benefit, maybe not equally, but they both
benefit from the transaction.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Did you have ever a situation where you mentored someone
but it turned out to be a toxic relationship and
a kind of came back to bite you.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
Oh yeah, yeah, I've had plenty of failed relationships, and
you know, fortunately from where I sit, I think I've,
for the most part, in relationships that have been broken
for whatever reason, I've tried to behave in a way
that was respectful and fair to the other person in
a lot of cases. You know, my view is, hey, look,
(08:25):
you know, even though our relationship is broken, I'm open
if you want to develop, you know, redevelop or work
on the relationship.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
I'm open to that.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
There have been a few where I haven't been where
I just felt like the other person viol violated whatever
my norms were to such a degree that.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
I didn't want to have anything to do with them.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
So, you know, my my description of give first, and
my narrative about my own life over the last forty
years is not Hey, look, how awesome this is. Everything
is great. I mean, you know, the world is challenging.
Human being is challenging. To say, we're all big bags
of chemicals, and some days there are chemicals don't mix properly.
(09:04):
And I have plenty of bad days, and I'm sure
I've hurt plenty of people's feelings, and I've made lots
of mistakes and.
Speaker 5 (09:10):
Had plenty of things that failed.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
But I think that's just part of the experience of
being a human and part of an experience of being
a business.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
How do you, I guess, how do you go about
a lot of the questions I get is how do
you find the right mentor for you?
Speaker 4 (09:25):
Yeah, this is a fun one because it's a really
challenging thing to do, especially for people who are younger.
My simple answer is just engage in things where there
are people who are operating from a perspective of mentorship
or give first, where you know you can tell that
(09:47):
that's embedded in how they're approaching things. Whether it's in
a startup community where that's a cultural norm within the
startup community, you know, or within an organization like tech Stars,
which I co found, where a key essential part of
what we've done over the last almost nineteen years now
is not just invest in over four thousand companies around
(10:10):
the world, but actively, as part of the investment in
the program that the companies are part of, surround them
with mentors.
Speaker 5 (10:15):
Like put yourself in those places.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
The other thing that's important to recognize around finding a
mentor is it's not going up to somebody and saying, hey, will.
Speaker 5 (10:26):
You be my mentor? That's not effective.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
The effective way to get a busy person's attention is
to figure out what they're interested in and do things
that are additive to their world, even if they're in
very small ways, that are in areas that are interesting
to them. You want to start to develop a relationship.
And if the person who you're developing the relationship with
(10:52):
that's experienced and successful and that you sort of view
as somebody that you want to have as a mentor,
if you do things that are additive to their world,
again can be very small, but engage with things that
are interesting to them, all of a sudden, they'll engage
with you. And for the ones that do those are
people where those relationships often turn into mentor relationships. Some
(11:14):
percentage of those people are just not going to be
interested in you. They're not going to respond, or they're
not going to answer your email, or they're going to
brush you off. That's fine, that that's a person that's
just not going to want to engage.
Speaker 5 (11:25):
It's okay, you need to keep looking.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
How do you make I guess make sure I don't
know if the right word, but that the person is
not doing it just to look good, right, that it's
this is like, you know, we're supposed to give back,
and it's performative and things like that, or that maybe
that doesn't matter, Brad.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
I probably put that in the neutral category. I think
if somebody is doing it for performative reasons, uh, you know,
that's that's probably fine from the standpoint of what it's
actually going to translate into how effective their mentorship is
going to be, how the deep the relationship is going
to develop. If it's performative, it probably is limited in
(12:04):
how deep it gets.
Speaker 5 (12:06):
Interestingly, though, I think judging.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
And rating someone's quality as a mentor is really tricky.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
Again, there's not if you read.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
If somebody gets interested in reads this book, what they're
going to see is that one of the key things
about a mentor is that there's no rules and you're
not judged. There's not a checklist. Oh I need to
do this, I do that, I need to do that.
But there are ways to be effective versus ways to
not be effective as a mentor, and we learned a
lot of them in the first four or five years
(12:40):
of tech Stars, going back to two thousand and six.
And one of the things that really was inspired by
David Collen that he came out with in twenty ten
or twenty eleven was something called the tech Star's Mentor Manifesto,
and it was eighteen bullet points of how to be
an effective mentor. Same thing though not rules, just ideas.
(13:02):
And here's an idea that I think people can grab onto.
I'll link two of them together. One of them is
that as a mentor, you're not telling the mentee what
to do. You're simply giving them data. And the most
effective way to give them data is to give them
data from your own experience, to describe a situation that
(13:22):
you think relates to the situation they're in, and to
sort of pok through that situation by providing them data. However,
you have to accept that they might take in your
data and take in five other piece people's data and
decide to do something totally different than what your data
suggests they should do. And that's okay. As a mentor,
(13:43):
you have to continue to support the mentee unconditionally, and
you know when it turns out the thing that they
do doesn't work. Because the vast majority of things people
try to do in startups, our experiments.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Don't don't work.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Right.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
The key is you run the experiment that doesn't work
as a mentor with the mentee.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
You have to learn from it with them.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
That's one of the things that's really cool about being
a mentor is you get to watch somebody else from
the experiment and then you get to see, oh huh,
my data told me A and they did B and
be worked.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
I'd never really considered that before all of a sudden.
As a mentor, you're learning a bunch too.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
You get the two way.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
What about if you get involved where someone is just
a taker? Can that leave to burnout?
Speaker 5 (14:30):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (14:31):
And the boundaries are really important, and part three of
the book talks about that. I've been very open with
my own struggles over the years, over a long period
of time with exhaustion and mental health issues around depression,
and anxiety. Can label it burnout whatever you want, But
in the context of being in a place where when
(14:53):
I look back at a lot of these situations where
I was just physically and physiologically exhausted. So figuring out
how to set appropriate boundaries the taker language is really
fascinating to me. Adam Grant, who's an organization right organizational
psychologists at Wharton about six months after I wrote Startup Communities,
(15:17):
a book I wrote in twenty twelve which had one
paragraph about this idea. It was called give before You Get,
and it was a very anecdotal paragraph. It was just
me saying, look, if you want to really get the
engine of a startup community moving, you've got to get
all of the founders around the startup community and a
geography putting energy into the system without knowing what they're
(15:38):
going to get back. They're going to get something back someday,
but they don't know what it is. They put energy
and put energy and put energy in then the flywheel
starts to turn. Adam wrote this fantastic book called Give
and Take, where actually did this extensive research that shows
that over the long term, givers are more successful than takers,
(15:58):
and he defines givers, not just financially. So he does
a really good job of exploring success in the context
of this way of being. So, of course, there are
plenty of people that are on the other end that
are constant takers. Understanding the boundary and how to set
a boundary, especially if you're in a mentor relationship with
(16:19):
somebody like that's important. It's also interesting, and I think
everybody probably has somebody like this in their life, whether
it's a friend or a family, where the person will
endlessly ask them for just another thing.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
Right. The person just can't it's their bottom.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
They can't not ask, whether it's money or resource, or
spend time with me, or come do this or whatever.
And anybody who's who's dealt with that in a healthy
way knows that, you know, you have to learn how
to say no to some of those things. And so
this is again a philosophy, not a religion. As a mentor,
you're not obligated to spend time with the mentee in
(17:00):
the context of give first, you're not obligated to spend
one hundred percent of your time non transactionally, that would
be ludicrous. Five percent of your time, ten percent of
your time in very specific areas where you're trying to
do something that's new, and you're trying to make progress
against something or something that you really are deeply committed
to and want to see come to bear with a
(17:23):
set of people who you can engage with like these
are places to look by the way, the power of
this philosophy is to allow it to be a positive
feedback loop for you. If it's not feeding you, if
it's not making you satisfied and happy, enthusiastic, fulfilled, successful,
(17:43):
you should question why you're spending your time this way
on a certain time.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, as you said from the beginning, it's got to
be two ways. We'll Brad.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
The title of the book is give first the power
of mentorship. Where can people catch up with you? May
with felve thoughts.
Speaker 5 (17:57):
I'm easy.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
My blog is at fel dot com. That's probably the
best way. I'm on LinkedIn as Brad Feld. I try
to respond to all my email It's Brad Atfeld dot com,
so you know, easy to find me.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Brad.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Thanks so much and thanks everyone for joining this week's
radio show. Remember love everyone, trust a few, and pali
your own canoe. Have a profitable and passionate week.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
You can find Barrymoltz on the web at Barrymolts dot com.
For more episodes of Small Business Radio at small Business
Radio Show dot com.
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