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The $10 Startup That Launched Brad Feld's Quest For Non-Transactional Relationships · The Inspired Stories Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast,
• 0:08
  where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
• 0:11
  their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
• 0:14
  adversity. My name is Anthony Cotispodi and
• 0:17
  today's guest is Brad Feld, partner at Foundry VC.
• 0:21
  They are a venture capital firm based in Boulder, Co investing
• 0:25
  in startups and venture funds since 2007.
• 0:29
  They believe in a give first philosophy and focus on building
• 0:33
  a strong network that drives innovation now.
• 0:36
  Brad has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since
• 0:40
  the mid 80s, Co founding tech stars and serving in leadership
• 0:44
  positions at Mobius Venture Capital and Intensity Ventures.
• 0:49
  He's also written multiple books on venture capital and
• 0:52
  entrepreneurship, sharing valuable insights with the
• 0:55
  startup community. And he has a new book coming out
• 0:58
  June 24th, 2025 called Give First, The Power of Leadership.
• 1:04
  Under his guidance, Foundry has supported companies across
• 1:07
  various industries and has continued to shape the venture
• 1:10
  ecosystem through mentorship and strategic investments.
• 1:14
  The firm is also recognized as a Certified B Corp, reinforcing
• 1:19
  its commitment to doing business that benefits society.
• 1:22
  Now before we get into all that good stuff, today's episode is
• 1:25
  brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where
• 1:28
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• 1:53
  Now back to our guest today, partner at Foundry VC, Brad
• 1:57
  Phelp. I appreciate you making the time
• 1:59
  to Share your story today. Thanks Anthony, fun to be here.
• 2:02
  So Brad, today you're best known as a founding partner at Foundry
• 2:06
  and one of the minds behind Techstars.
• 2:09
  But I want to rewind several years.
• 2:12
  Back in 1985, you started Feld Technologies before most people
• 2:18
  even knew what a venture backed startup was.
• 2:21
  I mean, were you still in school at that point?
• 2:23
  What made you want to build something of your own that early
• 2:26
  on? Yeah.
• 2:27
  And I, I would be really clear, Feld Technologies was most
• 2:29
  definitely not a venture backed startup because we had no money
• 2:32
  and we raised no money, OK, we funded the company with 10
• 2:36
  bucks. I, I had six of those.
• 2:39
  I got 6 shares of stock. My partner Dave Joke got 3
• 2:42
  shares of stock. He invested 3 bucks.
• 2:44
  And my dad, who was an advisor of ours, invested a buck and
• 2:50
  that's how he split up the company.
• 2:51
  But it, it was a bootstrap business.
• 2:54
  It was, I like to joke now that I named it after my dad, but not
• 2:58
  very creatively named. And we, you know, we really knew
• 3:01
  kind of nothing when we started the company.
• 3:03
  I was, I was in college, I was 19 years old when we started.
• 3:08
  Dave joined me in 1987. So we really sort of marked the
• 3:12
  beginning of the partnership that we had then.
• 3:16
  And we ran the business for seven years, built a couple
• 3:20
  $1,000,000 business that had to be profitable every month
• 3:23
  because we had no money and we had clients all around the US.
• 3:28
  What were you doing? What was the service you were
• 3:30
  we? Were writing business software,
• 3:33
  this was consulting company, but we were writing business
• 3:35
  software before they were real database, PC based database
• 3:41
  systems. So at the time, if you wind the
• 3:44
  clock back to the late 80s, early 90s, it was pre client
• 3:48
  server computing. For people that have been around
• 3:52
  for a while, they'll remember things like Dbase, maybe
• 3:56
  Paradox, a couple of other things like that.
• 4:00
  These database languages which were used to build systems kind
• 4:06
  of sucked. And generally speaking at the
• 4:08
  time they, they kind of worked only on single PCs.
• 4:12
  They didn't really work on a network.
• 4:15
  The networks themselves, the Internet, you know, commercially
• 4:18
  wasn't a thing. So the network, the primary
• 4:21
  network provider at the time or software provider at the time
• 4:23
  was Novell. Eventually Microsoft came out
• 4:27
  with Windows NT and a network server product and, and really
• 4:31
  kind of decimated Novell. But that was a dominant product
• 4:34
  at the time and it was pretty fragile.
• 4:37
  So the problem of building software that worked across a
• 4:44
  small or medium sized business on PCs cause most small, medium
• 4:48
  sized businesses up to that point that had computers, if
• 4:51
  they had a system, it was a mini computer based system, you know,
• 4:55
  IBM 36 or AS 400, things like that.
• 4:59
  So the PC based stuff was, was really hard to do.
• 5:03
  The difference that we took in our company was we hired both
• 5:09
  Dave and I had gone to MIT, We hired real software developers
• 5:14
  that had an interest in business and we used languages that were
• 5:18
  real programming languages to build real software, but that
• 5:21
  was custom aim for business. It's kind of ironic that today
• 5:27
  with LLMS and you know what's being classified as AI is once
• 5:32
  again making software development more accessible
• 5:35
  through this new thing called vibe coding.
• 5:39
  I stopped writing. Can you explain vibe coding for
• 5:41
  our listeners? Sure.
• 5:42
  So I I stopped writing commercial software in 1992.
• 5:47
  By that point, I was too busy being the, the I was president
• 5:51
  of the company. We didn't have ACEO 'cause we
• 5:52
  didn't even know what a difference between a president
• 5:54
  and the CEO was. And I just didn't have time to
• 5:59
  write software anymore. And then post that, I started to
• 6:02
  invest as an Angel investor with my own money.
• 6:04
  And then I ended up becoming a venture capital investor and
• 6:06
  started a few other companies, but just couldn't, you know,
• 6:09
  couldn't write software anymore. I've always loved to program
• 6:12
  like it's one of the things I enjoy.
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  And as an aside, I think the reason I've written so many
• 6:18
  books is because writing books to me in some ways is a similar
• 6:22
  activity to writing software. And the difference is the
• 6:26
  language doesn't change. I you write in English.
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  I mean, you get better at writing in English, but it's
• 6:31
  still the same language. And the tools really don't
• 6:34
  change. It's mostly using Microsoft Word
• 6:36
  and now Google Docs. And there's a couple of writing
• 6:39
  tools like Scrivener. But generally speaking, you
• 6:42
  don't have to learn a whole bunch of complicated stuff.
• 6:44
  Whereas with software development, especially with the
• 6:47
  rise of the commercial Internet by about 19, I don't know, 9798,
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  like the tools have become too complicated for me to get up the
• 6:56
  learning curve. So I would learn a new
• 6:58
  programming language every couple of years just as a hobby.
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  So, you know, I can, I'm reasonably proficient, for
• 7:04
  example, in Python, but I really can't do anything.
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  I can't make anything work because it's one thing to be
• 7:11
  able to write a simple little thing.
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  It's a whole nother thing to be able to build something that
• 7:14
  goes into production, works on the web, scales up and have
• 7:19
  multiple users, that sort of thing.
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  I just never had the time or the focus on it.
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  Vibe Coding is sort of a merge that got labeled in February or
• 7:29
  March of of 2025. For me, what happened was over
• 7:33
  the holiday break, December, you know, where a lot of the venture
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  capital world kind of shuts down and a lot of the business world
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  shuts down. It gets very slow.
• 7:43
  I usually use that time to mess around with something new.
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  I'd had a few friends who had mentioned to me this product
• 7:51
  called Cursor, and it said, hey, Brad, you know, I know we like
• 7:55
  to program. You want to try Cursor because
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  it integrates with all of the existing LLMS, whether it's
• 8:02
  clawed or open AI or Gemini, and it allows you to use them to
• 8:09
  help you write code. And I'm like, yeah, what the
• 8:13
  hell? And so, you know, I downloaded
• 8:16
  it from cursor.ai@thetimenowitscursor.com
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  that I think they got. They just got the domain name.
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  The tool is built on top of an open source product called VS
• 8:28
  Code, which is Microsoft's environment.
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  So the environment that Microsoft has used for
• 8:33
  developers for many, many years Evolved, evolved, evolved,
• 8:36
  eventually became called VS Code.
• 8:38
  And then they open sourced it a while ago for a variety of
• 8:42
  reasons, including the fact that I think there was a lot of
• 8:46
  backlash against Microsoft being closed source on a lot of their
• 8:49
  tools. Plus they had bought GitHub.
• 8:51
  I don't remember whether it was before or after they bought
• 8:53
  GitHub, but that was like to be part of the contemporary
• 8:56
  development community. They decided to do that.
• 8:59
  So this company started with that, did what in the open
• 9:04
  source world is called forking, which is you sort of take a
• 9:07
  starting point, you fork it, so now it's yours.
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  And then you can do whatever you want with it.
• 9:11
  You can build a proprietary product, you can build open
• 9:14
  source product, you can modify it.
• 9:16
  And what they did was really pretty brilliant was they
• 9:19
  integrated into the development environment before anybody else
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  was really doing this. All of these LMS.
• 9:27
  Now this market is moving very, very fast.
• 9:30
  And so that's not that unique anymore.
• 9:32
  There's a whole bunch of companies that have done this.
• 9:34
  But even in December, what was that seven months ago, you know,
• 9:38
  if you went on Microsoft and Copilot and the Microsoft tools
• 9:42
  with GitHub and with open AI, like it was pretty Medio, it
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  didn't really help somebody that didn't know how to do all this
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  stuff. Cursor within, I don't know, 4
• 9:54
  hours. I was able to make something
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  simple and deploy it and actually have it up and running
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  on the web using a back end called.
• 10:02
  It's incredible. For sell and all of a sudden I'm
• 10:05
  like, huh? And so I messed around with a
• 10:08
  couple of different projects. I have one longer project that
• 10:11
  I'm working on that's a personal health manager and describe it
• 10:16
  if you want. But the other one, which is kind
• 10:17
  of fun and people can play it because it's out on the web now,
• 10:19
  is called Dinostroids and Dino. What Dinostroids like asteroids?
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  Like asteroids but with dinosaurs instead of asteroids.
• 10:28
  I have a dinosaur fetish. I my inner 14 year old shines
• 10:31
  bright. I name things dinosaur names and
• 10:34
  stuff like that. I've got a, a bunch of land
• 10:38
  outside of Aspen where we live called Stegosaurus Ranch, you
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  know, stuff like that. And it's very.
• 10:45
  Thematic I guess. Yeah, I stay with that theme.
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  I like themes. And I just decided, you know,
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  I'll try to make a, you know, a dinosaur's game.
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  And probably took about 40 hours total, of which about 20 was
• 11:02
  going up the learning curve on cursor GitHub Versal.
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  I don't know JavaScript, it's programming language.
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  I've never done anything in I could, you know, I could maybe
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  read it a little because it's, it's kind of basic.
• 11:15
  But if you said, hey, sit down and write hello world very, you
• 11:18
  know, the, the first thing you write and when you learn to
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  write in a programming language, which is just a thing that says
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  on your screen, hello world. I, I couldn't do it with, I
• 11:27
  couldn't write it down on a piece of paper, the right code.
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  I don't. I don't know it well enough.
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  But you understand enough about how the different pieces and
• 11:34
  parts need to come together to make something to work that when
• 11:38
  you've got a tool like Cursor, it can fill in sort of those
• 11:41
  knowledge gaps about how to actually script things.
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  For you, it puts it all together and that's what Vibe coding is.
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  And so now you know, for people who are not software and into
• 11:49
  software development, what you'll be reading about
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  endlessly, and it's applicable to many different things, is
• 11:54
  this idea of agentic AI. Where what agentic AI really
• 11:59
  means is that there's these little agents that are AI agents
• 12:04
  that are doing things that otherwise you might be doing as
• 12:08
  a a human. And as a human, you control a
• 12:10
  bunch of these agents that are doing stuff and programming and
• 12:15
  writing software is a very easy for that technology to work
• 12:23
  effectively against. And the reason for that is, is
• 12:26
  that there's an enormous amount of code on the web and in
• 12:30
  different stores that are out there that are the AI can train
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  on. And in all cases, it's kind of a
• 12:39
  finite and constrained thing. There's multiple ways to do
• 12:42
  different things, but the the language has pretty definitive
• 12:46
  meaning. Programming languages, the
• 12:47
  constraints of the environments are reasonably well defined
• 12:51
  compared to, for example, English or French, you know
• 12:55
  where the words all are defined, but the way that you can do
• 12:57
  things with grammar and logic has nuance.
• 13:01
  The way you put things together matters a lot.
• 13:03
  It's less constrained. So like if you think about the,
• 13:06
  the, the tooling that you could build for software development,
• 13:10
  that's where a lot of energy's going.
• 13:12
  Oh, by the way, software developers for since the
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  beginning of time have been working on tooling for software
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  development. So it's like a natural place
• 13:18
  where there's a lot of energy that goes into it.
• 13:20
  The the thing that ties all this back to the 1990s was there was
• 13:26
  a thing called 4th generation languages, or 4 GLS languages
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  like BASIC and Pascal and C were considered 3 GLS third
• 13:38
  generation languages. The 4th generation languages
• 13:42
  were ones where you didn't have to write a lot of the code.
• 13:44
  You'd be able to interact with something that would generate a
• 13:48
  bunch of the code for you. And there were a number of 4G LS
• 13:51
  that got created in that time period.
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  Some that we my company worked with were Clarion was probably
• 13:57
  probably the primary one. We used another one called
• 13:59
  Dataflex, but there are many of these and most of the database
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  languages like dbase and Paradox kind of were positioned as 4th
• 14:08
  generation languages. However, probably by about 1995
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  4G LS were more or less done they.
• 14:20
  Weren't like hefty enough they couldn't actually execute on.
• 14:23
  Sort of the the functionality, I think it was a bunch of stuff.
• 14:26
  As they became more and more complicated, you had to become
• 14:29
  more and more capable to get to 4G LS to do anything the to
• 14:35
  actually build something that was significant.
• 14:39
  The Internet introduced a whole nother layer of networking and
• 14:42
  user interface that was very simplistic at the beginning with
• 14:48
  how HTML worked in the very early web browsers.
• 14:50
  If people think about early Yahoo and early things you'd
• 14:53
  done on the Web in 1995 or 1996. But pretty quickly that evolved.
• 14:58
  And even by, you know, the peak of the Internet bubble, 2000,
• 15:04
  2001, there was a lot of what was in the 80s and 90s called
• 15:09
  middleware, which was the software that sat between the
• 15:13
  user interface and the back end and did a bunch of stuff.
• 15:18
  And then you had APIs where all of a sudden if you build a piece
• 15:21
  of software, you can put an API around it and people could use
• 15:24
  the API to get the software to do things.
• 15:28
  And the rise of companies, very successful public companies like
• 15:31
  Twilio, we were investor in a company called Sendgrid, but
• 15:35
  hundreds of companies like that built their businesses entirely
• 15:39
  around the idea of APIs and that's what they charge money
• 15:42
  for. That complexity kind of became
• 15:44
  too much for 4G LS to be very effective with.
• 15:48
  And if you tried to sort of go up the learning curve in 2015,
• 15:55
  right? I, you know, I, I took a, a
• 15:58
  programming, somebody takes a programming class in college,
• 16:02
  they go and they try to learn how to do something in a company
• 16:05
  to build production level software.
• 16:08
  It's hard and it takes a while and it's complicated and it
• 16:12
  takes a lot of effort and focus. And so you can't really do it if
• 16:16
  you're a business person that has some affinity, like has the
• 16:20
  ability to do it versus say I want to pay somebody else to do
• 16:23
  it. Just you didn't the amount of
• 16:25
  time it took, the knowledge you had to have and frankly the reps
• 16:29
  you have to keep doing it over and over it again to keep your
• 16:32
  like muscles strong the same way you do with.
• 16:35
  But with some of the new AI tools, I think where you're
• 16:37
  going with this is that's not as necessary.
• 16:39
  It's changing, it's changing, and we'll see.
• 16:41
  I mean, for me as somebody who was reasonably capable as a
• 16:44
  software developer a long time ago, I'd certainly, I can
• 16:48
  certainly do it if I gave it to my mother and said to my mom,
• 16:51
  here's the thing, go do it. I think it would be much harder
• 16:54
  for her 'cause that's not, you know, that's not the background
• 16:57
  she has. But what you can see is this
• 16:58
  evolution of it happening very, very quickly on the tooling side
• 17:03
  where you're like, huh, this is interesting how this is gonna
• 17:06
  work. Maybe I'll end this thread by
• 17:08
  saying, you know, there's a lot of, there's 2 ends of the
• 17:11
  spectrums with people talking about AI and it's probably worth
• 17:14
  for your audience knowing. I mean, I, whenever somebody
• 17:18
  says AI in my head, I substitute the word software.
• 17:24
  And the reason I do that is to get rid of the hype cycle that's
• 17:27
  in AI right now, which is extraordinary.
• 17:29
  It's a extreme hype cycle. And you know, the computer
• 17:34
  industry, technology industry is, is extraordinary at hyping
• 17:39
  what the next thing is like. That's been the essence of
• 17:42
  marketing since I think Regis McKenna, who is the marketer
• 17:45
  that is famous for all the stuff he did for Apple in the 80s and
• 17:51
  90s, so invented this like thing.
• 17:55
  The the interesting step back is if you substitute the word
• 17:58
  software for AI, it forces you to realize that these are just
• 18:03
  rapidly evolving new technologies, not any different
• 18:07
  than it's ever been in the computer industry.
• 18:11
  And for me, what's fascinating is how the software is now
• 18:16
  starting to be used in a much more accessible way by a
• 18:21
  different set of users than they could before.
• 18:24
  It's changing the way a lot of software is created, changing
• 18:27
  the way we interact with the computer as end users in terms
• 18:31
  of typing into a box to search for something.
• 18:33
  Now typing into a box and getting actual text that has
• 18:37
  different stuff we can work with and over a long period of time.
• 18:41
  I think there's 2 frames of reference.
• 18:44
  One frame of reference is the what's what are now being
• 18:49
  labeled the AI Doomers, which are people in the AI world who
• 18:54
  believe that the Terminator is going to exterminate the human
• 18:57
  race. The other end of the spectrum
• 19:00
  are the AI gloomers. Sorry, the AI boomers who
• 19:03
  believe that this is going to make for a new generation of
• 19:08
  human enlightenment. And where does Brad sit in that
• 19:11
  spectrum? I am probably, I'm probably
• 19:15
  closer to the optimistic end than the pessimistic end because
• 19:20
  I've thought the machines have taken over for a long time.
• 19:23
  I said in 19, sorry, 20 about 2010, I at a talk at a public
• 19:29
  conference, I gave a talk called Resistance is Futile.
• 19:33
  And I said, look, I think the machines have already taken
• 19:36
  over. And I have no idea if the future
• 19:39
  is going to be human enhanced computers or computer enhanced
• 19:44
  humans. I don't know.
• 19:45
  But they've already taken over. They're just waiting.
• 19:47
  They're just very patient and they're patiently waiting for us
• 19:51
  to put all of human knowledge into them.
• 19:54
  And they're letting us assemble them so that they don't have to
• 19:57
  figure out how to assemble themselves.
• 20:00
  And as we as humans assemble them and put all of human
• 20:04
  knowledge into them and interconnect all the pieces,
• 20:07
  they're just being patient, but just.
• 20:09
  Be comfortable with that idea. So I I've been sort of in the.
• 20:12
  I mean, that actually sounds a little dystopian to me.
• 20:15
  Not so much at the optimistic end.
• 20:17
  It's like they've got a plan and they're sort of like letting us
• 20:20
  do the heavy lifting. I won't be.
• 20:23
  Yeah. So dystopian is unfortunately
• 20:25
  what Hollywood has been programming us since the
• 20:27
  beginning of sci-fi movies, right?
• 20:29
  I read a lot of science fiction. I love science fiction.
• 20:31
  But, you know, think of all of the movies where the, the, the
• 20:37
  forget about aliens. Now just think about computers
• 20:40
  or machines where the humans survive or defeat the machines
• 20:44
  or something like that. In the end or Skynet becomes
• 20:48
  activated. But you know, you're in the
• 20:49
  bunker and you know, that's setting you up for 37 Terminator
• 20:53
  sequels so that Hollywood can keep minting money.
• 20:57
  For me, I don't really know where it goes.
• 20:59
  I, I hope the machines are nice to me.
• 21:03
  So whenever I have a chance, whenever I'm public, machines
• 21:05
  are ingesting all this information.
• 21:06
  So I'm sure they're listening to this podcast and dissecting it.
• 21:11
  I just say to the machines, please be nice to me.
• 21:13
  I'm nice to you, be nice to me. You're trying to lay the
• 21:16
  groundwork that you're a good guy.
• 21:18
  I mean, they still, I don't know what's going to happen, but I
• 21:20
  think that's part of the human condition is we really don't
• 21:22
  know what's going to happen. And I'd rather be optimistic
• 21:24
  than pessimistic about the future.
• 21:26
  OK, so let's take a step back. I'm looking at your LinkedIn.
• 21:30
  For hijacking the 1st 10 minutes, it's good.
• 21:32
  Hey, I don't like to lose all your listeners.
• 21:34
  Like I told you, off screen, wherever the conversation goes
• 21:37
  is where it was meant to be. But you know, it looks to me
• 21:41
  like you're involved in probably 4 different ventures now.
• 21:44
  Mobius Venture Capital, Intensity Ventures, Techstars
• 21:47
  and Foundry. Yeah, 3, three of them, Mobius,
• 21:50
  which was a spin off from SoftBank in the mid 90s.
• 21:55
  I was one of four founders of that and SoftBank was our
• 22:00
  sponsor. In the mid 90s, nobody knew who
• 22:01
  SoftBank was or they were starting to become known.
• 22:03
  Today, I think most people know who SoftBank is.
• 22:06
  There's a group of us that was essentially the US based venture
• 22:10
  activity for SoftBank, but we had a separate fund and in 2000
• 22:15
  we changed the name of it to Mobius because SoftBank was
• 22:17
  doing a bunch of stuff and we were getting confused with each
• 22:19
  other. And it it, it just was we
• 22:22
  decided to do it. In hindsight, I have no idea
• 22:24
  what's a good idea about it. Yeah, Intensity Ventures is a
• 22:27
  long running entity that's my own holding company.
• 22:30
  So I do all my own personal investing through it and any
• 22:33
  business that I do that has any sort of commercial activities
• 22:36
  through that. Foundry is a venture fund.
• 22:40
  I started with four other partners in 2007 and that firm
• 22:47
  today is a little bit over 3 billion AUM.
• 22:50
  We have six partners. We've raised a bunch of funds,
• 22:54
  done a bunch of investments. We have about 60 or 70, maybe
• 22:58
  let's say 70 active companies today, all tech related, all US
• 23:02
  based except for a coupling in Canada.
• 23:05
  And then we also have invested since 2016 in venture funds.
• 23:10
  So we've been investing in pre seed and seed stage venture
• 23:13
  funds. We've got about 5050 different
• 23:15
  firms that we've invested in that created a network for us.
• 23:19
  I'd been investing personally in venture funds going back to
• 23:22
  1997. So that was always something I
• 23:25
  did as part of my own investing activity.
• 23:28
  And we institutionalized it, made a part of our funds in
• 23:31
  2016. And are these all tech related
• 23:33
  as well? They're all tech related.
• 23:34
  And if you go to foundry dot VC and look at portfolio and then
• 23:40
  click a button that says funds, you see all the funds and there
• 23:42
  are, you know many, many really now today successful very early
• 23:46
  stage precede and seed stage. Foundry's entry point is Series
• 23:51
  A. So we have a lot of exposure
• 23:53
  through our investments in funds to stuff at the pre seed and
• 23:57
  seed stage. And then we are constantly
• 24:00
  looking at that universe of companies for companies that we
• 24:04
  can then lead a Series A or Co lead a Series A.
• 24:08
  So it's kind of like a really good lead, Jen, you know what I
• 24:13
  mean? You're obviously a lot more
• 24:14
  involved and invested. There's a part of it that's
• 24:16
  that. I mean, we had always had that
• 24:18
  kind of view as a venture fund, which we didn't run around
• 24:23
  chasing deals. We sort of, we did about 10
• 24:27
  investments a year, so our 10 new investments a year.
• 24:29
  So our premise was not that we're trying to get into every
• 24:32
  great investment. We miss a lot of stuff, but then
• 24:34
  we make 10 investments a year that we feel really confident in
• 24:38
  knowing that many of them are going to fail because that's how
• 24:40
  venture capital works, right? If you even if you're investing
• 24:43
  at the Series A, the companies are still very young and they're
• 24:45
  not proven. A lot of things don't work, but
• 24:48
  we're looking, you know, across the universe of things that
• 24:51
  we're having good exposure to. We generally use historically
• 24:55
  used a theme based approach. We talked about themes earlier.
• 24:58
  We had a couple of areas of interest that we knew really
• 25:01
  well. And you know, we tended to
• 25:04
  invest in those areas over a period of time and then they'd
• 25:07
  evolve and sometimes they'd change.
• 25:10
  And we had a very small team. Foundry only has 12 people, so
• 25:13
  we have, you know, six partners, a couple of BAS, a general
• 25:18
  counsel, CFO, and then they have a person that's an operations
• 25:24
  manager that works for them that helps with transactional stuff.
• 25:27
  We don't have associates, we don't have, you know, venture
• 25:30
  partners, we don't have ears. It's just the six partners doing
• 25:35
  all the work. We did announce when we started
• 25:39
  Foundry in 2007, we said one day we'll have raised our last fund
• 25:43
  and we'll just announce that we've raised our last fund.
• 25:45
  Like we're not trying to create a multi generational firm.
• 25:47
  We're not trying to create a firm that lives, outlives its
• 25:49
  founders. I'm going to turn 60 at the end
• 25:53
  of this year. So I was definitely starting to
• 25:55
  get to the end of my cycle. We raised a fund that closed in
• 26:01
  spring of 2023, we call it our 22 fund, but we did our final
• 26:04
  close in spring of 23 and in January 24 we announced that
• 26:09
  that was our last fund. So we probably still got half a
• 26:13
  dozen investments or so out of that fund to make that would be
• 26:15
  new. But I, you know, I, I was
• 26:19
  personally clear that having, you know, been doing venture now
• 26:24
  and investing as an Angel investor or VC investor for over
• 26:27
  30 years. Like venture funds take another
• 26:30
  decade from the time that you close them at least to finish
• 26:35
  The Mobius fund that we raised in 2000, which I ran until the
• 26:40
  end, closed down. We closed down the, the fund in
• 26:43
  2022. So 22 years.
• 26:47
  And you know, I at 60, I could imagine myself in my 60s, you
• 26:51
  know, managing companies and being on the board and helping
• 26:56
  where I can help. But I wasn't really interested
• 26:58
  in continuing to sign up for at least another plus 10 years.
• 27:02
  And as a firm like we I had, my two of my other founding
• 27:05
  partners were in exactly the same place.
• 27:08
  And you know, the six of us talked about it and pretty
• 27:10
  pretty quickly agreed that it made sense to call it our last
• 27:14
  fund. So that foundry will continue
• 27:16
  and we have a lot of activity around it.
• 27:19
  But my guess is, you know, in the next year or so we'll have
• 27:22
  finished making new investments and then we have plenty of
• 27:26
  capital to support our existing companies and that sort of
• 27:29
  thing. And then Techstars is now 18
• 27:31
  years old. I, I was one of four Co founders
• 27:33
  of that in 2006, the year before we started Foundry.
• 27:36
  It was me, David Cohen who was the CEO, David Brown, who was
• 27:41
  David Cohen's long term time business partner and Jared
• 27:44
  Polis, who was a long time friend of mine.
• 27:46
  We've done a couple of companies together and Jared today is
• 27:50
  Governor of Colorado and is just a remarkable guy.
• 27:53
  And the four of us, David Cohen, had an idea for doing a thing
• 27:58
  that nobody had a label for. We were, you know, one of the
• 28:00
  very early accelerators. We labeled it an accelerator.
• 28:05
  We talked about it as a mentor driven accelerator.
• 28:08
  So the idea was we'll get 10 companies together, a finite
• 28:12
  number of them in Boulder for 90 days.
• 28:17
  We'd give them a small amount of money, but we'd spend full time
• 28:21
  with him. David spent full time with him,
• 28:23
  I spent part time with him and we'd surround him with mentors.
• 28:29
  We had about 50 people in the Boulder community, but Boulder
• 28:33
  Denver community, but also East Coast and West Coast friends, a
• 28:36
  couple of a couple of founders, a couple of investors who would
• 28:40
  come into Boulder for a day or two and spend time with these
• 28:42
  companies. And when we started in 2006, the
• 28:46
  first program we ran in 2007, we just viewed it as an experiment,
• 28:49
  like we really no idea whether it was a good idea or not.
• 28:52
  And you know, 18 years later, I think Techstar has now funded
• 28:56
  over 4000 companies around the world.
• 28:58
  And you know, we do, I don't know, 3-4 hundred investments a
• 29:02
  year. And we have a network of, you
• 29:07
  know, 10,000 founders and 20,000 mentors that are all sort of
• 29:10
  actively engaged again, in this network model.
• 29:14
  And you know, like most networks, some people are
• 29:16
  incredibly engaged. A lot of people are sort of
• 29:18
  engaged and some people are just part of the network and they
• 29:20
  engage every now and then. But it's been really rewarding
• 29:25
  on a path for me, which I now label this idea.
• 29:29
  One of my goals had been to help democratize entrepreneurship
• 29:33
  globally. So the premise that anyone
• 29:37
  anywhere in the world can and should be able to start a
• 29:41
  company and build a company. You don't have to build it in
• 29:44
  Silicon Valley or something like that.
• 29:46
  And also that every city in the world that had any critical mass
• 29:50
  of people and 50,000 people's plenty could and should have a
• 29:55
  thing. I called a startup community as
• 29:58
  part of it and a startup community, I wrote a book about
• 30:02
  it in 2012 called Startup Communities.
• 30:04
  That phrase didn't exist. A startup community is
• 30:10
  essentially has one purpose, and that purpose is to help founders
• 30:15
  be successful, help founders succeed.
• 30:18
  And there are these things called entrepreneurial
• 30:19
  ecosystems that are sort of a superset of it.
• 30:23
  And the entrepreneurial ecosystem are all the different
• 30:26
  actors in a community, university, government, big
• 30:30
  business, investors, service providers, companies that work
• 30:35
  with other companies like your business, they can all be part
• 30:38
  of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
• 30:41
  One of their goals is to help founders succeed and they often
• 30:46
  have people working for them who I labeled instigators who play
• 30:51
  leadership roles in the start up community.
• 30:54
  Instigators takes on a bit of a different meaning here.
• 30:57
  It does, and it's a positive instigator versus a negative
• 31:00
  instigator. And my, my, my language became
• 31:03
  I, I created a thing called the Boulder thesis.
• 31:06
  Initially I said the, the startup community has to be led
• 31:09
  by entrepreneurs. Today I say the startup
• 31:11
  community is led by founders and instigators.
• 31:14
  So people lead the startup community and organizations
• 31:18
  support the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem, of
• 31:22
  which some of the people that work for those organizations are
• 31:25
  the leaders in the startup community.
• 31:27
  So I, I've been on that, you know, personally through
• 31:29
  Techstars. Obviously you talked about
• 31:31
  Foundry as network driven, like this notion of the power of
• 31:36
  networks, both in the context of entrepreneurship and company
• 31:42
  creation, but frankly, just in the context of life.
• 31:45
  And you know, there's a, when I was in my 20s, like there were
• 31:48
  this, the word network started to be used and you had to like
• 31:51
  learn how to network. I look back on that.
• 31:55
  It's such bullshit. Like, you know, I, I'm not
• 31:57
  somebody that comfortably shows up where I don't know anybody.
• 32:00
  Hi, I'm Brad. You know, that's like, not my
• 32:03
  shtick, even though I, you know, I, I So what that's.
• 32:06
  Actually a good question is what does network look like in the
• 32:10
  Techstars example? Like how are people interacting
• 32:13
  with and supporting each other from a practical standpoint?
• 32:15
  Well, practically network. A healthy network has lots of
• 32:19
  different things going on, both physical, you know, in, in real
• 32:25
  life, but also virtual and the connection connectivity
• 32:30
  virtually. And we understand virtual
• 32:32
  networks now as a result of social networks, which emerged,
• 32:35
  you know, in the mid 2000, 2005, 2006 and today are both a source
• 32:41
  of good and a source of evil in our world, right.
• 32:44
  I mean, the dynamics of how social networks deal with the
• 32:47
  fabric of society and influence the fabric of society can be
• 32:50
  both both good and bad. My definition of of of a of a
• 32:55
  useful network is if you think about each individual person as
• 33:01
  a node on the network. So each person's a little circle
• 33:05
  and the people you know is a connection, a line between you.
• 33:10
  It's not the number of people that you know, the number of
• 33:13
  lines between the nodes. It's the number of lines times
• 33:19
  the value of information that travels across the those lines.
• 33:25
  So, for example, if somebody in a network is connected to an
• 33:30
  enormous number of people, but there's zero value, that gets
• 33:35
  transmitted back and forth and it's both directions.
• 33:38
  It's not just One Direction, it's both directions, no value
• 33:42
  transmitted. That person has a very tiny node
• 33:45
  on the network. They're not worth anything to
• 33:47
  the network if the person has very few connections, but
• 33:52
  there's a ton of information that travels over the lines.
• 33:57
  They are tiny because they don't have very many connections.
• 34:00
  They're not helping the network very much.
• 34:02
  It's a, it's a multiplier effect.
• 34:04
  So what you really want is you really want the combination of a
• 34:08
  reasonable number of connections times the value of the
• 34:12
  information travelling between participants that are connected.
• 34:17
  So in the context of Techstars and you know, it ties a little
• 34:20
  bit to, to my book, the book that I'm, I've just come out
• 34:23
  with give first. It's the notion that you you do
• 34:28
  want to be connected to more people on the network.
• 34:31
  So Techstars is organized, an organizing principle in that
• 34:35
  it's very easy to be connected to other people in Techstars.
• 34:38
  You share a common thing. But then we work really hard to
• 34:43
  facilitate not just those connections, but the value of
• 34:46
  the information between mentor and mentee, between investor and
• 34:51
  founder, between founder and founder.
• 34:54
  And if the philosophy is 1, where you're willing to put
• 34:57
  energy into the system without knowing what you're going to get
• 35:01
  back, it's not, it's not altruism.
• 35:04
  You expect to get something back, but you're willing to put
• 35:06
  energy into it. I don't have to, you know, I
• 35:08
  connect with somebody and I say, look, I'll connect with you if
• 35:12
  you pay me. XI will then give you Y or I
• 35:18
  will do Z for you if you do A for me first.
• 35:23
  There's none of that. It's the opposite.
• 35:24
  It's like, how can I be helpful? What can I do to help?
• 35:27
  And so that builds a feedback loop.
• 35:29
  That's a very powerful one. It accelerates.
• 35:32
  So it's a, it's, it's a positive feedback loop.
• 35:35
  And in the context of that, again, it's not altruism.
• 35:39
  You expect to get something back.
• 35:40
  You just don't know from whom in the network.
• 35:43
  It might not be that person you just connected to.
• 35:45
  It might be somewhere else in the network.
• 35:46
  So maybe we can make this a little bit more, I don't know,
• 35:50
  tangible for people listening because I think some people.
• 35:53
  I mean, I'm waving my hands around.
• 35:55
  I just got a white board behind me.
• 35:56
  You've got me really excited, but I want to give.
• 35:59
  Me an example. I want something specific here I
• 36:03
  can sink my teeth into because I think some people are naturally
• 36:07
  wired for this. Hey, how can I be helpful?
• 36:09
  What what can I do for you? And hey, at some point, I don't
• 36:12
  know, karma, whatever, it's going to come back and it and
• 36:15
  you know, I'll get mine in the end and that'll be good.
• 36:18
  And other people that doesn't, they're not wired that way sort
• 36:22
  of from the start. And so maybe if you can sort of
• 36:24
  paint a picture of a specific example where like this exact
• 36:27
  thing kind of played out or has, you know, routinely played out,
• 36:32
  people can be like, oh, OK, I can see that.
• 36:35
  Maybe I don't need to go into every conversation or
• 36:38
  relationship with, you know, me first.
• 36:40
  Like, what am I getting out of this?
• 36:42
  And I can go in a little bit softer and say like, hey, what
• 36:45
  do I have to offer here? Yeah.
• 36:47
  Well, I'll give you a example from yesterday.
• 36:51
  So I was for the last two days, I was in Indianapolis at an
• 36:58
  event called the Global Entrepreneurship Congress.
• 37:01
  This has been going on for a number of years.
• 37:03
  A guy named Jonathan Ortman, who's a long time friend runs
• 37:06
  the organization and every year they convene around the world,
• 37:13
  5000 people, something like that, that are different levels
• 37:18
  of government, entrepreneurial support organizations,
• 37:26
  nonprofit, supporting entrepreneurship leaders in
• 37:29
  different startup communities around the world, all in this
• 37:32
  notion of creating entrepreneurship as a thing
• 37:36
  globally, right? This notion of global
• 37:39
  democratization of it. So I was there for two days.
• 37:41
  I was one of the keynote speakers yesterday, Jonathan,
• 37:47
  you know, when he he's, I went to the 2013 event in Rio.
• 37:53
  And after that I said to him, next time you do it in the US,
• 37:55
  tell me and I'll come. And Indianapolis was the next
• 37:58
  time he's doing it in the US. And so I, I went to it.
• 38:01
  Many people there. I know the feedback I got was
• 38:04
  wonderful. I had a great time Monday night
• 38:10
  before the dinner I went to, I did an event, a book event at
• 38:14
  High Alpha. High Alpha is a company in
• 38:18
  Indianapolis. It it's a venture capital firm
• 38:21
  and a venture studio. It was started by Scott Dorsey
• 38:25
  and three of his partners from a company called Exact Target,
• 38:29
  which Salesforce acquired a number of years ago and it
• 38:32
  became the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• 38:34
  Exact Target went public and was a very large company in Indiana
• 38:37
  and Indianapolis and, and I think Salesforce now has a very
• 38:41
  large, I mean, I know it has a very large office in
• 38:44
  Indianapolis. I feel like they might have the
• 38:46
  tallest building in Indianapolis now.
• 38:48
  And Scott and his partners decided to focus on the
• 38:54
  Indianapolis startup community. They focused High Alpha as a
• 38:59
  physical space in a redeveloped part of town.
• 39:02
  So they've got a nice space. They have a lot of companies
• 39:05
  that work out of their space and they work at it as well.
• 39:08
  We're investors in High Alpha. I've been friends with Scott for
• 39:10
  a long time and we had a book event.
• 39:14
  We had about 150 people come and there's some really awesome
• 39:20
  pieces of that book event. You know, there's a group from
• 39:22
  Detroit that's working on doing stuff around the Detroit startup
• 39:25
  community that came to GEC that also came to the book event
• 39:29
  because they're tied into Scott and Scott's community.
• 39:34
  Doug Song, who is the founder of duo, which is a company that
• 39:38
  Cisco bought, is now putting a lot of energy into the Detroit
• 39:42
  startup community. So, you know, like cultural
• 39:46
  norms are built in. I, I give the preamble so you
• 39:49
  for the example, it makes sense. Like none of this is new to this
• 39:51
  group of people. They've all bought into this
• 39:53
  idea. They're all behaving this way in
• 39:55
  this using this give first philosophy and I'll describe it
• 39:58
  as a philosophy, importantly, not a religion, a philosophy.
• 40:02
  You adopt what you want from it. A religion.
• 40:04
  If you follow the path of the religion, you follow the path to
• 40:07
  salvation. And it's different.
• 40:09
  Like you don't have to embrace the whole thing.
• 40:12
  You don't have to always act this way.
• 40:14
  It you weave it into your own philosophy.
• 40:16
  And at the end of the book signing, I, I did a fireside
• 40:21
  chat with Scott, wonderful time for an hour, did some Q&A at the
• 40:25
  end. And then I did a book signing
• 40:27
  And one of my, one of my things, it's probably, I guess you could
• 40:31
  say it's part, somebody could say it's part of my shtick.
• 40:33
  Now that is when I do something that's a public event, I stick
• 40:37
  around till the end. I'm not, I'm not that guy that I
• 40:40
  finished the thing and now I just split them out of there.
• 40:44
  I've never felt like that was how I wanted to be.
• 40:46
  I wanted to be accessible. And interestingly, I've I've had
• 40:51
  a lot of interactions with people sort of afterwards that
• 40:54
  have then led to interesting things.
• 40:55
  Sometimes it's led to a business relationship, sometimes it's led
• 40:58
  to a friendship, sometimes it's led to I don't know what, and
• 41:01
  then four or five years later, something comes of it.
• 41:04
  So I was just finishing up, talking to folks, signing books,
• 41:07
  hanging around for whatever, and a guy named Eric came up to me
• 41:13
  and he started telling me about the thing he was trying to do,
• 41:17
  which was A twist on the studio model in Indianapolis that was
• 41:21
  complimentary to what Scott and High Alpha were doing.
• 41:25
  It was very nascent and he was trying to figure it out.
• 41:29
  And I said to, you know, we talked for a few minutes.
• 41:32
  I gave him a couple of ideas, said to look, you know, send me
• 41:33
  an e-mail with what you're doing, be specific about what
• 41:38
  kind of help you want. So I have something tangible to
• 41:40
  grab onto and, and send that to me.
• 41:45
  And, you know, next day or so, it's hard, but you know, when I
• 41:47
  get to the e-mail, I'll do something.
• 41:49
  So I got the e-mail. I was on a plane home last
• 41:50
  night. I saw the e-mail.
• 41:52
  It's a good e-mail, kind of laid out what he wanted.
• 41:54
  One of the things he wanted was some introductions to people
• 41:57
  running studios so that he could talk to them and learn from
• 42:01
  them. Now, he was at this event with
• 42:02
  Scott, you know, that Scott hosted.
• 42:03
  But there's, you know, 150 people and stuff's going on.
• 42:06
  And, like, you come up to somebody and say, hey, I want to
• 42:08
  talk to you about this. And, you know, it's hard.
• 42:10
  It's hard to have that moment, like click.
• 42:14
  But again, I had invited that of him.
• 42:17
  I sent the note to Scott and to Greg Gottesman, who runs a
• 42:23
  studio in Seattle called PSL Studio and Venture fund.
• 42:27
  We're also investors. Greg is phenomenally give first
• 42:31
  in all his behavior. He's been very successful in in
• 42:36
  what what he's done and was really, you know, I've known him
• 42:39
  since the 90s, but he was really one of two people, him and Andy
• 42:42
  Sack with a motive force for getting tech stars to open an
• 42:48
  office in Seattle and a long time ago 2009.
• 42:53
  And I think within 30 minutes of me sending a note to to them,
• 42:59
  they know each other. Hey, guys, see this note from
• 43:02
  this guy Eric, He's interested in talking to you.
• 43:06
  You know, I, I don't know him. I met him at Scott at your
• 43:09
  event. You know, would you be willing
• 43:11
  to spend some time with them? And both of them responded
• 43:14
  immediately. Yes, I like to do opt in emails.
• 43:17
  So I wouldn't just forward the e-mail.
• 43:18
  I want to give them a chance to say, no, I'm not interested or I
• 43:21
  know this guy or, you know, this isn't something I have time for
• 43:24
  now. And they both immediately
• 43:25
  responded yes. And they're both talking to to
• 43:28
  Eric. Like no idea where any of that
• 43:30
  leads, but that's that's like an that's an example of it.
• 43:34
  I didn't protect my network from something I didn't say to the
• 43:38
  person that was not he doesn't have a thing yet.
• 43:40
  He's trying to figure out how to have the thing.
• 43:44
  I didn't say to him, you know, well, when you've got the thing
• 43:46
  and you've got some support and some other people are supporting
• 43:48
  you, give me a call and maybe I'll help you, right?
• 43:50
  I send me a pitch deck. Like it was just like, let's
• 43:52
  just figure out where to go with this.
• 43:55
  I, I like this. And we've sort of been talking
• 43:57
  around the idea of your book and you, you kind of briefly
• 44:00
  referenced it, but now let's talk more specifically.
• 44:02
  You know, probably by the time this interview comes out, June
• 44:05
  24th, 2025, the book will be available.
• 44:09
  It's called Give first the Power of Leadership.
• 44:11
  And it's exactly this idea, I believe.
• 44:13
  But you know what you've been explaining for the past few
• 44:15
  minutes, right? Yeah, so give the book and and a
• 44:19
  minor adjustment, the subtitles Power of Mentorship.
• 44:22
  OK, thank you. No, it's I like, I if I had
• 44:26
  another title for it, I probably would have said Power of
• 44:28
  Leadership. I like that.
• 44:29
  I, I, I, yeah, in hindsight, I'm missing that because there's a
• 44:33
  lot in the book about leadership.
• 44:35
  I've combined these two concepts in this book, this philosophy of
• 44:40
  give first, which I defined earlier, right?
• 44:43
  You're willing to put energy into a system without knowing
• 44:45
  what you'll get back. It's not altruism.
• 44:48
  You expect to get something back.
• 44:50
  You just don't know when, from whom, over what time period, in
• 44:53
  what form, and in what magnitude.
• 44:57
  Combining that with things that I really learned from all of the
• 45:02
  work with Techstars as a mentor. When we started Techstars in
• 45:05
  2006, the word mentor was not very widely used, and it usually
• 45:10
  meant something in a big company that does not resemble effective
• 45:15
  mentorship. It's a senior person in a big
• 45:17
  company. Was your mentor as a junior
• 45:19
  person working their way up the management hierarchy?
• 45:22
  And so it was all about helping somebody navigate up the
• 45:25
  management hierarchy. And I'm sure there are effective
• 45:29
  mentor programs in big companies, but it was a
• 45:31
  different thing. You know, they could have called
• 45:33
  it. I'm looking at my desk for
• 45:35
  something green penmanship and we said mentorship.
• 45:44
  We didn't really know what it meant.
• 45:46
  First couple of years at Techstars, we learned a lot.
• 45:49
  Like we watched what was effective and what wasn't
• 45:51
  effective. We did things that were
• 45:53
  effective and not effective. We engaged with other mentors in
• 45:58
  ways, and we sort of learned by watching the mentors and the
• 46:01
  companies and the founders started to get some principles
• 46:04
  around what was effective and helpful mentorship versus
• 46:08
  activities or behaviors that were not effective.
• 46:12
  And in 2010, David Cohen sat down and wrote something called
• 46:18
  the Techstars Mentor Manifesto, which is on the web and widely
• 46:22
  referenced. That was 18 bullet points.
• 46:24
  He didn't spend a lot of time getting it right.
• 46:26
  He didn't spend, you know, Grammarly barfs on it every time
• 46:30
  I open up a document with it in it because it wants to fix the
• 46:33
  grammar. But but they were really short,
• 46:37
  like like bullet points and you sort of read through it and
• 46:39
  they're all bullet points that kind of kind of make sense, but
• 46:43
  you want to go a little deeper to understand what they mean.
• 46:45
  And so a while ago I wrote a bunch of blog posts on feld.com
• 46:49
  and, you know, I kind of wrote some thoughts about what each of
• 46:52
  the things in the Tech stars mentor manifesto meant.
• 46:54
  I occasionally gave an example and that really became the seed
• 46:59
  corn, seed corn for this book. And what I, what I've done with
• 47:02
  the book is the first section talks about give first as a
• 47:06
  philosophy. It has a lot of my own stories
• 47:09
  in it. So you can see where the
• 47:10
  philosophy comes from. It's very tangible, not like the
• 47:15
  abstract grant I gave earlier. And I try to, I try to, I get to
• 47:19
  the definition of it through a couple of examples of mentors of
• 47:23
  mine who really embrace this value system.
• 47:26
  And the one I'd probably name the most was Len Fassler, who
• 47:30
  passed a few years ago, but he bought my first company and 1993
• 47:35
  and he and I worked together on numerous things since then.
• 47:40
  My uncle, my dad's brother, Charlie Feld would be another
• 47:43
  person I'd I'd I'd list that way.
• 47:45
  Charlie when I was a teenager, introduced me to computers.
• 47:48
  Actually, when I was 12, he introduced me to computers.
• 47:50
  And even as a teenager was taking me to business meetings
• 47:54
  with technology companies that I had no business being in.
• 47:57
  And when I was in school at MIT, regularly go to meetings with
• 48:01
  Deck or with Lotus, which were both in the Boston area.
• 48:05
  When Charlie came to have meetings with him, he was or is
• 48:09
  he's still, he's still active, one of the most famous chief
• 48:12
  information officers in the world in big companies.
• 48:15
  And he really invented with a couple of other guys that
• 48:17
  discipline. He was originally, I think his
• 48:20
  initial title was like DP manager or something like that,
• 48:23
  data processing manager, right? It was he's, he's old.
• 48:26
  He's 82. I think he's old enough for
• 48:28
  that, but like what I learned from him was incredible.
• 48:32
  But the experience I had with both of them was also a key part
• 48:36
  of what was effective mentorship, which is it's not a
• 48:39
  one up, one down relationship. The mentor is not one up to the
• 48:44
  mentee and the mentee is not one down.
• 48:47
  What I actually experienced with both Charlie and Len and I
• 48:52
  talked specifically about the experiences of how this happened
• 48:55
  in the book is we became peers. And Len, who was 30 something
• 49:01
  years older than me, he would say regularly that he was
• 49:04
  learning more from me than he thought I was learning from him.
• 49:06
  And you know, I would just kind of be humble about it and say,
• 49:08
  Len, you learn. I learned way more from you.
• 49:10
  And he's like, no, you know, I'm learning a lot here.
• 49:15
  Charlie started at his first company five years after I'd
• 49:20
  started Feld Technologies. Now, we're not very creative in
• 49:22
  our family. He knew in his company, the Feld
• 49:24
  Group, and of course, you had Fell Technologies and you had
• 49:27
  the Fell Group. At some point, you guys were
• 49:30
  going to run out of names altogether.
• 49:31
  Yeah. Well, well, you know, we Fell
• 49:33
  real estate. Like, you keep going, like,
• 49:35
  figure it out. Just keep putting modifiers in
• 49:37
  it. But, you know, when he started
• 49:39
  his company, I've been running a company for five years.
• 49:41
  So all of a sudden, like, those conversations are different.
• 49:44
  And when I was at SoftBank, I invested in Charlie's company
• 49:51
  and joined his management committee and was on his board
• 49:53
  for a while and we worked as partners for a number of years.
• 49:56
  So like just the learning that that mentor dynamic where it's a
• 49:59
  long term relationship. I linked it back to this concept
• 50:03
  of give first. So in the book, section one is
• 50:06
  talking about give 1st and building it up.
• 50:09
  Section 2 is really going through each of the 18 things in
• 50:13
  the Tech Stars Mentor Manifesto, 1 by 1, and each of the
• 50:16
  sections, I start with an essay short, you know, 345 paragraphs
• 50:23
  explaining the Tech Stars Mentor Manifesto item.
• 50:27
  And then I tell a story. And a lot of the stories are my
• 50:29
  own stories. So it's not a memoir, but
• 50:31
  there's a lot of storytelling to try to make the thing come to
• 50:35
  life. Plenty of Tech Stars stories and
• 50:37
  then a couple of others. And then the third, the third
• 50:40
  part of each section is tying the story and that first
• 50:44
  paragraph back together. Because one of my problems when
• 50:46
  I've read business books a lot of times is you know, you have a
• 50:50
  concept and then you have an example, but then you go on to
• 50:53
  the next concept and the next example and the next concept and
• 50:56
  the next example. And I really wanted each of
• 50:57
  these to stand alone. Like somebody could read, you
• 51:00
  know, the 6th bullet point and that would be all they needed
• 51:03
  that day. They didn't need to read all 18
• 51:06
  of them to get their mind around it.
• 51:09
  I then have a section of the third.
• 51:11
  The third part of the book is challenges with give 1st.
• 51:16
  And I've had a lot of challenges around maintaining this behavior
• 51:23
  with me, and happy to go deeper on that if you want.
• 51:27
  I do actually it it what's the what's the challenge?
• 51:30
  Is it sort of that you give too much like you're you're
• 51:32
  stretched too? Thin it's it's one of them
• 51:34
  boundaries. Boundaries are a real challenge.
• 51:37
  You know, I'm I'm an introvert by nature.
• 51:41
  I describe introvert extrovert as introverts.
• 51:46
  If you think of it as a gas tank, your, your gas tank gets
• 51:49
  depleted when you're with lots of other people and it gets
• 51:51
  filled up when you're alone. I like being with other people,
• 51:54
  but I like being with a small amount of other people.
• 51:57
  But if I don't have alone time, my, my tank gets depleted.
• 52:00
  Extroverts the inverse, right? You, your tank fills up when
• 52:03
  you're with a lot of people and when you're alone, it gets
• 52:05
  depleted. And everybody's some spectrum of
• 52:07
  that. But, you know, if all you're
• 52:10
  doing is operating from a perspective of give first, it's
• 52:14
  exhausting for me. That's not the only thing.
• 52:18
  But I've talked pretty openly, publicly and, you know, in my
• 52:22
  writing about my own struggles with mental health and with
• 52:26
  depression specifically. I was diagnosed in my 20s.
• 52:31
  I'm my first major depressive episode.
• 52:34
  In my 20s, when I was running my first company, I was also in a
• 52:38
  PhD program. I was also in the midst of
• 52:42
  having a failed first marriage to my high school girlfriend.
• 52:45
  We didn't have kids, so it was more like a bad break up in your
• 52:47
  early 20s. And I got kicked out of the PhD
• 52:50
  program because I was spending all my time running my company.
• 52:52
  I wasn't being a good PhD student.
• 52:53
  And like the, you know, the linkage of all these things
• 52:56
  together along with being in my, you know, I don't know, 2324 and
• 53:02
  never having failed, like, you know, sure, I had things that
• 53:05
  didn't work, but I hadn't really had these public failures.
• 53:07
  I had, my marriage was a public failure and getting kicked out
• 53:10
  of this PhD program was a public failure.
• 53:12
  My business was doing fine, but I was kind of bored of it,
• 53:16
  wasn't really stimulating. I was, you know, kind of going
• 53:18
  through the motions every day. And I was really fortunate in
• 53:24
  that time period that I found a, a psychiatrist who understood
• 53:30
  something called obsessive compulsive disorder, which in
• 53:33
  the early 90s was not well understood.
• 53:35
  It's better understood today. And he was one of the early he
• 53:38
  was a Harvard trained a psychiatrist.
• 53:41
  I was in in Boston at the time. Random just got lucky that
• 53:44
  that's who it was. And he was able to make a
• 53:47
  diagnosis relatively early and understand what to do.
• 53:52
  Because if all it was was trying to treat depression, it wouldn't
• 53:54
  have actually got to the root cause of anything.
• 53:58
  If people don't know what OCD is or think that OCD is a positive
• 54:02
  thing, because a lot of people say I'm OCD because I like to be
• 54:04
  really organized. I'm like, it's not, it's a, it's
• 54:06
  a really difficult. Yeah, give boys to that if you
• 54:10
  would, please. Well, so, so we all have
• 54:12
  obsessions and we all have compulsions as humans.
• 54:16
  We just have them being, having OCD is that you have a linkage
• 54:20
  between the obsessions and the compulsions.
• 54:22
  And I'll give a few examples, that of ones I had in my 20s.
• 54:25
  I lived in Boston. If I don't straighten all the
• 54:29
  cigarettes that are on the street so that they're parallel
• 54:33
  with the street, my mother will die.
• 54:38
  If I don't do something three times, I'll lose a client.
• 54:43
  And if I don't do it three times, like I make a mistake and
• 54:47
  do it four times or only do it 2 times before I stop, I now have
• 54:50
  to do it 9 times because 3 was my magic number.
• 54:54
  And if I don't do it nine, if I screw that up, I got to do it 27
• 54:56
  times. If you do something, if you
• 54:59
  screw it up twice and you have to do it 27 times, you will damn
• 55:01
  well and good do it 27 times because you don't want to do it
• 55:04
  81 times, right? And you can creates a lot of
• 55:07
  noise. Crazy.
• 55:08
  It's crazy, like your brain has constantly running this
• 55:11
  background process that's interfering with your normal
• 55:14
  functioning. Have to shut my computer down a
• 55:17
  certain way. If I don't shut my computer down
• 55:18
  the right way, I got to turn it back on and back then turning on
• 55:21
  and turning off your computer was not like a boom.
• 55:24
  You pick up your lid, you know, And so 10 minutes later, I'm
• 55:28
  still turning on and turning off my fucking computer because I
• 55:31
  did something wrong in the sequence.
• 55:34
  So it really consumes a lot of mental and emotional energy and
• 55:39
  it interferes with you in kind of weird ways.
• 55:41
  You know, there's a little bit can be kind of cute, you know?
• 55:45
  Oh Brad, you're kind of cute walking down the street touching
• 55:47
  all The Dirty signs because you have to touch all The Dirty
• 55:49
  signs as you're walking down the street.
• 55:51
  But I'm a germaphobe. Like, I mean, that's another
• 55:53
  part of being OCD is that you, a lot of people who are OC have
• 55:56
  OCD are also germaphobes. And so I'd wash my hands 50
• 56:00
  times a day. Like that's really helpful now
• 56:03
  that we have this COVID thing and we've learned that, but
• 56:07
  probably wasn't that helpful in 1988.
• 56:10
  So, so that was early. Like I struggle with that.
• 56:12
  And I had this two year depressive episode where I was
• 56:15
  functional, like I could get through my day.
• 56:17
  I worked, it was OK, got my job done.
• 56:21
  But the best way to describe how I felt was the complete and
• 56:24
  total absence of joy. And you know, for a couple of
• 56:30
  weeks, all right, you can kind of get through that for a couple
• 56:33
  of months, starting to be a drag for a year, it really starts to
• 56:37
  suck. For two years.
• 56:38
  You start to wonder, am I ever going to feel different?
• 56:40
  This is I don't want to, I'm 25. I don't want to live the rest of
• 56:44
  my life feeling this way. And again, I did a lot of work
• 56:49
  at that time in with. Personal development Work with
• 56:53
  with your psychiatrist. But I was incredibly ashamed of
• 56:58
  everything. I was ashamed that I had a
• 57:01
  psychiatrist. I was ashamed that I was
• 57:03
  depressed. I was ashamed that as a leader,
• 57:07
  I couldn't show strength all the time.
• 57:09
  I didn't want to do anything at the end of the day because I was
• 57:11
  just physiologically exhausted. Like, I get home from work.
• 57:14
  I had nothing. I don't want to read a book.
• 57:15
  I didn't want to watch TV just, like, lay around and stare at
• 57:18
  the ceiling. So I wasn't a very good friend
• 57:20
  like, you know, proactively. And I was just ashamed.
• 57:26
  And I was ashamed to really talk about it with anybody.
• 57:29
  I, I, I took medication. I was ashamed that I was taking
• 57:32
  medication. I was ashamed, couldn't talk
• 57:34
  about it. I, I didn't have an extended
• 57:41
  depressive episode again until 9:00, until 2001, after 911.
• 57:45
  That was kind of the trigger for me, the combination of all the
• 57:47
  pressure from the Internet bubble deflating, all the just
• 57:50
  again, physiologically exhausted from hauling my ass all over
• 57:53
  the, the, the world at the time for all the companies I was
• 57:56
  involved in that everything was now falling apart.
• 58:00
  I was fortunate that now my, my marriage to Amy was, was, was
• 58:05
  strong and strong supporter. And of course, 911 was kind of
• 58:08
  this weird moment where every actually everyone, many people
• 58:11
  in the US were depressed and were disoriented because of how
• 58:14
  horrific the attack was. And so kind of you could be
• 58:17
  depressed in out in the open like it, it was a little
• 58:19
  different feeling for me, but it but it was the same.
• 58:24
  And but I was still very quiet about everything.
• 58:29
  I then had another depressive episode in 2013 that came out of
• 58:34
  nowhere. This time my business going
• 58:37
  great, Foundry's excellent tech stars is going great.
• 58:39
  My marriage is awesome. I mean, pretty good physical
• 58:43
  shape. I've been running marathons and
• 58:45
  taking care of myself and I'm very, very busy, you know,
• 58:49
  writing, doing, doing the work, writing books, travelling all
• 58:52
  over the place. And I just crashed, just totally
• 58:57
  crashed. And looking back in time, I
• 59:00
  realized that I kind of had that experience at the end of every
• 59:02
  year, like October, November, December.
• 59:06
  Usually it didn't start on October one, but kind of by
• 59:09
  Halloween, I was pretty tired. And usually sometime between
• 59:12
  beginning and middle of November, I'd get depressed.
• 59:15
  And I just talked about it as I don't like Christmas, I don't
• 59:17
  like the holidays. I'm Jewish.
• 59:18
  I grew up without Christmas, like grumpy, grumpy, grumpy
• 59:20
  Brad. And you know, everybody sort of
• 59:24
  allowed me to be grumpy, but I was depressed like very, very
• 59:30
  seasonally as a result of just being physiologically exhausted.
• 59:36
  This depression in 2013, I like to say it sounds like a country
• 59:40
  music song because of what led up to it, which is I ran A50
• 59:45
  mile race in April of 2022, which was way too much running,
• 59:50
  too much training, too much running for working the way I
• 59:53
  was working. I was travelling all over the
• 59:55
  country. I didn't take, I didn't rest
• 59:57
  afterwards. The day after the 50 mile race,
• 59:59
  I was, it was in Sacramento. I went to San Francisco, I went
• 1:00:02
  to a movie that night and on Monday I was full on, you know,
• 1:00:06
  doing my work again over the summer I continued to train, you
• 1:00:11
  know, train and exercise very significantly.
• 1:00:14
  And then I had for my partner, Seth's 40th birthday, went to
• 1:00:18
  Slovenia for a bike trip. He's a huge cyclist.
• 1:00:21
  And I'm not a cyclist. I'm no longer allowed to ride
• 1:00:23
  bicycles. But on the second or last day of
• 1:00:26
  the trip, I had a bike accident that is was is in the category
• 1:00:31
  of near fatal. Like if I hadn't smashed into my
• 1:00:34
  partner, Ryan McIntyre, turning left on a bridge, I would have
• 1:00:38
  gone over the bridge, you know, 1520 feet down rocks.
• 1:00:42
  Like, you know, maybe I wouldn't have died, but it would have
• 1:00:44
  been bad news. And I got really lucky.
• 1:00:47
  I just ran into Ryan. He absorbed the momentum.
• 1:00:50
  He wasn't hurt fortunately, but the consequence was that I
• 1:00:55
  didn't smash into the, the, the side of the bridge.
• 1:00:58
  And when I say side of the bridge, the bridge was like hip
• 1:01:00
  high. So like the bike would have
• 1:01:01
  smashed in, I would have just gone right over and but I was
• 1:01:05
  beat up pretty good. I, I bruised ribs, I broke a
• 1:01:08
  tooth. Entertainingly, the Slovenian
• 1:01:12
  healthcare system has much better dentistry then they have
• 1:01:16
  emergency medicine for sewing up the cuts in your chin.
• 1:01:19
  I have a very good tooth replacement and I have a nice
• 1:01:22
  little scar from the fishing wire and the needle that the guy
• 1:01:26
  sewed me up with. And but I kept calling.
• 1:01:33
  I came back, we came back in September, We spent September.
• 1:01:36
  New York City Amy's birthday is the month of September.
• 1:01:40
  I don't know how many people listening have a partner who's
• 1:01:43
  they celebrate their month for a birthday for an entire month,
• 1:01:45
  but we've been doing that for a while.
• 1:01:47
  So I sometimes I get it narrowed down to a week, but it was a
• 1:01:50
  month then. So you know, out to fancy
• 1:01:52
  dinners every night, working hard and I'm I'm not sleeping
• 1:01:55
  well because I'm, I hurt. I'm taking a lot of like Advil
• 1:01:59
  PM and things that are fucking with my biochemistry a little
• 1:02:01
  bit, but I'm not paying attention to it.
• 1:02:05
  And then in the fall, I'm in Iowa at an event and I go to the
• 1:02:12
  bathroom and I pee blood. And I didn't really think much
• 1:02:16
  of it. I'm like, yeah, I must, you
• 1:02:18
  know, like I made some, some narrative in my brain, like,
• 1:02:20
  must have eaten something funny like that.
• 1:02:23
  And, you know, that happened for a couple of days.
• 1:02:25
  And then I came for something and I just kind of ignored it
• 1:02:28
  and kind of went away. And then it came back.
• 1:02:31
  And this time I told Amy. So I hadn't told her the first
• 1:02:34
  time. I just like and told her.
• 1:02:36
  And she's like doctor right now. So I go to the doctor right now
• 1:02:41
  and still want to think about it, you know, do the thing you
• 1:02:45
  pee into a cup. It looks like a cherry soda.
• 1:02:48
  And I go to give a talk. Like I still not thinking about
• 1:02:53
  it. I'm in the middle of giving a
• 1:02:54
  talk at CU Boulder at at I can't remember.
• 1:02:58
  I think it was a Business School somewhere, you know, just to to
• 1:03:00
  a class of kids. And my doctor calls me and I
• 1:03:03
  said, hey, I just went to the doctor.
• 1:03:04
  I need to step out and just hear what she has to say.
• 1:03:06
  And her response was, Brad, great news.
• 1:03:10
  It's not cancer. It's a good way to start.
• 1:03:15
  I'm like, well, I hadn't really thought about that and but you
• 1:03:19
  get it like this, like the, like the country music song My dog
• 1:03:22
  died, My, this, my, that. And it turns out I had a kidney
• 1:03:26
  stone. That was a big one, 8mm.
• 1:03:29
  I've never had kidney stones. Holy.
• 1:03:30
  Cow. Yeah.
• 1:03:31
  So like, you know, they have to do a thing that's called a
• 1:03:34
  lithotripsy, which look it up if you're curious, but it's.
• 1:03:37
  Not I've been through 1 so my heart.
• 1:03:40
  Swelled a pleasant procedure. So I do that and then it, it
• 1:03:45
  went fine, but they put a stent in and so I had pain and we went
• 1:03:50
  on vacation to Mexico and I don't remember much of the
• 1:03:52
  vacation because I was on one of the oxy things, Vicodin or
• 1:03:55
  something, or maybe Oxycodin for the part of the trip because I
• 1:03:58
  just felt like shit. I came back sort of just chilled
• 1:04:03
  out, did nothing over Christmas, went to CES Consumer Electronics
• 1:04:06
  Show the first week of January, which I used to do every year.
• 1:04:10
  I don't do anymore. And I got to Las Vegas, I got to
• 1:04:13
  my hotel room and there's like people everywhere I go in my
• 1:04:18
  hotel room and like I literally lay down in bed and put the
• 1:04:20
  pillow over my head Like I, I, I, I knew I was depressed.
• 1:04:26
  And this time, though, I was able to put two things together.
• 1:04:30
  One was, I understood that it was physiological exhaustion,
• 1:04:34
  right? So I, I was able to understand
• 1:04:37
  that the thing that tipped me over was just being totally
• 1:04:39
  exhausted. The other was I had been, you
• 1:04:45
  know, I've been blogging now for a long time.
• 1:04:47
  And I decided that if I wasn't public about it on my, you know,
• 1:04:51
  my writing, it wasn't so much like I had an audience.
• 1:04:55
  I'd be truthful, my audience. I would be bullshitting myself.
• 1:04:58
  Like, I just didn't want to like have like this external, you
• 1:05:03
  know, view of things and this internal turmoil of how I was
• 1:05:07
  feeling. So I started writing about it
• 1:05:09
  and, you know, I got a couple of things that weren't very
• 1:05:12
  generous, but most of the things that came back as I was writing
• 1:05:14
  about it was incredibly positive.
• 1:05:16
  And I had many, many people in my circles that were, you know,
• 1:05:22
  entrepreneurs. And my guess is names of
• 1:05:24
  entrepreneurs that people here would know, many of their names
• 1:05:27
  reached out to me, a lot of people I didn't know.
• 1:05:30
  And the conversations were some version of, hey, Brad, you're
• 1:05:33
  the first person I'm talking to about this.
• 1:05:37
  And that was profound to me because what what it caused me
• 1:05:39
  to realize was how significant this stigma was, which I had
• 1:05:44
  been feeling up to this point. And now it's kind of like, fuck
• 1:05:47
  it, I don't care. And so part of what came out of
• 1:05:52
  that for me that that episode lasted about six months.
• 1:05:55
  I started therapy again, I did 10 years of, of therapy this
• 1:06:00
  time, so my late 40s to my late 50s.
• 1:06:03
  And it was really helpful that that that phase was even better
• 1:06:06
  than the first phase 'cause I kind of knew what I'd get out of
• 1:06:08
  it. And that's kind of you get out
• 1:06:10
  of it what you put into it. And I was there something?
• 1:06:13
  Special about the therapy sorry to interrupt, but I'm I'm for
• 1:06:17
  those who are listening that maybe you know they they felt
• 1:06:20
  something similar like there's specific.
• 1:06:23
  Yeah. Types of therapy that have been
• 1:06:24
  helpful. Yeah, well, I've, I've done
• 1:06:26
  what's called CBT or cognitive behavior therapy.
• 1:06:30
  And if you have OCD, the only way to to address OCD is is with
• 1:06:34
  a combination of medication to lower the anxiety and then CBT
• 1:06:42
  to break the linkage between the OS and the CS.
• 1:06:47
  That's what's effective. Nothing else is effective.
• 1:06:49
  You can't just take medication that doesn't solve the problem.
• 1:06:52
  You can't try to break the links between the OS and the CS
• 1:06:55
  without lowering your core anxiety because the core anxiety
• 1:06:58
  is part of that. And you get this negative
• 1:07:00
  feedback loop if you try to do it.
• 1:07:02
  Interesting. That just reinforces the, the
• 1:07:05
  thing. So, and you know, CBT is once a
• 1:07:09
  week, 50 minutes. Like it's not, it could be twice
• 1:07:12
  a week. It's not a a massive burden, but
• 1:07:14
  it's a very, you know, it's a very Socratic kind of therapy.
• 1:07:17
  It's a very listening therapy where you're guided by somebody,
• 1:07:19
  but they're guiding you on a path.
• 1:07:21
  They're not trying to tell you the answer.
• 1:07:24
  It's like mentorship, right? They're helping take you where
• 1:07:26
  you need to go in that moment in time by listening a lot and then
• 1:07:30
  nudging a little bit. I did that again, this time with
• 1:07:34
  instead of a psychiatrist, I had a psychologist who is also a
• 1:07:37
  Buddhist, which happened to be very helpful to me in terms of
• 1:07:41
  my own value system and how I think about the world.
• 1:07:46
  It didn't make make me a Buddhist.
• 1:07:50
  From the content, we would joke that there's just too many rules
• 1:07:53
  for me to have to follow to be a good Buddhist.
• 1:07:57
  The whole thing with Buddhism was kind of take what you works
• 1:08:00
  for you and leave the. Rest I'm big tongue in cheek.
• 1:08:03
  There's I don't know if if listeners are Big Lebowski fans.
• 1:08:06
  I'm a huge Big Lebowski fan of my wife and I watch it every
• 1:08:09
  couple of years again. And there's a scene in Big
• 1:08:11
  Lebowski where there's a a group of three people called the
• 1:08:14
  nihilists who are trying to like, you know, get their money,
• 1:08:18
  get, get money from Lebowski. And in the scene, you know,
• 1:08:24
  they're going, they're talking about Lebowski.
• 1:08:26
  You know, we're nihilists. And, you know, one of the
• 1:08:29
  characters is saying kept calling them Nazis.
• 1:08:31
  And it's like, no, no, no, no, they're nihilists.
• 1:08:33
  They're not Nazis. It's different.
• 1:08:35
  Like Jeff Bridges is such a great character in that movie.
• 1:08:40
  And there's a scene where the nihilists are explaining to
• 1:08:42
  Lebowski very angrily how, how to be a nihilist.
• 1:08:46
  And, and Lebowski, who again, if people don't know it, this is
• 1:08:50
  where the dude language comes from.
• 1:08:52
  You know, he's sort of this super mellow Stoner dude as a
• 1:08:56
  grown up. And he he just puts his head in
• 1:08:58
  his hands and he goes, man, that's so hard.
• 1:09:04
  Like being a nihilist is so many rules.
• 1:09:06
  So I like to make that done because you know, Buddhist you
• 1:09:08
  follow a set of rules are things like non attachment very useful
• 1:09:12
  rules. And if you follow them the right
• 1:09:15
  way, you know, and you die, maybe you get a chance to do it
• 1:09:19
  again. You have to do it again for all
• 1:09:21
  eternity to maybe reach Nirvana again.
• 1:09:24
  IIA lot of Buddhist philosophy I strongly support.
• 1:09:28
  And so I'd probably separated again religion and philosophy.
• 1:09:31
  I believe the I I follow a lot of the philosophy.
• 1:09:35
  The religion is not that interesting to me.
• 1:09:37
  And my my therapist here, his name was Mcandrew, was really
• 1:09:42
  awesome at incorporating that his world view into my world
• 1:09:48
  view in a way that helped guide me to address some of the things
• 1:09:52
  that were really causing me problems.
• 1:09:53
  And I'll come back to non attachment as a specific
• 1:09:57
  example. If you think about two, 2 ends
• 1:10:03
  of the spectrum and one end is attachment to things, you feel
• 1:10:08
  really attached to things. You feel really responsible.
• 1:10:11
  You feel ownership over them. You want to control them.
• 1:10:18
  Like there's good attachment, bad attachment, but you're
• 1:10:20
  really attached. And it could be relationship,
• 1:10:22
  could be business, could be people.
• 1:10:24
  I want to make this sale. I want my kid to do this.
• 1:10:26
  I want my wife to show me this kind of affection I like.
• 1:10:29
  These are things that I expect, and when they don't happen,
• 1:10:32
  that's what causes the strife. That's right.
• 1:10:34
  And so you're really tight with that.
• 1:10:35
  The other end of the spectrum is detachment.
• 1:10:38
  Doesn't really matter, don't really care, don't need that to
• 1:10:41
  happen. There's another concept.
• 1:10:44
  So I think a lot of people try to try to move between
• 1:10:47
  attachment and detachment. There's another concept which I
• 1:10:52
  prefer called non attachment. And this is a, you know, English
• 1:10:57
  language of a Buddhist concept, which is very different than
• 1:11:01
  detachment. And the way Mcandrew explained
• 1:11:05
  it to me at one point when we were sort of bouncing it around
• 1:11:08
  was, look, non attachment is imagine you're orbiting a sun or
• 1:11:14
  a planet and it's got gravity and, and you're out there in
• 1:11:18
  space sort of moving around and you feel the pull of the
• 1:11:21
  gravity, but the pull of the gravity doesn't really work on
• 1:11:25
  you. You just kind of keep doing what
• 1:11:26
  you're doing against this thing that has the pull of it.
• 1:11:29
  If you want to go towards it, you go towards it.
• 1:11:31
  You want to go away from it, you go away from it.
• 1:11:33
  You're, you have agency, you're the one choosing where you're
• 1:11:36
  going rather than the gravity sucking you in or repelling you
• 1:11:41
  where that gravity is attachment sucking you in or non attachment
• 1:11:45
  repelling you. And for me, like all of a sudden
• 1:11:49
  when I started to approach things with non attachment, it
• 1:11:52
  wasn't that I didn't care. It was that I could exert my own
• 1:11:57
  agency over what I wanted to spend my time and energy on.
• 1:12:02
  And one of my problems historically and one of the
• 1:12:04
  things that caused ultimately the depressive episodes was me
• 1:12:09
  not really feeling like I had or not even feeling me not even
• 1:12:15
  acknowledging that I had agency. And it to tie it back to give
• 1:12:19
  first. It's one of the problems with
• 1:12:20
  give first. If you feel like you have to
• 1:12:22
  give first to everyone who asks you for something and I'll give
• 1:12:26
  an example or everyone you encounter, forget about even
• 1:12:29
  asks. I would have people after give
• 1:12:31
  first became a thing that would come up to me and say, hey Brad,
• 1:12:33
  you're not behaving in a give first way.
• 1:12:36
  Jeez. What the fuck, you know, I, I
• 1:12:39
  would have people who would come up to me and say, all right, I
• 1:12:41
  get this give first thing. You're an investor.
• 1:12:43
  Why don't you give me 5,000,000 bucks and you know, I'll decide
• 1:12:47
  what to give you at the end when I have something.
• 1:12:49
  I'm like, wait a second. Now I, I can have transactional
• 1:12:51
  relationships in my life. It's not that everything has to
• 1:12:54
  be non transactional, but if you integrate the non transactional
• 1:13:00
  piece into your existence in a significant way, it really
• 1:13:03
  changes the flavor in a good way.
• 1:13:05
  For me, my belief in a lot of things.
• 1:13:07
  So I spend a decent amount of time in the third part of the
• 1:13:11
  book talking about some of those things and how to deal with
• 1:13:13
  them. Not necessarily giving solutions
• 1:13:15
  to all of them, but again, telling stories from my
• 1:13:17
  perspective about things that I did.
• 1:13:19
  You know that I similar to this kind of story, but you know a
• 1:13:23
  handful of other different things to to deal with and
• 1:13:26
  address it. So it was effective versus
• 1:13:28
  ineffective. Brad Feld, man, great
• 1:13:33
  conversation. I really appreciate you opening
• 1:13:35
  up to share about these struggles.
• 1:13:36
  This is going to help a lot of people who hear this.
• 1:13:39
  And for me, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing
• 1:13:42
  both your time and your story with us today.
• 1:13:44
  I really appreciate it. Anthony, thanks.
• 1:13:46
  Thanks for letting me ramble around.
• 1:13:48
  Hope hopefully somebody's still listening.
• 1:13:51
  I know for sure that they are. This is good stuff.
• 1:13:53
  This is exactly the heart of what we're trying to get at.
• 1:13:55
  So thanks again for opening up about it.
• 1:13:58
  And folks, that's a wrap here on another episode of the Inspired
• 1:14:01
  Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with.
• 1:14:02
  US today appreciate it.