The Heart of Business
"The Heart of Business" podcast, hosted by Mo Fathelbab, is an authentic and insightful exploration of the human side of leadership and professional growth. Through candid conversations with accomplished business leaders, thought leaders, and peer group facilitators, Mo will delve deep into the personal journeys, challenges, and triumphs that have shaped their careers. Mo Fathelbab's skillful and empathetic approach creates a safe space for guests to share their truths and vulnerabilities, revealing the emotional and often unseen dimensions of success in the corporate world. Each episode offers listeners a chance to glean practical wisdom, heartfelt advice, and a profound understanding of the intricate interplay between leadership, authenticity, and personal growth.
The "Heart of Business" is the official podcast of International Facilitators Organization, LLC and hosted by IFO's founder and CEO, Mo Fathelbab. To learn more, please visit www.internationalfacilitatorsorganization.com.
The Heart of Business
How Peer Mentorship Transforms Founders And Startup Communities with Brad Feld
What if the cure for founder loneliness isn’t more hustle, but better peers and a new way to mentor? Brad Feld joins us to map the journey from scrappy software shop to mentor-driven ecosystems, sharing how a bootstrapped mindset, structured forums, and a “give first” philosophy can reshape an entire career. You’ll hear about the origin of “We Suck Less,” why owning the full customer experience created trust, and how one room of candid founders at YEO turned isolation into momentum.
We unpack the mechanics of forum and why it works: monthly cadence, strict attendance, and a clear flow from updates to deep dives to questions to lived-experience reflections. Brad explains the crucial shift from giving advice to speaking from experience—an approach that lowers ego, invites equality, and helps the presenter uncover root causes rather than chase symptoms. He also shares how these ideas helped shape Techstars, from the early mentor-driven accelerator model to David Cohen’s Mentor Manifesto, a set of principles that encourages curiosity, presence, and practical generosity without turning mentorship into a transaction.
The conversation broadens into startup communities and the Give First philosophy: put energy into the system without predefining return, and watch value compound over time in unexpected ways. Brad connects these dots with stories from the dot-com crash to global programs that democratized entrepreneurship. And he leaves us with a grounding mantra from a trusted mentor: “They can’t kill you and they can’t eat you.” It’s a sharp reminder that perspective fuels resilience.
Please visit www.internationalfacilitatorsorganization.com to learn more about Mo Fathelbab and International Facilitators Organization (IFO), a leading provider of facilitators and related group facilitation services, providing training, certification, marketing services, education, and community for peer group facilitators at all stages of their career.
Welcome to the Heart of Business Podcast, sponsored by International Facilitators Organization, the Marketplace for Facilitators. I'm your host, Mo Fatelbob, and today I'm very excited to have with us Brad Feld. Brad is a renowned American entrepreneur, an early stage investor, a nine-time author, co-founder of Foundry, a venture capital firm based in Boulder. And what I most remember about Brad from probably 1991, when he was running a little IT company called Feld Technologies, is my favorite quote of Brad's, which is everybody in this industry sucks. Our goal is to suck left. Welcome, Brad.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks. And it's very funny every time I see somebody that uses the uh the tagline We SuckLess, that's public. Somebody sends me an email and says, Isn't that yours?
SPEAKER_00:Amazing, amazing, amazing. So if I remember correctly, Brad, at the time, uh Felt Technologies, when you first joined the Young Entrepreneurs Organization before they changed the name to the Entrepreneurs Organization, you were doing maybe a million or two when we met, something like that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it was a little, it was a little business. It was self-funded. We never raised any money. I had a partner, a guy named Dave Jilk. And, you know, we just built it systematically every year. We did one primary thing and then a secondary thing. The primary thing was we wrote software for uh businesses to use to help run their businesses. This is the late 80s, early 90s, back before there were networks, back before the web and the internet, even really back before client server databases. So the sort of using PCs to run your business was pretty shaky back then because the software technology and the hardware technology was pretty fragile. Um, so that was the primary thing we did. And the secondary thing we did was there were a bunch of companies that theoretically provided all the hardware infrastructure. So they'd sell the hardware and they provide, they kind of set up the hardware. And to the extent that networks existed, we used these things called Nobel networks for people that are old like us. Um, and they'd wire them up and they'd use actual physical cable inside office buildings to connect the computers together. And that's where the WeSuck last line came from. I mean, the those people were terrible. And so we would always be the ones that were responsible for it, even though we didn't like put that stuff in. So at some point we said, you know what, we're gonna be responsible for this stuff too. And so we started doing the what became called network integration. Um, but it was putting, you know, putting the PCs on people's desks and connecting everything together and just making sure it all worked, so that then the software that we wrote for companies to automate their businesses would work.
SPEAKER_00:All right, all right, all right. And that was not your first business, was it?
SPEAKER_01:No, it was not. The first couple of companies I did failed. So I uh started a company with uh a couple of college friends. Um uh uh we were freshmen. Yeah, we were we were all freshmen except for one who was Dave, who became my partner at Fell Technologies. And we started a company called Martingale Software. And we uh the original idea was to write uh software for this new computer that had not yet come out yet. It's called a Mac or Macintosh. And to write software for that computer, you had to write it on a thing called a Lisa, which was uh Apple's product that some people may remember. Um, and then you'd like have to do like a hundred disk swaps to put it on the little disks for the uh uh the Macintosh. And then you put it in the Macintosh and it would start running and take a little while, and then a little bomb would show up in the middle of the Macintosh screen because the program would crash. Like that was how you wrote software for the Mac at the beginning, terrible. And um, we were gonna write a piece of software that allowed you to type in numbers into uh a grid, and it would then generate a graph from the grid. And uh so we started doing this, and we were all in college, so we had plenty of other stuff to do. And of course, when when the Macintosh actually shipped, there was this product that shipped with it called Excel that Microsoft made, where it had a grid, a spreadsheet, and you type numbers into it, it made graph. We're like, all right, well, that didn't work. Um, and then I did another company with a guy that was a client of a company that I had worked for in the oil and gas industry, and we did a company called Datavision, and that company built a piece of software to do cephalographic analysis. And if you're wondering what is cephalographic analysis, the answer is everybody else was too. We had one customer, he got the software for free because he was the one who told us about this thing called cephalographic analysis that was going to be really important. It was a way to do facial reconstruction surgery. And the way they did it at the time was they took an X-ray and they, a ruler, and they drew lines on it and figured out the angles and decided where to move the stuff on your face around. And we effectively automated that. So you scan the X-ray into a computer on a high-res monitor, and it was a special monitor at the time, and you like would put little points on the monitor and it would automatically calculate stuff. And so he was our in today's language, he would be our design partner. And so uh it was a doctor at uh LC, Louisiana State University. Remember, nice guy. I visited him a few times, and we wrote this pretty cool piece of software that then nobody bought. Uh, and so that company went out of business a year or so later. Uh, and by that point, I had already, you know, I'm still in school at the time, and I now have a couple of other clients that I'm doing this kind of software for littler projects while I'm in school, and I just decided, okay, well, you know what, I'm just gonna do this by myself. And that became Feld Technologies. And then when I uh in 1987, Dave, my partner, joined me, and the two of us really sort of marked that as the beginning of the company for real.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I think so. But by the time we'd met, we probably had 15 employees, and it was between a million and a million and a half bucks in revenue.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And and what inspired you to pursue entrepreneurship in the first place?
SPEAKER_01:I never really thought of it. Like it was never really a conscious choice. So in high school, well, even though I go back further, when I was uh Bar mitzfood, I got an Apple II computer for my bar mitzvah. So at the time, all of my friends, when they would get Bar mitzvah that era, they would get Krugrams. That was kind of like the the fancy gift. You know, you get lots of the silly little things, a pen and whatever. But like Krug Rams were what everybody wanted. And um, I had started to, I'd been exposed to computers a couple of years earlier, uh, a year or two earlier by my dad's younger brother, a guy named Charlie Feld, who I still to this day call Uncle Charlie. He was the head of data processing at Frito Lay. I grew up in Dallas. Frida was headquartered in Dallas. And today the head of data processing would be called the chief information officer, but at the time they didn't have a title like that. Charlie was one of the half a dozen people or so that created that uh profession. And I I would he would take me down to a data center in uh downtown Dallas that was a free-to-lay data center, and I just sit in front of a terminal all day and just play around. And that was kind of my introduction to computers, and I just loved it, it just completely absorbed me. And so when I got bar mitzvah, my dad said, What do you want? And I said, Uh, you know, uh, I want to get a computer. A computer, okay. Well, you know, let's go figure out what computer to get you. And we ended up getting an Apple II computer. It was before, it was a very early Apple II computer. So it only had 48K of memory, not 64k of memory. They had this thing called the integer card that gave you extra memory. It didn't have disk drives, it just had cassette tape. Like it was really at the very beginning. And um uh that was kind of my introduction. So between my dad and Charlie, like very early on, there was this encouragement around it. So I'd write little pieces of software on the Apple II. I did a little checkbook manager for my dad and you know, some other things like that. And um my junior or senior year of high school, I can't remember which, my father introduced me to one of his patients, a guy named uh Eugene Scott. And um, Mr. Scott um was uh a wonderful guy. He had been a head of sales for a couple of the mini computer software companies and some some very famous, well-known ones. And um, there's a guy named Sam Wiley that had created in Dallas, Texas, this very large company that eventually became part of or the core of computer associates, what became computer associates. And Mr. Scott would have lunch with me for a couple of hours, and we he just sort of regaled me with stories from what he was doing in the computer industry. And he and his son, um uh David had started a company called Scott Instruments, and they made a product called the VET20. VET stands for voice entry terminal. So imagine a thing you put on your head with a big microphone, you talk to it, and it connected to an Apple II, and it allowed you to talk to the Apple II, and the Apple II recognized your speech. So think of it as what Siri is today, or what we fantasize Siri would be if Siri got things right all the time. And um, this was the very first of that kind of technology. So they'd uh effectively, I said David, his name was Brian, not David, Scott. So they effectively had invented this technology, and so they had an uh office, maybe 50 employees, and I would go to their office and hang out, and they made their own circuit boards and you know, they made they wrote all the software and like I just the this idea of creating it myself, creating it from nothing, was embedded at that point in time. And then the last sort of experience like that was my between my senior year in high school and my first year in college, I worked for a company called Petcom. Chris and Helena Aves were the founders, husband and wife. And they wrote software for the oil and gas industry. So in the early 80s in Dallas, Texas, or in Texas, oil and oil and gas was booming. Yeah, and everybody was exploring, you know, digging holes in the ground trying to find uh oil. And uh Chris and Helena came up with a couple of software product ideas. Chris wrote some of it. He wrote a bunch of accounting software. He used to be an accountant, so he wrote a bunch of software on the now the IBM PC, uh, for keeping track of all of this. And I wrote two products for them. One that did something called well logging, analyzing the exploration, and the other called PC Economics, which was like an economic forecasting tool for you put a bunch of assumptions in it would tell you over the next 20 years, you know, what your cash flows from this theoretical thing you were gonna dig in the ground was gonna create. And among other things, they were magnificent. I was their first employee. They grew that company to about 20 people before the oil and gas boom crashed, and all their customers went out of business. Um, but I learned two things from them. One, they paid me 10 bucks an hour, but they paid me per hour. So if I worked 80 hours a week, I got paid twice as much as if I worked 40 hours a week. That was kind of easy but cool. The other, I didn't know what equity was, but they they paid me um 5% royalty. In the oil and gas industry, royalties were what you got. Uh, they paid me 5% royalty on all the software I wrote that they sold. So when I was a freshman in college, I'd get a check in the mail. And the check would have the number of hours I'd work part-time for them during college, uh, you know, times 10, and then a random number of the royalties that I'd get, and they would always substantiate it with a little letter. And, you know, I get uh, you know, 1,500 bucks one month, another month I get 2,500 bucks. One month I got a little bit over$10,000, which was a mind-blowing check to get as a freshman in college.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I remember taking all my, I lived in a fraternity with about 60 people total. I took my other 59 friends to dinner at the Chinese restaurant across the street, and I paid for dinner, and I still had 8,000 bucks left. Right. So very early on, sort of uh I learned this notion and had these experiences with people that were entrepreneurial, that were creating things from their own sort of starting point. And I saw the ups and downs of it, but I just never thought of any other thing. I never thought of getting a job after that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So Feld Technologies, back to Feld Technologies. Uh, how long was that business uh running? And what was the what was the the culmination, so to speak? Did you sell it? Did you shut it down? What tell us the story?
SPEAKER_01:Well, we ran it for seven years, and in that time period is when I first intersected with you. And so I'll sort of break it into two time periods. One was pre uh YEO, Bern Harnish, and Mo. Uh, and the second was post. The the the end was in about year seven, 1993. Um uh uh we sold it uh to a public company. That was a public company that was growing, a little public company growing very fast through acquisition. The co-chair of though that company were Len Fassler and Jerry Pack, two people who had an amazing impact on me. Uh, Len, who I talked uh about uh deeply in Give First, you know, is the person who I really sort of learned the most from in terms of how to be in business. Jerry, I learned a lot from as well. And so both of them were incredible mentors for me. But that's that's so that was the culmination of the business. And then I went on and worked with them for a couple of years. Um, as they bought more companies, I ended up being the technical guy on the deal team. I didn't know anything about deals, but I worked with them, helping them buy companies, essentially helping evaluate companies from a technical perspective, not really buy the companies, but be part of that team. But I was sort of sitting at their side as they were doing these deals. And I also made a bunch of angel investments. I made about 40 angel investments with the money I made from the sale of the company between 1994 and 1996, right at the beginning of the rise of the commercial internet. So I learned how to buy and sell companies and I learned how to make investments in that time period. But the first half of Fell Technologies, from about 1987 to 1990-ish, 90 or 91, I can't remember, I would describe as extremely lonely. Um, uh, Dave and I didn't really have any peers. Like we had clients who had their own businesses because our clients ranged from small to big companies. But we definitely had, you know, they were different. They were 40, 50 years old. They we were in Boston. So they'd they'd been running these businesses for a long time. They just didn't feel like our peers, our people. Um, and we would learn from them, but it was always a client relationship, right? We wanted to always make sure that they were happy as a client. So, you know, what can you share with them really about the stresses of being a startup? Um, and we didn't even have the language for it. We didn't know what we were, we were just creating a company. Um, as we hired people, you know, we kind of we knew nothing. We kind of figured it all out on our own, but it was us figuring it out by making mistakes. And it must have been 1990. I had this amazing experience. The only, the only information available to us now, and for somebody in 2025 that's in their 20s, you know, like this is uh you have to like time travel back. There was no online anything. The only real physical magazine that had any utility for us at the time, and Dave wasn't even interested. He liked to read Forbes and Fortune and things about big businesses and and that sort of stuff. And and he was fascinated by that. I read that if I was less interested. I read a magazine called Inc. magazine. Yeah. And it was the only thing that existed for people that were running small little companies. And I read it religiously every month when it showed up. And it, but it felt very unattainable, right? It was stuff that felt like that's like when we grow up and build something meaningful, maybe we'll be one of those people. And I see an advertisement in Inc magazine for this thing called birthing of giants.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And um, it has a bunch of requirements. You have to be under 40, you have to be a founder of a company, and you have to have more than a million dollars in revenue. And I qualified for the first two of those three, but I didn't qualify for the third. We had like 950,000 in revenue. And I'm a goody two shoes, and I'm too honest for my own good, you know, in those situations. So, like I wrote, I'm whatever the exact number was, I wrote that number in the blank for how much revenue we had. And I sent it in, hoping I get in. We got in. Years later, I learned from Vern Harney. Uh, I said, you know, Vern, I didn't, we're talking, I didn't have a million in revenue. He said, Brad, we let everybody in that was even close. Like, okay, cool. Um, so I go to this thing, it's a four-day thing in in uh outside of Boston at MIT Endicott House. It's sponsored by Inc. magazine, MIT Enterprise Forum, which I knew. And that's a keyword, enterprise form, not MIT entrepreneurship form, MIT Enterprise Forum. So again, the language didn't exist. And then um this thing called Young Entrepreneurs Organization. And uh I go and I have a mind-blowing four days. Mind blow, absolutely, completely transformative. I'm all of a sudden, it's about 60 people again, like in my fraternity. I'm with 59 people that are my peers. Now, I'm one of the smallest companies there, and I'm one of the youngest people there. And there's some people that go on, you know, to be amazing. Ted Leones, this is one that people may know the name of. He was running a little company called Redgate Communications at the time that AOL acquired, and he went on to be Steve Case's partner at AOL. But, you know, there was he was there as a guy named Um Um uh what was uh Mark's last name from Daymark? Oh Mark Cohen. Mark Cohen was there, and he had this huge catalog business and a bunch of other people.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And so there's they're all this collection of interesting people. And we had, you know, four days that was not four days of partying, it was four days of in-classroom, sort of intense, with other more experienced entrepreneurs telling their stories, a couple of academic things, a couple of you know, round table-y type things, and then lots of hanging out, where the hanging out again was we were at this sort of MIT retreat thing. So it wasn't like a party thing, it was like hanging out late at night talking about your woes of your business. Uh, you know, Charles, I found my people. I'm like, wow, right? And that was like boom. I went back to Boston and I told Dave, and he's like, Yeah, yeah, sounds interesting. He was never really that interested in stuff like that. And I'd heard of this thing, right? It was one of the co-sponsors, Young Entrepreneurs Organization. I think at the time I joined immediately, I think I was like the hundredth person. It was tiny. It was tiny. Tiny.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I said, I'm gonna start a Boston chapter. And so I started a Boston chapter. And uh all of a sudden, you know, but with a little help from a couple of other people, all of a sudden we had a Boston chapter with 10 or 15 people that then became 20, and 30, and 40, and 50. Um, I ended up getting very involved with YO uh at a board level as YO was going up on uh on his very rapid ascent. Yeah, I got linked into Kaufman Foundation through something at MIT with somebody named Jenna Matthews, who's a longtime friend now. And Jenna linked all linked into YO, loved it because she loved at the time Kaufman, which was doing a lot of stuff around entrepreneurship, it was all small business. And they really weren't doing anything around this category of what we started talking about as high growth entrepreneurs. So, like all of these things, this is now the second half of my fellow technologies experiences. I now have peer group, I have YEO, I have um, you know, the these activities that are, you know, for me a little stressful financially because like traveling someplace, you know, on a company that's we're making money every month. So, you know, we're doing fine and I'm making a decent amount of money, but I'm still thinking about money in terms of the trade-offs. Um, but like it was an easy decision to invest in those things because it was ended up being an invest in me. And there was the profound intersection at the time that I had with you, which I think became the foundation of so much of how I think about mentorship, which was as we started the Boston chapter, you know, okay, Brad, you're now the president or the head of the Boston chapter, whatever it was. Here's the things you got to do. Number one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Number two, create a forum group. What's a forum group? Okay, here's what a forum group is. Okay, that sounds kind of cool. And in the context of what's a form group, okay, now you have to do form training.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And so there are about 10 of us, a dozen of us, I can't remember. Um I'm trying to think of the people. Steve Ransom, Mark Mark McNaka, Mark McNacca was one.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Rich Kivill, maybe.
SPEAKER_01:Rich Kivill for sure was one. Yeah. Um, so like there's these groups, and I, you know, these are new people to me too. They're not people I know already. And we go and we take go on a retreat somewhere, and it's a three-day thing, and all of us, like, as a we're sort of, and this is pre-email, right? So we're calling each other together coordinating, and everybody's like, I don't have three days, I don't have a long weekend. What are we doing? What is this thing? What is who is this Mo guy? Um, and we go and we have this. I can't remember, it was in an old building, sort of in um Cape Cod, I think. Cape Cod somewhere. I can't, I don't remember. It was cold, it was in the winter. Yeah. And and it was amazing. Amazing. And you have this moment as a as a young person for me, as a young person who has been alone, but now starting to find, again, my people, other founders, other entrepreneurs, other people struggling with the same thing. Some people further along than me, some people at the same place as me, but all of us feeling like we're peers together. Nobody rating, nobody saying, how big is your business and how much money you're making? We tell each other this stuff. Like it doesn't matter. It's just, it's part of getting to know each other, not and here's how I'm doing, and none of this. I'm killing it, kind of crap. It's like, you know, let's start with all the things that are totally fucked up and that I'm feeling stressed about professionally and personally. And you come out of this and you're like, I'm just not alone. And then that sets off this arc over a long period of time. I I really had an amazing experience in Boston. I moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1995. I sold the business in 93. Uh, Amy, my wife, told me uh two months before I turned 30, which was December 95, that she was moving to Boulder and I could come with her. Uh, we were married, so that was really kind of like an intelligence test, I suppose. And we moved to Boulder, and we ironically, I only knew one person in Boulder at the time, and that was Vern Harnish. And he moved away six months later, something like that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um, and I didn't move to Boulder because of Vern. In fact, it hadn't really connected that Vern was in Boulder until we had moved, and then somehow the two of us were talking about something. It's like, oh, I'm here too, and then get together. Um, and then sort of from that, I started, I didn't know anybody. So, how you know, what's the strategy for getting to know people when you move someplace? You don't know anybody. Well, I'll start the YU Colorado chapter. So I started that, and this same kind of experience with like having a form group and finding people and then sort of building these networks, those experiences were part of the foundational thing for me about building networks and the power of networks and how that works alongside this construct of this really magical thing around mentorship called peer mentorship, which I I give to you. Like I learned that from you.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thank you. Thank you. And what a pleasure and what an honor and what uh a long time it's been that we've been doing this. So, for those people that don't know what a forum is, Brad, can you, in your words, talk about what it is, uh, how it connects to peer mentorship? Uh, what are some of the you know key principles that make it work effectively uh from your view?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So it's evolved over time and I think gotten um more robust over time as I talked to EORs today about how Forum works. When we when we did it, I think the the base is the same. It's a once a month, three-hour meeting. It's not social. Uh generally, we would do it at someone's office, and you'd rotate around so you'd see different people's offices. It was structured. So it was important that you always attend and you be on time and you be available for the entire three hours. That was the ground rules. Um, and I think in each of my forums, we allowed people to have once a year you could miss, but you had to admit you had to say in advance you were gonna miss. And if you miss twice, you're out of form. So it was a pretty pretty strict, like you really have to be there and show up. And in both of my forums, people really adhered to that. Um and you know, as over time you'd allow people to dial in, you know, we didn't have video conferencing, but you you know, you let somebody dial in on the phone if it was really like they had a good reason. Um the three hours tended to be structured. Um, the first part of it uh was updates. And you would each sit and you go around the room and you give personal and professional updates, and you talk about highs and lows, and you just talk, and you had to actually describe what was going on. It wasn't like bullet point list, but like, you know, here's the professional positive, you know, high. And we each I remember when we started, I can't remember if this was always the way we did it, but when we started, we everybody had a piece of paper and you filled it out for a few minutes on the piece of paper. So you had your starting point for the first five minutes everybody wrote versus you're just talking off the top of your head, and then you go through highs, lows, personal, professional, and then generally, like there was some summation. Go around the room and everybody would listen to each other. Don't give feedback, don't comment, just listen and really with attention. Then we generally from that would somebody would say, I would like to go deep as they're going around the room, say, I'd like to go deeper on this issue. And it could be a professional issue or a personal issue. It could be a higher or a low, it could be some combination of things. And oftentimes one person, by the time you get around the room, one person would have said that, maybe sometimes two. And we decide between one and two to then run a process. And this is the other half of form. So maybe that what I just described consumes an hour. The other two hours you start, the person that is now the presenter describes their problem or describe or their issue. It doesn't need to be a problem, whatever they're wanting to think through. And sometimes it would be I've got an offer for the business, I'm having trouble with my my relationship, I've got a problematic employee, I'm super depressed and bored. Uh I, you know, my uh mother is driving me batch fit crazy because of this, that, or the other. It could be anything. And the person would just present and they'd talk about what the issue was in their own words. They'd go deep on it, and they'd have about up to third, depending on it, 15 to 30 minutes to uh to explain. And you know, people would often, with just the explanation, as they get deeper and deeper into it, get emotional about it. And again, you just sit and listen. No interaction, no questions, no anything, but really attentive. At the end of that, each person would then, and then we wouldn't go around the room person by person, but each person could talk about things from their own experience that related to what they just heard. And what they would do from their own experience is not say, I think you should do this, but instead, here's an experience I had that's like this part of what you're describing. It doesn't have to be the whole. Or I don't know if this fits, but when you were talking about this, it made me think of this experience I had. So always again framing it from my experience. Um and then uh sorry, that's the last part. Before that part, sorry, before that part, then you have the second part was a QA. So the person presents, and then the room, after listening, asks questions. And the questions can be any kind of questions around the context. So it's leading questions to draw more out from the person. That then leads to the from my experience uh part. And the interesting thing about that was, and when I when I reflect on some, it was making me think of one uh one one very uh poignant moment uh in in one of my Colorado forums. The thing the person was describing on the surface, it would feel like nobody would have had that experience. But the questions people asked caused people to realize that the experience the person was having had little to do with the thing they were describing, and so almost everybody had a completely different life experience that related to the experience, but wouldn't have come out without the questions.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And then at the end, the person who's the presenter has a chance to kind of go around and address each person in a you know, whatever way they want it. It could be appreciation, it could be, you know, uh uh empathy around something, it could be a specific uh statement around something. Um, so that that was the the long arc. Person presents, questions go around the room, each person can talk from their own experience. And what I found, I mean, I I did Boston form for three years, and then I did the Colorado form for like seven or eight years, maybe more than that, eight years, let's say. The level of emotional intimacy that gets created within the first three or four meetings is beyond any other relationships I have with anybody other than my business partner, Dave, and my wife Amy. And so all this, you know, and this is not all of YO, this is just your form group. So, you know, in Colorado, we had two forms at the beginning. Form one was my form. I can't remember what the other form group name was called. And then over time, you know, 100 people, you probably have 10 or 15 form groups, you know, it kind of continues to grow and evolve. But but that level of emotional intimacy between people at different points in their experiences, but all overlapping in under 40, founder of company, more than a million in revenue, ended up creating a way to engage with other people that was unlike anything I had done before and has turned into a way to engage with people, especially now. You know, I'm almost 60. I'd like to think that many of the founders that I invest in, I can engage with them in those ways if they are interested. I don't have to, they don't have to. But I'm obviously attracted to uh founders who have that way of being. And, you know, one of the things in several of the larger networks that I've been involved in, Techstars being one of them, you see that in lots of places. It doesn't have to be with every single person, but lots of areas where that sort of emotional intimacy uh is part of the fabric of the relationship.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Absolutely. What a did I describe form pretty well? Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. The one piece I would love for you to touch on, because I think it also ties into uh your work with your new book, uh Give First about mentorship. I want you to touch on the importance of speaking from experience as it relates to creating that equality.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's it's uh profound. I think it's obvious in hindsight, but unfortunately for so many people, it's not intuitive. And it's also a little hard from an ego perspective, right? We all have egos. Um uh and uh you know you can modulate your ego in different ways. And you know, my my the ego that sits on my shoulder sometimes, I look at my ego and tell my ego to fuck off and leave me alone, right? Because you know, you make ego-driven decisions a lot of times, not good decisions. Um in this context, this idea, if you if you take the two ends of the spectrum, one is you know, I've I've had uh whatever experiences I've had, lots of successful experiences, lots of experience of failure, lots of different kinds of experiences over the 40 years. I've been in business in the 60 years I've been on this planet, lots of good and bad. Those experiences are ones that are mine, that I can describe. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum, imagine, and you know, I like to say uh my father, my father doesn't do this anymore very much, but he did it when I was a kid. And I describe it as the finger wag. And think of think of the politician. I think uh the the politician that does it the most is probably Bernie Sanders, you know, the contemporary politician, where they wag their finger at you. You should, you should, you should. This is how it should be. These declarative statements about how things should work, which might or might not be correct. But think about your emotional reaction to the you should, you should, you should, when, especially if you're an entrepreneur or a founder, if somebody's telling you you should, I mean, like some people are obedient to that. Like most people are like, I want to do the exact opposite. Or, you know, their response is to immediately stop listening, or to say, you don't understand me, or you don't understand my situation. So those are the two ends of the spectrum. And what I found in this notion of engaging, regardless of experience, regardless of any attribute, pick your attribute, just throw it out the window. Um, in terms of engaging with someone, if you can talk to them from your experience, rather than directing them what to do, uh, telling them what the answer is. It's not dissimilar to a management technique that if anybody's listening that's ever managed a team. If you're trying to get a team done to get something done that's really hard in some compressed period of time, the worst way to do it is to tell them you have to get this done by this day or you're fired. Now, there's some leaders that do that and are quite effective at it, but for my frame of reference, the much more effective way to do it is to get the team to commit to getting the thing done by that time. And you, as the leader, to say, okay, look, we got these constraints within these constraints. One of the hard constraints is the deadline. Like, what can we get done? And how can we get it done? And then working with the team to get the team to agree that they're going to get the thing done by that deadline, then that team's going to be way more committed to doing the thing with high quality to do, you know, move heaven and earth to do it. So, again, different leadership styles. My own view in this creating equality is this notion that, you know, we're all individuals with different strengths and weaknesses. And what you're trying to do, whether you're in a pure mentor relationship, whether you're in a manager relationship, or whether you're a managee, or whether you're a mentor, mentee that still has a one-up, one-down relationship, it's an old cliche, but you're trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes. And the only way to really put yourself in the other person's shoes is to try to understand the problem from their perspective. And frankly, the only way to communicate to someone when you're trying to understand the problem from their perspective is to talk from your experience with examples rather than be directive as to what the other person should do.
SPEAKER_00:Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Uh, thank you. And I love your perspective and your explanation for that. And it's just good to hear it from somebody else's words who's been doing this for for a long time. And you believe so much in this process, you brought it to Techstars and have used it to support many of your Techstars uh members. Uh, maybe speak to that for a minute if you don't mind.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there were two things that happened uh early in Techstars that evolved over time. One that was directly in the context of Techstars, and then one that was um emerging from it. In the very first Tech Stars program, which was we started in 2006, ran the first program in 2007 in Boulder. Well, we with David Cohen, who is the co-founder and the CEO of TextSe came up with this idea for this thing that we started calling an accelerator. And then pretty quickly started calling it a mentor-driven accelerator. And the reason we called it a mentor-driven accelerator, the word mentor didn't really exist in the fabric of entrepreneurship much, then it would pop up every now and then, but it wasn't really the word. And what we said is look, we're gonna get a bunch of people in the Boulder and Denver, you know, uh uh region who were, you know, founders or worked with founders and service providers, or maybe were investors. And we're gonna surround these founders for 90 days, which was the length of the accelerator program, with these mentors. We're gonna call them mentors, and the mentors are gonna spend time with no commitment of any sort other than willingness to spend time with these founders. There's no quid pro quo, there was no definition, there was no economics. It was just gonna be interesting. We'll see what happens. And when we were recruiting the mentors, and I most many of them were people I knew, and some of them were from the East Coast or the West Coast and would travel to Boulder. And, you know, the way I would entice them to come to Boulder, I said, look, if you come to Boulder, in addition to doing this Textars thing with us, I'll have dinner with you. And if you want me to, you know, wander you around town the next day and introduce you to a bunch of folks, happy to do that. So, like it was it was a way to kind of get people to to come to town. But people were like, no, it sounds like fun. Summer, Boulder, awesome, let's do it. In the first couple of years, we we didn't really know what mentorship was, but we pretty quickly started seeing things that were effective and things that weren't effective. And of course, many of these things tied back to form. Um, because I already had, I was already doing form. I had this intuition about sort of the dynamics around these things. Like, you know, it was it was sort of already in my head. And so we started talking, and and I, and of course, we were doing, David and I were doing a lot of the mentorship with the individual companies as well. And then, of course, a lot of the people you'd be spending time with who are mentors, you'd also be doing mentor-like conversations about their business or about, you know, I was, you know, what uh where tech service was going to evolve, or at this point, we had raised foundries first fund and sort of what was going on with that. You'd have those same kind of peer-mentor conversations in these contexts one-on-one. By about the fourth year, we now had done 10 programs. We were in a couple of different cities. Um, and we'd really learned, I think, a decent amount about what was effective versus not. And David wrote very quickly this thing called the Textstar's Mentor Manifesto. It was 18 bullet points. Wasn't rules. It was not, and if you do these things, you will be a good mentor and get a check mark. It was not that. It was one-liners that were ideas for people to think about in the context of mentoring. And those one-liners, when I wrote Give First, I organized part two of the book around those one-liners, they really hold up well. And they don't hold up well of do these and you will be a good mentor. They hold up well. And if you think hard about this kind of abstract idea, it can help you be more effective. And if you think about it and kind of don't do it, you're probably going to be less effective. And so that part of the book is fleshing those out from my own experience. Right. So describing the one-liners with more depth, um, and and sort of talking about them with more depth uh intellectually, but then using experiences that I'd had that reflected that one-liner. Um, so that was one construct. The other construct was this phrase give first, uh, which is a philosophy, not a religion. It's something to think about and to incorporate into your way of being. It's not what you should spend 100% of your energy on, but it's a part of the way that you one operates. And it's a set of ideas around it. And the definition is very simple: it's that you're willing to put energy into a system without knowing what you're going to get back. You don't define the transaction up front. It's not altruism. You expect to get something back, you just don't know from whom, over what time period, in what form, and what consideration. And by 2012, uh, I had written a book called Startup Communities. And that book, that phrase didn't exist before that. And it talked about the idea of how do you how you can create a startup community in any city in the world. And I made this assertion that any city over about 50,000 people benefited from having a startup community. And so there's this phenomena as entrepreneurship, which always existed all around the world. But now this sort of next wave of entrepreneurship started to have that. In that, Techstars was a big part of that global democratization of entrepreneurship, because it was not just running programs all over the world, but eventually started doing startup weekends uh all over the world and participating in startup weeks and doing things that were really global in nature. And I had this one paragraph in that book called Give Before You Get. And that paragraph, I didn't think very hard about it, but I wrote what was roughly the definition. And I was basically saying, look, if you want to really get things going, you need to be willing to give before you get. Put energy into the startup community without defining what you get from it. And in a sort of wonderful uh moment, about six months later, Adam Grant, who's a Wharton professor of organizational psychology, came out with a book called Give and Take.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:And my one paragraph was anecdotal. It was just the way I write, it was from my experience. It was things that, you know, I'd been percolating on. Adam did like all this research that showed basically substantiated this construct of being willing to put energy into a system without knowing what you're going to get, being a giver. And for me, it was another you know, mind-blowing moment of like, yep, you know, there's some real substantiation for this. And that that evolved in Techstars lingo and in value system into this idea of give first, being willing to put energy into things without knowing what you're going to get back.
SPEAKER_00:I love it. Two quick questions before we say goodbye. Brad Feld, the first your storied career, you've done many, many amazing things. You look back. What are you most proud of?
SPEAKER_01:I think I'm I don't think I'm most proud of a singular thing. I think I'm most proud, I hadn't thought of it this way, in reflecting on how I feel about how I've engaged with so many people. And I feel like I attribute that to Len Fastner, in that at Len passed a few years ago. Uh, Len and I were incredibly close friends and stayed close through the end of his life, even when we weren't working together. And what I saw in Len was just this great joy in how he had engaged with others in good times and bad, including me. And I feel the same way. Like, of course, I have people that don't like me. Of course, I've disappointed people, of course, I've got some broken relationships. Every human being does. Uh, and I'm okay with that. Like, I feel like that's part of life. But I am very comfortable with a wide set of ways, you know, the way I feel about the way I've related to so many people.
SPEAKER_00:Well, my next question was going to be about who's had the most impact on you. And I think Len certainly is one that came up for me as I was reading the book. Uh, I would ask this though. He did say something that was a beautiful quote that I'd love to end with, having something to do with they can't kill you. Uh, can you give us 30 seconds of what that quote was?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the book leads off with a story of a moment where I'm just in abject misery at Len's house one morning, sort of as the internet bubble is uh collapsing. And, you know, not just the company we were running was all fucked up, but everything in my world, of which I was on a lot of boards and made a lot of investments was a mess. And he sort of cheerfully comes down the stairs to his kitchen. He he sees immediately that I'm like hunched over the kitchen table, you know, like looking like uh sad sack that morning. He comes up to me and gives me a big hug after we talk a little bit, and he says, Brad, they can't kill you and they can't eat you. Let's go to work.
SPEAKER_00:I love it. I love it. I love it. Brad Feld, thank you so much for your time and for everything you've done for this incredible community of entrepreneurs, uh, both in EEO and the tech stars, not to mention everything else you have done. A special thanks to our audience. And as a reminder, that reviews help uh people find our podcast. So please leave a review to help others find the show. And thank you again and have a great rest of your day.
