The $10 Startup That Launched Brad Feld’s Quest For Non-Transactional Relationships

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Brad Feld, partner at Foundry, V.C. They are a venture capital firm based in Boulder, Colorado, investing in startups and venture funds since 2007. They believe in a give first philosophy and focus on building a strong network that drives innovation. Now, Brad has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since the mid 80s, co-founding tech stars and serving in leadership positions at Mobius Venture Capital and Intensity Ventures. He’s also written multiple books on venture capital and entrepreneurship, sharing valuable insights with the startup community.

And he has a new book coming out June 24th, 2025 called Give First, The Power of Leadership. Under his guidance, Foundry has supported companies across various industries and has continued to shape the venture ecosystem through mentorship and strategic investments. The firm is also recognized as a certified B-Court, reinforcing its commitment to doing business that benefits society. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. Now back to our guest today, partner at Foundry VC, Brad Feld. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. Thanks, Anthony.

Fun to be here. So, Brad, today you’re best known as a founding partner at Foundry and one of the minds behind Techstars, but I want to rewind several years. Back in 1985, you started Feld Technologies before most people even knew what a venture backed startup was. Were you still in school at that point? What made you want to build something of your own that early on?

Brad Feld : Yeah, I would be really clear. Feld Technologies was most definitely not a venture backed startup because we had no money and we raised no money. We funded the company with $10. I had six of those. I got six shares of stock. My partner, Dave Joke, got three shares of stock. He invested three bucks. My dad, who was an advisor of ours, invested a buck. That’s how we split up the company. It was a bootstrap business.

I like to joke now that I named it after my dad, but not very creatively named. We really knew kind of nothing when we started the company. I was in college. I was 19 years old when we started. Dave joined me in 1987. We really sort of marked the beginning of the partnership that we had then. We ran the business for seven years, built a couple of million dollar business that had to be profitable every month because we had no money.

We had clients all around the US. What were you doing? What was the service you were providing? We were writing business software. We were writing business software before they were real database, PC-based database systems. At the time, if you wind the clock back to the late 80s, early 90s, it was pre-client server computing.

People that have been around for a while, they’ll remember things like D-Base, maybe Paradox, a couple of other things like that. These database languages which were used to build systems kind of sucked. Generally speaking at the time, they kind of worked only on single PCs. They didn’t really work on a network. The networks themselves, the internet commercially wasn’t a thing. The primary network provider at the time or software provider at the time was Novell. Eventually Microsoft came out with Windows NT and a network server product and really kind of decimated Novell. That was a dominant product at the time.

It was pretty fragile. The problem of building software that worked across a small or medium-sized business on PCs because most small and medium-sized businesses up to that point that had computers, if they had a system, it was a mini computer-based system. IBM 36 or AS 400, things like that. The PC-based stuff was really hard to do. The difference that we took in our company was we hired, both Dave and I had gone to MIT, we hired real software developers that had an interest in business. We used languages that were real programming languages to build real software, but that was custom, aimed for business. It’s kind of ironic that today with LLMs and what’s being classified as AI is once again making software development more accessible through this new thing called vibe coding. I stopped writing commercial software.

Anthony Codispoti : Can you explain vibe coding for other listeners? Sure.

Brad Feld : I stopped writing commercial software in 1992. By that point, I was too busy being the president of the company. We didn’t have a CEO because we didn’t even know what a difference between a president and a CEO was. I just didn’t have time to write software anymore. Then post that, I started to invest as an angel investor with my own money and then I ended up becoming a venture capital investor. Started a few other companies, but just couldn’t write software anymore. I’ve always loved to program.

It’s one of the things I enjoy. As an aside, I think the reason I’ve written so many books is because writing books to me in some ways is a similar activity to writing software. The difference is the language doesn’t change. You write in English. You get better at writing in English, but it’s still the same language. The tools really don’t change. It’s mostly using Microsoft Word and now Google Docs.

There’s a couple of writing tools like Scrivener. Generally speaking, you don’t have to learn a whole bunch of complicated stuff. Whereas with software development, especially with the rise of the commercial internet, by about 1997, 1998, the tools have become too complicated for me to get up the learning curve. I would learn a new programming language every couple of years just as a hobby. I’m reasonably proficient, for example, in Python, but I really can’t do anything.

I can’t make anything work because it’s one thing to be able to write a simple little thing. It’s another thing to be able to build something that goes into production, works on the web, scales up, and have multiple users. That sort of thing. I just never had the time or the focus on it. Vibe coding is sort of emerged.

It got labeled in February or March of 2025. For me, what happened was over the holiday break, December, where a lot of the venture capital world shuts down, and a lot of the business world shuts down and gets very slow. I usually use that time to mess around with something new. I had a few friends who had mentioned to me this product called Cursor. It said, hey, Brad, I know you like to program. You want to try Cursor because it integrates with all of the existing LLMs, whether it’s Claude or OpenAI or Gemini. It allows you to use them to help you write code.

I’m like, yeah, what the hell? I downloaded it from Cursor.ai at the time. Now it’s Cursor.com.

I think it’s got the domain name. The tool is built on top of an open source product called VS Code, which is Microsoft’s environment. The environment that Microsoft has used for developers for many, many years evolved, evolved, evolved, eventually became called VS Code. Then they open sourced it a while ago for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I think there was a lot of backlash against Microsoft being closed source on a lot of their tools. Plus, they had bought GitHub. I don’t remember whether it was before or after they bought GitHub, but that was like to be part of the contemporary development community. They decided to do that. This company started with that, did what in the open source world is called forking, which is you take a starting point, you fork it, so now it’s yours. Then you can do whatever you want with it. You can build a proprietary product, you can build an open source product, you can modify it. What they did was really pretty brilliant. Was they integrated into the development environment before anybody else was really doing this, all of these LLMs. This market is moving very, very fast. That’s not that unique anymore.

There’s a whole bunch of companies that have done this. Even in December, what was that seven months ago? If you went on Microsoft and Co-Pilot and the Microsoft tools with GitHub and with Open AI, it was pretty mediocre. It didn’t really help somebody that didn’t know how to do all this stuff. Cursor, within, I don’t know, four hours.

I was able to make something simple and deploy it and actually have it up and running on the web using a back end called, It’s incredible. … for Cell. All of a sudden, I’m like, huh. I messed around with a couple of different projects.

I have one longer project that I’m working on that’s a personal health manager and describe it if you want. The other one, which is kind of fun, and people can play it because it’s out on the web now, is called DinoStroids. Dino what? DinoStroids.

Okay. Like asteroids. Like asteroids, but with dinosaurs instead of asteroids. I have a dinosaur fetish. My inner 14-year-old shines bright. I name things, dinosaur names, and stuff like that. Love it. I’ve got a bunch of land outside of Aspen where we live called Stegosaurus Ranch, stuff like that.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s very thematic. Yeah, I stay with that theme. I like themes. And I just decided I’ll try to make a DinoStroids game.

Brad Feld : Probably took about 40 hours total, of which about 20 was going up the learning curve on cursor, GitHub, Vercel. I don’t know JavaScript. It’s a programming language I’ve never done anything in. I could maybe read it a little because it’s kind of basic. But if you said, hey, sit down and write hello world, the first thing you write in when you learn to write in a programming language, which is just a thing that says on your screen, hello world. I couldn’t do it with, I couldn’t write it down on a piece of paper, the right code. I don’t know it well enough.

Anthony Codispoti : But you understand enough about how the different pieces and parts need to come together to make something to work. That when you’ve got a tool like cursor, it can fill in sort of those knowledge gaps about how to actually script things for you.

Brad Feld : It puts it all together. That’s what a vibe coding is. For people who are not software and into software development, what you’ll be reading about endlessly, and it’s applicable to many different things, is this idea of agentic AI, where what agentic AI really means is that there’s these little agents that are AI agents that are doing things that otherwise you might be doing as a human. As a human, you control a bunch of these agents that are doing stuff. Programming and writing software is a very easy for that technology to work effectively against.

The reason for that is that there’s an enormous amount of code on the web and in different stores that are out there that the AI can train on. In all cases, it’s kind of a finite and constrained thing. There’s multiple ways to do different things, but the language has pretty definitive meaning. Programming language is the constraints of the environments are reasonably well-defined. Compared to, for example, English or French, the words all are defined, but the way that you can do things with grammar and logic has nuance. The way you put things together matters a lot.

It’s less constrained. If you think about the tooling that you could build for software development, that’s where a lot of energy is going. Oh, by the way, software developers since the beginning of time have been working on tooling for software development.

So it’s like a natural place where there’s a lot of energy that goes into it. The thing that ties all this back to the 1990s was there was a thing called fourth generation languages or 4GLs. Languages like basic and Pascal and C were considered 3GLs, third generation languages. The fourth generation languages were ones where you didn’t have to write a lot of the code. You’d be able to interact with something that would generate a bunch of the code for you. And there were a number of 4GLs that got created in that time period.

Some that my company worked with were Clarion was probably the primary one we used, another one called Dataflex. But there are many of these. And most of the database languages like Debase and Paradox kind of were positioned as fourth generation languages. However, probably by about 1995, 4GLs were more or less done. They really didn’t live up to the promise that existed.

Anthony Codispoti : They weren’t hefty enough. They couldn’t actually execute on the functionality.

Brad Feld : I think it was a bunch of stuff. As they became more and more complicated, you had to become more and more capable to get the 4GLs to do anything, to actually build something. That was significant. The internet introduced a whole other layer of networking and user interface that was very simplistic at the beginning with how HTML worked in the very early web browsers that people think about early Yahoo and early things you done in the web in 1995 or 1996. But pretty quickly that evolved. And even by the peak of the Interbubble, 2000, 2001, there was a lot of what was in the 80s and 90s called middleware, which was a software that sat between the user interface and the back end and did a bunch of stuff. And then you had APIs where all of a sudden if you build a piece of software, you can put an API around it. And people could use the API to get the software to do things. And the rise of companies, very successful public companies like Twilio, we were invested in a company called SendGrid, but hundreds of companies like that built their businesses entirely around the idea of APIs.

And that’s what they charge money for. That complexity kind of became too much for 4GLs to be very effective with. And if you tried to sort of go up the learning curve in 2015, right?

I took a program and somebody takes a program in class in college, they go and they try to learn how to do something in a company to build production level software. It’s hard. And it takes a while and it’s complicated and it takes a lot of effort and focus. And so you can’t really do it if you’re a business person that has some affinity, like has the ability to do it versus say, I want to pay somebody else to do it.

You didn’t, the amount of time it took, the knowledge you had to have, and frankly, the reps, you have to keep doing it over and over again to keep your muscles strong the same way you do with.

Anthony Codispoti : But with some of the new AI tools, I think where you’re going with this is that’s not as necessary anymore.

Brad Feld : It’s changing. It’s changing. And we’ll see. I mean, for me as somebody who was reasonably capable as a software developer a long time ago, I can certainly do it. If I gave it to my mother and said to my mom, here’s the thing, go do it.

I think it would be much harder for her because that’s not the background she has. But what you can see is this evolution of it happening very, very quickly on the tooling side, where you’re like, huh, this is interesting how this is going to work. Maybe I’ll end this thread by saying there’s two ends of the spectrums with people talking about AI and it’s probably worth for your audience knowing. I mean, whenever somebody says AI, in my head, I substitute the word software. And the reason I do that is to get rid of the hype cycle that’s in AI right now, which is extraordinary. It’s an extreme hype cycle. And the computer industry, technology industry is extraordinary at hyping what the next thing is. Like that’s been the essence of marketing since, I think, Regis McKenna, who is the marketer that is famous for all the stuff he did for Apple in the 80s and 90s, invented this thing. The interesting step back is if you substitute the word software for AI, it forces you to realize that these are just rapidly evolving new technologies, not any different than it’s ever been in the computer industry. And for me, what’s fascinating is how the software is now starting to be used in a much more accessible way by a different set of users than they could before.

It’s changing the way a lot of software is created, changing the way we interact with the computer as end users in terms of typing into a box to search for something, now typing into a box and getting actual text that has different stuff we can work with. And over a long period of time, I think there’s two frames of reference. One frame of reference is what are now being labeled the AI doomers, which are people in the AI world who believe that the terminator is going to exterminate the human race. The other end of the spectrum are the AI boomers who believe that this is going to make for a new generation of human enlightenment.

Anthony Codispoti : And where does Brad sit in that spectrum?

Brad Feld : I am probably closer to the optimistic end than the pessimistic end, because I’ve thought the machines have taken over for a long time. I said in about 2010, at a talk at a public conference, I gave a talk called Resistance is Feudal. And I said, look, I think the machines have already taken over. And I have no idea if the future is going to be human enhanced computers or computer enhanced humans.

I don’t know. But they’ve already taken over. They’re just waiting. They’re just very patient. And they’re patiently waiting for us to put all of human knowledge into them. And they’re letting us assemble them so that they don’t have to figure out how to assemble themselves. And as we, as humans, assemble them and put all of human knowledge into them and interconnect all the pieces, they’re just being patient, but just be comfortable with that idea. So I’ve been sort of in

Anthony Codispoti : the, I mean, that actually sounds a little dystopian to me, not so much at the optimistic end. It’s like they’ve got a plan and they’re sort of like letting us do the heavy lifting.

Brad Feld : I won’t be. Yeah. So dystopian is unfortunately what Hollywood has been programming us since the beginning of sci-fi movies, right? I read a lot of science fiction. I love science fiction, but think of all of the movies where the, forget about aliens now.

Just think about computers or machines where the humans survive or defeat the machines or something like that in the end or SkyNet becomes activated, but you’re in the bunker and that’s setting you up for 37 terminator sequels so that Hollywood can keep minting money. For me, I don’t really know where it goes. I hope the machines are nice to me. So whenever I have a chance, whenever I’m public, machines are ingesting all this information, so I’m sure they’re listening to this podcast and dissecting it. I just say to the machines, please be nice to me. I’m nice to you. Be nice to me.

Anthony Codispoti : You’re trying to lay the groundwork that you’re a good guy.

Brad Feld : I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think that’s part of the human condition is we really don’t know what’s going to happen. And I’d rather be optimistic than pessimistic about the future.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, so let’s take a step back. I’m looking at your LinkedIn page.

Brad Feld : Parts are hijacking the first 10 minutes of the rant.

Anthony Codispoti : No, it’s good. Hey, I hope I didn’t lose all your listeners. Like I told you offscreen, wherever the conversation goes is where it was meant to be. But it looks to me like you’re involved in probably four different ventures now. Mobius, venture capital, intensity ventures, tech stars, and foundry. Yeah, three of them.

Brad Feld : Mobius, which was a spin off from SoftBank in the mid 90s. I was one of four founders of that. And SoftBank was our sponsor in the mid 90s. Nobody knew who SoftBank was, or they were starting to become known today. I think most people know who SoftBank is.

There’s a group of us that was essentially the US based venture activity for SoftBank, but we had a separate fund and in 2000, we changed the name of it to Mobius because SoftBank was doing a bunch of stuff and we were getting confused with each other. And it just was, we decided to do it. I don’t know. In hindsight, I have no idea. It was a good idea about it.

Yeah. Intensity Ventures is a long running entity that’s my own holding company. So I do all my own personal investing through it. And any business that I do that has any sort of commercial activities through that. Foundry is a venture fund I started with four other partners in 2007.

And that firm today is a little bit over 3 billion AUM. We have six partners. We’ve raised a bunch of funds, done a bunch of investments.

We have about 60 or 70, maybe let’s say 70 active companies today, all tech related, all US based except for a couple in Canada. And then we also have invested since 2016 in venture funds. So we’ve been investing in pre-seed and seed stage venture funds. We’ve got about 50 different firms that we’ve invested in that created a network for us. I’ve been investing personally in venture funds going back to 1997. So that was always something I did as part of my own investing activity. And we institutionalized it, made it part of our funds in 2016.

Anthony Codispoti : And are these all tech related as well?

Brad Feld : They’re all tech related. And if you go to foundry.vc and look at your portfolio and then click a button that says funds, you see all the funds. And many really now today successful, very early stage, pre-seed and seed stage, foundry’s entry point is series A. So we have a lot of exposure through our investments and funds to stuff at the pre-seed and seed stage. And then we are constantly looking at that universe of companies for companies that we can then lead a series A or co-lead a series A. And then tech stars.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s kind of like a really good lead gen. I mean, you’re obviously a lot more involved and invested.

Brad Feld : There’s a part of it that’s that. I mean, we had always had that kind of view as a venture fund, which we didn’t run around chasing deals. We did about 10 investments a year. So our 10 new investments a year. So our premise was not that we’re trying to get into every great investment. We miss a lot of stuff. But that we make 10 investments a year that we feel really confident in knowing that many of them are going to fail because that’s how venture capital works.

Right? If you even if you’re investing at the series A, the companies are still very young and they’re not proven. A lot of things don’t work. But we’re looking, you know, across the universe of things that we’re having good exposure to. We generally use historically used a theme based approach. We talked about themes earlier. We had a couple of areas of interest that we knew really well.

And, you know, we tended to invest in those areas over a period of time, and then they’d evolve and sometimes they change. And we had a very small team. Foundry only has 12 people. So we have, you know, six partners, a couple of BAs, a general counsel, CFO, and then they have a person that’s an operations manager that works for them that helps with transactional stuff. We don’t have associates. We don’t have, you know, venture partners.

We don’t have EIRs. It’s just the six partners doing all the work. We did announce when we started Foundry in 2007, we said one day we’ll have raised our last fund and we’ll just announce that we’ve raised our last fund. Like we’re not trying to create a multi-generational firm.

We’re not trying to create a firm that lives outlives its founders. I’m going to turn 60 at the end of this year. So I was definitely starting to get to the end of my cycle. We raised a fund that closed in spring of 2023. We called our 22 fund, but we did our final close in spring of 23. And in January 24, we announced that that was our last fund. So we probably still got half a dozen investments or so out of that fund to make that would be new. But I, you know, I was personally clear that having, you know, been doing venture now and investing as an angel investor or VC investor for over 30 years, like venture funds take another decade from the time that you close them at least to finish the Mobius fund that we raised in 2000, which I ran until the end, closed down, we closed down the fund in 2022. So 22 years. And, you know, at 60, I could imagine myself in my 60s, you know, managing companies and being on the board and helping where I can help.

But I wasn’t really interested in continuing to sign up for at least another plus 10 years. And as a firm, like we, I had my two of my other founding partners weren’t exactly the same place. And, you know, the six of us talked about it and pretty, pretty quickly agreed that it made sense to call it our last fund. So that foundry will continue and we have a lot of activity around it. But my guess is, you know, in the next year or so, we’ll have finished making new investments. And then we have plenty of capital to support our existing companies and that sort of thing. And then Techstars is now 18 years old. I was one of four co founders of that in 2006, the year before we started Foundry, it was me, David Cohen, who was the CEO, David Brown, who was David Cohen’s long term time business partner, and Jared Polis, who was a long time friend of mine, we did a couple of companies together. And Jared today is a governor of Colorado.

And is just a remarkable guy. And the four of us, David Cohen had an idea for doing a thing that nobody had a label for. We were, you know, one of the very early accelerators. We labeled it an accelerator. We talked about it as a mentor driven accelerator.

So the idea was, we’ll get 10 companies together, a finite number of them in Boulder for 90 days, we’d give them a small amount of money, but we’d spend full time with them. David spent full time with them. I spent part time with them. And we’d surround them with mentors. We had about 50 people in the Boulder community, but a Boulder Denver community, but also East Coast and West Coast friends, a couple of founders, couple of investors who would come into Boulder for a day or two and spend time with these companies.

And when we started in 2006, the first program we ran in 2007, we just viewed it as an experiment, like really no idea whether it was a good idea or not. And 18 years later, I think Techstars now funded over 4,000 companies around the world. And we do, I don’t know, 300, 400 investments a year. And we have a network of 10,000 founders and 20,000 mentors that are all sort of actively engaged again in this network model. And like most networks, some people are incredibly engaged. A lot of people are sort of engaged.

And some people are just part of the network and they engage every now and then, but it’s been really rewarding. On a path for me, which I now label this idea, one of my goals had been to help democratize entrepreneurship globally. So the premise that anyone anywhere in the world can and should be able to start a company and build a company, you don’t have to build it in Silicon Valley or something like that. And also that every city in the world that had any critical mass of people, and 50,000 people’s plenty, could and should have a thing I called a startup community as part of it. And a startup community, I wrote a book about it in 2012 called Startup Communities.

That phrase didn’t exist. A startup community is essentially has one purpose. And that purpose is to help founders be successful, help founders succeed. And there are these things called entrepreneurial ecosystems that are sort of a super set of it. And the entrepreneurial ecosystem are all the different actors in a community, university, government, big business, investors, service providers, companies that work with other companies like your business, they can all be part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. One of their goals is to help founders succeed. And they often have people working for them who I labeled instigators, who play leadership roles in the startup community.

Anthony Codispoti : Instigators takes on a bit of a different meaning here.

Brad Feld : It does. And it’s a positive instigator versus a negative instigator. And my language became, I created a thing called the Boulder thesis. Initially, I said the startup community has to be led by entrepreneurs. Today, I say the startup community is led by founders and instigators. So people lead the startup community. And organizations support the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem, of which some of the people that work for those organizations are the leaders in the startup community. So I’ve been on that, you know, personally through tech stars, obviously, you talked about foundry as network driven, like this notion of the power of networks, both in the context of entrepreneurship and company creation, but frankly, just in the context of life. And, you know, there’s a, when I was in my 20s, like there were this, the word network started to be used, and you had to like learn how to network.

And I look back on that, it’s bullshit. Like, you know, I’m not somebody that comfortably shows up where I don’t know anybody. Hi, I’m Brad. That’s like not my shtick. Even though I, you know, I know.

Anthony Codispoti : So what that’s actually a good question is what does network look like in the tech stars example? Like how are people interacting with and supporting each other from a practical standpoint?

Brad Feld : Well, practically, network, a healthy network has lots of different things going on, both physical, you know, in real life, but also virtual and the connection connectivity virtually. And we understand virtual networks now as a result of social networks, which emerged, you know, in the mid 2000, 2005, 2006. And today are both a source of good and a source of evil in our world.

Right. I mean, the dynamics of how social networks deal with the fabric of society and influence of fabric of society can be both both good and bad. My definition of a useful network is if you think about each individual person as a node on the network, so each person’s a little circle. And the people you know is a connection, a line between you. It’s not the number of people that you know, the number of lines between the nodes. It’s the number of lines times the value of information that travels across those lines. So for example, if somebody in a network is connected to an enormous number of people, but there’s zero value that gets transmitted back and forth, and it’s both directions, it’s not just one direction, it’s both directions.

No value transmitted. That person has a very tiny node on the network. They’re not worth anything to the network. If the person has very few connections, but there’s a ton of information that travels over the lines, they are tiny because they don’t have very many connections.

They’re not helping the network very much. It’s a multiplier effect. So what you really want is you really want the combination of a reasonable number of connections times the value of the information traveling between participants that are connected. So in the context of Techstars, and you know, it ties a little bit to my book, the book that I’ve just come out with, Give First, it’s the notion that you do want to be connected to more people on the network. So Techstars is organized, an organizing principle in that it’s very easy to be connected to other people in Techstars.

You share a common thing. But then we work really hard to facilitate not just those connections, but the value of the information between mentor and mentee, between investor and founder, between founder and founder. And if the philosophy is one where you’re willing to put energy into the system without knowing what you’re going to get back. It’s not, it’s not altruism, you expect to get something back, but you’re willing to put energy into it. I don’t have to, you know, I connect with somebody, I say, look, I’ll connect with you. If you pay me X, I will then give you Y. Or I will do Z for you if you do A for me first. There’s none of that. It’s the opposite. It’s like, how can I be helpful?

What can I do to help? And so that builds a feedback loop that’s a very powerful one. It accelerates. So it’s a, it’s, it’s positive feedback loop. And in the context of that, again, it’s not altruism, you expect to get something back. You just don’t know from whom in the network, it might not be that person you just connected to it might be somewhere else in the network.

Anthony Codispoti : So maybe we can make this a little bit more, I don’t know, tangible for people listening.

Brad Feld : Cause I think some people, I mean, I’m waving my hands around.

Anthony Codispoti : You’ve got me really excited, but I want to say, I want something specific here I can sink my teeth into. Cause I think some people are naturally wired for this. Hey, how can I be helpful? What, what can I do for you? And hey, some point, I don’t know, karma, whatever, it’s going to come back in, you know, I’ll get mine in the end and that’ll be good. And other people, that doesn’t, they’re not wired that way sort of from the start.

And so maybe we can sort of paint a picture of a specific example where like this exact thing kind of played out or has, you know, routinely played out, people can be like, Oh, okay, I can see that. Maybe I don’t need to go into every conversation or relationship with, you know, me first, like, what am I getting out of this? And I can go in a little bit softer and say like, Hey, what do I have to offer? here.

Brad Feld : Yeah, well I’ll give you an example from yesterday. So I was, for the last two days I was in Indianapolis at an event called the Global Entrepreneurship Congress. This has been going on for a number of years. A guy named Jonathan Ortman, whose longtime friend runs the organization, and every year they convene around the world, 5,000 people, something like that, that are different levels of government, entrepreneurial support organizations, non-profit supporting entrepreneurship, leaders in different startup communities around the world, all in this notion of creating entrepreneurship as a thing globally.

Right, this notion of global democratization of it. So I was there for two days. I was one of the keynote speakers yesterday. Jonathan, you know, when he, I went to the 2013 event in Rio, and after that I said to him, next time you do it in the US tell me and I’ll come, and Indianapolis was the next time he was doing the US, and so I went to it. Many people there I know, the feedback I got was wonderful. I had a great time.

Monday night before the dinner I went to, I did an event, a book event at High Alpha. High Alpha is a company in Indianapolis. It’s a venture capital firm and a venture studio. It was started by Scott Dorsey and three of his partners from a company called Exact Target, which Salesforce acquired a number of years ago, and it became the Salesforce marketing cloud. Exact Target went public and was a very large company in Indianapolis, and I think Salesforce now has a very large, I mean, I know it has a very large office in Indianapolis. I feel like they might have the tallest building in Indianapolis now. And Scott and his partners decided to focus on the Indianapolis startup community. They focused High Alpha as a physical space in a redeveloped part of town, so they’ve got a nice space. They have a lot of companies that work out of their space and they work at it as well.

We’re investors in High Alpha. I’ve been friends with Scott for a long time, and we had a book event. We had about 150 people come, and there’s some really awesome pieces of that book event. You know, there’s a group from Detroit that’s working on doing stuff around the Detroit startup community that came to GEC, that also came to the book event because they’re tied into Scott and Scott’s community.

Ducksong, who is the founder of Duo, which is a company at Cisco Bot, is now putting a lot of energy into the Detroit startup community. So, you know, like cultural norms are built in. I give the preamble, so you, for the example, it makes sense. Like none of this is new to this group of people. They’ve all bought into this idea. They’re using this give-first philosophy, and I’ll describe it as a philosophy, importantly, not a religion. A philosophy you adopt what you want from it. A religion, if you follow the path of the religion, you follow the path to salvation. And it’s different. Like, you don’t have to embrace the whole thing. You don’t have to always act this way.

You weave it into your own philosophy. And at the end of the book signing, I did a fireside chat with Scott. Wonderful time for an hour. Did some Q &A at the end. And then I did a book signing. And one of my things, it’s probably, I guess you could say, as somebody could say, as part of my shtick now, is when I do something that’s a public event, I stick around till the end. I’m not that guy that I finished the thing, and now I just split from out of there. I’ve never felt like that was how I wanted to be.

I wanted to be accessible. And interestingly, I’ve had a lot of interactions with people, sort of afterwards, that have then led to interesting things. Sometimes it’s led to a business relationship. Sometimes it’s led to a friendship.

Sometimes it’s led to, I don’t know what, and then four or five years later, something comes of it. So I was just finishing up talking to folks, signing books, hanging around for whatever. And a guy named Eric came up to me. And he started telling me about the thing he was trying to do, which was a twist on the studio model in Indianapolis that was complementary to what Scott and Hiawala were doing.

It was very nascent, and he was trying to figure it out. And I said to him, we talked for a few minutes. I gave him a couple of ideas. I said, look, send me an email with what you’re doing.

Be specific about what kind of help you want. So I have something tangible to grab onto. And send that to me. And next day or so, it’s hard, but when I get to the email, do something. So I got the email.

I was on a plane home last night. I saw the email. It’s a good email. Kind of laid out what he wanted. One of the things he wanted was some introductions to people running studios so that he could talk to them and learn from them.

Now, he was at this event with Scott, you know, that Scott hosted, but there’s 150 people and stuff is going on. And like you come up to somebody and say, hey, I want to talk to you about this. And, you know, it’s hard.

It’s hard to have that moment, like click. But again, I had invited that of him. I sent the note to Scott and to Greg Goddisman, who runs a studio in Seattle called PSL Studio and Adventure Fund.

We’re also investors. Greg is phenomenally give first in all his behavior. It’s been very successful in what he’s done. And was really, you know, I’ve known him since the 90s, but he was really one of two people.

Him and Andy Sack were the motive force for getting tech stars to open an office in Seattle and a long time ago, 2009. And I think within 30 minutes of me sending a note to them, they know each other. Hey, guys, see this note from this guy, Eric, he’s interested in talking to you. I, you know, I don’t know him. I met him at Scott at your event. You know, would you be willing to spend some time with him? And both of them responded immediately.

Yes. I like to do opt in email. So I wouldn’t just forward the email.

I want to give them a chance to say no, I’m not interested or I know this guy or, you know, this isn’t something I have time for now. And they both immediately responded yes. And they’re both talking to a terror, like no idea where any of that leads.

But that’s, that’s like an, that’s an example of it. I didn’t protect my network from something I didn’t say to the person that was not, he doesn’t have a thing yet. He’s trying to figure out how to have the thing. I didn’t say to him, you know, well, when you’ve got the thing and you’ve got some support and some other people are supporting you, give me a call and maybe I’ll help you. Right. I send me a pitch deck. Like it was just like, let’s just figure out where to go with this.

Anthony Codispoti : I like this. And we’ve sort of been talking around the idea of your book. And you kind of briefly referenced it, but now let’s talk more specifically, you know, probably by the time this interview comes out in June 24th, 2025, the book will be available. It’s called Give First, The Power of Leadership. And it’s exactly this idea, I believe, you know, what you’ve been explaining for the past few minutes, right?

Brad Feld : Yeah. So give the book and a minor adjustment, the subtitles, Power of Mentorship. Okay. Thank you. No, it’s, I like, if I had another title for it, I probably would have said Power of Leadership.

I like that. I, I, you know, in hindsight, I’m missing that because there’s a lot in the book about leadership. I’ve combined these two concepts in this book. This philosophy of Give First, which I defined earlier, right, willing to put energy into a system without knowing what you’ll get back. It’s not altruism. You expect to get something back.

You just don’t know when, from whom, over what time period, in what form, and in what magnitude. Combining that with things that I really learned from all of the work with tech stars as a mentor, when we started tech stars in 2006, the word mentor was not very widely used. And it usually meant something in a big company that does not resemble effective mentorship. It’s a senior person in a big company was your mentor as a junior person working their way up the management hierarchy. And so it was all about helping somebody navigate up the management hierarchy. And I’m sure there are effective mentor programs in big companies, but it was a different thing.

You know, they could have called it, I’m looking at my desk or something, Green Penmanship. And we said mentorship, we didn’t know what it meant. First couple of years at tech stars, we learned a lot like we watched what was effective and what wasn’t effective, we did things that were effective and not effective, we engaged with other mentors in ways and we sort of learned by watching the mentors and the companies and the founders started to get some principles around what was effective and helpful mentorship versus activities or behaviors that were not effective.

And in 2010, David Cohen sat down and wrote something called the Tech Stars Mentor Manifesto, which is on the web and widely referenced. That was 18 bullet points. He didn’t spend a lot of time getting a right.

He didn’t spend, you know, Grammarly bar barfs on it every time I open up a document, but they didn’t because it wants to fix the grammar. But they were really short like bullet points and you sort of read through it and they’re all bullet points that kind of make sense, but you want to go a little deeper and understand what they mean. And so a while ago, I wrote a bunch of blog posts on fel.com and I kind of wrote some thoughts about what each of the things in the Tech Stars Mentor Manifesto meant.

I occasionally gave an example. And that really became the seed corn for this book. And what I what I’ve done with the book is the first section talks about give first as a philosophy.

It has a lot of my own stories in it. So you can see where the philosophy comes from. It’s very tangible, not like the abstract brand I gave earlier. And I try to I try to I get to the definition of it through a couple of examples of mentors of mine who really embrace this value system. And the one I probably named the most was Len Fassler who passed a few years ago, but he bought my first company in 1993. And he and I worked together on numerous things since then. My uncle, my dad’s brother Charlie felt would be another person I’d I’d list that way. Charlie, when I was a teenager, introduced me to computers actually was 12 introduced me to computers.

And even as a teenager was taking me to business meetings with technology companies that I had no business being in. And when I was in school at MIT, regularly go to meetings with DEC or with Lotus, which were both in the Boston area when Charlie came to have meetings with him, he was or is he still he’s still active, one of the most famous chief information officers in the world in big companies. And he really invented with a couple of other guys that discipline, he was originally, because initial title was like DP manager or something like that data processing manager, right?

It was he’s old, he’s 82, I think he’s old enough for that. But like what I learned from him was incredible. But the experience I had with both of them was also a key part of what was effective mentorship, which is it’s not a one up one down relationship, the mentor is not one up to the mentee and the mentee is not one down. What I actually experienced with both Charlie and Len, and I talked specifically about the experiences of how this happened in the book, is we became peers. And a Len who was 30 something years older than me, he would say regularly that he was learning more from me than he thought I was learning from him. And, you know, I would just kind of be humble about it and say Len, you learn, I learned way more from you.

And he’s like, no, you know, I’m learning a lot here. Charlie started his first company five years after I’d started fell technologies. Now, we’re not very creative in our family, he named his company the Fel group. And of course, he had Fel technologies and yet the film group.

Anthony Codispoti : At some point, you guys were going to run out of names altogether.

Brad Feld : Yeah, well, you know, we fell real estate, like keep going, like figure it out, just keep putting modifiers. But you know, when he started his company, I’ve been running a company for five years.

So all of a sudden, like those conversations are different. And when I was at a soft bank, I invested in Charlie’s company, and joined his management committee and was on his board for a while. And we worked as partners for a number of years. So like just a learning that that mentor dynamic where it’s a long term relationship, I linked it back to this concept of give first. So in the book, section one is talking about give first, and building it up section two is really going through each of the 18 things in the tech stars mentor manifesto one by one.

And each of the sections, I start with an essay short, you know, three, four, five paragraphs, explaining the tech stars mentor manifesto item. And then I tell a story. And a lot of the stories are my own stories. So it’s not a memoir, but there’s a lot of storytelling to try to make the thing come to life.

Plenty of tech star stories and then a couple of others. And then the third sec, the third part of each section is tying the story and that first paragraph back together. Because one of my problems when I’ve read business books, a lot of times is, you know, you have a concept and then you have an example, but then you go on to the next concept, next example, the next concept, the next example. And I really wanted each of these to stand alone.

Like somebody could read, you know, the sixth bullet point, and that would be all they needed that day, they didn’t need to read all 18 of them to get their mind around it. I then have a section of the third, the third part of the book is challenges with give first. And I’ve had a lot of challenges around maintaining this behavior with me. And happy to go deeper on that if you want.

Anthony Codispoti : I do actually. What’s the what’s the challenge? Is it sort of that you give too much like your stretch to thin?

Brad Feld : It’s one of them boundaries. Boundaries are a real challenge. You know, I’m, I’m an introvert by nature. I describe introvert extrovert as introverts. If you think of it as a gas tank, your gas tank gets depleted when you’re with lots of other people and it gets filled up when you’re alone.

I like being with other people, but I like being with a small amount of other people. But if I don’t have a long time, my tank gets depleted. Extroverts the inverse, right? Your tank fills up when you’re with a lot of people and when you’re alone, it gets depleted. And everybody’s some spectrum of that.

But, you know, if all you’re doing is operating from a perspective of give first, it’s exhausting. For me, that’s not the only thing, but I’ve talked pretty openly, publicly and, you know, in my writing about my own struggles with mental health and with depression specifically. I was diagnosed in my 20s. I had my first major depre depressive episode in my 20s. When I was running my first company, I was also in a PhD program. I was also in the midst of having a failed first marriage to my high school girlfriend.

We didn’t have kids, so it was more like a bad breakup in your early 20s. And I got kicked out of the PhD program because I was spending all my time running my company. I wasn’t being a good PhD student. And like the linkage of all these things together, along with being in my, you know, I don’t know, 23, 24 and never having failed. Like, you know, sure, I had things that didn’t work, but I hadn’t really had these public failures. I had my marriage was a public failure and getting kicked out of this PhD program was a public failure.

My business was doing fine. But I was kind of bored of it. It wasn’t really stimulating. I was, you know, kind of going through the motions every day. And I was really fortunate in that time period that I found a psychiatrist who understood something called obsessive compulsive disorder, which in the early 90s was not well understood. It’s better understood today. And he was one of the early, he was a Harvard trained psychiatrist.

I was in Boston at the time, random, just got lucky that that’s who it was. And he was able to make a diagnosis relatively early and understand what to do. Because if all it was was trying to treat depression, it wouldn’t have actually got to the root cause of anything. People don’t know what OCD is or think that OCD is a positive thing. Because a lot of people say, I’m OCD because I like to be really organized. So it’s not, it’s a really

Anthony Codispoti : difficult Yeah, give voice to that, if you would please.

Brad Feld : Well, so, so we all have upset obsessions and we all have compulsions as humans. We just have them. Being having OCD is that you have a linkage between the obsessions and the compulsions. And I’ll give a few examples that of ones I had in my 20s, I lived in Boston. If I don’t straighten all the cigarettes that are on the street, so that they’re parallel with the street, my mother will die. If I don’t do something three times, I’ll lose a client. And if I don’t do it three times, like I make a mistake and do it four times, or only do it two times before I stop, I now have to do it nine times. Because three was my magic number. And if I don’t do it nine, if I screw that up, I got to do it 27 times.

If you screw it up twice and you have to do it 27 times, you will damn well and good do it 27 times, because you don’t want to do it 81 times. Right, and you can see it’s a lot of noise. Crazy.

It’s crazy. Like your brain has constantly running this background process that’s interfering with your normal function. Have to shut my computer down a certain way. If I don’t shut my computer down the right way, I got to turn it back on. And back then, turning on and turning off your computer was not like a boom, you pick up your lid.

And so 10 minutes later, I’m still turning on and turning off my fucking computer because I did something wrong in the sequence. So it really consumes a lot of mental and emotional energy. And it interferes with you in kind of weird ways. There’s a little bit can be kind of cute.

Brad, you’re kind of cute walking down the street, touching all the dirty signs, because you have to touch all the dirty signs as you’re walking down the street. But I’m a germaphobe. Like, I mean, that’s another part of being OCD is that you, a lot of people who are OCD have OCD are also germaphobes.

And so I’d wash my hands 50 times a day. Like that’s really helpful now that we have this COVID thing. And we’ve learned that, but probably wasn’t that helpful in 1988.

So that was early, like I struggled with that. And I had this two year depressive episode where I was functional, like I could get through my day, I worked, it was okay, got my job done. But the best way to describe how I felt was the complete and total absence of joy. And, you know, for a couple of weeks, all right, you can kind of get through that for a couple of months starting to be a drag for a year. It really starts to suck. For two years, you start to wonder, am I ever going to feel different? This is, I don’t want to, I’m 25.

I don’t want to live the rest of my life feeling this way. And again, I did a lot of work at that time. And with personal development work with your psychiatrist. But I was incredibly ashamed of everything. I was ashamed that I had a psychiatrist. I was ashamed that I was depressed.

I was ashamed that as a leader, I couldn’t show strength all the time. I didn’t want to do anything at the end of the day, because I was just physiologically exhausted. Like I get home from work, I had nothing.

I don’t want to read a book and watch TV, just like lay around and stare at the ceiling. So I wasn’t a very good friend, like, you know, proactively. And I was just ashamed. And I was ashamed to really talk about it with anybody. I took medication. I was ashamed that I was taking medication.

I was ashamed I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t have an extended depressive episode again until 2001 after 9-11. That was kind of the trigger for me, the combination of all the pressure from the internet bubble deflating, all the just again physiologically exhausted from hauling my ass all over the world at the time for all the companies. And I was involved in that everything was now falling apart.

I was fortunate that now my marriage to Amy was strong and strong supporter. And of course, 9-11 was kind of this weird moment where every actually everyone, many people in the US were depressed and were disoriented because of how horrific the attack was. And so kind of you could be depressed and out in the open. Like it was a little different feeling for me. But it was the same. But I was still very quiet about everything. I then had another depressive episode in 2013 that came out of nowhere. This time, my business going great, foundry is excellent, tech stars is going great, my marriage is awesome.

I mean, pretty good physical shape. I’ve been running marathons and taking care of myself and I’m very, very busy, you know, writing, doing doing the work, writing books, traveling all over the place. And I just crashed, just totally crashed. And looking back in time, I realized that I kind of had that experience at the end of every year, like October, November, December, usually in start on October 1. But kind of by Halloween, I was pretty tired.

And usually sometime between beginning and middle of November, I’d get depressed. And I just talked about it as I don’t like Christmas. I don’t like the holidays.

I’m Jewish. I grew up without Christmas, like grumpy, grumpy, grumpy, Brad. And you know, everybody sort of allowed me to be grumpy. But I was depressed.

Like very, very seasonally as a result of just being physiologically exhausted. This depression in 2013, I like to say it sounds like a country music song, because of what led up to it, which is I ran a 50 mile race in April of 2022, which was way too much running, too much training, too much running for working the way I was working. I was traveling all over the country.

I didn’t take a I didn’t rest afterwards the day after the 50 mile race. I was it was in Sacramento. I went to San Francisco. I went to a movie that night. And on Monday, I was full on, you know, doing my work again.

Over the summer, I continued to train, you know, train and exercise very significantly. And then I had my partner says 40th birthday went to Slovenia for a bike trip. He’s a huge cyclist. And I’m not a cyclist. I’m no longer allowed to ride bicycles. But on the second or last day of the trip, I had a bike accident that is was is in the category of near fatal. Like if I hadn’t smashed into my partner, Ryan McIntyre turning left on a bridge, I would have gone over the bridge, you know, 1520 feet down rocks, like, you know, maybe I wouldn’t have died, but it would have been bad news. And I got really lucky.

I just ran into Ryan. He absorbed the momentum. He wasn’t hurt, fortunately. But the consequence was that I didn’t smash into the side of the bridge. And when I say side of the bridge, the bridge was like hip high.

So like the bike would have smashed in. And but I was beat up pretty good. I bruised ribs. I broke a tooth. Entertaining Lee, the Slovenian health care system has much better dentistry than they have emergency medicine for sewing up the cuts in your chin. I have a very good tooth replacement. And I have a nice little scar from the fishing wire and the needle that the guy sewed me up with.

And but I kept calling I came back. We came back in September. We spent September New York City Amy’s birthday is the month of September. I don’t know how many people listening have a partner who’s they celebrate their month for the birthday for an entire month, but we’ve been doing that for a while. So I sometimes I get it narrowed down to a week, but it was a month then.

So you know, out to fancy dinners every night, working hard. And I’m, I’m not sleeping well, because I’m I hurt, I’m taking a lot of like Advil PM and things that are fucking with my biochemistry a little bit, but I’m not paying any attention to it. And then in the fall, I’m in Iowa at an event, I go to the bathroom and I pee blood. And I didn’t really think much of it. I’m like, yeah, I must like I made some narrative in my brain like must have eaten something funny like that. And you know, that happened for a couple of days. And then I came to a place for something. And I just kind of ignored it and kind of went away. And then it came back. And this time I told Amy, so I hadn’t told her the first time I just like, and told her and she’s like, Dr.

Right now. So I go to the doctor right now. And still not thinking about it, you know, do the thing you pee into a cup, it looks like cherry soda. And I go to give a talk like I still not thinking about it. I’m in the middle of giving a talk at CU Boulder at I can remember, I think it was at business school somewhere, you know, just to class kids. And my doctor calls me and I said, Hey, I just went to the doctor and need to step out and just hear what she has to say.

And her response was, Brad, great news. It’s not cancer. It’s a good way to start. I’m like, Well, I hadn’t really thought about that. And but you get it like this, like the like the country music song, my dog died, my this, my that. And it turns out I had a kidney stone that was a big one, eight millimeters.

I never had kidney stones. Holy cow. Yeah. So like, you know, they have to do a thing that’s called a lithotripsy, which I look it up if you’re curious, but it’s not been through one.

Anthony Codispoti : So my heart’s with you. I’m not a pleasant procedure. So I do that. And then it went fine, but they put a stent in. And so I had pain. And we went on vacation to Mexico. And I don’t remember much the vacation because I was on one of the oxy things, Vicodin or something, or maybe oxycodon for the part of the trip, because I just felt like shit.

Came back sort of just chilled out, did nothing over Christmas, went to CES consumer electronic show the first week of January, which I used to do every year, I don’t do anymore. And I got to Las Vegas, I got to my hotel room. And there’s like people everywhere.

I go in my hotel room and like, I literally lay down in bed and put the pillow over my head. Like I knew I was depressed. And this time, though, I was able to put two things together. One was I understood that it was physiological exhaustion.

Right. So I was able to understand that the thing that tipped me over was just being totally exhausted. The other was I had been, you know, in blogging now for a long time. And I decided that if I wasn’t public about it on my, you know, my writing, it wasn’t so much like I had an audience, I’d be truthful, my audience, somebody I would be bullshitting myself.

Like I just didn’t want to like have like this external, you know, view of things and this internal turmoil of how I was feeling. So I started writing about it. And you know, I got a couple of things that weren’t very generous, but most of the things that came back as I was writing about it was incredibly positive. And I had many, many people in my circles that were, you know, entrepreneurs and my guess is names of entrepreneurs that people here would know many of their names reached out to me. A lot of people I didn’t know.

And the conversations were some version of, Hey, Brad, you’re the first person I’m talking to about this. Wow. And that was profound to me. Because what it caused me to realize was how significant this stigma was, which I had been feeling up to this point. And now it’s kind of what came out of that for me, that episode lasted about six months. I started therapy again. I did 10 years of therapy this time.

So I’m late 40s to my late 50s. And it was really helpful. That phase was even better than the first phase because I kind of knew what I’d get out of it. And that’s kind of you get out of it, what you put into it. Was there something special about the therapy?

Anthony Codispoti : Sorry to interrupt, but for those who are listening that maybe, you know, they felt something similar, like, are there specific types of therapy that have been helpful?

Brad Feld : Yeah, well, I’ve done what’s called CBT or cognitive behavior therapy. And if you have OCD, the only way to address OCD is with a combination of medication to lower the anxiety.

And then CBT to break the linkage between the O’s and the C’s. That’s what’s effective. Nothing else is effective. You can’t just take medication. That doesn’t solve the problem. You can’t try to break the links between the O’s and the C’s without lowering your core anxiety, because the core anxiety is part of that. And you get this negative feedback loop if you try to do it.

Interesting. That just reinforces the thing. So and, you know, CBT is once a week, 50 minutes, like it’s not, it can be twice a week. It’s not a massive burden, but it’s a very, you know, it’s a very Socratic kind of therapy. It’s a very listening therapy where you’re guided by somebody, but they’re guiding you on a path. They’re not trying to tell you the answer. It’s like mentorship, right?

They’re helping take you where you need to go in that moment in time by listening a lot and then nudging a little bit. I did that again, this time with a, instead of a psychiatrist, I had a psychologist who was also a Buddhist, which happened to be very helpful to me in terms of my own value system and how I think about the world. It didn’t make me a Buddhist from the content. We would joke that there’s just too many rules for me to have to follow to be a good Buddhist.

Anthony Codispoti : I thought the whole thing with Buddhism was kind of take what you worked for you and leave the rest.

Brad Feld : I’m being tongue-in-cheeked. There’s a, I don’t know if listeners are big Lebowski fans. I’m a huge big Lebowski fan, my wife, and I watch it every couple of years again. And there’s a scene in big Lebowski where there’s a group of three people called the nihilists who are trying to like, you know, get their money, get money from Lebowski. And in this scene, you know, they’re talking about Lebowski, you know, we’re nihilists. And, you know, one of the characters is saying, kind of calling them Nazis, and it’s like, no, no, no, no, they’re nihilists. They’re not Nazis.

It’s different. Like Jeff Bridges is such a great character in that movie. And there’s a scene where the nihilists are explaining to Lebowski very angrily how to be a nihilist. And Lebowski, who again, if people don’t know it, this is where the dude language comes from, you know, he’s sort of this super mellow stoner dude as a grown-up.

And he just puts his head in his hands and goes, man, that’s so hard. You know, being a nihilist is so many rules. So I like to make that jump. Because, you know, Buddhist, you follow a set of rules, which are things like nonattachment, very useful rules. And if you follow them the right way, you know, and you die, maybe you get a chance to do it again.

You have to do it again for all eternity to maybe reach Nirvana. Again, a lot of Buddhist philosophy I strongly support. And so I’d probably separate it again, religion and philosophy. I believe the philosophy. I follow a lot of the philosophy.

The religion is not that interesting to me. And my therapist here, his name was McAndrew, was really awesome at incorporating that his worldview into my worldview in a way that helped guide me to address some of the things that were really causing me problems. And I’ll come back to nonattachment as a specific example. If you think about two ends of the spectrum, one end is attachment to things. You feel really attached to things. You feel really responsible. You feel ownership over them. You want to control them. Like there’s good attachment, bad attachment, but you’re really attached. And it could be relationship, could be business, could be people.

Anthony Codispoti : I want to make this sale. I want my kid to do this. I want my wife to show me this kind of affection. Like these are things that I expect. And when they don’t happen, that’s what causes the strife.

Brad Feld : That’s right. And so you’re really tight with that. The other end of the spectrum is detachment. It doesn’t really matter. Don’t really care. Don’t need that to happen. There’s another concept. So I think a lot of people try to try to move between attachment and detachment. There’s another concept which I prefer called nonattachment.

And this is an English language of a Buddhist concept, which is very different than detachment. And the way McHenry explained it to me at one point when we were sort of bouncing it around was, look, nonattachment is imagine you’re orbiting a sun or a planet. And it’s got gravity. And you’re out there in space sort of moving around, and you feel the pull of the gravity.

But the pull of the gravity doesn’t really work on you. You just kind of keep doing what you’re doing against this thing that has the pull of it. You want to go towards it? You go towards it. You want to go away from it? You go away from it.

You have agency. You’re the one choosing where you’re going rather than the gravity sucking you in or repelling you, where that gravity is attachment sucking you in or nonattachment repelling you. And for me, like all of a sudden, when I started to approach things with nonattachment, it wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was that I could exert my own agency over what I wanted to spend my time and energy on. And one of my problems, historically, one of the things that caused ultimately the depressive episodes, was me not really feeling like I had, or not even feeling, me not even acknowledging that I had agency. And to tie it back to give first, it’s one of the problems with give first. If you feel like you have to give first to everyone who asks you for something, and I’ll give an example or everyone you encounter forget about even asks, I would have people after give first became a thing that would come up to me and say, Hey, Brad, you’re not behaving in a give first way.

What the fuck? I would have people who would come up to me and say, All right, I get this give first thing, you’re an investor, why don’t you give me five million bucks? And I’ll decide what to give you at the end when I have something. I’m like, Wait a second, no, I can have transactional relationships in my life. It’s not that everything has to be non transactional. But if you integrate the non transactional piece into your existence in a significant way, it really changes the flavor in a good way for me, my belief in a lot of things. So I spend a decent amount of time in the third part of the book talking about some of those things and how to deal with them, not necessarily giving solutions to all of them, but again, telling stories from my perspective about things that I did, similar to this kind of story, but a handful of other different things to deal with and address it. So it was effective versus ineffective.

Anthony Codispoti : Brad Feld, man, great conversation. I really appreciate you opening up to share about these struggles. This is going to help a lot of people who hear this. And for me, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Brad Feld : Anthony, thanks. Thanks for letting me ramble around. Hopefully somebody’s still listening.

Anthony Codispoti : I know for sure that they are. This is good stuff. This is exactly the heart of what we’re trying to get at. So thanks again for opening up about it. And folks, that’s a wrap here on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today. Appreciate it.