Brad Feld, author and co-founder of Foundry Group.

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that explores the evolving landscape of the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Behr, managing partner of Behr, Negron, and Troff and president of CMUG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind the decision strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. One can go across many different social characteristics of our society, and almost all of those things where there was real structural change was much more a function of bottom up phenomena than top down hierarchical control.

So, again, I apply that to my own entrepreneurial thinking. And it's not that things are bad and they must be changed. It's that things are always changing. Today, we get into a fascinating, and let me tell you, enjoyable conversation with Brad Feld, cofounder of the venture capital firm, The Foundry Group, and an author of several books on investment, including his recently published, The Entrepreneurs Weekly, Nietzsche. We talked about the journey as an entrepreneur and investor, his commitment to building a life in his chosen location, and how companies can be successful with a more mindful path towards development and growth.

So, Brad, welcome, and thanks for being here today. Let's get started with a little bit about your background. Sure. Thanks for having me. Today, I'm a partner at a venture fund called Foundry Group.

We invest all across The US in tech companies. We've got about, a little bit over 3,000,000,000 under management. We also invest about 25% of our money in other early stage venture funds. So we built a very large network of venture funds that we're partners with. We're based in Boulder, Colorado.

That's where I've lived since 1995, but have this national focus. I'm also a cofounder of Techstars, which today has about 400 investments a year that we make through 40 accelerator programs around the world, about 300 people working for Techstars. And it's got probably 2,500 active investments at this point, something around that. So extremely active pre seed stage investor. My journey to this point was, if I go in backwards order, I've been a VC VC now for quite some time.

I accidentally became a venture capitalist in the mid nineties. I had sold my first company, which I'd ran for seven years. I sold to a public company. I worked with them for a couple of years. They were very acquisitive, so I got involved in buying tech companies.

Being the technical guy in the deal team, I didn't know anything about buying or selling companies before that. I also took almost all the money that I made selling my first company and invested in 40 companies over three years as an angel investor. $2,550,000 dollars at a time, but, you know, the very first check into a whole bunch of companies. And I learned how to make very, you know, seed stage investing doing that. When I started doing that again, I'd never made an investment in something else, so I had no idea what to do.

And along the way, I got connected with this obscure Japanese company called SoftBank that nobody really knew of that today, I think, many people are very aware of. And they were putting together a group of people to augment a small team they had that was starting to make investments in what at the time was called digital media companies and very quickly became called the Internet companies. There was a couple of people who worked for SoftBank and then a couple of us that were affiliates, me, a guy named Fred Wilson, who's very well known in venture circles, Jerry Colonna, who was Fred Wilson's partner at the time, but today runs a coaching business called Reboot and is an extraordinary CEO coach, and then another guy named Rich Levendov. And we were all sort of affiliated with SoftBank, sort of doing deals and helping and being part of the team. And at some point, SoftBank ran out of money for this group.

So a subset of us went and raised a fund, me and three of the people that worked for SoftBank. And that's how I ended up being a VC. Like, I had never really planned to do it, and I sort of woke up one day and did it. In terms of last comment about sort of my path, in terms of geography, I grew up in Dallas, Texas. I went to school, at MIT, so I lived in Boston, Cambridge in Boston for a dozen years.

I met my wife, Amy Bachelor, when we were in college. We were friends for many years, and then at some point became a couple. She grew up in Alaska. When we were together after I'd sold my first company, Boston was very good to us, but it wasn't home. Again, she was from Alaska and I was from Dallas.

So, you know, what were we doing in New England? And when I sold my company, I was 28, and I told Amy by the time I was 30, we'd be out of Boston. And two months before I turned 30, she told me she was moving to Boulder and I could come with her if I wanted to. And we knew one person. He moved away about six months later.

So Boulder was a random thing. We've been there before, and we've been to Colorado, both of us, a lot. And it was just like, let's just choose a place that we think could be amazing to live. And if we don't like it, we'll try something else. And a logical place for me to go at that time probably would have been the Bay Area.

I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, but I never lived there. And it wasn't in the same way that Boston wasn't my place, a different version of it. The Bay Area also wasn't my kind of place. It wasn't where I wanted to live. And six months after moving to Boulder in 1995, we were in love with the place.

We're like, yep. This is where we are for the duration. So that's how I ended up in Boulder. Amazing. When you invest in these companies, and you said you did these 40 investments, and then presumably you've learned and you've got this huge fund now and doing amazing things, is there anything you particularly look for in an entrepreneur?

Yeah. It's been a very long learning experience for me, which over essentially now almost thirty years of investing, I'm sort of back where I started. When I started investing, those first 40 companies, I did them about one a month. Right? Sometimes I did two in a month.

Sometimes I wouldn't do an investment, but it's a very fast pace. I was really only focusing on two things. One was the people, the founders, and did I wanna work with them and did they wanna work with me? The other thing I focused on was the product. I focused on a couple of different aspects of the product.

I couldn't have said this back in the mid nineties, but when I reflect on it, I had an engineer's brain. And so I sort of focused on the product from the standpoint of, did I care about what the product was, and were the founders obsessed about what they were doing? That would be the way I'd characterize it today. At the time, I would just say, all I really care about is people and product, and I'm just sort of digging in deciding whether I wanna be an investor based on that. I also made investment decisions really fast.

I'd often make a decision after one meeting, sometimes two meetings, and it was an angel investor. It's just being an angel, not a devil. It's supposed to be helping people. And so if I was interested and like the people and they like me and I was interested in what they were doing, you know, I made a commitment. I would say of that, I learned a lot of very powerful lessons, including one about investing from a portfolio perspective.

Because for the prior seven years, I had one company, and that was a 100% of my investing activity. Was that one business that I owned part of. Now all of a sudden, I owned a smaller part of a lot more businesses. And in the end of those 40 companies, I learned the difference between zero times my money and a 100 times my money. As an early stage investor, I had three of those 40 companies that returned over each of them returned over a 100 times my investment.

And I invested roughly the same amount of money in each of the companies. Again, Again, 25 to $50,000 depending on a set of rules which are not worth talking about at this stage. And in that experience, the other 37 companies could be worth zero. I still made, you know, a very nice multiple on the money that I'd invested. And it turned out about 20 of those companies, of those 40 were worth zero.

They failed. But the other 17 returned somewhere between half the money back and couple of more two x, three x, five x. I had a couple that were more than 10 x. And it really was helpful to me to understand that the very early stages, it's not random. I mean, every single company I invested in, I thought, could be a successful business.

But it's so hard to build a successful business that if you look at it as a a singular event, it's very low probability. I went through this this sort of arc and, you know, the SoftBank era where I was investing as a VC, those funds ended up at some point, we changed the name of the fund to Mobius Venture Capital because there was a lot confusion with other activity that SoftBank was doing, but there's still a tight affiliation with them. At the peak, we had about 10 partners in that firm. We had a very complex rating system for every company. So, you know, a company would come in and there'd be all these meetings with lots of people and lots of, quote, diligence and exploration and memo write ups.

You know? And then at the end, there'd be this sort of ranking spreadsheet on a bunch of factors, and everybody would rate the company regardless of how much time they spent with them. And, you know, if you get the sense of the tone of how I'm describing it, like, in the end, it was kind of just all bullshit. Like, if you really wanted to get a deal done, you knew how to game the system to get a high enough rating to get the deal done, or you politic behind the scenes with everybody else. Or as we got to this very large stage, we broke the teams into smaller teams.

So three people had to approve something to then bring it forward to everybody. But nine out of 10 times, if it got brought forward to everybody, it got done. So, really, only three people were making the decision about any particular investment. We had a very successful first fund pre Internet bubble, but then we struggled after that as the Internet bubble collapsed. I've learned an enormous amount from that experience.

I continued to be involved in managing those funds. We're just finally, twenty years later, shutting down the fund we raised in 2000. I was the person who ended up shutting it all down. So I got the benefit of an enormous amount of sort of hindsight on the decision making that we made along the way, much of which was I don't wanna say it was flawed. It was just it had random characteristics to it.

It wasn't sort of deeply rational. It wasn't deeply principled. It was very personality driven, and it was very haphazard and chaotic based on what was going on or the emotions between people at the time. In 2006, we decided not to raise another fund as Mobius. And in 2007, we raised a new fund called Foundry Group.

There are five of us initially, and one of the people left pretty early on. So I guess with four of my colleagues, we raised a fund. And that first fund, which we raised in 2007, we raised a $225,000,000 fund. It took us about a year to raise it, so it was quite difficult to get it raised. And in that, we developed a series of deeply held beliefs, many of which were informed by mistakes we've made at Mobius or things we've learned from Mobius that we didn't wanna repeat, some that were new.

And when I reflect on the decision making, and back to your question, like, what did we look for in companies? After this, all of these different sort of processes, we really sort of came back to where I started. And today, if I describe it, the historical approach that Foundry had was we focused on the founders and did we wanna be partners with the founders, and did the founders wanna be partners with us? We focused on the product. Did we have an affinity for the product?

And I've been involved in so many investments where I didn't care that much about the product. And when everything is going fine, it's great. But when everything's all screwed up and you're struggling to survive, if you don't care about the product, it's really hard to put energy and attention into the thing to try to get it back to a good place. And then the other was that we really looked for the founders were obsessed about the product. And I use the word obsession deliberately because there's such a difference between somebody who was put on planet Earth to work on this and someone who's just excited about something or passionate about something.

And so I dismissed the word passion entrepreneurship. I don't like it. I think it's easy to fake. Not very interesting, but this sort of notion of being deeply, deeply obsessed about what you're doing. You know, that was how Foundry as a a firm operated for a long time.

In 2016, we evolved our strategy and started investing in these other venture firms. We very deliberately changed the name of the firm from Foundry Group to Foundry Group Next or the fund names to Foundry Group Next. And we've really developed and evolved a network driven strategy with our partner funds, where we're working with them and building on top of the investments they're making at the pre seed and seed stage level and using that very large network we have, and then applying sort of a much lighter weight version of our evaluative criteria. But if you come back to it, it's a lot about people and it's a lot about product. It's interesting.

I've been in the venture space for years and went through the late nineties and the 2001 bust. And as a VC lawyer, and then as a guy who shut down funds too, because people would come to me as the cleanup guy because I have these relationships. I do a lot of ABCs as well. I came to a conclusion that there was a secret to investing in companies, and it was basically like sports. You had to get kind of the first draft picks.

And so, like, if you use take Tom Brady, for example, and he goes down and plays in Florida, oh my god, the team wins. It's all execution. What I love about what you're saying is if you want somebody that's gonna execute on something, they gotta be called, they gotta be driven, they gotta be the right person to do it, given. Right? And then we'll come back to how do you find them.

But you, you're investing in these companies. This is your money. This is your life. So if you don't like the founder, if you don't like the direction the product's going, why would you invest? It may make a lot of money.

It just may not be for you. When you put them together, you're not only meeting the needs of the founder because you're gonna help them be successful, but you're also meeting your needs and your investors need because they're investing in you. And, obviously, you have to be passionate about it to guide them and partner with them to help them get to the next level. So, I mean, it's very holistic what you're saying. It's covering both sides of the equation.

Yeah. It's well said. I'd add two other things in there, which is as an individual or for me as a person, you know, one of my highest values is learning and continually exploring and learning new things. You know, one of the critical things that I experienced early in my investing and I continued to reinforce in a powerful way, and Techstars has been a huge amplifier of this globally, is this premise that I have around entrepreneurship can and should be and and now has been broadly democratized on a global basis where, you know, you can start a company anywhere. But all of the other dimensions of that matter as well.

So I've always been equally enthusiastic about investing in first time entrepreneurs as well as second or third or fourth time entrepreneurs. I don't have a bias towards experienced entrepreneurs versus people who are doing it for the first time. I think the needs are different. The dynamics are different. The opportunities exist on both ends of the spectrum.

And then I think, you know, in the context of venture capital and the venture capital industry in general, you know, in the last couple of years, I think there's been finally some self awareness of the inequities that exist. First, on the gender dimension and more recently, you know, in the last year or so since George Floyd got murdered on racial equity dimension. And it's not that these are new discoveries. I mean, I've been involved in gender equity dynamics around tech going back to when I got involved as the founding chair of an organization called National Center for Women Information Technology, and much of what I learned about gender equity came from my experience with that organization and working with the founder CEO, Lucy Sanders, who's just tremendous. But the reflection of investors, it's very easy for an investor to say, oh, yeah.

Well, it's meritocracy, and the best opportunities and best ideas win. But that's bullshit because there's so much structural inequity in the way that the investing activity works and the way that capital flows and capital is deployed, and people's own individual biases about what they view as a good opportunity or a good founder to back or, you know, what somebody's pedigree should be or background should be. You know, one of the powerful and significant things that I have tried to focus on with my own investing and my own decision making around investing is not to be constrained by my own biases that are unconscious ones or my own sort of view of how the world should work, and instead try to eliminate all of those things and be very, very open. I often, when I'm doing this, focus on where the puck is going and asking from the companies they're doing where they're going. But what's fascinating to me is I'm seeing you as an auditor.

I'm seeing you moving your investments in a direction. And so I'm curious because you touched on a couple of things relating to what I would call income inequality or opportunity inequality. There's a book called Winners Take All. There's a book called The Meritocracy Trap. There's Capitalism in the twenty first Century.

There's a lot of people that have been pointing out that IQ could be found anywhere on the planet now. At the end of the day, it's created this real disparity, by the way, between the 30% and the 70% using American statistics. Because you can come out of school and make $225,000 if you have a high IQ, and you can do coding or start a company. But if you're working on a farm and that's really all you were ever gonna do, you're screwed when we're going to China for what that we can get it in China. Right?

So we've created this situation where we kinda left our middle class behind. There's a couple ways to solve that. Right? Just give money away, or you can also provide new opportunities because you're creating companies in the future, and you're democratizing your ability to start a company, number one, wherever you are. And number two, to hire people wherever they are.

And I'm interested. Are you thinking about those kind of issues? Very much. I hope I'm doing more than thinking about them, which is I'm actually trying to help obliterate some of the structural inequities in an active way, not a passive way. When George Floyd got murdered, I realized that my wife, Amy Bachelor, and I had been, you know, supporters of social justice causes for twenty years and had been providing philanthropic dollars and, you know, occasionally getting involved in something here or there.

But my own view of my own activity around the statement eliminate racism in America was passive, not active. Right. I shifted into a different gear, which was an active gear, but also an active gear where I recognize that I'm playing as a middle aged white guy. I'm playing the role of an accomplice, not as the leader. I'm an accomplice or an advocate or an ally.

That's the other language that you hear from gender equity is, advocate or male advocate, where the person that has the lived experience of the inequity. If you don't have the lived experience of the inequity, you're not the problem solver. What you can do is actively engage in helping the person or people with the lived experience to address and again, I'll use the word eliminate or obliterate the inequity. One of my partners at Foundry Group, Seth Levine, just came out with an incredibly important book called The New Builders. And in it, he and his coauthor, Elizabeth, do a brilliant job of a long form view of entrepreneurship in The United States.

Today, entrepreneurship has been largely co opted with the notion of high growth entrepreneurship, the idea of creating, you know, unicorns and help companies and da da da da da. And if you look at the history of entrepreneurship in The United States, there's an enormous amount of business creation that is local business creation that, you know, fits in the category of small business, and that is foundational for the health and development of the cities they live in and the societal structures they're part of, which in a lot of ways is a much more resilient entrepreneur than entrepreneurs who have, you know, lots of financial dollars thrown at them to try to go build their business. And in terms of the next wave of evolution or growth of our society, that entrepreneur is equally important or possibly more important than what the sort of contemporary view of venture capital backed technology entrepreneur is. I'm not suggesting that either is a problem. I'm suggesting they're both critically powerful.

It's just that so much attention is on the high growth technology venture capital driven entrepreneur. And this vision of what is actually the fabric of the business ecosystem that we've created starts to get lost. You know, again, in this book, I think Seth and Elizabeth do just a brilliant job of deconstructing that using real examples and helping put a frame on something that's motivating, that's active, that's powerful about changing where we're going. And I think it links to your comment. When I started writing about startup communities, I read a book in 2012 titled Startup Communities, and the phrase didn't exist when I wrote the book, so I coined the phrase.

Even when I was working on the book in 2010, 2011, I regularly would hear the cliche, if you're serious about starting a company, you need to come to the Bay Area. And, you know, I've lived in Boulder since '95, so I simply didn't agree or believe in that. Although, I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. The Bay Area is an amazing place, but, you know, I've been involved in funding and creating really significant companies in other parts of The US. I saw lots of other places in The US that had very vibrant start up communities.

Boulder, where I live, being a great example of a small city, a 100,000 people, that has an extraordinarily active and significant start up community. And I just, going back to 2012, believe that one should be able to start and run and create their business anywhere. And every city in the world, not just in The United States, but in the world, needed to have a vibrant start up community as part of it. Not the only thing in the city. Cities need lots of things to be healthy.

But if they don't have an innovation economy, if they don't have the start up community that's driving new business creation, long term, the city will not be healthy. 2021, like, there's no debate about that anymore. The idea that you need to be in the Bay Area to create a company is an extinct concept. It's not that you shouldn't be in the Bay Area. Again, the Bay Area is an amazing place to be an entrepreneur, but there's a lot of people who don't wanna live there, can't afford to live there, are in a place where they have family they wanna be or other constraints or desire to be in a different place in terms of creating their business.

You know, notwithstanding the fact that for the last four years, we've had an immigration policy that's actively prevented other people from coming to The US to create their company. This idea that sort of turns on its head, which is innovation is a thing that can happen anywhere. And now on top of it, the lesson we've learned from COVID is talent can be much more broadly distributed. They don't have to go to a headquarters in a downtown office building or an office park every day and be in cubes in an office. There are lots of different cultures.

And within tech, there have always been companies that had a very good either remote or distributed work culture. You know, in tech companies like Automatic, which owns WordPress or GitLab or two that are cited often. But there are a number of tech companies that, for many years, have had a a largely remote workforce. Personally, I've been a remote worker since 1995 because I traveled all the time. And when I live in Boulder and I have investments all over The US, and I'm in the Bay Area for a board meeting, and then I have another board meeting right after in Boston, I'm doing that remotely.

I'm not flying to Boston because I can't get there, or I'm sort of living this life of dragging myself all over the place, which maybe is not the most effective way to live one's life. The end of that is that if you look at it today, it's not that the world should be distributed and everybody should be a remote worker, but it's the recognition that geography can be much more linked to what where individuals want to be and build their lives versus geography being, oh, well, I have to go there if I want to do that. It's clear. I mean, look, you can live anywhere, and I think there is a value of communities being together. And so, for instance, you're building a company and having a lot of people in Boulder is helpful.

Now maybe you're gonna have people out there participating remotely and by Zoom and everything else. As a firm, we're even debating, like, we're gonna come back two days a week, we're gonna come back three days a week, are we gonna come back at all? One of my dear friends, he came up at DLJ, and he built an investment banking firm, said the other day, you know, when I came up, the mentoring, the travel together, the spending time with people, there's something about that personal experience you lose in a virtual world. Yeah. There are absolutely differences between the pre COVID work motion and the post COVID work motion.

I encourage the leaders not to anchor on what's missing or what's lost, but instead, I encourage them to think about what's different. And in the context of what's different, how they can use those differences inside their companies in a way that is an advantage to them, and how they can change their own cultural norms in a way that is more effective for their business, not just in terms of the day to day operations of the business, but for recruiting and retaining people for scaling up the business, especially when you're scaling up quickly and you have to scale in multiple geographies. And, ultimately, for companies that do become a certain size and then are almost by definition distributed because they bought another company somewhere else or they open multiple offices. And it's interesting. The investment banking example is a fascinating one for me because I've been involved in taking a number of companies public over the years, and I've been the principal on a couple of roadshows.

And when I say the principal, one of the three people, you know, on the team that was giving the pitch. Typically, in a role that was a chairperson role versus a CEO role. As part of that fundraising activity, I've also raised a bunch of venture funds as either the number two or the principal in that fundraising activity. Let's go to stay with the IPO ones for a second. An IPO roadshow used to be a two to three week experience.

It was on private planes. You realized after the fact that the private plane was just gonna get rebuilt to the company after you're public. Essentially, your company is paying for it. You're flying around with a couple of investment bankers. You know, you get from the plane.

You get in the black car. You drive in the town car to a meeting. You have a meeting for thirty minutes with somebody who, you know, is having 10 of those meetings a day. You then get in the car. You go to the next meeting.

You go to the next meeting. You go to the next meeting. You get a plane. You go somewhere else. And you do that for somewhere between ten days and fifteen days depending on the offering.

It's exhausting. It's not terribly emotionally satisfying. The first time, it's kinda novel. It's something new. But the second time, it's real drag.

And the people that you're meeting with, you're not actually developing a relationship with any of them. It's not even clear exactly what they're evaluating. They're going through, you know, sort of a motion to make a decision, but they're not getting enough out of that thirty minute meeting separate from what they get from the other material they're getting. I took a company public in the first week of January of this year, and we started at 09:30 in the morning, East Coast time. And we priced the deal at 3PM.

And it was entirely done by Zoom, and there was no private plan involved. And the book was, I don't know, 10 times oversubscribed or something like that. First of all, completely agree. For those people that don't get where the puck is going, we are gonna have amazing creative virtual world, Zoom, things we can't even imagine. I completely agree that so much can be done the way we're doing it right now.

So for those people that are saying, oh, we have to go back to a traditional model, that train's left the station. But I have noticed since I've been vaccinated, if you and I had a beer or took a hike in Boulder, there's something right brain and intangible about spending time with people. When you're learning how to ask for money, when you're learning how to mentor somebody, and you're trying to see the thing and read their body language and all that right brain stuff, there is something that I think is lost. And all I'm saying is that we're going into this virtual world. And I love it.

I also am debating with my team right now where I said, hey, guys. Let's go back to the office. Because there is something I think that we gain from that interaction. I made a comment to a CEO the other day. I think the comment you're making is important, the way you're describing it.

I made a comment to a CEO the other day, which I think is reflective a little bit of what you're doing with your team. There's a spectrum. And at one end of the spectrum, you have I'm gonna focus on the leader of the company now. The leader of the company at one end of the spectrum has an intense desire for human interaction and getting back together in person. At the other end of the spectrum has no desire for human interaction getting together in person.

Let's just use those as extremes. Everybody's on a spectrum. Those are the endpoints. Interestingly, because of the experience that we've just had for the last fifteen months, we have a moment in time where companies and leaders can reevaluate the norms that their companies have with regard to physical proximity in space and how that affects lots of other choices in the company. Sure.

The comment I made to the CEO was it was a CEO who is far at the end of the spectrum towards wanting to be in person. You know, business is a 150 people, so it's big enough to be interesting to have the conversation. It's not five people that can sort of have the conversation. It's pretty meaty. My comment to him was I encouraged him as he was describing his personal, like, we need to do this.

I said, put your own bias on the shelf. Just put it on the shelf. Acknowledge your bias. It's totally fine, but put it on the shelf and think about the team that you currently have because your bias is so overwhelming to the team that people may not be saying what they want about the norms that are effective in this moment. I have another example of a CEO of a company that's probably a couple thousand people.

Same thing. He's very strong biased towards that. And you can hear the emotional cadence of the business has energy because people are back in the office, whether or not that's what the individuals want in terms of their workflow. Then I have another example with an entrepreneur who already was running a remote company prior to COVID. So the business, which probably a 100 people, was already distributed and remote.

And with COVID, they evaluated, like, you know what? We don't have enough proximity. Like, we didn't recognize the informality of our proximity before. It was informal. It was chaotic.

People would sort of move around and get together. Once a year, they had a in person event. But coming out of it, the CEO said, you know what? I think we need to do that more often. We need to do it once a quarter.

You know, we need to be more deliberate in the places where we have more than 10 people. And instead of renting an office, you know, they get a temporary space or a coworking space. And there's no requirements, but there's sort of this encouragement that when you're doing something where you can get together, get together. So I say that from the standpoint of encouraging the leaders to say it this way I said a few minutes ago. Put their biases on the shelf as they engage with the rest of the team to try to see what the things that are working and aren't working are.

I say it that way because I think as leaders, one's needs tend to overwhelm everybody else in the company even if you don't realize it. And I'll use myself as an example. I have no need to ever go back to an office again. You know, my partners know that, and we're clear about that in the conversation, and they're accommodating to that, but that doesn't drive us being a remote organization. Right.

I have several partners who desperately wanna spend time physically together. Let's figure that out. Let's figure out how to make work and so it can accommodate sort of everybody's needs. And, you know, the bigger the organization is, the more you need to make that a norm versus, you know, sort of figure out how to hack it together. But I think we're at a moment in time that's unique where we can reevaluate a bunch of those things.

I wanna take this from the micro to the macro. On a micro level, narcissism, seeing things from your own perspective, it's innate to a certain extent. As we grow, our consciousness expands, we start to understand the other. When you're talking about this, for instance, it's the customer's always right. You have to pivot.

If your business is going in a certain direction, this is what you think everybody wants, but guess what? They don't really care about it. You better change. So let's go back to what you were talking about with these communities and income inequality and leveling the playing field. I have a term called character based capitalism.

There's also a book that Robert Putnam Rock talked about where we're in this I period as opposed to we period. And the question is, we got polarization on both extremes. Forget politics. How do you not go from one extreme of capitalism to communism? Right?

How do you have the middle way character based capitalism? That's my passion. You talk about you back people that are passionate. My passion is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We are a melting pot, and we're blowing it up, I mean, at the seams, right, because it's hard because we're tribal.

There is that nationalism tribal instinct. But in terms of the elite and in terms of the wealth inequality, how do you find the middle way in capitalism? There's a wonderful book that I encourage everybody to read based on that, which is by Kurt Andersen called Fantasyland, How America Went Haywire, a five hundred year history. The book is incredibly powerful because it doesn't separate America's history into logical time frames, you know, like ten year time frames or twenty year time frames, generations, or whatever. It sort of moves through the five hundred year history of the country with epics, you know, e p o c h.

And each epoch has sort of like a category, and you read through this epic, and you're like, things are so unbelievably screwed up. And then you go to the next epic, and it's a totally different version of, wow, things are totally screwed up. For me, I have tried to be exploratory and tried to do everything from the bottom up versus from the top down. And I think that's the trick from my perspective because when you try to organize something from the top down, you essentially are making a trade, and the trade is I'm going to create a bureaucratic command and control hierarchy versus from the bottom up, I'm gonna create an evolving network driven complex system. And the network driven complex system is going to evolve based on all of the stimuli that it encounters.

The inputs generate outputs that generate new inputs generate new outputs. And it's gonna have some chaoticness in it or some chaos in it, but the complexity is what causes it to evolve and change. Whereas the top down hierarchical approach tends to calcify, balkanize, reinforce certain things. Against the backdrop of that, when I'm thinking about entrepreneurship and innovation, I think that most entrepreneurs view themselves as trying to do something new or something previously didn't exist. I think many entrepreneurs today would apply or use the word disruptor to what they're doing.

Whether they're disrupting at a large scale or a small scale, that disruption is not a new phenomenon if you go back and read this book. Because the essence of the grand arc of the American experiment has been an endless set of disruptions to historical norms. Those disruptions then were disrupted by new disruptions to the historical norms. And as time passed, a lot of stuff gets ossified. And, you know, there's another remarkable book right now.

I'm almost done with. I'll finish it tomorrow. Michael Lewis's new book, Premonition, which is about the pandemic, is just spectacular. And what you see is you see that the hardened bureaucratic institutions that we have are ones that are very, very difficult to modify in any way, shape, or form, even by people who say, I'm gonna disrupt the government. Bullshit.

That's not how it works. How it works is the bottom up phenomena that generates real change. One can go across many different social characteristics of our society, and almost all of those things where there was real structural change was much more a function of bottom up phenomena than top down hierarchical control. So, again, I apply that to my own entrepreneurial thinking. And it's not that things are bad and they must be changed.

It's that things are always changing. You know, that is part of the I I was gonna say fun, interest, enjoyment, challenge, you know, stimuli of the experience. The other thing I just sort of end on is I don't believe I know what any of the right answers are at a macro level, nor do I try anymore. I used to have a belief. I wrote this in the first startup community book with regard to government.

My sort of view on how government can help entrepreneurship and innovation, I said, you know, do no harm. It's not that government is bad. It's that one has to have a frame of reference that creates a world view that's rational was a word I was gonna use, but I'll use the word logical instead. It's logical in the context of what the constraints and what the existing things are. You know, it's the same thing that I think a lot of people make in business, you know, the idea of a rational fallacy or illogical argument.

When you anchor on something that's a rational fallacy, you really get into a path that is not going to be effective. Whereas if you question it, but understand what the constraints that you're operating in against the backdrop of what you're trying to affect, and you understand that it's gonna take a long time and a lot of commitment to actually affect it, that's very, very powerful. You have this book, an Entrepreneurs Weekly, Nietzsche. What was it that got you to write it with David, Jill, and how does that figure into the discussion we're having? I've written a bunch of books, and, you know, I write mostly daily on a blog at feld.com, maybe 15 to 20 posts a month.

I'm not every day, but most days. I decided with Dave, and my coauthor on this new book is Dave Jilke. Dave was my first business partner. He's semi retired, and he had gone very, very deep on, I would say, classical philosophy from the age of reason, enlightenment, and and some crossover into contemporary philosophy. It's probably been seven years ago now.

He was getting into Nietzsche, and he started tossing out quotes, and he'd say to me, does that sound like entrepreneurship? Dave's been an entrepreneur, so they were sort of rhetorical questions. And I would say, yeah. Definitely sounds like entrepreneurship as we'd sort of bounce back and forth and try to actually understand what it means. For people who don't know Nietzsche, he was a philosopher and who wrote in German, so the translations are ponderous in the mid to late eighteen hundreds.

So you've also got sort of '18 hundreds, you know, 1860, 1870, 1880 type language. As Dave and I were talking about it, we realized that one of the things in a lot of the books I've written today, they stimulated a lot of thought, but they didn't stimulate as much introspection. I think the startup communities books did some, and the book that I wrote with my wife, Amy, called startup life did some. But generally speaking, I think people sort of use them more as, okay. I should do this, or here's how to think about that, or, you know, here's some stories about that.

So we started working on trying to figure out if there was something to do here with Nietzsche. And a couple of things happened at the same time. One is we went very deep on Nietzsche. He's incredibly misunderstood and misrepresented, and he's very complicated. Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn fame wrote the foreword to the book, and Reid studied philosophy in a program master's program in Oxford.

And when I reached out to him to sort of ask him about his thoughts on Nietzsche and entrepreneurship, he was immediately positively responsive. And he coined the phrase that Nietzsche was the patron philosopher or entrepreneur. And the place that that came about was that Nietzsche in his own time was incredibly disruptive to the norms. He was very provocative. The phrase that's often used is he philosophized with a hammer.

He was not polite, long treatises that nobody read, that were academic, that academic, that built off of lots of other people, but it was much more profound newness in a way of thinking. And it turned out that he was influenced by many and influenced many before and after, and was really the bridge from classical philosophy to contemporary philosophy. Part of the misunderstanding for him is that it's so easy to take what he's written and interpret and twist it however you want. One of his personal challenges, he died in 1900, and his estate went to his sister who was a Nazi. He was not.

You'll often hear that Nietzsche was a Nazi. He was not only not a Nazi, he was avidly opposed to nationalism. He was avidly opposed to antisemitism. He wrote aggressively against it. Yet his sister basically published a book posthumously.

And imagine if somebody gave you piles and piles and piles of scraps of paper and said, here's the stuff to play with. And then that person has an agenda, and they write something with an agenda. So there's a bunch of other stuff. And in in the book, we have a chapter that sort of deconstructs this. But as I went deeper into it, I thought this guy was truly in his time an entrepreneur in the context of the field he was in.

For Dave and I, as we started talking about this, one person did an amazing job of bringing stoicism to entrepreneurship, which is Ryan Holiday. And Ryan's written now a number of books. One of his books that came out, I think, about 2016, we'd started working on it, but we hadn't really done much other than write a bunch of crap that was trying to, like, sort out some of the Nietzsche quotes. Ryan came out with his book, The Daily Stoic, which I think is one of the best books an entrepreneur can read. It's three hundred and sixty five days.

It's not a calendar quote of the day type calendar. It's 12 sections, one for each month. And within each section, there's a page for each date, and sometimes it's two pages. And each is a stoic quote from Seneca or Marcus Aurelius and the Pictetius and on and on and on. Then is Ryan's two to five paragraph linkage of that quote to entrepreneurship, business, a way of life.

Not just entrepreneurship, but way of life more broadly. It really made stoicism, which is highly relevant to entrepreneurship, and so we decided to do the same with Nietzsche. We felt like 52 quotes was enough. The world doesn't need 365 Nietzsche quotes. And what we did in this case is we took a Nietzsche quote.

We translated it into contemporary English. So we rewrote it in a way that is easily accessible. I have to read the quotes three or four times before I really even understand them. And so we actually encourage in the book people to read our transliteration before they go back and read the quote. Doesn't matter.

But just to, like, sit with them a little bit. Then we've written two, three pages of provocative thought about the quote. We're not saying, and you should do this, and this is the answer, and here's how you should. But we're bringing things up that that quote brings up with us around whatever the topic we're covering. And then about two thirds of them, we have a narrative from an entrepreneur, some that are well known, but many who are not.

And with these, we gave the entrepreneurs the quotes and said, what does this cause you to think? So we weren't trying to tell people what to do, but instead, in the way of philosophers, provoke a lot of thought. And it's very meta because that's what Nietzsche does is he provokes thought anyway. And in the end, we tested the book with a lot of friends and a lot of entrepreneurs. And, you know, the feedback we've gotten so far, we launched a couple weeks ago, have been extremely strong positive in accomplishing that goal.

I mean, there's plenty of things, I think, in this book people will read and say, I don't agree with that, or I don't understand that, or I don't know what to do with that. My response is good. Right. You sit with it. Like, read it again in a week.

Dog your the page and come back to it a year from now and see if it rings something different based on the experience you've had. That was the motivation for it. It makes total sense. I was talking to a buddy of mine about parable. When you're trying to give people these experiences and you're trying to take wisdom and transfer to the next generation, so to speak, if you think about it, if you're teaching physics at college and you're asked to guest lecture in kindergarten, But if you don't bring it down and talk about it in a different way, you're gonna lose everybody.

You can love Nietzsche, and you can understand all these things. I mean, see all the interrelations because you've been a philosophy major and you understand all this stuff. And if you don't realize that some of it's gonna go into some people, but some of it's gonna sit out there, It is like sitting under the piano and feeling the music and coming back to it. And at different stages of your life, it's gonna mean different things to you. I like the sitting under the piano and feeling the music analogy.

And, you know, in this, I would say Nietzsche is the frame for us, Dave and I, exploring a bunch of the things that we've encountered as entrepreneurs and giving people who read the book something to play with and reflect on in terms of their own experience as entrepreneurs. The other thing which I think is important and has been important for me, I think a lot of times entrepreneurs get stuck in two traps. One is they don't slow down and learn themselves, and they just don't allocate time to themselves to learn themselves. That was for sure true of me early on. I was fortunate.

I had a couple of good mentors, and I ended up in an organization called Young Entrepreneurs Organization where I got some peers relatively early on. You know, even then, I was too self involved with the business to actually learn about myself and invest time in that. The other is, I think it's human nature. There's much too much looking for an answer to solve a problem or assuming that nobody has ever solved the problem before and trying to find your own answer for the first time. Like, again, ends of the spectrum.

And a lot of times, the answers come when you sit and think and when you reflect. And when you're not actually trying to solve a specific problem, you realize you put things together that you hadn't otherwise thought. And this is particularly true around things like organizational design of companies as they're scaling or culture or how to interact with other people or how to present what your business is doing or how to think about strategy. I mean, things that are more abstract versus here's how you run an agile software development project, and this is what a daily stand up is. I think that entrepreneurs, especially when they're in the thick of it, don't often step back enough and are either at the end of the spectrum.

They're heads down just trying to sort it out without allowing themselves to contemplate, or they're just following what they see other people doing as though there's a playbook. You know, the first page of the playbook should be there is no playbook. One of my dear friends who is a very, very successful entrepreneur built a billion dollar plus company was a philosophy major. He loved it, and he was just obsessed about it. And we and I was on a walk the other day, and we were talking about it because he kind of gave it up because he said that he realized that there was something that always was or that came out of nothing, and that there was a place that philosophy could not go to him where if you wanna understand death, for instance, he's a libertarian, doesn't love religion, and kinda gave up on philosophy because he said, I'm putting words in his mouth now, but I got stuck with the paradox that there's a rational world and that Socrates and Plato and all the philosophers are trying to solve it.

Again, it didn't make room for the right brain infinite. And he had a hard time reconciling the two. And I said to him, is there a way that you can realize that there is a need for parable and that the right brain and the left brain have to coexist? Nonrational is not bad. Intuition and where that comes from is not bad.

But you threw out the baby with the bathwater. It's the beginning of a lifetime conversation. But as a philosopher, I'm curious if you've ever struggled with that. The direct question, have I struggled with it? Sure.

I've struggled with many things. I'd love to meet your friend. And what I would do if asked, I would encourage him to read some science fiction, not philosophy. And I give him, you know, a handful of books that envision a future where none of the underlying stories are necessarily new ones. And I think one could say this about history and philosophy.

We certainly see this about TV. Right? Like, you watch the newest movie that just came out. It's like, man, I've seen this movie, like, a 100 times. It's the same movie.

Different seats. It's the same movie. Right. And so you can be cynical and say it's the same stuff over and over again, But there's this interesting thing that happens, I think, when you time travel into a future imagined future that is one that you then decide to believe could exist, and then have to reconcile the dynamics of that potential future. I mean, this is in some ways, this is what theoretical physicists do, and it's brilliant to read some of the stuff by contemporary theoretical physicists around them trying to translate what they're thinking about and what they're trying to do with what they know today into a model, a mental model that people can relate to.

Now in all of this, like, I don't have any criticism for your friend. I get it. Like, I give them Dave as a counterexample. Dave was a hyperrational software engineer. Like, the idea that in his, you know, sixties, he would write poetry and study philosophy.

If you told that to his 22 year old former self, his 22 year old former self, who's he talking about? It's not me. So I think one of the things that's interesting about humans is you can go in and out of these things, and that's okay. Right. One of the challenges, I think, with any sort of classical educational framing is that, again, like anything else that's institutionalized, the degrees of freedom outside of that have to be driven by the individual, not by the institution.

Right. That's why I would give your friend some science fiction because my bet is if he has training in classical philosophy, and maybe he loves science fiction. Maybe he's read a bunch of science fiction and hates it. But if you go explore some of the books, whether it's a book about parallel universe you know, infinite number parallel universes, a book by Robert Ford that's a classic from the nineteen sixties and seventies called Dragon Egg, which is about maybe thirty years from the sixties or probably seventy years in the future. He was a true, you know, rocket science physicist that wrote science fiction, and he wrote a book about the evolution of a species that Earth discovered, that the humans discovered that were living on a neutron star, you know, they came in contact with each other, a day of Earth time was something like a thousand years of their time.

So the evolutionary pace of the interaction of these two species was incredible. You know, you read a book like this, and you put yourself in that kind of a world, and you say, well, could that exist? And what does that actually mean? And what are the implications of that, and and how I should think about it? So that's how I'd go there.

It's like, don't constrain yourself, especially when you run slamming into something. It doesn't feel necessarily comfortable. It's like, okay. Well, kinda keep poking around. There's some stuff there or not if you're bored of it.

He loves Ready Player One. I think in terms of trying to understand virtual reality and where the world's going Ready player one and ready player two are great examples. You know, another one is the book that just came out, John Ware's book. He's the guy that wrote The Martian. He just came out with a book called The Hail Mary, and I read it last week.

And it's another one. Like, it's extraordinary. It's extraordinary because it sort of intersects between contemporary society, science, real science, and human interaction and all the challenges that we have. For TV watchers, the remake of Battlestar Galactica, the one that was done in 2000 to 2005 is another good example of how this works where you can use the sort of imagined future state to explore a bunch of things that our current state constrains us on exploring. It's not that the future state is the one that we aspire to.

It just allows you to travel into a different frame of reference, which then when you come back to your current state, at least for me, is expansive. I haven't read a ton of science fiction, but I love science fiction. I went back about a year ago in COVID. I started watching the Star Trek episodes, the Gene Roddenberry original Star Trek. Yeah.

You wanna see somebody that was just so far ahead of their time and dealing with the different races, the different people and how to interact them and Federation of Planets and all this other stuff and time travel. And he was just genius. It's fun. Speaking of fun, this was a lot of fun for me. I actually look forward to meeting you in person next time I'm in Colorado.

Living in Colorado in June 2021 is awesome because summer in Colorado spectacular. People so desperately wanna be outside and there's so much space in the mountains. It's just a huge emotional relief to be able to wander around. But thanks for having me. This was a blast.

Enjoy the rest of your day. See y'all.