Category: Give First
My morning started early with a 6:30 a.m. drive to Denver to give a talk about Give First: The Power of Mentorship, which Erik Mitisek had organized for a group of Denver-area founders.
In it, one of Erik’s questions caused me to go off on a riff about authenticity, which led me to one of the Techstars Mentor Manifesto items titled Be Authentic—Practice: What You Preach and a section in the book titled Nonsense Phrases Such as “I’m Value Added”. I gave the example in the section Being Full of Value‑Added Shit and explained that when I hear someone say “I’m an (adjective) (noun)” I insert (in my brain) the word “not” after the word “I’m.” From the book:
I’m amused when someone says, “I’m authentic,” “I’m transparent,” “I’m founder-friendly,” or “I’m a value-added investor.” Whenever I hear something like that, I automatically insert the word “not” between “I’m” and the rest of the phrase.
I’m suspicious whenever someone says, “I’m an (adjective) (noun).” Why did you need to say, “I’m a great tennis player,” “I’m a deep thinker,” or “I’m a generous person”? Instead, why not simply play tennis, regardless of how great you are? Or think as deeply as you want? Or be generous?
I’ve followed it up with two more Techstars-related talks, where I used this example again. In the last talk, I said, “I think I’ll make that today’s blog.” So – here’s the story.
“Hmm,” I thought to myself.
I had just watched a video interview with a famous VC. Although I didn’t know him, I was friendly with several founders who had worked with him and knew of at least one of the situations he had described.
The VC’s verbal fillers took up the first 30 minutes of the interview. There were plenty of “Honestly” and “To tell you the truth” woven in between “I’ll be transparent about what happened” and “The best
founders are authentic to their true selves.”
One of his stories, which I was familiar with, didn’t feel right. I knew the founder/CEO of the company he described and thought she’d had a particularly rough time with this VC. However, the VC’s preamble was, “In difficult situations, I’m always transparent about what will happen with the founder. That way, they have an opportunity to challenge or correct me.”
I emailed my founder-CEO friend to ask about the situation. I told her I’d just seen an interview with the VC in which he discussed her company. Had she seen the interview? Did she agree with what
the VC said?
“He’s full of shit,” said my friend. “That guy is a manipulative psychopath. Before we even talked about the situation, he’d gone around me to everyone on my management team and planted seeds of doubt with them. He told different things to each team member, lied about our situation, and attributed things to me that hadn’t happened at all.”
“So, he wasn’t transparent with you?”
“Are you kidding me? I have no idea why anyone takes this guy seriously.”
“Did you when you first met him?”
“Well, yes, of course. He was charismatic, had a lot of capital, talked a good game, and had a lot of people who said great things about him.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I think he’s a manipulative, misogynistic, ego-challenged person who is deeply deceitful. Well, maybe he’s not misogynistic, but all the people who liked him were men, and I’ve subsequently met a few other female founders who had similar experiences to mine.”
The VC was neither transparent nor authentic. As is often the case, his reputation eventually caught up with him.
Wow did I need that this morning!
I was feeling tired and a little down before our call. I slept until the last possible minute before starting a Techstars Managing Director Alumni Network. While that cheered me up somewhat and gave me some energy, I followed it with another call with a CEO/investor/long-time friend where we spent some of the time wrestling with things going on in the US right now. My energy coming out of this was low and my mood was “meh.”
But then Seth Godin and I recorded an episode of the Give First Podcast, which will be released soon. We’ve known each other for 30 years and have a friendship where both of us are in “instant yes” mode (which we discussed). I smiled more in the last 30 minutes than I did all day yesterday.
I just asked my friendly neighborhood AI for a summary of one-liners from our discussion.
- “Two cannibals are eating a clown, and one says, does this taste funny to you?”
- “Leadership is not the act of you doing all the jobs and belittling everybody else.”
- “Some people end up in an instant yes category.”
- “If Jerry asks me for anything, even a kidney, it’s always yes.”
- “Are you building something that the future you will thank you for?”
- “Founder mode is seductive—good for your ego, but it will burn you out.”
- “No can also be a gift.”
- “The system outlasts us.”
- “The shortest version is, is your mom gonna be proud of what you’re doing?”
- “I don’t get why you signed up to do all this work if all you’re gonna do is be a cog in that system.”
There’s plenty more in front of me today – some easy, some hard, but with one conversation, I’ve been able to reframe my mood and energy.
Seth – thank you.
I’ve been having a lot of fun at public events around the launch of my new book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship. I’ve got a handful of events left in Boulder before Amy and I head to Aspen for the summer.
- 6/5: Denver: Techstars Workforce Development Demo Day + Give First with Brad Feld
- 6/10: Boulder: CoinGeek Startup Spotlight: From Entrepreneur to Enterprise
- 6/12: Boulder: New Tech ft. Give First Fireside Chat w/ Brad Feld
For the past two days, I was in Indianapolis at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2025. The last time I was at GEC was in Rio de Janeiro in 2013. Even then, I was talking about Give Before You Get, a concept I had introduced in Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, which I wrote in 2012. And, I had longer hair.
In addition to a panel and a keynote, I reconnected with many people around the world who work on startup communities, some of whom have been long-time friends (Andy, Victor, and Lesa – I’m looking at you). I had several great conversations with Jonathan Ortmans, the CEO of GEN, and I’m incredibly proud to be associated with the fantastic work he has done over the past 20+ years. I recorded several podcasts in the recording studio that Silver Foxx Media set up, which will soon be dropping on the Give First Podcast.
And, I spent a wonderful evening at High Alpha with Scott Dorsey and 150 of their closest friends. Mollie Kuramoto on their team wrote a lovely long-form post about our fireside chat: Give First: Insights from Our Fireside Chat with Brad Feld. I loved Molly’s final words on our discussion, which included:
Brad closed the evening with reflections on life’s finite nature and the importance of living with intention. “This is the moment,” he shared. “Life is full of challenges, heartbreak, and failure, but it’s also filled with opportunity. Focus on what matters to you. Define your own meaning. And don’t miss the chance to contribute to something greater.”
I’ve decided to mix metaphors and turn into a pumpkin at midnight on Halloween and go back into hibernation for an indeterminate amount of time on November 1st. I turn 60 on December 1st, and I want to spend at least a few months experiencing that and fully embracing my entrance into what Amy and I call “the third third of life.” Until then, I’m having a great time being out and about in the world again.
As a voracious reader, I love a good table of contents (TOC) as the roadmap to a book. While fiction is often structured as Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, … Chapter N, some of the best fiction writers are creative with their TOC. Any non-fiction author who doesn’t provide a detailed table of contents TOC is missing an opportunity to help the reader understand the book’s flow before they begin reading it.
Below is the Give First: The Power of Mentorship TOC. While pre-orders are available now (the official release is June 24, 2025), the book is physically available at only one bookstore in the world: Composition Shop in Longmont.
I’ll be there tomorrow (Tuesday, May 28, 2025) from 10 am to 5 pm except for a break for lunch from 1 pm to 2:30 pm, when I’ll be with a friend who is in town. Join me and buy a copy of the physical book now, rather than waiting for the release date in a month.
Additionally, if you’d like to see where I’ll be out and about in public (until I go back into hibernation), take a look at the new Events page on this website. Registration links for any events that require them are in the event details.
And now, the TOC for Give First: The Power of Mentorship.
I’m going to have a Random Day on 5/28 at The Composition Shop in Longmont. I plan to be there from 11 am to 5 pm with a break for a lunch meeting from 1 pm to 2:30 pm. We will have copies of Give First: The Power of Mentorship in the store on sale, even though the book’s official release date isn’t until June 24th, because my Colorado friends get special bonus early bird stuff.
I have nine random day slots (15 minutes each), and I’ll hang out between them for anyone in the bookstore signing books. I’ll also have a bunch of my other books there that day in case you are interested in one of them (and yes – I’ll sign them also).
The Composition Shop is a new bookstore created by Greeley Sachs, an extremely close friend married to my Foundry partner, Seth Levine. Greeley has bought several buildings on Main Street in Longmont and is new and improving the area. So, in addition to participating in Random Day, give Greeley and her new bookstore some love (she’ll be there all day also, and maybe some other Foundry partners will come by).
Sign up is first-come, first-served below (click on the Jump to the next bookable date button). If Mailchimp blows the link up, like it did with my AC/DC YouTube video, just click through to my website – it works there.
If you don’t know how Random Day works, here’s an excerpt from Give First: The Power of Mentorship.
It’s pre-order time for Give First: The Power of Mentorship. If you find this post’s topic interesting, help boost my input into the Amazon algorithm by pre-ordering the book.
I’ve failed at many things. Anyone with a lot of success has also had plenty of failure. If a successful person denies this, they are lying.
Reflecting on my professional failures, some resulted from passively avoiding a situation. These are the ones I regret the most because my behavior is under my control. While I’m comfortable with confrontation, living in a work world of endless conflict and negotiation, it took me a long time to fully acknowledge situations where I was passively avoidant.
Today, I separate passive avoidance, which I now try never to do, from active avoidance, where I’ve deliberately decided not to deal with or address a situation. When I’m actively avoidant, I tell the people involved I’ve chosen not to engage with the situation. When I realize I’m being passively avoidant, I either address the situation directly or decide to be actively avoidant and state that to the involved parties.
In Give First: The Power of Mentorship, I have a chapter for each of the 18 principles in the Techstars Mentor Manifesto. One of them is Be Direct. Tell the Truth, However Hard, and in that chapter, I have a section titled The Cost of Passive Avoidance.
Following is an excerpt.
Recently, the concept of “the truth” has become elusive. While mistruths, lies, and deceit have been a foundational part of our species’ communication, a new level of misdirection and deflection around being direct and telling the truth became popular when the phrase “fake news” became part of our vocabulary.
In entrepreneurship, passive avoidance is a pernicious version of avoiding the truth. Every crisis communication playbook has a chapter on ignoring the crisis and pretending it’s not happening. This approach is related to deflection, another deeply destructive maneuver from the crisis communication playbook, which follows another strategy: attack.
There are moments when I’m too tired or frustrated to deal with a situation. Or, I disagree with a path a team is going down, but I have other things on my mind, and I don’t feel like bothering with it. Or I’m tired of arguing with someone, don’t care anymore, or feel defeatist about the situation. That’s passive-avoidant.
Reflecting on my past, I often regret when I was passive-avoidant. Many of my disappointments can be linked directly to being passive avoidant. When Amy challenges me about something at work, it’s usually about me being passive-avoidant. I feel anxiety when I’m avoiding dealing with something. And, when I look back at some of my depressive episodes, they often were triggered by an accumulation of avoiding things, including my own physical and emotional health, that I let build up until I couldn’t handle it anymore.
If you realize you are acting passive-avoidant, pause and consider why you have fallen into this behavioral trap. Step back and get to the root cause of what is bothering you. Apply the Five Whys to the situation. Once you discover the root cause, decide if you should take action to address it. Or, should you disengage? Either way, you are now ready to be direct about what you are thinking, feeling, and going to do.
Passive-avoidant behavior is occasionally inevitable. But if you do it repeatedly, it builds up. You start being unable to confront situations. You begin avoiding being direct. Consequently, the other person doesn’t hear challenging information that could impact their behavior. You stop telling the truth and get caught up in your deceit around a situation. You withdraw, where silence can do as much damage as
hostility and attack.
I put much of myself and my personal philosophy into this book. In addition to conceptual explanations, there are plenty of examples from my own experience, such as the section immediately following, titled Young Adult Lessons from Lying and Being Lied To.
I’m looking forward Give First: The Power of Mentorship being out in the wild and getting feedback on what rings true, what I could have explained better, and what doesn’t resonate.
Jaclyn Hester, one of my Foundry Group partners, recently asked if there was an online definition of #GiveFirst. I spent some time looking around, and, while it’s embedded in numerous podcasts and video interviews, I couldn’t find a clear definition on the web. The closest I found was from January 1, 2013, in a post titled Give Before You Get.
#GiveFirst first appeared as “Give Before You Get” in my book Startup Communities published in 2012. It was turned into the #GiveFirst hashtag by someone at Techstars around 2014. I updated it in the 2nd Edition of Startup Communities (2e) which was published in 2020. I also defined it in The Startup Community Way, also published in 2020.
The definition, from The Startup Community Way, follows:
#GiveFirst means you are willing to put energy into a relationship or a system without defining the transactional parameters. However, it’s not altruism because you expect to get something. But you don’t know when, from whom, in what form, in what consideration, or over what time frame.
While I generally use #GiveFirst to refer to the idea, it often shows up at “Give First.” It’s become the official mantra of Techstars, and there’s even a podcast called Give First.
It’s a deeply held personal philosophy of mine. However, it’s not a static idea, and I’ve been thinking a lot about both the positives and negatives of it lately. But, for now, if you are looking for a definitive definition circa 2020, here it is.
The phrase “contemporary mentors” popped into my head on loop number six of eight on my morning run. I’m training for a Covid marathon, which is 27 loops around my property.
My pace is tentative as I’m still gearing up after a long break due to a back injury, but I’m letting the miles and the time on my feet build on the weekends.
Running in circles for hours is different than running in the mountains in Aspen during the summer. But, I’m afraid of going to Aspen right now because of Covid, and I’m afraid of leaving my property and running on the roads or the trails near Boulder.
So, I’m embracing the circles. Amy likes it because she can keep an eye on me and let Cooper come out for the last couple of loops. While I think he could run with me forever, she worries about him when he goes for more than three loops, which is about six miles for him given all the back and forth he does.
I’ve decided that I’m going to approach the second half of 2020 differently than I approached the first half. This weekend, I turned off a bunch of inputs. I had several long conversations with Amy, right after I meditated, but before I did anything else, including one today where I acknowledged that the organizing principle I’ve been operating with for the last year isn’t working for me. I spent a lot of time outside, but without feeling tethered to anything. I allowed myself to feel what I was feeling, instead of trying to catch up or get on top of the stuff. I laughed at the few absurd things that crossed my path, rather than letting them aggravate me. I thought some more about what I wanted to spend my time on and what I was going to delete.
None of this is new for me – it’s a regular repeating cycle. Sometimes it’s part of my burnout loop or a boom-bust work cycle. Other times it’s a function of not knowing my limits and getting depressed. Once it was a function of a self-induced depressive episode because I stupidly took Ambien for two weeks on an international trip. And sometimes it’s just random.
A little more than a year ago, I came up with a new organizing principle for how I was going to address my work. I thought it was clever, was proud of myself for coming up with it, and tried it for a while. About a month ago I realized that it was a failure and that I wasn’t happy with it. While several aspect were working, several weren’t, but most importantly I realized that my frustration with it and my determination to try to make it work, even when it wasn’t, was making me unhappy.
So, about a month ago, I threw it away. I didn’t stop any of the activities I was doing, but I threw away the organizing principle.
This morning, I told Amy that I had thrown it away. It was the first time I was able to articulate this clearly. I don’t have a new organizing principle yet, but I knew the one I was using wasn’t working.
When my running loops increased, I realized I needed to listen to something while I’m running. Usually, I run “naked” (without headphones), especially when I’m in the mountains or on trails. But, after a few 0.95-mile loops, I want some stimuli other than “another loop.”
I decided to go through some Tim Ferriss podcasts and listen to some of my friends that he interviewed. I think the world of Tim and have learned a lot from him, even though we haven’t spent a lot of time together. And, whenever I listen to any of his podcasts, I learn at least one thing, and they often cause me to think about a few things.
In order, over the past few longer runs, I’ve listened to:
- Secretary Madeleine Albright — Optimism, the Future of the US, and 450-Pound Leg Presses (#437)
- Jerry Colonna — The Coach with the Spider Tattoo (#373)
- Ryan Holiday — How to Use Stoicism to Choose Alive Time Over Dead Time (#419)
- How Seth Godin Manages His Life — Rules, Principles, and Obsessions (#138)
- Jim Collins — A Rare Interview with a Reclusive Polymath (#361)
It was in the middle of Seth’s interview that the phrase “contemporary mentors” popped into my head.
I was searching in the background for a phrase different than “entrepreneurial heroes.” I started my first business in the 1980s and my entrepreneurs heroes include Bill Gates, Mitch Kapor, Steve Case, and Dan Bricklin.
But Seth, Jerry, Ryan, Tim, Madeleine, and Jim are in a different category. They are mentors of mine, in a long list of mentors. Some – like Jerry – are soulmates. Others, like Madeline and Jim, are people I know a little bit but respect enormously. And Ryan and Tim are contemporaries on a different vector entirely.
Aha – “contemporary mentors.” The ideal mentor-mentee relationship is when the mentor and mentee become peers and learn from each other. But peer mentorship has never become an easy category for me to explain as it implies an evolution from a mentor-mentee relationship. What if that’s not what happened.
Tim and Seth – thank you. As I listened to you today on my run, I learned from each of you, while having a close emotional connection from my own relationship with each of you. And from it came a new phrase for me: “contemporary mentors.”
When David and I started doing the #GiveFirst podcast, I was told by a long-time podcaster that it takes about 20 episodes to hit your stride. Since then, several other podcasters have told me that the number is actually closer to 100. Given that hurdle, David and I are 20% of the way there.
In Episode 22, we review the last dozen podcast guests including Josh Hix, Rajat Bhargava, Elizabeth Kraus, Jason Mendelson, Jannet Bannister, Heidi Roizen, Marc Nager & Dave Mayer, John China, Sherri Hammons, Rebecca Lovell, and Harry Stebbings.
I’m enjoying co-hosting the #GiveFirst podcast with David. I hope you are enjoying listening to it.