Brad Feld Quotes

While I’ve had plenty of ups and downs, dealt with my share of failure, and struggled through emotionally difficult periods, I’m fundamentally an optimist.

I hope more cities engage with immigrant entrepreneurs the way St. Louis has – it’s a great model.

By definition, as a company scales rapidly, it adds people quickly.

St. Louis has a great startup scene and a vibrant business community.

Kauffman Fellows is not necessarily for people just entering the venture industry but for experienced VCs looking to accelerate their growth. The program is centered around established innovation leaders – if you are looking to grow and become a better investor, you should think about doing this program.

Periodically, at the end of a conversation, someone will ask me, ‘Is there something I can do for you?’ I used to answer with ‘Do something that is helpful to something or someone in my world.’

By 2002, I realized that what was classically called a rollup strategy was not generally effective, at least not for me.

I’m a strong believer that you can build great companies in time of both greed and fear. But you have to be paying attention and operating under the right assumptions. You don’t have to believe history repeats itself, but you should accept that history rhymes.

I have a long history with Kansas City.

In 2016, you no longer have to be in Silicon Valley to launch a successful startup. Colorado is home to many.

I love dreams.

I can’t tell you the number of people who pitched something and have no idea whom they are pitching it to. They don’t know the background of the investor.

I’m a venture capitalist. I like to say my job is to help and support entrepreneurs. I can play a leadership role, but my organization can’t be the leader.

A rite of passage in America when you turn 50 and have good health insurance is a colonoscopy.

While it’s trendy to outsource your accounting to a third party, once you hit a certain size, it’s dangerous.

I have trouble sleeping maybe one night a year. On that special night, I get up and read on the couch until I fall asleep.

I wonder if, as the tech to deliver content continues to evolve, we will start seeing the one season / 6-8 hour show that ends at a peak moment rather than is cancelled because it sucks.

America’s future as the global leader in innovation remains in the balance until our immigration system is fixed. A large portion of a reform package should focus on updating our system to better reflect the business landscape and market realities of the 21st century.

My weight fluctuates between 205 and 220, depending on how much I pay attention to it.

I’m very comfortable in the U.S. and Europe, but I feel completely out of place in the rest of the world, mostly because I never spent time outside the U.S. and Europe until I was in my 30s.

At Foundry Group, we always look for companies that we think build magic into their products. Occipital has been one of those companies.

I would say my whole universe is probably categorized as guerilla marketing. For a long time, I had a line which was, ‘Whenever I hear the word ‘marketing,’ it makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth.’

For those trying to protect the past, it is a way of retaining power, status, money, a way a life, predictability, comfort, control, and a bunch of other things like that. It is a struggle against the inevitability of change.

I’m glad I get to live in the United States of America.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Kauffman Foundation working with Jana Matthews on ‘learning programs for high growth entrepreneurs.’

Don’t be afraid to have a big vision, but make sure it’s a clear one.

I’m usually an excruciatingly happy person.

Governments spend all their time trying to get big companies to relocate their headquarters, and they end up subsidizing the move with tax breaks. And companies that relocate their headquarters are often not meaningful job creators.

While I’d like to be able to simply do all of my financings with a handshake or, possibly, on a napkin written in crayon, I also wish I had a herd of unicorns surrounded by rainbows, a balanced U.S. government budget, and agreement on how to address the debt ceiling issue.

Over the years, I’ve been involved in many business crises. I qualify this, since my crises have never involved life and death or the survival of the human race. But they are still crises.

I’ve been using email since 1983. I started with MH and Rmail, then cc:Mail, then Microsoft Mail, with Compuserve mixed in. Eventually, I ended up using Pine for non-Windows stuff and Outlook for Windows stuff. For a while.

We should explore ways to make us a more amazing species. A more fascinating society. We should embrace our innovations and evolve with them.

December used to be very difficult for me. For many years, I fought the transition to the new year, was generally exhausted at the end of the year, and just wanted to hide. I described myself as a ‘cranky Jewish kid who felt left out by Christmas.’

I’m always fascinated by the dedicated monitors in a hospital. Non-standard cables, funny button shapes, odd LED colors, and lots of extra controls.

While the line between stress, deep anxiety, and depression often blurs, most entrepreneurs struggle with broad mental health issues at various points in their lives.

Usually, the first three months post acquisition are up and down. The acquirer and the acquiree are trying to figure out how to interact. The founders of the acquiree are usually tired from the deal process and adjusting to their new reality.

On a daily basis, I pay almost no attention to the macro.

While I live a busy life, the pace ebbs and flows.

I feel like an email cross-dresser – I use a Microsoft product on my Apple product to access my Google product.

Q1 is the easiest quarter to make. If you miss your Q1, regardless of the type of revenue you have, you aren’t going to make your revenue plan for the year because your budget process isn’t accurate.

‘Sunspring,’ the first known screenplay written by an AI, was produced recently. It is awesome. Awesomely awful. But it’s worth watching all ten minutes of it to get a taste of the gap between a great screenplay and something an AI can currently produce.

When we raised the first Foundry Group fund in 2007, we took over 100 first meetings. We told our story several hundred times. As part of it was a slide called ‘Strategy.’ I still repeat the elements of that slide regularly, a decade later, as our core strategy has not changed.

In my world, historical revenue is the least interesting thing to consider in an acquisition strategy. The goal is to acquire technology that is on your product roadmap or people that fit culturally within your organization and help you execute on your roadmap faster.

It’s much easier to get a reception from someone if there is an introduction versus randomly trying to get in front of people.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a strong advocate for diversity across all dimensions.

I have shifted my mindset in terms of how companies should… focus on building amazing products. If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial.

If you are feeling some December blues, or even depression, don’t fight it. Instead, do something for yourself. Be reflective. Let the emotions exist. And be encouraged that, like me, you can get to a better place, but it can take time.

That’s the problem with so many organizations around entrepreneurship. They’re driven by metrics that don’t matter.

One of the consistent characteristics of the tech industry is an endless labelling of technology and approaches.

I separate the world of startup communities into two constituencies – leaders and feeders. The leaders are entrepreneurs and the feeders everyone else.

As I continue to believe that innovation and entrepreneurship are the key drivers to our economic future, it’s frustrating to hear such little cogent discussion around it.

I love near-term sci-fi. I especially love right-now sci-fi: stuff that happens in current time but incorporates a scientific breakthrough that is currently being explored.

Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning.

I’m a huge believer in the importance of vacations for leaders, entrepreneurs, and everyone else. I work extremely hard – usually 70+ hours a week.

I especially love right-now sci-fi: stuff that happens in current time but incorporates a scientific breakthrough that is currently being explored.

I think ‘Shoe Dog‘ by Phil Knight is the best memoir I’ve ever read by a business person.

I watched my parents act as completely equal partners in their relationship, and as a son to a woman I respect immensely, I never thought of gender inequality as a child.

When the entrepreneur is obsessed with the product and the company has organized all of its activities around that, it’s very powerful.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

As a teenager, my dad taught me about the idea of unintended consequences, and I’ve had the experience, and how to deal with it, pounded into my soul over the years.

Lots of entrepreneurs don’t want to be hassled by a board of directors early on. The entrepreneurs want to control the company, don’t want to be responsible to a board, or don’t want to waste time communicating with board members. This is a classic error of thinking about the early stage board incorrectly.

When I think about the books I’ve written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.

I think one of the brilliant parts of our democracy is how resilient it is. We are each allowed to have our own beliefs and, as long as we follow the rule of law, we can express them however we’d like. This is a unique characteristic of the best democracies and one I value tremendously.

If I have a golden touch, I’d also say that I have the opposite of whatever a golden touch is, because I’ve had a lot of things fail. I think part of the experience of being successful is that you have to have a lot of stuff not work.

St. Louis is a good example of a vibrant city. Having stayed in a hotel in 2011 overlooking Cardinals stadium when they won the World Series, their fans definitely show up loud and proud.

I believe that all men and women are created equal, but it took our country until 1920 to acknowledge this for women. And then it took until 1964, the year before I was born, to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. And same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015.

If you aren’t going to make your revenue plan, it’s unlikely you’ll make your EBITDA or Net Income plan. You don’t even have to get complicated and look at Gross Margin or more derivative metrics – if you are off in Q1 and have any sort of growth expectations , you are going to miss for the year.

My optimism holds that the good guys eventually come out on top.

Some Sundays, I read it quickly – other Sundays, I savor it. I generally spend most of my time in ‘The New York Times Book Review,’ ‘Sunday Business,’ ‘Sunday Review,’ and ‘The New York Times Magazine.’ I turn all the other pages, only stopping when I find a headline that interests me.

One of my core values is diversity of everything.

Technology doesn’t address everything – for example, air travel still sucks.

My wife is a writer. She grew up in Alaska. She told me she was moving to Boulder and that I could come with her if I wanted to. We were married at the time, so I chose to come with her.

As a company grows from 25 to 50 to 100 to 200 to 500 to 1000 people, the characteristics of who is the very best talent in leadership roles will change. It’s rarely the case that your leadership team at 1000 people is the same leadership team you had a 25 people.

Immigrants have historically been an entrepreneurial bunch.

I regularly see leaders change what they say because they get bored of saying the same thing over and over again. It’s not that they vary a few words or change examples, but they change the message.