‘Give First’: A Boulder Entrepreneur’s Philosophy for Success

Brad Feld has been a leading figure in the startup community for over 15 years. After seeing his own share of successes and misses, Feld has a very comprehensive understanding of what makes a good startup ecosystem work.

The Boulder-based Feld is now sharing those insights in his new book Give First: The Power of Mentorship.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” Feld, the co-founder of the venture capital firms Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, and the business Techstars said.

Feld said “The concept of ‘Give First’ was actually something that first appeared in a book I wrote in 2012 (Startup Communities).”

That construct is centered around how to build “long-term, powerful startup communities by putting energy into a system without defining upfront what you’re going to get back.” Or to put it another way, “it’s the idea of giving before you get. ”

He is quick to point out that the ideas in Give First “are a philosophy, not a religion.” It is not simply pure altruism either. Giving First as a base concept is about taking a situation that has traditionally been very direct and looking at it in a completely different way. 

While Feld has been working over these concepts for almost a decade, he indicated that the current business environment provided a push to codify them in print. “In this moment in time we have a culture, in both business and politically, that is extremely transactional. One where I would suggest that you find a clear winner and a clear loser in even simple scenarios.”

A Selfish System

Entrepreneur Brad Feld

“This book offers a different way to approach systems, it’s very different then what we are seeing modeled day in and day out,” Feld said. 

 He explains the basic concept as “You can’t say if I do A and then B and then C, I’ll get to D. That’s because what happens is you do A and it generates Q and then Q becomes the input into the thing where the output is 27.” When Giving First you worry more about what’s happening in the moment and less about getting to D. This approach also in many ways creates a level playing field for startups. In Giving First, the privileged aren’t working to exclusively connect and mentor the privileged because there is a longer-term outlook to the relationship. Benefits will develop, but they won’t often be immediate. Under this outlook Feld admits that at its core “Give First can be fundamentally selfish.” 

The goal is to use this philosophy to create a “relationship dynamic.” 

“One thing I really wanted to bring out was that in business, particularly in startups, the mentor and mentee can both benefit from the relationship” Feld said. “It should be a positive sum experience.”

The Boulder Thesis

“I believe you should be able to build a startup anywhere in the world and today we’re seeing that happen. Every startup community and geography is defined by the area where it is located,” Feld said. “I didn’t move to Boulder to be in New York City, I moved to Boulder because I wanted to be part of Boulder.”

After being involved in startup communities around the country, Feld began to notice patterns directing why some saw more streamlined success while others were rife with churn. He classified these tenets for success in The Boulder Thesis, named after the thriving startup community in his own backyard.

In the Boulder Thesis, Feld states that a strong startup ecosystem needs  “Founders who will lead. A long-term view of at least 20 years. An inclusive, welcoming environment that includes anyone who wants to participate. Activities and events that foster engagement and collaboration.” And he ties all of this directly into the concepts in Give First. “If you want to get things moving in your startup community, all of the founders have to be willing to put energy into the community without defining upfront what they’re going to get out of it.”

The Give First concept has relevance not just to the world of venture capital, but to other businesses, organizations, and even individual actions as well. “You want to get something out of an interaction,” Feld admits, “but you just never know when, from whom, over what time period or what other considerations may come into play.”

Feld says that it’s important to remember that part of this process, of any process, is failure. “Doing anything new is just a series of experiments. You have a hypothesis, you run an experiment. Most of the time the experiment fails. But the key is to learn something from what happened, change your hypothesis and then run the experiment again.”

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