Speaker 1:

From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week, we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world.

Now, let's go inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.

Lance Glinn:

Welcome into another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Our guest today, Brad Feld, has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987, co-founding two venture capital firms and multiple companies. He's also the author of nine books, most recently Give First: The Power of Mentorship, out now from IdeaPress Publishing. Brad, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House. Really appreciate you being here.

Brad Feld:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Lance Glinn:

So you've written several books over the years, but Give First, your most recent, feels sort of especially personal and philosophical in nature. When did you realize that this idea, this sort of mindset, the power of mentorship deserved its own book among your portfolio? What made you want to put your philosophy really into words?

Brad Feld:

Probably sometime after I came out with the book Startup Communities in 2012, where in that book I had a paragraph that was kind of a throwaway paragraph. When I wrote that book, the phrase startup communities didn't exist, and I was describing this idea of a startup community, which has one purpose, which is to help entrepreneurs be successful, help founders succeed. And in 2012, we were now out of the financial crisis, but we were in the dynamic of the beginning of the current wave of entrepreneurship, was starting to get exciting again. And I wrote the book 2010, 2011.

And what I focused on really intently was saying the way to get activity going in a startup community was that you have to have a bunch of people who are willing to put energy into a system without knowing what they're going to get out of it. Basically being willing to engage non-transactionally.

I also said though it wasn't altruism. You expected to get something back, you just didn't know when, from whom, in what form, over what time period, and in what consideration. So the idea was to get the flywheel moving in a startup community was to use this philosophy, as I started to call it, of Give First. That book, that subtitle of that section was Give Before You Get. And in a world of Twitter with 140 characters, #givebeforeyouget is not very efficient. So somebody at Techstars hashtag did Give First and then suddenly it started appearing as Give First everywhere.

But that was kind of the moment where I started to think more about it because I was seeing this happen and I didn't come up with this in a vacuum. I had been experiencing this in what I was doing in Boulder, Colorado since 2005, 2006. And then as I started to think deeper about it, I saw a through line going back to my own entrepreneurial experience starting around 1990, which was three years after I'd started my first company. And the timing of that really was the moment where I first found my peer group. Up until that point, for the first couple of years of that first business, I didn't know anybody else that was a founder or entrepreneur. I had some clients where the person running the company was the founder of the company, but they were my clients. They weren't really my peers.

And then all of a sudden, I ended up at this event that was co-sponsored by Inc Magazine and an organization called Young Entrepreneurs' Organization, and then MIT Enterprise Forum, where, for a four-day weekend, I spent immersed with 59 other founders who were young, who were under the age of 40, who were all founders of companies with at least a million in revenue. And it was this big unlock for me to suddenly be surrounded by peers, many of whom had much larger businesses than mine, but who we all were able to talk to each other in the context of the different struggles we were going through as [inaudible 00:04:49].

Lance Glinn:

So I think what's really cool about Give First and the book that you've written is that regardless of the company that you founded, the size of the company, whether it's a small business or one that's incredibly large, say, even one that's potentially listed here on the New York Stock Exchange, is that you could take away something from it, right? It relates to all different kinds of people. What were you hoping leaders, whether again, they're big or small founders, investors, community builders, what are you hoping they would walk away thinking differently about after reading?

Brad Feld:

I think two things. One was this philosophy Give First, which I described the definition.

Lance Glinn:

Sure.

Brad Feld:

But I want to be clear that it's a philosophy, not a religion. Right? In a religious tradition, there's often a set of rules and you follow the rules and good things happen theoretically, independent of what religious tradition you believe in. In a philosophy, it's a set of ideas to incorporate into the way you approach things. And the ideas essentially are not do these things, it's more ponder this and think about how they relate to or how they could work with what it is that you care about. So first piece of it is to incorporate some of these tenets of the Give First philosophy into the way that people operate in the context of entrepreneurship and business, generally speaking, especially around leadership.

The second is the notion of mentorship and how powerful mentorship can be in the context of the entrepreneurial journey or the leadership journey. And specifically not, again, a set of rules, do these things and you will be a good mentor. That was not my goal with the book. My goal was instead, here are some ideas about how to be effective, and what effective mentorship looks like.

And if you tie it back to the conversation five minutes ago, the magic trick of mentorship is when the mentor and the mentee become peers, and it's a peer relationship. And part of the power of being effective around mentorship, whether you are a mentor or a mentee, is the relationship that develops and how that relationship develops so both the mentor and the mentee are learning from each other, at different levels and different ways around different things.

So with this book, I've tried to link those two constructs. And importantly, on the philosophy of Give First, just to make it very precise and tangible, there's three concepts that are elemental to it.

The first is that it's a philosophy that encourages non-transactional engagement in systems. You are willing to engage in a system without defining up front what the transaction is. And if you think about leadership, especially contemporary leadership in 2025, there's an awful lot of leadership that's modeled where everything is transactional.

Lance Glinn:

Sure. Sure.

Brad Feld:

And there's nothing wrong with... I have a lot of transactional stuff in my life. People say, "Oh, you're that Give First VC. How about you give me 5 million bucks and I'll..." It's like, no, no, no, I have a lot of transactional stuff in my life too. I'm not saying transactions are bad. I'm saying incorporate into what you're doing this willingness to enter into systems, especially new systems or systems where you're trying to explore or have things happen with a collective group of people, non-transactionally.

The second is the idea of positive sum, which I think is crucial and is often lost in language today on two sides. One is this language of zero sum and zero-sum behavior. Zero-sum means somebody gets plus X and the other person gets minus X, and the sum is zero. Positive sum is both parties or all parties can benefit, they just benefit in different amounts. And I think there's so much power in systems where people approach them from a positive sum experience rather than a zero-sum experience.

And really, the essence of the entirety of the growth of the technology industry over the last 50 years has positive sum experiences in it. If you go back in time, it used to be called coopetition where you competed, but you also cooperated. And the whole notion of the technology world and landscape that we're dealing with has huge elements of positive sum activity in it, in addition to plenty of competitive zero-sum, I win, you lose kind of action. So incorporating positive sum into the mix.

And then the last is multi-turn. The idea that these are multiple long-term relationships rather than single-turn, single transactions. So if you take those constructs against the idea or interwoven with the idea of the power of working with other people, where both the mentor and the mentee can learn from each other, and understanding effective ways to do that, that's kind of the essence around this book where again, it's focused on founders or leaders, not saying, "Oh, this is a better way. Here's your framework. On page 72, I have a four-box graph that shows exactly how you should do it." But instead trying to show, through examples and stories and my own experience, things that have been very powerful, both positive and negative, in navigating what is a very complex journey that most founders have.

Lance Glinn:

So before we get really into the book and some of those stories, I do want to sort of go back to that definition you had of Give First, right? Putting energy into a relationship without defining the transactional parameters of it, while still at the same time expecting something back, you obviously just don't know when or how you were going to get said thing back. I want you to unpack that idea a little bit. How do you draw the line between being really genuinely generous while still protecting yourself from being drained by people who only take?

Brad Feld:

Yeah, boundaries are challenging, and I think every philosophy has problems. And the third part of this book is titled Challenges of Give First. So I openly address some of these challenges directly.

There's a magnificent book by Adam Grant called Give and Take. Adam is an organizational psychologist at Wharton. He's written a number of great books and he's a super thoughtful guy. And Give and Take came out about six months after my book Startup Communities came out. And I didn't know Adam at the time.

And when he came out with his book, I had one of those aha moments, which is, oh, somebody actually did research that demonstrates that givers over a long period of time are the most successful in the hierarchy of people who are givers, takers, and then Adam defines a category called matchers, which are I'll give you this if you give me that. My book and Give Before You get was totally anecdotal. It had no science or research behind it.

So Adam came out with his book and his realization or conclusion was that givers are the most successful long-term, where success is defined by more characteristics than just money and power. Money and power are components of success, but not the only attributes of success. And if somebody's listening and they say, "Well, that's nonsense. The only thing that matters is money and power." You should probably stop listening to the podcast now because you're not going to get anything out of it.

Adam also found that givers were at the bottom of the stack of most success. So you had this situation where in some cases, people who had a giving orientation were the most successful. And in other cases, they were the least successful. And he unpacks that a bunch in the book with different characteristics.

And one of the big ones is boundaries and understanding how to establish the appropriate boundaries. If 100% of your energy is from a giving orientation, it is unlikely that you are going to end up at the top of that success ladder. However, if 0% of your energy is from that orientation, it is unlikely that you will end up at the top of that ladder.

So in the dynamics of the specific question that you asked, I think understanding how you weave this Give First philosophy into what you do, how you think about engaging with people, and I like to say it's not just relationships, it's relationships and systems. And system could be a company, system could be a community, it could be something that you have direct influence over, it could be something new that you're trying to get going. And thinking about how those things interact because almost everything we do as a species is what academics like to call a complex adaptive system.

Complexity theory is really important here. Most of the things that we're involved, and I shouldn't say everything, many of the things that we're involved in do not have a deterministic outcome. The outcome is not, if I just do these following four things, this fifth thing is going to happen. If I do the following four things, there's a whole portfolio of things that might result. And I can have the goal of something, but every output that emerges is an input into this complex adaptive system. And the more people that are involved in, the more inputs that you have, the more non-deterministic the outcome becomes.

That is a very, very powerful thing because if you're willing to engage without knowing where the thing is going to go. And you obviously want it to go in a positive direction, so it's not that you don't have a premise about where you want it to go. But you let go of the notion that you can control the outcome and that you can predetermine the outcome, that's a very powerful thing. It's really visible to founders. If you're a founder of a company and you start from that frame of reference, you realize, well, that's almost the essence of starting something where nothing existed before.

When you started the podcast, I'm sure there were goals for this podcast. But you couldn't have necessarily envisioned the path it was going to take.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. 100%.

Brad Feld:

Right?

Lance Glinn:

Yeah.

Brad Feld:

So in that context, if you try to over-define everything in advance, I think that you constrain yourself significantly. All right, so that's simple sort of description of then a very complex and rich tableau of the experience that we all have wandering through life or wandering through business, either as founders or as leaders. And my statement to most leaders is, if you embrace this notion that you are dealing with a lot of things that are non-deterministic, your willingness to put energy into things, not knowing where they're going to go, gives you a much higher probability of successful outcomes.

Lance Glinn:

So speaking to that giving in a sense, right? Towards the beginning of your book, there's a line that you wrote when talking about even if a company fails, I'm going to quote you here, "People will remember you for how you behaved and treated others in difficult situations." I feel like that's sort of like a hard-won truth of sorts, to know that obviously you'd be distraught, right? A company fails, but people are going to remember you for how you behaved and treated them. Was there a particular moment, whether it's know with Interliant, Techstars, whatever, where you really saw that idea play out where your behavior, even in the worst moment, may have trumped any successes that you had?

Brad Feld:

Yeah, two things. And I'll do a preamble because the preamble to that question is fun.

Lance Glinn:

Okay.

Brad Feld:

I attribute the quote to Warren Buffett, I have no idea who the quote came from. But the Warren Buffett quote, "Reputation is built over a lifetime and destroyed in a minute." And we see this over and over again-

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely.

Brad Feld:

... an all aspects of society, but especially in business, is that people blow themselves up. And in finance, of course, from a perspective, there's often a lot of schadenfreude where somebody is very successful for a long time and then bloviates about it endlessly and then blows themselves up with a stupid trade or a stupid decision. Then everybody's like, "Haha, look how stupid that person-"

Lance Glinn:

Countless stories in history.

Brad Feld:

Right? Nothing new to see over here.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah.

Brad Feld:

But that art, that landed with, when I heard that, whenever I heard it for the first time, I'm like, "Yeah, that's exactly sort of how I think," which is this idea that the entrepreneurial journey, and frankly, the journey through life is full of both successes and failures. My view is that almost everything I've ever done, I'm about to turn 60, almost everything I've ever done was a hypothesis that I then ran an experiment against. And most of those experiments were unsuccessful. But I learned from the unsuccessful experience. I then applied it, ran a new experiment with a new hypothesis, and occasionally had something that was successful. And when I found a successful experiment, I did a lot more of that. But even when you have a successful experiment, you have to keep testing because things change. The world changes, the environment changes. The thing you're doing that's working is not going to work forever.

Lance Glinn:

As we've seen over the last two or three years.

Brad Feld:

Endlessly, over and over again. Again, just look, history doesn't have to be the guide, but whatever, this is a Mark Twain cliche, I think, right? Is that history rhymes.

So in this context for me, sure, have I hurt people's feelings? Yes. Have I done things that cause people to not want to deal with me? Yes. Have I done things that I look back at and say, "Gosh, I wish I hadn't behaved that way in that moment"? Yes.

So as a guide for myself, I come back to over and over again this notion of what is it when I disappoint myself that behaviorally is the problem? Rather than the specific action. And for me, the behavioral dynamic, and again, I'm not saying this is generically true for all humans, this is for me, but that links back to your question, has been passive avoidance of a problem, identifying that there was a problem and then not dealing with it. Different than active avoidance, which is to identify a problem and say, "You know what? I see a problem over there. Hey team, there's a problem over there. I'm not going to do anything about it. If somebody wants to do something about that problem, somebody should probably do something about it, but it's not mine to deal with," which is the psychological version of that is putting a boundary around responsibility.

There's a lot of pathology, and I've had my own struggles with this of taking responsibility for things I had no need to or no right to take responsibility for, which is actually problematic downstream. It might feel good, it might make people say, "Oh, look, what a good guy that person is because he's taken on all this (beep) that's not his (beep)." But that's not healthy either.

So for me, when I look at this dynamic, I don't have any regrets about the failures that I've had. Those were just part of the process. My regret is entirely around passive avoidance, when I identified a problem and didn't directly deal with it.

Lance Glinn:

So later on in the book, I found your concept of [inaudible 00:21:15] very interesting. The idea that mentorship is built not on legal agreements, but on trust and reputation, right? You then tell a story, as the book goes on, about a mentor that patented a mentee's idea.

Brad Feld:

Yeah.

Lance Glinn:

Excuse me. When something like that happens, when there's I think a clear breach of that trust and almost reliance, but that relationship, when there's a clear breach of that relationship, how do you repair trust in a community that really relies so heavily on it? Because I think that's what mentorship does, it relies so heavily on that trust.

Is it even possible to repair it?

Brad Feld:

Well, it's possible to repair some elements of it. Interestingly, that particular anecdote, I think that it was impossible to repair trust with the person who violated the trust in that situation because they refused to acknowledge their behavior. They refused to acknowledge their breach of trust.

And it goes even a step further, and we see this in leadership today. It's something that I find very distasteful. We all make mistakes. We all screw up. We all disappoint people. There are leaders who are incapable of acknowledging their mistakes. There are leaders who view their leadership approach is one that everybody else has to constantly adjust for their mistakes. Taking responsibility for one's actions, I think is a critical and essential part of, in my book, effective leadership.

So in this case, the person who violated trust could have repaired trust by saying, "You know what? I screwed up. You're right." [inaudible 00:23:12].

Lance Glinn:

Just a simple acknowledgement.

Brad Feld:

That's it. That's it. And instead, the person tried hard to say, "No, no, that's not the way it worked." And, "No, I didn't do anything wrong." And they were, in the classic case, caught dead to rights that they'd done something wrong. It was unambiguous that they had done something wrong.

And in the end, the thing they had done wrong, the end of the story was the company who the mentor had patented the mentee's product, the company had to spend money, but was able to get the patent invalidated as part of their own patent process. So the mentor's patent was invalidated. The mentee company, after spending money, was fine. But it did create a break and it created a break where that mentor's reputation was not able to be repaired. And all that person had to do in the moment when confronted was say, "Huh. You're right, I did something inappropriate." Or not even in the moment, they could have said it a week later or two weeks later, after they had time to think about it and say, "You know what? I'm sorry." That's it. Nothing more.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah. You emphasize as well in the book, when it comes to mentorship, that the mentor's role is to guide, not to control. You say that good mentors provide data, context, and perspective, but don't actually dictate decisions, right? They're just there to help out, to give an opinion, to guide, so on and so forth. I'm sure obviously that's easier said than done, especially when believing maybe even a founder is sort of heading toward a mistake. How do you hold back in those moments when you think a mistake is there, yet that's not your role? Your role is not to make a decision, your role is to just provide input.

Brad Feld:

It's fun because it's really hard. Imagine the world and think about how you feel when somebody says, and I like to do it visually, when somebody sort of wags their finger at you and say, "You should. You should do this." For me, it teleports me back to my 14-year-old self. And my immediate instinctive response when somebody says, "You should," is to want to do the exact opposite of it. Right? To be [inaudible 00:25:37]-

Lance Glinn:

And for me, it's like they're a teacher more than they are a mentor at that point.

Brad Feld:

Teacher or a parent. It's like come on. So for starters, the, "You should," is not helpful.

Lance Glinn:

Sure.

Brad Feld:

Next, you might not be right as the mentor. So the directive that you're giving or the idea that you have that, okay, well, I've had this experience and I know the answer might have been right for the context you were in, but might not be right for the context that the mentee is in. Or not just the context, but for the person and the personality and what they want to accomplish and how they want to approach things.

So it's important as a mentor to recognize you are data, not the answer. Now, as data, you might believe your data is correct, and you might have a strong point of view about it. And that's where guide comes in, which is you're providing data. It doesn't mean that you have to provide data in the absence of any guidance, But you're guiding the mentee, rather than saying, "This is the answer."

Last, and this comes back to the finger wagging at the beginning, it's well known in product development and engineering and building anything that if you as the manager tell your team, "I need X by date Y done for cost Z," you are setting up an impossible set of constraints. And there are some leaders that like to set up impossible constraints because they think that motivates their teams. Maybe it does. I don't know. There are other leaders who look at it and say, "You know what? The better approach would be to have the team set the constraints," as the manager or the leader, provide a broad arc of where we're trying to go, but then have the team define it.

Or pick two of those. "Look, we've only got Z dollars to spend on this, and we need it to do some subset of the following things. When can you get it done? And what subset of the following things can you do?" And back and forth with the team. And when the team defines that, they're committed to that. They're going to work as hard as they know how to work to get that done. It's different when you, as the leader, are saying, "You have to do X, Y, and Z." Maybe people will do it because they're fearful that they'll lose their jobs if they don't do it. But is that a healthy leadership dynamic? And is that a leadership dynamic that scales effectively?

There are some theories of leadership that say yes. So again, people may be listening to this and saying, "Yeah, of course, that's the way I want to do it." That's fine, I'm not making a judgment on it. I'm suggesting that there's another, more effective approach. And that other effective approach, especially if you're a mentor, not a manager, where you're trying to help somebody figure out how to be effective themselves in terms of what they're doing and what their leadership is, that notion of guiding them and that notion of providing data rather than telling them what to do is very powerful.

Lance Glinn:

So Brad, as we begin to wrap up our conversation, and I think throughout the book, and even throughout our conversation just today, you show that mentorship isn't just about transferring wisdom, it really is about becoming better yourself through the act of giving. When you look back on your journey, what's sort of the biggest thing mentoring has taught you about leadership? And what have you gained from mentoring yourself?

Brad Feld:

A couple of things. One, great joy. This is part of the definition of success. If we come back to the definition, which we didn't flesh out, but I said if all you care about is power and money, then you're not listening now, so those people have gone away. For me, success includes things like joy. The emotional resonance from not just my own success, but seeing other people be successful and participating in their success, even if I don't have a financial outcome as a result of it.

That's been a wonderful thing for me to experience. And I learned it from a few folks early in my own career as a founder and as an entrepreneur, where others were helpful to me but didn't necessarily share financially in the outcomes. But I could see that they had great joy and great satisfaction in being a participant and in what ended up being my own success in different situations.

For some of them, the recognition was important. And for the people who the recognition was important, you can usually tell. There were others who had no need to have any recognition, who just had the joy from the participation in the activity. So that's piece one.

Second, the amount I've learned from people I've been a mentor to exceeds what I think they've learned from me. I value learning as one of the highest things in our species' ability. And for me, learning has always been a huge source of motivation. Being involved in situations where I can learn creates enormous intrinsic motivation for me to engage. And as someone who's been involved with lots of different people and lots of different things where they were viewing me as someone they were getting benefit from, whether it was help or support or investment or whatever, for me, in those situations, the learning that I got had huge value to me, and I view that as a meaningful part of success, both directly and indirectly. Directly because of the joy and satisfaction I got from it. Indirectly, in how that learning contributed to my own ability to figure out things that then ended up having success, whether it was, again, whatever the definition would be.

Maybe the last is I like to think by nature, I'm a peaceful, happy, friendly, relatively easy to deal with person. That's my personality, that's my self-assessment in my personality. Other people get to decide what my personality actually is because one is judged by others, not by themselves, but that's how I think of myself. And as a result, the things that I've gotten exposed to and I've gotten to experience as a result of that personality, especially in the context of new experiences, new learnings, new opportunities, for me has far outweighed what I think I would've been exposed to if I had a different approach to things.

And it comes back really to this notion of Give First that we started with and the philosophy of it. I've been willing to engage with so many things and so many people non-transactionally. Many of them led to transactional dynamics, but I didn't know where that was going to come from or who it was going to come from or what that was going to look like when I engaged. Many of those things were positive sum, both parties benefited. I got something out of it, the other party got something out of it. And the best ones were multi-turn, like 40 years later I still have relationships and friendships, not just where we reminisce about the good old days, not just where there's, I'm doing a thing for you because you're doing a thing for me, but where unexpectedly, things continue to show up and pay dividends from these very long relationships, from things that might've happened 10, 20 years ago or something that happened three days ago.

Lance Glinn:

Give First: The Power of Mentorship out now from IdeaPress Publishing. Brad, thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House. I really appreciate it.

Brad Feld:

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X @ICEHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside the ICE House.

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