Top 88 Brad Feld Quotes

As an investor, I’m always looking for the next great American company. Who will create tomorrow’s Twitter, Facebook, or Google?

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.

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.

I hear entrepreneurs use the word ‘disruption’ on a daily basis and continuously hear the cliche change the world.

Boulder is a very smart community.

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

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

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.

I love using a targeted acquisition approach in conjunction with a business that has a clear strategy and strong organic growth.

A lot of times, when I interact with someone for the first time, I don’t want to see the presentation.

I’m an optimistic person, and I tend to bury my cynicism in what I read and the movies I watch. My optimism holds that the good guys eventually come out on top.

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

When I struggled with a depressive episode in 2013, I realized that I had a glitch in my thinking about my own motivation. I had separated learning and teaching into different concepts.

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.’

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.

Part of the power of having startup communities is it continues to challenge the status quo. So for many of these cities that were once very important and powerful that today are struggling, startup communities are a way for them to rejuvenate themselves.

In 2013, when Google announced that Kansas City would be the first city in the country to have Google Fiber, I bought a house in the first neighborhood that was being wired up with Google’s gigabit Internet.

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’m hugely intrinsically motivated and have always believed that I’m fueled and motivated by learning.

While we should certainly be investing in our own STEM education, we should take advantage of the thousands of international students who come here to study and are ready to fill these gaps immediately upon graduation.

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

In entrepreneurial circles, it’s clear to me that violence, hatred, and discrimination – or whatever you want to label it – is another category where we need to pay attention to disruption before it changes the world in ways we don’t want it to.

I talk often about being intrinsically motivated by learning. It’s the primary driver of most of my activity.

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’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.

I’m usually an excruciatingly happy person.

Ever since I learned about the concept of garbage collection in 6.001 at MIT in 1984 while using Scheme on HP Chipmunks, I’ve always thought of dreaming as the same as garbage collection for a computer.

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

I read a lot of science fiction and biography – these are my two favorite genres. My favorite science fiction writers are Hertling, Suarez, Gibson and Stephenson, but I enjoy many others. I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.

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

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

One of my core values is diversity of everything.

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 often get asked how I write so much. As any writer knows, the answer is to write a lot more than you actually publish.

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.

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

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

The super awesomeness would be a portable teleportation machine that I could take with me. I go wherever I want, and then I can go from there to wherever I want. Instantly. Without having to go through TSA. One can wish.

The first thing that any city that’s trying to create a startup community or an entrepreneurial ecosystem that’s vibrant should do is get rid of the idea that they’re trying to be like Silicon Valley.

It’s time to focus on what I care about and not let the noise take over my brain.

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.

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.

While I’m a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker.

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.

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

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.

If you don’t have a VP Finance on your team reporting to you, do yourself, your team, and your investors a favor and go hire one right now.

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.

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

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.

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

In my world, historical revenue is the least interesting thing to consider in an acquisition strategy.

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

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

I love dreams.

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

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

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 know a lot of companies that have a very well defined post-acquisition process. However, many of them don’t take into consideration the dynamics and personalities of the acquiree. Instead, they assume that everyone will happily be assimilated.

Many people, companies, and organizations are trying to protect the past at any cost. We see this regularly in business as the incumbent vs. innovator fight, but I think it’s more profound than that. It’s literally a difference in point of view.

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

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.

If the crisis lasts moments, rapid action is critical. But if it’s simply the beginning of a broader issue, especially one where the root cause isn’t known yet, the worst thing a leader can do is act immediately.

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

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.

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

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

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

Twitter has always been that refreshing place where I can quickly find out what is going on in my tech world. I follow mostly entrepreneurs and VCs – some who I know and some who I don’t know. I have a few companies in my feed. But no newspapers, no magazines, and no mainstream media.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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

‘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.

I have a long history with Kansas City.

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.

So many companies talk about increasing the number of prospects at the top of the funnel, but they spend remarkably little time making sure actions are taken – on a daily basis – to make sure these prospects convert into paid users.

What I’m looking for in my interaction is critical thinking on the part of the person pitching to me.

My view was, if I didn’t like Boulder, I’d keep going west, except I never really wanted to live in the Bay Area.

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.

I don’t read newspapers or watch the news on TV, deliberately to avoid the noise.

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.

Ultimately, the goal is to use acquisitions to compress time on product development and get people on the team, especially in senior roles, who can help build out areas of the company they have experience in.

If you’re in a city where there’s no clear startup community, the goal is not raise a bunch of money to fund a nonprofit; the goal is not get your government involved. The goal is start finding the other entrepreneurial leaders who are committed to being in your city over the next 20 years.

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.’