{"id":15098,"date":"2025-06-26T02:20:08","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T02:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/15098\/"},"modified":"2025-06-26T02:20:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T02:20:08","slug":"brad-feld-on-give-first-and-the-art-of-mentorship-at-any-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/15098\/","title":{"rendered":"Brad Feld on “Give First” and the art of mentorship (at any age)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brad Feld has spent decades operating by a simple principle: give without expecting anything in return. This philosophy goes beyond traditional pay-it-forward thinking, he says. It\u2019s about helping others, knowing only that meaningful connections and opportunities will emerge organically over time if you do.<\/p>\n

The entrepreneur and VC, who began angel investing in the 1990s, rose to prominence through his candid blog \u201cFeld Thoughts,\u201d which pulled back the curtain on the then-secretive venture industry and sparked countless discussions across Silicon Valley. After decades as an investor and co-founding both Techstars and the venture firm Foundry Group \u2014 which backed hundreds of companies over 18 years before deciding to stop raising new funds<\/a> in early 2024 \u2014 Feld has distilled his approach to business and life into his latest book, \u201cGive First<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

TechCrunch talked with Feld last week about mentorship, boundaries, and why vulnerability might be the most important leadership skill.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve been thinking about this \u201cGive First\u201d concept for over a decade. What finally pushed you to write the book now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is my ninth book, and I was getting close to being done with writing nonfiction; I\u2019m interested in exploring science fiction writing. The intersection of maybe this being my last book and really wanting to capture these ideas made me sit down about three years ago.<\/p>\n

The concept emerged in 2012 in my \u201cStartup Communities\u201d book as a paragraph called \u201cGive Before You Get.\u201d The idea was that if you want a startup community to really move, you need people willing to put energy in without defining upfront what they\u2019ll get back. It\u2019s not altruism \u2014 they\u2019ll get something, but they don\u2019t know when, from whom, over what time period, or in what form.<\/p>\n

You were once seemingly everywhere, then you pulled way back. After taking a two-year break from public life, what brought you back?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I decided I didn\u2019t want to be involved in anything public-facing. I was tired and burnt out. I focused on behind-the-scenes work, which meant [my wife] Amy and I were together all the time because I wasn\u2019t distracted by other stuff. That\u2019s been really satisfying.<\/p>\n

When David Cohen came back<\/a> as CEO of Techstars a year ago, I told him I\u2019d engage as much as he wanted, but I still didn\u2019t feel like being public. Working with him on strategy got me super deep back into it. I also took the [book draft] off the shelf, looked at it, and thought, \u201cThis is pretty good.\u201d <\/p>\n

This book is really about mentorship in its different forms. You also talk about the importance of setting boundaries to avoid burnout. There\u2019s a reason for the adage \u2018no good deed goes unpunished.\u2019 How should mentors protect themselves while still giving generously? <\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of that in the book. I\u2019ve been very open about mental health struggles to help destigmatize these issues. . .and there aren\u2019t absolute answers to the question. One challenge when you\u2019re willing to contribute energy without being transactional is that there are people who can\u2019t do that, or who are extractors. <\/p>\n

Adam Grant describes this spectrum in \u201cGive and Take<\/a>,\u201d with givers on one end, takers on the other, and traders in the middle. Most of our world, really, is traders to takers. Over the short term, takers can do extremely well, but over the long term, people at the giver end are much more successful when success isn\u2019t simply measured as power and money.<\/p>\n

You emphasize the importance of saying \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d when mentoring. Why is that so crucial?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s extremely harmful to new founders when experienced, successful people position themselves as having the answer to everything. The magic in entrepreneurship is having lots of hypotheses, testing them quickly, and learning when most fail.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re in an environment where people can\u2019t present things as hypotheses. They present them as assertions. The blurring between opinion and fact is a mess. The best mentors provide data and hypotheses, not assertions about what you should do.<\/p>\n

One of [my] mentor manifesto phrases is \u201cguide, don\u2019t control.\u201d Sometimes you do know the answer, but anyone who\u2019s been a great manager knows the best way to get commitment is to get people to make the commitment themselves.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of opinion shopping that goes on behind the scenes. How should founders navigate conflicting advice from multiple mentors?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I got feedback on my first draft [of the book] from 25 people, I absolutely got conflicting information. The more mentors can make feedback from their own experience, the more useful it is. Instead of saying \u201chere\u2019s what you should do,\u201d they should say, \u201chere\u2019s an experience I had that\u2019s similar, and here\u2019s what I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

If mentees listen that way, mentor whiplash is no big deal; you\u2019re getting multiple data points from multiple experiences. It\u2019s less \u201cchoose your own adventure\u201d and more synthesizing things that make sense in your context, making a decision, communicating it back to mentors, and then having them commit and support you.<\/p>\n

At what point is someone ready to be a mentor? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the magic trick of mentorship: the best mentor-mentee relationships become peer relationships where the mentor learns as much from the mentee as the mentee learns from the mentor. That means essentially anyone can be a mentor at any point.<\/p>\n

Some of the people I\u2019ve learned the most from are at the very beginning of their careers\u2014people still in college, running their first company. My friend Rajat Bhargava was 21 when we started working together in 1994. The amount we\u2019ve learned from each other since then is unreal.<\/p>\n

There are very successful, experienced people who are awful mentors, and people early on with little experience who are extraordinary mentors. Your ability to be effective as a mentor isn\u2019t related to your success or experience \u2014 it\u2019s a way of being.<\/p>\n

How does this philosophy apply during times like now<\/strong>, where we\u2019re seeing massive layoffs in tech, disruption from AI in everything . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right now, there is almost zero predictive power associated with anything anyone is saying. We\u2019re so disconnected from understanding what will actually happen. The very loud, extreme pronouncements people are making have the lowest predictive power I\u2019ve ever seen.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re living in a space where it\u2019s loud and jarring, but I\u2019m hopeful this stuff is timeless. My goal with this book isn\u2019t for people to say I got it right. It\u2019s to stimulate people to think differently about some things, or reinforce what they\u2019re already thinking in an additive way.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re still managing funds and assets dating back almost two decades<\/strong>. Any final thoughts on stepping back from the traditional venture model?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Amy and I say it all the time: we\u2019re all going to die. We don\u2019t know when that day is. What are you going to do with your precious life? The number of people hanging on to relevance by their fingernails in their 70s and 80s . . . if that gives you meaning, awesome. But for many, the answer [to the question of whether or not to do that] is not yes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brad Feld has spent decades operating by a simple principle: give without expecting anything in return. This philosophy…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[15311,64,607,15312,15313,67,132,68,1594],"class_list":{"0":"post-15098","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-brad-feld","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-entrepreneurship","11":"tag-give-first","12":"tag-techstars","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us","16":"tag-venture-capital"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114747278886748852","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}