Philosophy

Brad Feld

Brad Feld

 

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0:00 – Welcome to Boulder
1:00 – Early Experiences
3:45 – Writing First Book
5:30 – Incubator to Accelerator
11:11 – Random Days
28:00 – Startup Communities
34:42 – Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
36:03 – Too Many Referees, Not Enough Boxers
36:49 – Rural Startup Communities
42:00 – Astronomy
44:00 – Positive Sum Games
44:44 – Give First Intrapreneurs
49:15 – J-Curve
50:30 – Venture Capital Timelines
52:35 – Investor Metrics
55:00 – The Measurement Trap
59:45 – 5 Whys
62:22 – Cliffhangers

Break

1:00 – Founders of Techstars
11:00 – Startup Community Partnerships
20:20 – Guitar Hero in Times Square
25:15 – Bigger isn’t Better
28:00 – Sclerotic Thoughts
29:00 – Contentment
29:50 – BEN BOT
31:05 – Digitized Consciousness
32:12 – Vibe Coding
33:45 – Dinostoids
36:40 – Quantified Self
41:16 – Biohacking
43:30 – AI Note Taking
46:55 – Founders Interest in Philosophy
47:50 – The Entrepreneurs Weekly Niche
54:10 – Healthy Obsession > Passion
58:20 – Affinity as an Investor
59:35 – Fight to the End
60:00 – The Dip
60:20 – Successful Companies Experiment
61:23 – Evolution of Work
62:40 – Quickfire
Spell Check
Ant Hills
Signal to Raise Financial Capital
Favorite Epiphany on Long Run
Being Alone
Pinball Wizard
Music
71:20 – Fine Art
72:45 – YDNTB Contribution
Hints of Season 3
“They can’t kill you, and they can’t eat you.” –Len Fassler

BONUS MATERIALS

 

Roasted Reflections Break: #GiveFirst + Intrinsic

http://BradFeld.YouDontNeedThisPodcast.com

EP14 – Drams of History 🎙️ Tej Dhawan

EP18 – Fourteeners 🎙️🎞️ Jeff Reed

EP29 – Borderless 🎙️ Kerty Levy

https://BenMcDougal.com/tag/Brad-Feld

https://BenMcDougal.com/tag/Techstars

http://YouDontNeedThisPodcast.com

http://BENBOT.ai

By Ben McDougal, ago

Aphorism

Personal truths on health, life, wealth, and happiness evolve from entrepreneurial endeavors.

The pursuit of building a business causes people to be more contemplative about other aspects of life. Learning to articulate thoughts as a leader is transformative. Knowing ones self can be parlayed with mindful aging to create curiosity that can be mixed into heartfelt conversations.

How we explore big ideas depends on the environment, people you interact with, and knowledge you pursue. This makes me thankful for my own entrepreneurial experiences, but more important, the immeasurable blessing it can be to expand our minds by plugging into startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems.

A willingness to show up and the trust built through such generosity has allows leaders to become apart of so many other startup stories. As mentioned throughout YDNTB, consistent action over the long run is required, but insight learned along the way provides a path to understanding for anyone, on almost any front.

As we support entrepreneurs through the art of connection, the invitation to have more diverse discussions is unlocked more often. Whether it’s strategic, tactical or philosophical, what a gift toward open-mindedness this becomes.

Along with stimulating conversations with agreeable peers in a support network, Adam Grant reminds us that it’s important to weave in the perspectives from a challenge network as well. Challenge networks consist of disagreeable people we trust to point out blind spots. This helps to overcome weaknesses with critical feedback we may not want, but need. Peculiar interactions within a challenge network also unlock humbling opportunities to be wrong. Intellectual humility helps avoid misguided confidence and brings us closer to different forms of truth.

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Smart people change their mind all the time. Find joy in discovering you were wrong and now less wrong than before. This is not incompetency. It’s being honest, respectful, and willing to learn.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Overbooked

It’s a go-go world of busy, busy, busy

With days scheduled from start to finish, what time is left for random acts of conspicuous kindness, welcoming serendipity, or just saying yes to more adventure?

Thoughtful preparation is often required to coordinate whatever it may be. There’s value in staying organized, but over planning is a trap. The thirst for productivity in an industrial age has made busy feel/look successful. How often do we hear pride disguised by disgust, in the tone of someone explaining the constrictions of their overbooked calendar? Yes, it takes boundless hard work, a healthy obsession, and endless sequencing to be remarkable, but unexpected opportunities emerge when we’re not captive to a calendar.

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A lack of routine may slow down time.

Renting time can be lucrative, but in our connected era, there are ways to efficiently get things done without falling victim to a back-to-back life. Perhaps being comfortable without a plan can leave space to connect more interesting dots? Things will not always come together, but if the calendar is a tool to keep promises while staying quietly organized, complacency can be released and replaced by unplanned experiences that keep us open to next.

As we sip on another holiday season, see how it feels to fly without a plan. May voids filled with no agenda unravel a freedom to be your best.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Replicants

A friendly futurist and DAO developer within our web3dsm community shared this Ray Kurzweil interview that triggered my continued curiosity toward our neon future.

One tangent they take is interacting with replicants. There’s no single definition for what a replicant might be, but I imagine my replicant to be an artificially intelligent, bioengineered entity that has consciousness rooted in the human (or machine) it originated from. This humanoid would index everything I ever created, map the complexity of my network, understand the difference between internalized vs. externalized thoughts, have empathy for how I matured over time, and gain contextual insight from storytelling to form a foundational identity. This identity would support an operating system with core characteristics, essential rules, and different permission levels to guide autonomous growth.

With seemingly limitless advances in technology, interactions with different versions of our past and future self seem inevitable. We’re already speaking to holocaust surviving holograms, watching monkeys play video games with their brain, growing synthetic realities, and experimenting with nanorobotics. As the bandwidth of technology reaches escape velocity, what’s stopping us from pressing the record button to store every angle from every moment? At that speed, how can the linear evolution of humanity’s intelligence fuse with the exponential trajectory of machine learning? Even when it’s possible, do humans want to extend our lifespan?

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Days feel long, but years fly by.

There are more questions to ask and variables to consider, but as we think about futuristic interactions, how might we reconsider the way we spend our time? Would you live your life differently knowing future generations may interact with your own replicant? I have to think our thoughts and actions would be less careless with such a forward-focused mindset. It would also seem that staying in the moment would be more natural when every byte counts.

With a future that gives humans an opportunity to merge with machines, let’s avoid the numbness of endless distractions as we collectively consider ways to transcend time with purpose.

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“…if tomorrow I wake up and I’m sixty years old,I hope when I look in the mirror and ask have you lived,I look right back and say, “shiiit, you tell me!” -Machine Gun Kelly

By Ben McDougal, ago

Feng Shui

Welcoming the unpredictable forces of life, provides ease and creates space for energizing adaptation. Peace awaits those who appreciate all that is, without worrying so much about all that is not. That said, we know this doesn’t mean everything just falls into place. It takes initiative, consistency, awareness, and sacrifice to find your own version of equanimity.

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It’s not a rainy day. It’s free water.

As I felt the warm wind of this sunset cruise on a glass lake, Kid Cudi mentioned feng shui and got me thinking about this week’s writing. Similar to how one may setup the space of a home to harmonize with nature, we can connect elements of our own career portfolio to feel the universal benefits of feng shui.

The places you visit, the people you’re with, and the art you generously create all connect through you. Over a lifetime, you become an environment for others, and this becomes your legacy. If there’s passion, diversity, intellectual humility, and overall harmony within your environment, your impact on the universe can be serendipitous and my hope is that the way you spend your time, will add up in the end.

By Ben McDougal, ago