YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Feld

lines on the record: 163
first: 2020-07-23
most recent: 2020-07-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You're welcome, and Tim, I appreciate you a great deal for both all the things you do, but also investing your energy and bringing things like this out for other people to the extent that anything is useful anywhere. I think you're a master of your craft and it's wonderful to watch and it's an incredible honor to participate.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just breathe another billboard which is not probably the Bay Area billboard, but there's plenty of places would be some version of Don't Believe Your Own Bullshit.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd actually get emails in the random tweets. So I look forward to my Tim Ferris flood of emails. Just put in the subject line TF so I know who to be annoyed with Tim, I'm just going to forward them all to Seth Coat and so we're good there. So anybody that wants to get an email to Seth Code and just send it to me or Jerry Colin, I'll send some to Jerry randomly. Maybe I'll toss Fred in for good measure”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Twitter's fine. If people tweet at me, I'll respond to them, you know, totally fine. My email is pretty easily discoverable, so just brad at feld.com. People have things they want to reach out directly about. I'm always happy to get emails.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continued to invest in the institutions in their cities, right? The schools, the museums, symphony, the cultural institutions, a lot of cases, the actual business institutions, the sports teams. Mark Cuban owning the Mavericks is an investment that he makes in Dallas. I mean, it's a satisfying investment for him, but he didn't make an investment in a sports team, not in the city he loved. He did it in the city he loves.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And today, if you look at Boulder as a startup community, you look at Denver as a startup community, they're connected, but they're two distinct things. The amount of that positive feedback loop, that entrepreneur recycling from companies like Zayo and Rally Software and Data Logics and Sengrid and now Twilio after they bought SenGrid and on and on and on. The characteristic of the health of the cities is that much stronger because of the investment of the entrepreneurs back into the innovation cycle of their city. And it's really not that distinct from, you know, a hundred or whatever 150 years ago as cities were starting to really be developed. And the people in the cities who had generated economic wealth”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's such a powerful moment, right? Think about that, though, in the community. In the absence of that, if you have a city where one company is trying to dominate, that won't be a successful startup community. You have a city where the dominant successful startup is enabling and investing and helping make that city better and really stoking the innovation engine of the city. That's awesome. And so, you know, again, great example because you totally describe the essence of it. Now, in 2007, I don't know anybody that talked that way. And I remember when we started Tech Stars in Boulder, people like Boulder, why would I ever go to do a thing in Boulder? Nice mountains.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think an important part of that, Tim, is that I don't know the Shopify founders well enough, but my guess is they're not playing a zero-sum game either, right? Long term enlightened, they're playing a positive sum game where what they're not trying to do is be the only company in town. They're not trying to be the only game.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And understanding the initial conditions and understanding the inputs and not necessarily focusing on the people or the activities themselves, but the connections between all those things and how that then influenced where things went is powerful. And I can't not say this because it's a fundamental part of what I call the Boulder thesis around startup communities is that you have to take a very long-term view. like to say i used to say you have to take a 20 year view from today uh or you have to take a 20 year view now i say you have to take a 20 view from today literally you always have to have a long-term view from the moment in time you are at it never can get shorter and then you know one day you die and you're not part of it anymore but that's okay because the next generation of people are taking that long term view”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those people then reinvest not just their wealth, but their expertise into new companies in that community. And that recycling then follows generations. The first generation of it's interesting. The second generation, so when some of those companies become successful and those entrepreneurs and employees and people that work for them and leaders recycle their time, their expertise, and their money, it continues to expand. And if you go back to the initial conditions of Silicon Valley, that happened a lot over a long period of time. And I would argue that a line that Ian and I like to use is that even Silicon Valley today couldn't recreate Silicon Valley. It would be by definition a different thing. And that's the essence of a complex system. You are creating a new and different thing.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That last statement was exactly correct and super important, right? Your Ottawa example and your Shopify example is an example of what we refer to as entrepreneurial recycling. And the idea is that over time, it takes a long time, right? As you have success in a geography, in a city, in a startup community, all of a sudden entrepreneurs have a new resource, which is wealth. And if they care, if they have topophilia, if they care about their city, it's not just the entrepreneurs, it's also many of the early employees. And in fact, many of the not so early employees end up with wealth and an understanding of how economic wealth gets generated by creating something where nothing previously existed, right? Before Shopify existed, there wasn't a thing called Shopify. It was the product of a couple of founders and then a team and then more people and then more people and more people. And eventually, you know, today an incredibly valuable company.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things we're doing affect everything else we're doing, and back to this notion of I love contagion in this context, right? There is an idea of positive and negative contagion. And COVID is obviously extreme negative contagion. But in business, we talk all the time of positive contagion. The whole idea of a viral loop, you know, for anybody that runs any business that's consumer facing is positive contagion. And if you scale it up to society, that's what we're talking about in the startup community way. I mean, literally, that's what we're talking about. You can scale it up to that level or you can scale it down, you know, to how the startup community in Birmingham, Alabama is growing and developing in positive and negative ways.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of a crisis like none other I've experienced in my life that is the essence of a complex system. And the COVID crisis is not a crisis, right? It's a health crisis. It's an economic crisis that was generated by the health crisis. It's a mental health crisis in the US now. We have a racial equity crisis. By the way, none of these crises are new. And the intersection of these things is part of the essence of the complex system. Each of them on their own are complex systems. You do not have a deterministic outcome. There is not a playbook to follow. There is not a set of things that we can do that if we do them in the proper sequence, all will be good and we will finish. And in fact, the whole idea of finishing and in some ways the idea of defining good at any moment of time is temporal because all”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Core for understanding how startup communities grow and evolve and differentiating very clearly a startup community from an entrepreneurial ecosystem because they're very different things. And what does that mean? And especially what does that mean over a long period of time? Because again, if the inputs are becoming the outputs, et cetera, I mean, the thing that today to this moment is kind of baffling to me in a horrifying and wonderful way. We are living in the middle.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that book I read, I remember laying on my couch in my apartment on Bay State Road reading that book and just sort of, you know, must have been 1990 or 1991. And just having my mind blown. It was just like, yep, yep, yep. And, you know, Game Alive, Conway's Game of Life and sort of all the stuff that from that around emergent behavior, contagion, positive and negative feedback loops, words that we throw around, and many people, by the way, throw around as though they know what any of it means, but then don't act in any way whatsoever that reflects what those words mean. I was always fascinated with it. If I have a regret in terms of engagement, I regret that after I sold my first company, I didn't go figure out how to get involved in the Santa Fe Institute because I think it would have been super stimulating to me based on things that I like. We went really deep on complex systems, but in the end, we came up with a book that uses the notion of complexity and the idea of complex systems as the fundamental”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just because of natural human being kid, or they'll need a lot of therapy, one of the two. But there are many, many things that are complex systems. And the idea that you can apply a playbook or a rule book or a recipe or a sequence of steps that get a deterministic outcome doesn't occur. Interestingly, when we wrote this and we had this aas and we spent another year working on this, now I knew we both knew a fair amount about complex systems and complexity theory prior. He had Ian had been fascinated by this, which is why he landed on it. I had been fascinated by it going back to the 1980s, early 90s, when I read a book called Complexity by, and I'm going to lose the author's name. I want to say Marshall or Malcolm something, but it was one of the early books that came out of the Santa Fe Institute research and talked about Brian Arthur and the idea of increasing returns, you know, which are really just exponential curves.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“complex system does not have a deterministic outcome. You cannot predict the outcome from the starting point. And the inputs along the way generate outputs that become inputs into the system. There are lots of fun examples of complex systems, but the one that I think a lot of people immediately get is raising a kid. Because even if you don't have kids, you are a kid. And if when you're born, the day you're born, Your parents say This kid is going to go to Harvard, become a doctor, become a cardiologist, you know, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And we're going to follow the rules for how to do that. Chances are the kid is going to be the opposite of that.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Complicated system again has a recipe or a playbook, but it's got a lot of different steps and the steps can be done in different order. But you end up with a deterministic outcome, doing your monthly, quarterly, or financial annual financial statements. A complicated system doing a financial audit is a complicated system. It's replicable. Building an airplane is a complicated system. It's really hard to figure out how to do it the first time. But once you've done it, you just keep doing it.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I listened to Seth Goden's podcast with you recently, which was from a long time ago, but for some reason it popped up and I wanted to listen to it. I love Seth. And I listened to Madeline Aubreit's podcast with you, and that really inspired me. And I went back and I poked through and went looking for some other podcasts that people that I knew and I really liked and respected. And Seth was one of them. And he talks in that podcast, y'all talk about how he makes a cup of coffee and his obsession with a cup of coffee. And may how you make a cup of coffee. Making a cup of coffee is a simple system. There's a recipe. There's a set of rules. You can make a really shitty cup of coffee if you don't follow the recipe quite right or if you're not good at the pieces of the recipe, but it's a pretty straightforward thing. Yeah, there's different types of coffees and there's different modifications to the recipe, but it's a simple system. You have an input and a deterministic output. Might not like the thing you taste when you taste the output, but it's a deterministic output.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100% agree. So let me define that. And we have in the book and in general taken the liberty of instead of calling it over and over again a complex adaptive system, we're calling it a complex system, a complex adaptive system is a particular type of complex system. But for purposes of the startup community way and for how people think about it, I think the idea of complex systems plenty, it doesn't have to be the exact precise academic thing. Think of three types of systems. Simple, complicated, and complex. A simple system is making a cup of coffee.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It to the next level. So we decided to write a book that was a sequel. So we started writing the sequel. And we wrote, I don't know, made a book like Start of Community Ways, 50,000, 60,000 words. We probably wrote 25,000 words. And we were both unhappy. And it was hard. And we weren't, there was no rhythm. There was no cadence to anything we were doing. And Ian called me. He moved to Boulder for a while and then moved to London. And he called me or sent me a note and he said, I have come up with a framework to use to describe what the startup community weighs. I said, okay. He said, what a startup community really is, is a complex adaptive system. That's all he said. I said, silence.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not just partial shit, it's total. And that was the experience that my co-author, Ian Hathaway, and I had about a year into working on the startup community way. We had started talking in 2017. We met each other. I liked Ian. We'd done a few things together around startup communities, talked about a few things, had a couple of long discussions. And he said to me, have you ever thought about writing a sequel? And I said, I hadn't really thought about it. He said, you know, I think the world has started communities and all the people I'm talking to, like the book that, you know, the 2012 book, The Startup Communities, was really helpful. And it was foundational for a lot of basic thoughts about building startup communities. But I know you, Brad, get the question and I know I, Ian, even though I'm not deep in this, get the question of what now, right? I've been at this for five years or you're in a conversation with somebody in a city where their startup community has gotten to a certain level according to their framing of it. But they're really struggling with what to do to get.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that you know as an author is that a lot of times when you start working on a new book, you work on a new book for a while and then you realize it's total shit.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That flavor as a human. You have to end up living in a place you have topophilia for, that you have a love of. Interestingly, if you can find a place that you have a love of, that the constraints of living in that place are lowered because of the way that our society works. A positive way that gives you even more flexibility. If you're able to find places that are not as enclavy and are more inclusive and that have different dimensions of diversity, including being able to time travel to other geographies while still having that love of place for the people that you're interacting with. So it's not the physical love of place anymore that becomes the dominant. It's a characteristic, an important one, but not the dominant that gets even more interesting. And I think we're at the beginning of that shift in our society.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Digitally connected to society in a meaningful way. I think we just proved that the answer to that's yes. So that then changes again the importance or relative importance of place in terms of how you build your life and what you build your life around and where that place is. I'll end this rant with. There's a word that I learned from John Hickenlooper, who was our governor for a number of years, now running for Senate, and is also an entrepreneur. He was one of the people that basically helped create the microbrewery industry. And the idea of a microbrewery in the first place. I don't remember the first time I heard this word from him. I think it was one of his state-of-the-art speeches. He used the word topophilia. And topophilia is love of place. And I think to be truly satisfied, I almost said happy, but I don't think that's the right word. And I'm not sure satisfied is the right word either. So I don't have the right word, but something that...”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What and where I like to be. And then most interestingly, how our technology today has changed all that, right? Pre-COVID, if you had said to somebody 90% of people who work in office buildings or 95% of people who work in office buildings are going to be working from their houses for the next three months, you know, the person would have looked at you and said, never going to happen. Impossible can't happen. The technological infrastructure doesn't exist. Well, guess what? All those people that said it couldn't happen were wrong. We just lived that experiment and it worked just fine. It worked just fine, you know, incredibly challenging for many people. Super disruptive on many levels for some companies really negative. For some companies, really positive. But from a structural sense, could one who likes to be physically disconnected from others still be”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We pretty quickly, we didn't realize it until after we had a place there and were living there on a part-time basis, that it was an enclave as well and a whole different level of enclave in terms of privilege and the dynamics around it. And while there are elements of that that are appealing, there are many elements of it that are very disorienting, confusing, and not necessarily healthy for the city. I understand those things much clearer today than I did even three or four years ago. You know, as I find myself living on the edge of Longmont, which is still a pretty comfortable place to live, but much more of a normal town than Boulder. I find myself spending more and more time away from big cities because of pre-COVID, even lack of travel, and sort of reflecting on”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like that so much better. The negative, which I'm very aware of today, is something that Amy and I started to label a few years ago as an enclave. We just started to use that word. And we realized that it's not a filter bubble. It's not that, but it's an enclave. It's a very privileged place to live. We built a house in Aspen a couple years ago. And there was something that we had a house in Keystone, Colorado for a long time. I love running in the mountains. We love being in the mountains. There's something about Aspen that we were drawn to because of the restaurants and the town, but also the ability to be in the mountains and just be disconnected from it all.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It felt like a place that could be very comfortable against that backdrop. Amy and I also have a house in Homer, Alaska, which is a town of 5,000 people. That's where she grew up until she was eight. And we used to go to Homer for a month every year. We still go to Homer. And it's, again, a totally different yet another thing to live in a town of 5,000 people. That's 60 miles away from the next town that has 10,000 people in it”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100,000 people or more, but small enough that I could get my mind around it and what was going on as I tried to understand the dynamics and the characteristics of building a vibrant startup community. Last comment on why Boulder, and there's positives and negatives that I understand today having lived here for 25 years, is both Amy and I are very socially liberal. And Boulder is a very socially liberal place. So in some ways, it was a very comfortable place to come. There's plenty of other socially liberal places in the country. And of course, being in Boston is very polyglot, so it's pretty easy to be socially liberal there. But growing up in Dallas, you know, not so much. different dynamic. And I was aware of that. I was aware of the overwhelm that I felt when I was in Los Angeles. Just, you know, Los Angeles isn't a city. Somebody told me once the number of it's 80-something cities in one thing called Los Angeles. Like it's just overwhelming. In the same way to me that Manhattan is just overwhelming. And so”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've had this very longstanding belief, partly because I've been started and invested in countries all over the US that you can create and build companies anywhere, that the ability to build startup communities in really vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems, not just are important and are you able to do them anywhere, it's actually an imperative that any city with any critical mass, 100,000 people, have a vibrant startup community. And one of the things that's been most powerful to me about Boulder, at least from the time period 1995 to probably 2015, so a 20-year period for me, maybe a little bit longer, was I was in a place that was big enough to be interesting.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was okay. Same thing with San Francisco three days San Francisco. Then I just want to get out of there. I can't stand it. But then the peninsula I spent an enormous amount of time on the peninsula during my softbank and Mobius time. I lived most of the time between 1999 and 2006 when I was coming out all the time. I lived at my partner Heidi Reisen's house in Atherton. I mean, it's a beautiful place. It's not my place. It's not where I feel at home. And I had formed with Amy, I think the two of us formed it together, a pretty deep belief that it was important to pick the place you wanted to live and build your life around it rather than go to a place that you felt like you should go to because there was an opportunity there.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To answer your question when I was 30, I couldn't. Today, my answer is I don't like cities. I don't like being around a lot of people. I can do it. I can put up with it for a couple of days. We had an apartment in New York for three years, and I probably spent a week, a month in New York, you know, between 97 and 99, not necessarily a consecutive week, but over the course of a month. You know, two days, three days.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We bought a house behind a state park in a place called Elorado Canyon, behind El Dorado Springs State Park. We initially bought a piece of land with 40 acres and a house on it. Over time, we ended up buying the pieces of land around us and ended up having a little bit over 100 acres there. We lived there for 17 years. And eventually as we got started to get a little bit older, we've moved to the other side of Boulder right on the edge of Longmont. We again have 40 acres and the land is an important point of this story, so I'll get to it in a sec. And now we're looking at the mountains rather than being in the mountains. And we have this real sense of expansiveness as we look at Long's Peak each morning. And, you know, we have two big golden retrievers and they just kind of run wild on our 40 acres whenever they feel like it, although one is old and not running so wild anymore. Today, I would be able”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wintry, kind of like remember this is this is pretty awesome. So she told me we were going. I had a staff job for the company that I worked for so I could go anywhere. This was Meridata. So it was easy for me to just relocate from Boston because I didn't have anybody working for me anymore. And we flew out. We rented a house. We flew back. We told all our friends we were moving to Boulder. We packed a truck and we drove to Boulder. We knew one person guy named Verne and he moved away within a year. So we really moved out here not knowing anybody. 1995. And our view, our goal was nothing, zero to do with work. Our goal was to build a life here. Let's evaluate whether this is the place we want to build a life. And if it isn't, we'll try something else. And if it is, this is our place. And within six months, we knew unambiguously that Boulder was where we wanted to build our life.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're married, right? And I'd sold my company. I was still working. I was doing lots of angel investments around the country. I was traveling a lot, West Coast, East Coast, Boston, New York, Seattle. San Francisco, LA, occasionally somewhere else. We had been to Colorado a lot. She'd lived here when she was in third grade, and I had come here skiing as a kid some and then as a young adult some. And we always Colorado was just sort of the fantasy of it. It was a cool place. The rugged West is kind of a thing in our culture, independent of what you think about Atlas Rugged as a book or Ayn Rand as a philosopher, like the whole idea of Goltz Gulch being in Colorado sort of stays with you, you know, and this idea that it's away from all the other stuff, right? So not the epicenter that kind of appealed. And we'd been to Boulder. We went to Colorado for a two or three week trip. And we'd been in Boulder on a December, January day that was like 50 degrees on the Pearl Street Mall and it's a beautiful winter day that was not really.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know, when you're in your college and you're in your early 20s, like the definition of home is tricky, right? Like, what does that actually mean? What is home? When I was in college, We complained as a couple, we complained to our friends regularly about Boston and how we were going to leave and get out of Boston someday. And I think our friends just thought we were wrong. Like, yeah, whatever. We hear you, but whatever, you're not seeming to take action against that. And when I sold my first company, I was 28. And I told Amy that by the time I was 30, we'd be out of Boston. And we traveled a lot together and we like to explore different places. And she said her requirements were ocean or mountains. And growing up in Dallas, I didn't have either. So I didn't totally get that. But I'm like, okay, well, not both either, right? And she's like, either. I need one or the other. And, you know, growing up in Alaska, she had both. And about two months before I turned 30, she said to me, I'm moving to Boulder and you can come with me if you'd like.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple of reasons. One is, I think actually the word epicenter is a good one. I've never really wanted to be in the epicenter of anything It's not my thing. I'm more of a loner than a joiner. I am more of a detached disconnected from a sort of in the middle of kind of person. So I think epicenter is an interesting word to sort of underscore in the context of this. I grew up in Dallas, Texas. Amy grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska. We met in Boston. We lived in Boston for 12 years. Boston was very good to both of us, but I like to describe living there for 12 years as living there for 11 years and 364 days too many. It was never home. It never, ever felt like home to me.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“on so many levels in terms of what we've dealt with and how we're dealing with it. And of course, he goes and tells the whole story, right? So it ends up in this dystopic ending, really, really dystopic ending. But the first 25% of the book is about where we are right now. And for anyone who likes, again, I put this in the category. It's not science fiction, but it's near term, right? It was written about a global pandemic that could happen in the future. Oops, it got published as that global pandemic was starting.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to toss one else on the pile too for fun that's contemporaneously relevant for anybody that wants to explore how badly things could go in the time of COVID if this turns into the dystopic future reality rather than the optimistic everything goes away and we're back to normal magical thinking. It's a book called The End of October. It's written by a gang named Lawrence Wright. And it came out in April of this year, April 2020. And so he had to be done with it in February. So before, you know, the current pandemic probably had in COVID had probably very little to do with the book. It is so good and so terrifying and so real.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better and less shitty, and sometimes it's really good, and then sometimes you write something and it's not so good. And then you try again on the next thing you do is a guy named Elliot Pepper. And Elliot has become in a category called near-term science fiction writers that guys like William Hurtling and Daniel Schwarz are in, which are things that you can almost imagine are happening right now, almost like just around the corner. And so it's so accessible, but then it's so provocative because of the thing that happens and the way it causes you to think and reflect back on how your current existence is. So there's some books for you.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lost in the story, but cause you to really reflect on your own existence and what it means and what's meaningful or not meaningful about certain elements of it off the charts. Another person who's become a close friend, I helped sponsor him when he was writing his first couple of books. He's now, I think, on book eight or nine or ten that's really emerged now, I think, as a really great writer. I mean, becoming a great writer of any sort is a craft. You've got to do a bunch of it, as you know. And you write a bunch of shit, you write a bunch of shit, and then eventually it starts to be...”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And science fiction authors that get the world building right and really know how to do it, the books that they write are just truly, truly incredible. And it's not even that you lose yourself in them, but they cause you to think about your own world in a totally different way. I'll give you two more contemporary writers to play with that are in this category. NK Jemison, who's a black woman who's unusual in the world of science fiction because I think most people think of science fiction as the domain of white men, has emerged as one of the absolute best world builders ever. And her ability to construct these engaging, incredibly complex narratives that don't just get you”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's a few shows that are now classics that I missed the first time around that I watched in the last 10 years. And Battlestar Galactic or BSG is one of them, where it's a great space opera, but it's not about being a space opera. It's once again about humans and machines and the interaction between humans and machines and the dynamics of the evolution of our species, the human species, and the machine species call it whatever you want. And then everything that happens around all the boundaries of humanity and society as a result. And the reason I like these so much, and I put them so much at the top of the list for somebody who's a non-fiction reader or anybody that just wants to dig in, is that the best part of science fiction is world building.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Book telling their stories as they're going on a pilgrimage that, of course, has a very meaningful climactic end that motivates you to read the second book. The reason Battlestar Galactica is on that list is I don't watch TV that's broadcast TV. I didn't watch TV as a kid. My parents let Daniel, my brother and I have one hour a day. I like to give my hour to my brother. I'd rather read a book. However, I like to watch TV that”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, I mean, this book goes way more granular than that in terms of the boundaries, but it's awesome. By the way, another book in that vein that I think Good or better, but also the first book was written in the early 1990s, I believe, by a guy named Dan Simmons, is a book called Hyperion. It's actually four books, the Hyperion Cantos. And it takes place over about a 300-year period. And again, all of these things that are folded together, it's not just science fiction, but it's AI versus human. It's religion, it's society, it's gender, it's augmentation, geopolitical I'll overuse, right? But the idea of all of these things happening and the first book is so wonderfully fun because it's written in the style of the Canterbury Tales. So it's a pilgrimage where the first book that's the setup for the whole series is The Seven Protagonists in the First”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How politics works, how drugs work, long, long arc of things. Snow crash is written in 1992. So just before the World Wide Web begins. And I think the technology part of Snow Crash is brilliant, but even more powerful is the geopolitical part of Snow Crash. And the geopolitical part of Snow Crash is so incredible against the backdrop of 2020 and nationalism. And the idea, for example, that states, if you had said to somebody a year ago states in the United States of America are going to start closing their borders to other states. Person would say, You're fucking out of your mind. That if you were from Texas, you are not going to be able to travel. Not going to be allowed into New York.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that you don't get the full value of it the first time, but it's easy to move through. So I think that's a book every human being should read. The two books I listed there, Snow Crash and Neuromancer. Important books because they essentially are the books that created, that pre-saged the context we have today. And Stevenson and William Gibson are two of my favorite and two of the best contemporary science fiction writers. Neuromancer was first. It was written in 1984. And if you read it today, you kind of go, whatever. But if you read it, if you time travel back to 1984 and read it given our world in 1984, it will blow your mind, how he predicted, and whether it's 2000 or 2010 or 2020, just the number of things that he got right as a predictive force in our not too distant future, not just technology, societal issues, humans against interaction with artificial intelligence, the dynamics of society.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I recommend it to all entrepreneurs. I read it when I was in high school and I've read it every couple of years since. Probably read it every three or four years. I listened to it on book on tape once when I was training for a marathon just to see if it sunk in in a different way and it did. And while it's fiction, it's sort of fiction memory philosophy. It's fiction like memoir is fiction, right? Fiction's the wrong word for it. It's memory philosophy. And the essence of the book is the notion of what the definition of quality means, but using a series of different things that are happening to the protagonist, the narrator, who is the author over his a period of time where he descends into madness against the backdrop of classical philosophy. So it just combines a bunch of things in a very powerful way.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's public, so anybody can join it. It's been amazing to see some of the conversations and the level of engagement. To your question of those three books. So Peercy's book is Zenir Motorcycle Maintenance is a book I think anybody who makes anything should read.”
2020-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT