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

“Obvious from the outside to my best friends, I don't see them. And I think that's true for many people, right? We're in complete denial of how we're creating those conditions that create Unhappiness, create our happiness, that's good, but create our unhappiness, create our limitations, create our box around and put a negative sign in front of it. And he, again, he is good at poking through that, not touching it and tapping it, but just barreling into it and saying, all right, here we are in this box. Let's talk about all the mess that's in this box.”
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
“Working too much or not having time and space for my relationship or fearful of something or whatever in a relationship with a company, with a founder, with work, with a friend that's not healthy for me, what is my responsibility? What is my role in creating those conditions? And a lot of times when I look at that and carve out the time to look at that, there's a tactical, okay, I'm not going to do this anymore. I don't want to do that anymore. I'll stop doing this. That's tactical. That's different than going into it and saying, all right, I can change that. I can fix my schedule. I can delete some things. Why am I doing this? What is it satisfying in me? And is that thing it's satisfying a good thing or a bad thing? And is it a wanted thing or an unwanted thing? And man, even with things that seem 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
“The one about how are you complicit in the conditions that you've created is so powerful to reflect on. It's the conversation that Amy and I have been having for 30 years, right? I work too much. I work a lot. I work. I create time and space for myself. I used to travel all the time. I could complain about it, but how am I complicit in creating those conditions? Like I have complete, I mean, you do too, right? You have the freedom to do what you want to do, where freedom is a very American word in some ways very poignant word in this moment. But as, again, white men with resources, we have a lot of freedom relative to many other people, most other people on planet Earth. When I find myself in a modality that I don't want to be in.”
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
“Where they're both empathetic to the person who is engaging intensely with Jerry, but it's reflecting on them. It's allowing them to let their door crack open a little. And then he stays with it. And he stays with it not in a hostile way, not in an aggressive way, not in an attacking way, just in this Jerry way. I don't have a label for it, that at least for my experiences with him, take people to a place where they realize, wow, okay, what is important to me very, very quickly.”
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 he opens that door quickly, doesn't take four years of therapy to open that door. He opens that door in the first 15 minutes. And all of a sudden, the door's open. You don't have to dance around it for four more years. And when the door opens, some people run away, right? I mean, it's terrifying. But for most people, they've already committed that they're going to do the work. They've already said, I want to be here. And so when that door opens, all the barriers just sort of crumble all at once. And he is so good at that one-on-one, but especially in a group setting, but doing it in a way where everyone feels like they're part of the experience rather than he's singling you out. It's not like you're in Harvard Law School waiting for the professor to point at you next, you know, to talk about the case and explain what happened or Harvard Business School or whatever, wherever they do shit like that. I didn't go to Harvard School.”
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 little of that. Some of it's a questions. I mean, Jerry has a well-known superpower, which is that people start crying in front of him in a group right away. And people that would never imagine that they'd start crying and let their emotion out, let their emotion out. And one of the things that is so fascinating is he's not really trying to do that. What he's doing is he's locking in on the person in the moment and being fully present for the person he's talking to. He's then instinctively locking in. I'm using that word on purpose, on what is going on with them. And not so much what the surface level stuff is, but two or three layers down what's really at their core, what they're really afraid of, what they're not saying. what they're not acknowledging to anyone, but especially to themselves.”
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
“Put your adjective in. It doesn't have to be better or more satisfying, more successful. I don't care what you fill in the blank with, but make it a positive word. Knowing yourself and continuing to scrape away all the cruft and continue to recognize that we're all flawed and being willing to keep going deep on ourselves and to the extent that we can do that without fear, without shame, that is even more satisfying. And I think that was sort of it all clicking into place for me, which is, all right, I'm going to die someday. I hope that I have more good experiences than bad experiences between now and then. I probably will, right? Because in the Warren Buffett words, I won the genetic lottery, right? I'm a white male in America. I happen to be in my mid-50s. I got plenty of resources. Like probably lots better than worse for me. And so I should be aware of that and try to use that as a force for good.”
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 the human condition, we can either deal with it or not deal with it. And I'm fine dealing with it. And then, of course, if you look at the evolution of Jerry and if you read his book Reboot, just understanding that if one wants to have”
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
“50, 100 people whose names listeners would recognize, well known entrepreneurs, well-known investors, a few well-known public figures that I didn't know, reached out to me for one reason or another. I did a few interviews because then all of a sudden Ink magazine wants to write an article about entrepreneurs and depression. Okay, fine, Jerry and I are in that article together. Like there's a little of that going on. But I had a bunch of emotionally intimate conversations with very successful people, many of whom said I was the first person they were having a real conversation with their own struggles with depression with. And that didn't make me feel necessarily better, but it made me feel that what I was doing had value. And that created a positive feedback loop, which over time essentially obliterated the shame, didn't just make it go away, it obliterated it. It's like, no, we're human. This is part.”
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
“Interestingly, there was a very strong, mostly positive feedback loop that came out of that. Some negative, definitely people are like, why are you saying this? The bad guys are going to get you. People that didn't understand why I'd say something like this. Why would you expose your weakness? Plenty of, you know, look when I remember when Fred and I started blogging in 2004 timeframe, lots of people said lots of VCs, lots of our peers said they must have way too much time on their hand to write blogs. Right now everybody writes blogs. But it's kind of the same thing. It's like, nah, you know, I don't really care what anybody else says about it. This is going to make me feel better to let myself let go of this shame. And I'm going to let go of this shame in an active way. And if that's helpful to the people I work with and the people that I support, that's a good thing. And the other side of it, the positive feedback loop is during this period, three, four months, you know, I don't know the number.”
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
“Point to me was you, Brad, can be a better leader by just being you. And letting go of your constraints around how you present. You already don't have many constraints around how you present yourself. Like I always think I've been a pretty, I am what I am and I try to talk about it very openly. But he says, you're holding back on this dimension. The fact that you don't ever say you take medication, you're holding back. The fact that you don't talk about therapy. You're holding back. So I carried that with me. And when I had this depression in 2013, I immediately went back into, I hadn't been to therapy since I was in my 20s. I immediately went back into therapy. And I remember the day that I had that therapy session, which was the first therapy session with a new therapist this kind of worse than the first day of school at a new school. It just kind of sucks. But I wrote a blog the next day. And I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to write about how I'm feeling. I don't want this extra layer of pressure on myself.”
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 in this conversation that we're having, we talked very quickly about depression and he's been depressed and I've been fortunate that I haven't had the suicidal attempt and really the suicidal ideation activity that he's had. But the depth of the depression is something that we talk about pretty openly. And I don't remember exactly what the words were in that moment. Again, this is 2010, 2011. But he said something to me that caused me to change my mode with the founders that I was working with and the leaders that I was working with, where I was already, I think, pretty emotionally accessible to them. But I still think many of those relationships are power relationships, right? I'm the investor, they're the CEO, so therefore the level of comfort that they're going to have being open about how they're actually doing it at any moment in time varies a lot. And Jerry.”
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 sitting with Jerry. This is before I'm depressed. But as we're sort of going through things, maybe 2010, 2011, and we're having these conversations about how full of shit most of us are all the time. And, you know, he's coaching now and he's really pulling out of people without having to do a lot of magic because his magic is right up front. the bad the 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
“Fred and I got along and hung out, but I was really close to Jerry, and we did some deals together, and it wasn't really till the late 90s, almost early 2000s, when Jerry was kind of departing that Fred and I started to really engage with each other at a deeper personal level. And there was some point along the way where all three of us are very close. And Fred said something to me like, you know, when I was partners with Jerry, I couldn't handle both of you. And when Jerry finally disappeared for a while, I could handle you. And, you know, there's some, it was, he said it in jest, but it was some element of it in terms of the emotional engagement.”
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 Jerry's one of my closest friends. I regularly refer to him as my soulmate. He and I have known each other going back to the mid-90s. I knew Jerry when Jerry first started working with Fred Wilson when they started their firm Flatiron Partners. I knew Jerry much better than I knew Fred.”
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
“All four of the original partners had plenty of ups and downs, and we had lots of conversations about it. And so I gradually became less uncomfortable talking to people in a professional context about it. My closest friends that were And then one person in particular really changed how I approached it, which was Jerry Colonna. And I know you know Jerry and he did a great podcast with you not too long ago.”
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 a good thing to interrupt with. So in my 30s, I was still pretty ashamed of being depressed, but I realized I was depressed out in the open. By the time I got into my 40s and when we started foundry group, we made a commitment to each other at the beginning that we would be available to each other, emotionally available to each other as partners. And our effectiveness of that, how well we've done at that, has ebbed and flowed over time. I wouldn't say that we are perfect at that and it's been awesome and it's never had trouble. But that was a thing that was an important part of my own value system from the beginning is I had been in this partnership at Mobius where some of the partners were emotionally accessible to each other, but many of them were not. And there was a lot of bullshit and there was a lot of stuff that was not great through that. So we started in 2007 with that framing. During that period of time, 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
“This person, how could this have happened? And then sort of it would drift away. And in this moment, I wasn't ashamed anymore. I had been open about my struggles with depression to my friends. I was blogging all the time about my life for various motivations, a lot of it to be that I think by writing versus thinking some other 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
“Sort of in the end of this, at the end of 2012, I was physiologically exhausted, just completely kaput. And I had this kidney stone surgery, which I had a very big kidney stone. They had to actually do surgery to get it out. I kind of took most of December off to recover. I thought I was fine. I'm like, okay, let's get back to it. And I went to CES in Las Vegas computer electronic show, which is the second week of January. And literally within two weeks of getting into Vegas, getting to my hotel room, I'm in bed with a pillow over my head and I know I'm totally screwed. Like I'm in a depressive episode. In 2012, several, and then also in 2013, several entrepreneurs committed suicide. And there was a little bit of conversation around that, but not a lot. Aaron Schwartz is probably the first of the stream. And there was like a pop of, oh my God.”
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
“This time it was a result of a bunch of things that happened in 2012. And they started with me running a 50-mile run, 50 mile race in April of 2012. So I overtrained. I trained a lot. I was working a lot. My business world was going very well between Foundry Group and Tech Stars. very healthy relationship with Amy. I had lots of things, but I was working really hard. And I did this 50 mile race. I trained a ton. I did the race and I didn't take any time in recovery. I just kept going. And a bunch of things happened, including a near fatal bike accident at the end of the summer. We had one of our dogs die. Sounds like a country music song sometimes. I ended up with a kidney stone that I had been ignoring and just avoiding. Oh, never mind that blood comes out when I pee. No big deal. I'm sure that'll go. I just ate something wrong. And on and on and 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
“So I go through that phase. In my 30s, 9 11 triggered another really intense depression that lasted about three months. I was in New York. I'd taken a red eye to New York the night before the towers fell. So I woke up as the towers were falling literally. I was in midtown, so I was never really in harm's way, but I was terrified. And that depression was kind of in plain sight, right? That was at the tail end of the collapse of the internet bubble. So kind of everybody in my business world was completely a mess. And now all of the United States is a mess for a couple of months because we're all struggling with we've been attacked. We've had friends die. What does this mean? I know. These were not my only depressive episodes, but these were the ones that were extended, profound lasted more than a couple of weeks that I really was in the midst of. And in 2013, I had another one.”
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 really understood that I was having a major depressive episode and the thing that had triggered it was my inability to manage my OCD. But on top of all of this is this incredible shame, shame of all those dimensions. I couldn't tell anybody I was taking medication. Oh my God, like if anybody knew I was taking medication, how awful would that 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
“When that happened, I had incredible shame. Shame at all levels. Shame that I was depressed. Fortunately, my PhD advisor, who to this day is still a wonderful substitute paternalistic figure for me, guy named Derek van Hippel, connected me with his therapist, who was a classical Boston psychiatrist. Turned out that OCD at this time was not well understood. It was just starting to be better understood. Fortunately, I got diagnosed with that. So, you know, the treatment that I had, which was both CBT and medication, was highly effective. Cognitive behavioral therapy, certain type of therapy where it's, you know, you think about therapy with like, you know, sitting in a couch, you know, laying on a couch with your back to the therapist is one type of therapy. This was the sort of conversational therapy, but it was actionable around certain things.”
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 then three things happened in fairly short order. Remember, I'm anxious all the time, so I have incredible amount of anxiety that I'm carrying around with a bunch of things. The three things that happened in order were, one, my marriage blew up. So public failure. Two, I got kicked out of the PhD program because I was a lousy PhD student. I was running my company and I wasn't taking it seriously. And three is I was incredibly bored of my business. So my business while it was succeeding was not stimulating me in any way, shape, or form. And these three things tipped me into a very deep depression.”
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 I actually got like a B minus C. Like, who the fuck gives the first test so that the class av is a 32 MIT? Like, that's what they do. They just make you very aware that you are, you know, there's a 10% of the people that are off the charts, but they make the other 90% very aware. Yeah, you're smart kids, but you're going to have to work hard. So, you know, college, I was successful. I'd started a company. It was successful. I married my high school sweetheart, not Amy. I was in a PhD program at MIT at a very young age while running my company externally, like everything looked awesome.”
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 never get, I mean, maybe I got to be in some English thing somewhere. I thought I was really good at physics. I got 20. What do you do when you're 17 years old at college away from home and you get a 20 on your first physics test? I went in my room and I cried for an hour. Like I closed the door and I cried. I know what to do. Like how do I even process it? Turns out class av on that test was 32”
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
“Some big number and four of them were Jewish. So I had funny holidays and I had some moments that were not great moments as a Jewish teenager sort of surrounded by people who weren't. But generally I had a very easy teenage years. My parents were very supportive, loving, challenging in different ways, in different times, but very much there for my brother and I. I went to college. MIT is a place that is a daily assault on your self-esteem. So you show up, you're at the top of your class in high school and you've done well and everything and you think you're really good at stuff. And I remember a month in, everybody has to take physics as a freshman and, you know, get a test a month in. And I knew I didn't do well in the test. And, you know, I got my grade, I got 20. This kid never made.”
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
“Well, let me answer the second one first. I discovered depression in my mid-20s. And I'm sure I had been depressed before, but I didn't have language for it. I was always anxious that anxiousness translated itself in a very positive way, right? It created focus, it created intensity. It was linked to need for achievement. But there was always anxiety. And the anxiety manifests itself in lots of different ways. In my 20s, I had three things happen simultaneously. So, you know, I'm one of those kids growing up, you know, my dad was a doctor. My mom was an artist. We grew up in Dallas, Texas. We had plenty of resources. It was an interesting place to be in the 70s and 80s. I think there were 2,000 kids in my high school. I don't know, 1,500 kids in my high school.”
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
“He didn't need to be doing any of this work, right? He could have said, fuck it, I don't want to do this anymore. Why are we doing this? He was in that thing till the end. He felt an obligation to do the work even as it was all falling apart, even he needs money. He was doing it because I'd asked him to do it with me, that sort of thing. But that moment of I'm at the absolute bottom of this, but I've still got shit to do. And him just sort of saying just suit up, let's go. was a powerful moment for me. And, you know, I've had many, many other up and down experiences since then. But ultimately, they can't kill you and they can't eat you. And now some people may argue that depending on where you're from and where you live and what you've got to deal with in your life. But in the context of the US in business, entrepreneurship, trying to create things, those things are true.”
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 like gnawing on it, like, you know, a depraved dog or something. And he comes in and he sneaks up. He just comes in behind me. He puts his arms around me, you know, like in that big hug, somebody gives you from behind. And Len's short. He's like five, five, it's like Yoda, like a Jewish Yoda with, you know, ear hair and stuff. And he just kind of hugs me from behind with this sort of heavy hug. And he then grabs me on the shoulders from behind, and he says. Brad, they can't kill you and they can't eat you. Suit up.”
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 have such a vivid memory of waking up for breakfast at his house because he didn't really have breakfast. So I'd wake up and I'd like take a bagel and I'd cut it in half and I put it in a toaster and I put cream cheese on it. I make a cup of coffee and then eventually he'd sort of wander in and we'd go to the office. And this particular morning, I was so fried and just so despondent. And I just knew it was going to be another utterly shitty day. I don't remember exactly what was in front of me that day, but whatever it was, it was going to suck. I'm sitting at his little kitchen table. He's got this beautiful house in Harrison, his little tiny kitchen table in the corner. And I'm chewing on a bagel. I didn't even bother toasting it or putting cream cheese on it this morning.”
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
“Loss a month, he'd only mastered a million. So when everything reversed, he was able to get to cash flow break even. We weren't. So we're now on the downside of the utter collapse of this business that at a moment in time had been the most successful thing I'd ever been involved in. And I was a co-founder, so I had a huge amount of personal value tied up in the stock that then was every day vanishing. We were doing layoffs. We were selling pieces of the business. We were just trying to survive this complete collapse. And I was trying to survive it in the midst of flying across the country every week, having 20 other companies that I was involved in that were all falling apart at the same time. It's the same time frame. And when I would go to New York, I would stay at Len's House. I had an apartment in the city, but a lot of the office was in purchase, so a lot of times I would just stay in purchase because that was where it was just easy.”
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 we had built this company, and basically we'd grown incredibly fast, most through acquisition, some organic growth, but we didn't have a cost structure that worked. And so as a business, we had lots of real estate leases for data centers. We had lots of equipment leases. We had lots of OpEx. And basically $5 million went out the door every day. For a while, that was fine because capital was freely available. And the only thing that the market cared about was growth. And so we were handsomely rewarded for growing incredibly fast, independent of the fact that we have mastered the art of losing this money. Now, there's another company about the same time as us that had another company people may have heard of called Rackspace. And Graham Weston, who's the CEO of that company, we knew of each other, but we didn't have relationship. And Graham ended up, we became friends years later. And, you know, he said, you know, our problem was that we've mastered $5 million.”
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 had a peak market cap of right at $3 billion back when a market cap of $3 billion was a big market cap for a tech company. Company was called Interliant. And when the internet bubble burst, we had mastered, we built about a $200 million year business, so a pretty sizable company, 1,500 employees. And Lennon and I were co-chairmen. So we didn't run it. We had a CEO who ran it, but he was full-time. I was part-time because I was also a partner at the time Mobius. We mastered the art of losing $5 million a month.”
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
“Other people, Raj Bhargava, an entrepreneur, I've worked with a number of times, and Steve Maggs, who also had had a company bought by Len in 1996. And that company was a company that bought web hosting companies. And we did a consolidation of web hosting companies that really was one of three companies that create a category called application service provider. And ASP was a precursor to software as a service or SaaS. And there was like a rise up at the end of the 90s and then a complete collapse in 2001, 2002. And of course, 20 years later, software is delivered on the web online. That was essentially the business that we had created. We just didn't, in the end, we didn't execute it correctly. We bought a bunch of companies, I think about 25. We went public in 1999.”
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 one of my favorite professional moments ever, maybe one of the most important ones ever. That line was said by Len Fastler, who is one of the two guys that bought my first company, two guys, Len Fassler and Jerry Pock were partners in a company that was called Ameridata, which ultimately was a public company got up by G Capital. Len is my closest mentor. He's the person I've learned the most about business from over my career. He's in his late 80s. He's just spectacular, a spectacular human on many, many, many dimensions. We had co-founded a company in 1996. So Lennon and Jerry bought my company in 1993. GE bought their Meradata in 1995. And Lennon and I started with two.”
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 used to come back on Sundays. It didn't give us enough gear downtime. And we used to leave on Sundays. And leaving on Sundays just meant that the weekend, you lost that front-end weekend. If you left, you know, first thing on Saturday was when it starts, even if we don't go anywhere, a lot of times we just stay home”
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
“Our collective schedule. Some of it is also when we need it. So there are moments where we'll have it, you know, and it's a month from now, and we'll look at each other and say we're fried. We need a break. And I would say even in sort of this moment of, you know, the COVID crisis and the dynamics of work, our entire schedule from March to December, we just deleted. We said, we're not going anywhere in 2020. Other people can, but we're not. We're just going to stay home. And I don't know when I'm going to leave my house again, but it's certainly not going to be in 2020. And therefore, all of this stuff that's a trip here, trip there, a thing there, a thing there, none of that matters. So let's look and think what tempo we really need so that we can maintain the intensity of our normal life pace. We have learned, by the way, that Saturday to Saturday is the trick.”
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
“There isn't. Some years we sit down, my birthday is December 1st, and I have been for a number of years. I used to do it privately. Now I do it publicly. I write a post that's version, you know, it's called V, whatever my age is. So I turn 54 last December. So I wrote Be Feld V54. And the year before I wrote B feld V53. Oftentimes around that We'll sit down and we'll look at the next year and we'll try to get ahead of the calendar nonsense and just block out some weeks. But they're not four weeks that are necessarily just convenient for me because Amy has a professional life. She's on the Board of Nature Conservancy. She's on the board of Wellesley College where she went to school. You know, she's got some other responsibilities that are part of the schedule. So some of it is just navigating.”
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
“You'd move the week to another week and say, look, I really were on the roadshow for taking this company public this week, and I have to be involved and I can't be off the grid. Okay, well, let's move the week. So there are a lot of things like that that took making mistakes. Like it wasn't like, okay, good, cool, let's just go do this thing. It's a commitment I made to Amy and a commitment she made to me to build this into her life in a way that would be successful and healthy for both of us.”
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
“In 20 something years of doing this, I don't think there's actually ever been one of those. I mean, I've made them up, right? And I've had plenty of them that have distracted me, but I don't actually think there has ever been really one of those. If there really was one, you'd move your vacation.”
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
“Right, so on Wednesday, it's like I'll just go check and see. And boom, the whole, everything you've just done is in terms of your own mental adjustment and mental health is gone, independent of whether or not Amy catches me cheating, in which case then I'm actually cheating on her, which is, you know, kind of like not the contract that we had. Do your words match your actions? No, that's the foundational thing. So there's like getting through that. Then there's the I only have this one thing I have to do this week, right? This one really important thing that just can't wait the week.”
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
“Right, and like, you know, that's cheating the best diet ever. Cheating in a way that undermines everything you're trying to do for yourself.”
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 it wasn't as though I got to not experience that week in the rest of my world. I had to go live it again on Monday morning. And by the end of the day, Monday, all of the things that happened over the week were, again, in my head versus The second was cheating. Every hotel has a computer connected to the internet.”
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 took me a while to figure that out. So for the first couple of years, I would put a vacation reminder up, but I'd come back to this onslaught and I lived again the previous week.”
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
“Yeah, it took more than a year to detox or to get into a place where it was flipping a switch. Today I have a ritual, right? My ritual is on Friday night, I turn on my email responder. My email responder usually says something like, I'm taking a week off the grid. I'm not checking email. When I get back, I'm archiving all my emails. So I will not see this email. If you want me to see it, send it to me again after day X, which is usually Tuesday, not the following Monday because I come back to Monday and 75 people send me emails first thing Monday morning, you know, it's like, okay, now I'm just dealing with last week. And, you know, not surprisingly, the whatever, pick the number. I don't know, a thousand new emails a week or whatever, a couple thousand new emails a week that come in. You know, it's kind of nice to just start Monday morning with nothing in your inbox.”
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 worth it, you know, three or four years later, the muscle that was built was four times a year. I kind of just say to the rest of the world, fuck it and disappear for a week. And as far as I can tell, you know, all of those fears that I have, oh, by the way, there's a lot of anxieties that one has when they go away, right? If I'm not here for this meeting, this bad thing will happen or this will happen or I won't sell this stock or I won't close this investment or I'll miss this new opportunity or whatever, right? Pick your business anxiety. Well, yeah, all those things happen, but none of them were significant. They weren't meaningful. relative to the meaning and the value of being able to spend this time with Amy and with me, the two of us together doing what we wanted to do rather than doing what the rest of the world wanted to do.”
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
“basically a quarterly vacation off the grid. So each quarter since 2000, we take a week Saturday to Saturday, and we just go off the grid. And I'm fortunate that I can take four weeks of vacation like that a year. And, you know, we screw up some. Sometimes we don't end up doing it or end up sort of being on or off. It took probably a dozen times before it wasn't a terrifying experience. The process literally of turning off my phone and leaving my computer at home when we got on a plane and went somewhere for a week of vacation was so incredibly anxiety producing. The challenge that I had for the first couple of days of disconnecting from the momentum of my work life and shifting into this open space and time in front of me with the person I love the most was so hard to do.”
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
“But I don't have much of a temper. It takes a lot to get me to react with anger, external anger. Amy has a temper. And I learned early on in our relationship that there was no value in trying to win when her temper started to escalate. It was mutually assured destruction. She just keep escalating, I'd escalate. She'd escalate, I'd escalate, she'd escalate. I'd eventually like lay on the ground like your dog that says, you know, just pet me on the stomach. I give up. I yield. In this particular moment, she said, the reason I'm so angry right now is I'm scared. I'm scared for you. I think you're killing yourself. I don't think you're having fun. I don't think you're enjoying what you're doing. I don't think you're creating enough space for you. And I'm, she didn't say I'm enabling that, but that would be the language we'd use today. And so from that came this idea of”
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 could do it with phone calls, you could do it with emails, you could do with work, you could be, you know, I was late to every single thing we ever did because I just had one more thing to do before I went to the dinner that we had scheduled for the fancy night out or whatever. So when she said to me, your words don't match your actions and then gave me an example that really snapped into place. And that's been foundational. The other part of it was, and this is a thing I've learned about, Amy, I don't have much of a temper. I suppress my anger and frustration. I'm like Mark Simpson and I just push it down to my toes. And I have lots of other ways to process it, some that are not particularly healthy, which I expect you'll probe me on at some point.”
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