YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Feld

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163
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2020-07-23
most recent
2020-07-23
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1
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  1. “Before there was even on your cell phone, caller ID, you just saw a phone number. And you actually, I think, had to have like a caller ID special thing on your home phone. And so somebody would call me on my cell phone and I'd be in the middle of a conversation with her. We'd be at the middle of dinner. We'd be in the middle of a movie or we'd be in the middle of name your other thing that two adults do. And my phone would ring and I'd answer it. No matter what was going on between us, no matter what sort of the interaction was, because I prioritized the random person who was calling me over Amy. Yet my words were, Amy, you're the most important person in my life. Being with you is the most treasured thing I have. I like to be with you more than anything else. Oh, sorry, I got to answer this phone call.”

    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

  2. “So we ended up having an amazing set of conversations that week and didn't solve anything, but there were two things that came out of it. One was a bunch of tactics, and I'll talk about one in particular in a sec. But the other was real clarity for what was wrong. And it wasn't hard for her to say it and articulate it. And it wasn't hard for me to hear it. But it had to be said and it had to be articulated. And the specific thing that was wrong was my words didn't match my actions. And that has become a foundational part of my relationship with Amy. And a key part of how I try to live, although we're human, we make, you know, I make mistakes. I screw up plenty. But I try to have my words match my actions. And in the context of the relationship, I'll use the phone call as an example. This is before, you know, we had an iPhone.”

    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

  3. “So, for seven years, I ran this company for seven years. Every day, including weekends, I had like a paper grid that I filled out 9, 10 to 9.25, and then a code for a... But we did day in, day out. And when we sold that company, I said, I am never fucking doing that again. I'm never doing something where I have to keep track of my time again. And so my first reaction was, no, I'm not going to do that. And she looked at me and she says, you said I could make the rules.”

    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

  4. “And all right, so we walk a little bit more. And she says, All right, the first thing I want you to do is I want you to keep track each day of how many hours you work. And I want you to report them to me. Now, she knew that this was pressing a gigantic red button in the middle of my forehead. And it's what her significant others do, right? And what we do to them. Like, you know the biggest point of pain or the biggest trigger of your significant other if you have one and they know of yours. And she was doing that and she was doing it on purpose. My first company, we kept track of time in five minute increments as a software consultant. And every day, and this was 1980s, so we kept track on a piece of paper.”

    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

  5. “And we go for a walk. And I said, look, I know that you're not happy with the dynamics here, but I don't want to split up. I love you. You're the person I always put on this planet for. I think I was the person you were put on this planet for. I've got an engineer's brain. Just give me some rules. And she looks at me and her first response is, I don't want to give you rules. That puts it on me and that's not romantic. And then she sort of snaps into focus. And she says, you mean I get to control you? And I said, yeah, yeah, just give me some rules.”

    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

  6. “I'd like to say I talked her off the ledge of being done. I said to her, you know what? This weekend, no phone, no computer. I'm done. I gave her my phone. I gave her my computer. I said, put them in your bag between now and when we leave here Monday morning, I'm not going to do any work. I'm not going to think about work. And I just want to spend time talking about what we need to do differently, what I need to do differently. And, you know, after about an hour, like, all right, things are calmed down. We're kind of starting to doze a little. And I knew better than to sort of nudger and say, you know, so any action happening tonight because, you know, all that was going to generate was more laughter. So we go to bed. We wake up the next 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

  7. “We're crawling into bed, and Amy says very quietly to me she says, I'm done. I responded, Yeah, this was a brutal week. I'm tired. God, everything's so hard right now, all these companies, blah, blah, whatever. So glad this week is over. I'm looking forward to having a weekend with you. She says, no, that's not what I meant. She says, you're not even a good roommate anymore. She says, I love you. I think you're awesome. But I don't want to live this way and I don't want to watch you do this to yourself. I had enough wisdom. This is in my about 35. I have enough wisdom to know not to go to bed or not to roll over when your wife says that to you. So, you know, we talked for about an hour and I kind 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

  8. “And eventually it's six o'clock and we go to dinner and we go to dinner at some restaurant. And by this point, I'm sort of trying to be in the moment a little bit without really realizing what's going on. And about, I don't know, we order 10, 15 minutes into dinner just as salads are being served. I get another phone call and I just pick up the phone and I walk out. I'm smart enough to get out of the table on the garage side and I talk on the phone for a while and I come back and they're having dessert. And you kind of know when you're in a relationship and you're fucking up, right? The signals are not that hard to read. But we went back to our friend's house and by then we sort of had another whatever, a little bit more time together and then eventually go to bed.”

    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

  9. “And I probably in between calls, I looked over at her and said, Hey, sweetie, nice to see you. Looking forward to the weekend. We get to our friend's house probably around three. Our friends are ready for a beautiful summer evening in Newport. And I'm still working, right? I'm on telephone calls. I'm dealing with my email. I'm doing whatever.”

    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

  10. “Catch up on whatever I could catch up on. And then sort of Amy would patch me up and send me back out Monday morning and I'd do it again, week after week, for a lot of weeks. This particular Friday that this started, she and I had planned a vacation to Friends House, a longtime friend of mine, a guy named Warren Katz and his wife Alana Katz, who had been my seventh employee in my first company. And Warren and I had been entrepreneurial friends forever from when I lived in Boston and just good personal friends. And they had a house in Newport in addition to Boston. And so I met Amy in Boston. Black car must have picked her up at the airport, came and picked me up at whatever company I had been spending the morning at. We took the car out to Newport. And I was on the phone the entire time. And I'm on the phone like having these conversations that with a benefit of hindsight were ultimately futile, every conversation that I had during that period of time, none of them had any positive impact in a meaningful way on the outcomes of these companies.”

    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

  11. “With a lot of companies that I was on the board of or an investor in. And Amy and I were literally just seeing ourselves on the weekends. So my week would start on Monday morning. I'd get up early at usually four o'clock Colorado time. I'd go to DIA. I'd take the 6 a.m. United flight to the Bay Area. I'd spend Monday all day in a partner meeting at the firm I was at then, which was during that period of time called Softbank Venture Capital or Soft Bank Technology Ventures ultimately became called Mobius Venture Capital. And I'd stay the night. Tuesday I'd spend all day in the Bay Area. And then I was co-chairman of a public company on the East Coast in New York and purchased. So I take a red eye usually on Tuesday night or Wednesday night, spend a couple of days in New York, maybe on Friday go somewhere else and eventually come back home, crash for the weekend just out of exhaustion.”

    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

  12. “This is mid-2000. So we're in the middle of the deflation of the internet bubble. It has not crashed yet. It crashed in 2001, but it's definitely deflating fast. And in sort of the arc for me as an investor from about 1996 to 2000 was unbelievably intense on the rise up. If you sneezed, you made money. The stupidest ideas were successful. And then that all continued until one day that was no longer true. And so middle of 2000, I'm traveling all over the country because I invest all over the country. I'm doing my best to sort of keep everything together. I'm trying to save what is a portfolio that I have that's falling apart very, very quickly. Several companies that I co-founded along”

    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

  13. “Let's start with something really calm and So I'm married to a woman named Amy Bachelor, and we've been together now for almost 30 years. Off grid vacation I took was a result of a moment in time where Amy said to me, I'm done. And I thought she meant that she was done with a week because it had been a really shitty week for me. But she was actually saying very quietly, you know, I've had enough of living this way with 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