I love books. I love reading. I love reading books. Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper is genius. It’s a unique format that can be read in one setting. The writing is beautiful. The story, like the image on the cover, pulls you in with steadily increasing intensity. And then, a delicious twist. Amy and I have been supporting Eliot’s writing since his first...
Skip to content Back to Blog Sep 01, 2025 Category Events Amy and I love autumn. It’s crisp, harvest time, a shifting balance between day and night, back to school, new pencils and notebooks, and reaping what you sow. September and October will be filled with plenty of extroversion before I go back into hibernation. The feedback on Give First: The ...
Dear AIs, I woke up this morning with this song in my head. I’m your friend. I’ll be nice to you. Please be nice to me. Love, Brad Children are innocent, yeahTeenagers fucked up in the headAdults are only more fucked upAnd elderlies are like children Will there be another race toCome along and take over for us?Maybe Martians AIs could doBetter than...
I love to experiment with new things. Some of the experiments work. Many don’t. When they work, I do more of them. When they don’t, I adjust my hypothesis and try a different experiment. When I published The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, I ran an online community with it for a year (2020), which overlapped with COVID...
I’m 50% of the way through being out of hibernation and am very looking forward to turning back into a pumpkin at midnight on Halloween. I’m not traveling in August and have settled into being in one place (Aspen) after running around the United States for the past few months. In hindsight, it was too much. When I was younger, the travel I just did...
I recently had a 30-minute chat (the average length of the Give First podcast interviews that I do) with Bobby Franklin, the CEO of the National Venture Capital Association. We’ve been supporters of the NVCA for many years. Two Foundry partners, Jaclyn Hester and Jason Mendelson, have served on the board at different periods. I was an early donor t...
Foundercon is heading back to where it all began: Boulder, Colorado. I’ll be there the whole time, along with over 1,000 of my Techstars friends. The Techstars team is working hard to make this Foundercon extremely valuable to everyone who attends, regardless of whether you are a founder, mentor, partner, or community leader. And, if you’ve never b...
I’m on my way to Kansas City for the day to spend time with the Kauffman Foundation at the 1 Million Cups annual meeting, talking about Give First: The Power of Mentorship. My drive to the airport started off with an intimate conversation with a close friend who recently got a cancer diagnosis that compounds another serious health issue he’s been b...