Month: September 2025
Back when the pandemic hit, Chris Heivly spearheaded a podcast with Ian Hathaway and me in support of our upcoming two books, The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Build The Fort: The Startup Community Builder’s Field Guide.
We did eight episodes of a solid but complicated-to-produce series.
Chris is now spearheading a Season 2 podcast series with Techstars, mirroring a format pioneered by Seth Godin, who was a recent guest on our GiveFirst podcast.
Chris has designed a very simple, concise way for those of us who continue to learn how to effectively build our startup communities. At around 15 minutes per episode, they are an easy listen for even the busiest of leaders, instigators, and feeders.
Every other week, Chris will do a deep dive on a specific topic. I saw his topic list, which numbers over 100+ draft episode titles, so we are covered for the next few years. This list is based on his continued leadership in this area and the countless conversations he continues to have with community and ecosystem enthusiasts all over the world.
You can find the podcast on all the typical platforms including:
You can also read a weekly blog post from Chris and published by Techstars for thought leadership around startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems.
If this topic is important or interesting to you, subscribe to your favorite channel.
Reid Hoffman’s new book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future is spectacular and a must-read for every non-technologist about how to think about this “AI thing.” If you want the short version, the recent AI & I podcast with Reid is an excellent way to get a feel for it.
Reid describes his approach as “smart risk taking” rather than blind optimism. “Everyone, generally speaking, focuses way too much on what could go wrong, and insufficiently on what could go right,” he told TechCrunch recently. This resonates with me. I’m tired of the endless AI apocalypse takes.
The book’s central idea is “superagency” – basically when technology gives us new superpowers and millions of people get those superpowers at the same time. Reid uses the car analogy. Cars were once so scary they required a person walking in front waving an orange flag. Now we can’t imagine life without them.
What I love about the book is how practical it is. Reid and his co-author Greg Beato didn’t use AI to write it, but they used AI to vet it – checking facts, doing research, getting different perspectives. That’s exactly how I think about AI tools. They’re not going to replace my thinking, but they can definitely amplify it.
The timing feels perfect given what’s happening here in Colorado with our AI regulation mess. While Reid is writing optimistically about AI’s potential, Colorado has been having a complete meltdown trying to regulate it. Our state legislature passed SB 24-205 in May 2024, making us the first state to broadly restrict private companies using AI. Governor Polis signed it “with reservations” and within a month Polis, our attorney general Phil Weiser, and the bill sponsor Robert Rodriguez issued an open letter that “Starting today, in the lead up to the 2025 legislative session and well before the February 2026 deadline for implementation of the law, at the governor and legislative leadership’s direction, state and legislative leaders will engage in a process to revise the new law, and minimize unintended consequences associated with its implementation,”
This is exactly the kind of regulatory approach Reid warns against. In his recent podcast, he explained his philosophy: “I tend to be more regulatory cautious than anti-regulation.” The key difference? Start with measurement rather than prohibition. “When you start having the impulse that maybe there should be regulation, you should start with, well, how do we measure the questions that we’re worried about as harms?”
Colorado did the opposite and went straight to broad restrictions without first understanding what we were actually trying to prevent or how to measure it. The timeline since then has been a comedy of errors – multiple failed attempts to amend the law during the regular session, and most recently, an August special session that ended with lawmakers just pushing the start date from February 2026 to June 2026. That’s it. After over a year of fighting, we got a four-month delay.
Reid believes in “iterative deployment” – getting AI tools into people’s hands and then responding to actual feedback and real problems, not hypothetical ones. Instead, Colorado jumped straight to prescriptive rules based on fears rather than evidence. Reid’s approach would have been: Deploy AI systems, measure actual discrimination outcomes, then iterate on solutions. Our approach was: Assume the worst, regulate preemptively, and figure out implementation later.
The Colorado situation perfectly illustrates Reid’s point about fear-based thinking around AI. Superagency offers a much better framework – one that acknowledges challenges while focusing on AI’s potential to increase individual agency and create better outcomes for society.
Read the book. We need more thoughtful optimism and less regulatory panic. Especially here in Colorado, where we’re supposed to be leaders in technology, not cautionary tales about how fear can paralyze good policy-making.
A Call for Founder Voices for an MIT Study on Entrepreneurial Ethics
I’m helping MIT (Fiona Murray and Alon Shklarek) share a short survey exploring how founders around the world navigate ethical challenges. Insights will shape practical tools for entrepreneurs, investors, and ecosystem leaders.
Survey link: https://mit.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2rVOSwnXT0Qe8qa?org=3
It takes just 8 minutes, and your input directly contributes to a healthier entrepreneurial ecosystem.
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 book, and he’s become a dear friend. I started my weekend with this, and it inspired me to read a few more things by friends.
The Night Slayer by George Jankovic was next. I fondly remember a vacation to Hawaii with the McIntyres when their son Quinn was a pre-teen. This particular vacation was dedicated to me and Quinn reading several Percy Jackson books while lying on adjacent beach chairs overlooking the ocean. George’s book teleported me back to that week. I funded George’s first company, RF Globalnet, when he lived in Boulder in the mid-1990s. We had a failure together with a company called eVulkan, but then I was fortunate to be invited to fund NutriSystems when he and his partner, Mike Hagan, took it over as it was on the brink of bankruptcy. If you had told me in 1997 that almost 30 years later, George would write an epic YA coming-of-age fantasy series that moves faster than the Percy Jackson books, I would have laughed out loud. I can’t wait for The Princes of the Abyss to show up on my Kindle.
I’ve been remiss in addressing the infinite pile of PDFs on my Kindle from friends that are drafts of their books, so I tackled the first three chapters of the upcoming book City on the Edge by Jonathan Weber. It’s fantastic and is going to be a powerful and definitive story of San Francisco from 1990 to the present day. I’ve known Jonathan since he was editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard and was an investor in his online venture New West. Jonathan’s writing reflects a journalist’s cynicism and inquisitiveness, unwilling to accept the endless surface-level storytelling, self-promotion, and general deceit and deflection of many people. As a reward for giving him feedback, he sent me the rest of the book to read.
I’m halfway through When River Loves Deborah by Yong Kim. We are tiny investors via FG Angels in Yong’s company, Wonolo, and I hadn’t realized he’d written this book. I’m halfway through and am looking forward to lying on my couch on Thursday to finish it up.
I’m ensorcelled when I read books by friends (see what I did there…)
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 Power of Mentorship has been gratifying, and as I enter the last two months of discussing it before wrapping up this particular book project, I’ve already started a few new projects. Hint: AI is everywhere. It’s fun. It’s getting more expensive. And it’s definitely not AGI. But, AI muppets are a reminder never to take yourself too seriously.
Following are the events coming up.
- 9/2: Virtual: Board Prospects AMA
- 9/8-9/9: Aspen: Aspen Venture Summit
- 9/10: San Francisco: NVCA Venture Forward: 5-Year Celebration
- 9/11: Sunnyvale: illumyn Boardroom Excellence Fellowship Summit
- 9/15 – 9/16: Boulder: Techstars Foundercon
- 9/17: Denver: Colorado Startup Week
- 9/18: Virtual: Las Vegas Startup Week
- 10/1: Denver: Access Mode “Colorado Innovators Breakfast” Fundraiser
- 10/2: Longmont: ‘Break the Fast’
- 10/3: Boulder: Silicon Flatirons
- 10/9: New York: Techstars
- 10/14: Washington, DC: Distilled Intelligence
- 10/29: Golden: Colorado School of Mines
- 11/8: Virtual: Startup Mountain Summit
- 11/18: La Jolla: Alliance for SoCal Innovation
I’ve now flipped to default no on anything new. My cave awaits.