Give First

Wow did I need that this morning! I was feeling tired and a little down before our call. I slept until the last possible minute before starting a Techstars Managing Director Alumni Network . While that cheered me up somewhat and gave me some energy, I followed it with another call with a CEO/investor/long-time friend where we spent some of the time wrestling with things going on in the US right now. My energy coming out of this was low and my mood was “meh.” ...

I’ve been having a lot of fun at public events around the launch of my new book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship . I’ve got a handful of events left in Boulder before Amy and I head to Aspen for the summer. 6/5: Denver: Techstars Workforce Development Demo Day + Give First with Brad Feld 6/10: Boulder: CoinGeek Startup Spotlight: From Entrepreneur to Enterprise 6/12: Boulder: New Tech ft. Give First Fireside Chat w/ Brad Feld For the past two days, I was in Indianapolis at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2025 . The last time I was at GEC was in Rio de Janeiro in 2013. Even then, I was talking about Give Before You Get , a concept I had introduced in Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City , which I wrote in 2012. And, I had longer hair. ...

As a voracious reader , I love a good table of contents (TOC) as the roadmap to a book. While fiction is often structured as Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, … Chapter N, some of the best fiction writers are creative with their TOC. Any non-fiction author who doesn’t provide a detailed table of contents TOC is missing an opportunity to help the reader understand the book’s flow before they begin reading it. ...

I’m going to have a Random Day on 5/28 at The Composition Shop in Longmont. I plan to be there from 11 am to 5 pm with a break for a lunch meeting from 1 pm to 2:30 pm. We will have copies of Give First: The Power of Mentorship in the store on sale, even though the book’s official release date isn’t until June 24th, because my Colorado friends get special bonus early bird stuff. ...

It’s pre-order time for Give First: The Power of Mentorship . If you find this post’s topic interesting, help boost my input into the Amazon algorithm by pre-ordering the book. I’ve failed at many things. Anyone with a lot of success has also had plenty of failure. If a successful person denies this, they are lying. Reflecting on my professional failures, some resulted from passively avoiding a situation. These are the ones I regret the most because my behavior is under my control. While I’m comfortable with confrontation, living in a work world of endless conflict and negotiation, it took me a long time to fully acknowledge situations where I was passively avoidant. ...

Jaclyn Hester, one of my Foundry Group partners , recently asked if there was an online definition of #GiveFirst. I spent some time looking around, and, while it’s embedded in numerous podcasts and video interviews, I couldn’t find a clear definition on the web. The closest I found was from January 1, 2013, in a post titled Give Before You Get . #GiveFirst first appeared as “Give Before You Get” in my book Startup Communities published in 2012. It was turned into the #GiveFirst hashtag by someone at Techstars around 2014. I updated it in the 2nd Edition of Startup Communities (2e) which was published in 2020. I also defined it in The Startup Community Way , also published in 2020. ...

The phrase “contemporary mentors” popped into my head on loop number six of eight on my morning run. I’m training for a Covid marathon, which is 27 loops around my property. My pace is tentative as I’m still gearing up after a long break due to a back injury, but I’m letting the miles and the time on my feet build on the weekends. Running in circles for hours is different than running in the mountains in Aspen during the summer. But, I’m afraid of going to Aspen right now because of Covid, and I’m afraid of leaving my property and running on the roads or the trails near Boulder. ...

When David and I started doing the #GiveFirst podcast , I was told by a long-time podcaster that it takes about 20 episodes to hit your stride. Since then, several other podcasters have told me that the number is actually closer to 100. Given that hurdle, David and I are 20% of the way there. In Episode 22, we review the last dozen podcast guests including Josh Hix, Rajat Bhargava, Elizabeth Kraus, Jason Mendelson, Jannet Bannister, Heidi Roizen, Marc Nager & Dave Mayer, John China, Sherri Hammons, Rebecca Lovell, and Harry Stebbings. ...

It was a delight to interview Rajat Bhargava for the Give First Podcast. We’ve been working together since 1994 when I made my first angel investment in Raj’s first company (NetGenesis). We’ve worked on a number of companies since then, some successful, and some not, but our friendship – even with our own personal ups and downs – has been a constant. Raj covers a lot of ground in this podcast, including some origin stories, his relationship with Will Herman (who co-invested in NetGenesis with me at the very beginning, which is how he met Raj), a moment where I treated Raj poorly and our relationship could have easily gone off the rails if we hadn’t both put energy into acknowledging what had happened and getting back to a healthy place, and how he thinks about Give First, both in the Boulder startup community and at his current company JumpCloud . ...

Today’s Give First podcast features Harry Stebbings of the 20 Minute VC and a partner at Stride.vc on committing to building a network & giving first. Harry is probably best known for his podcast, The Twenty Minute VC , the world’s largest media asset in venture capital, with over five million downloads per month. He’s talked with amazing VCs and entrepreneurs on over 2,800 shows. When he was 13, Harry watched “The Social Network,” the movie about Facebook, and it inspired him to become an entrepreneur and investor. At 18, he set up the Twenty Minute VC podcast. ...