Substack vs. X vs. LinkedIn vs. Medium vs. Blog

I’m so confused. I suppose that’s what you get when you hibernate from all things public for two years, then pick your head up and try to figure out the best way to engage with the world again. When life was simpler, I just posted to my blog at feld.com. You could subscribe by RSS or email (via MailChimp). It automatically tweeted a link to the post. When Medium became a thing, I used a WordPress plugin to cross-post there until it stopped working. Eventually, I grew tired of having the same context appear on Google twice – once under my blog and once under Medium, so I deleted my Medium account since I wasn’t using it for anything else.

June 9, 2025 · 2 min

Is This What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works?

For your Sunday morning (or daytime) reading, take a look at Tyler Austin Harper’s article in The Atlantic titled What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works. Since coming out of hibernation, I’ve had many bizarre conversations with non-tech people who misunderstand entirely what “AI”, as the tech industry currently calls it, actually is. This doesn’t surprise me, as the tech hype cycle around AI is extreme. However, several of these conversations, especially with political leaders, have highlighted the issue this article addresses.

June 8, 2025 · 2 min

Being Out And About At Public Events

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.

June 4, 2025 · 2 min

Destigmatizing Mental Health in Entrepreneurship

I’m currently at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2025 in Indianapolis. Yesterday, at the end of the day, I spent several hours at High Alpha hanging out with my friends and then doing a Give First: The Power of Mentorship book event with them and about 150 people. One of the questions during the book talk was around mental health and entrepreneurship. I talked about my own experiences with anxiety and depression and explained that my core diagnosis, which I was diagnosed with in my 20s, was obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I said that one of my goals for being open was to destigmatize mental health issues, especially in the context of entrepreneurship and mentioned that I periodically hear something like “I’m OCD and it’s my superpower” and dismissed that idea as nonsense, since OCD is an insidious thing that gets in the way of so many things in life.

June 3, 2025 · 2 min

Vibecoding Prompts

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a CTO of a large, fast-growing public company. Well, I was a Quasi CTO in the same way the United States and the First French Republic had a Quasi War between 1798 and 1800 (basically, sort of a war; sort of a CTO … but not really.) As I rediscover my second love (my first love is Amy), I’ve relied on several mentors to help guide me. One of them is Michael Natkin, who has been helping me with Cursor in the background at a few key moments.

May 31, 2025 · 5 min

A Tweet, Vibe Coding, Jj, and Grok Walk Into A Bar

This played out on @bfeld on X, and I thought it was fun enough to replay it here for anyone who is struggling to get their minds around vibe coding and current AI tooling. If you are receiving this via email and the tweets/X’s aren’t showing, click through to the website as I’m still struggling to get Mailchimp working well after my hibernation. Perhaps it’s time to switch everything to WordPress…

May 29, 2025 · 3 min

Give First – Table of Contents

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.

May 27, 2025 · 2 min

Beware the Grinfuckers

I did a talk with a private community of 100 GPs and investors in venture capital called Aces last week. It’s an off-the-record, confidential group organized by a few people, including Max Beaumont, who said I could mention him in this post. Max sent me the following summary. I asked him if I could post it, and he said yes. Thank you again for taking the time to join us yesterday, and for staying well past the scheduled end.. I could tell how meaningful the conversation was for those who stayed..

May 26, 2025 · 2 min

Venture Deals Summer Course 2025 Enrollment Is Open

Registration for the Venture Deals Summer 2025 online, self-guided, free course by Techstars and Kauffman Fellows starts today. It’s based on the book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. When Jason Mendelson and I wrote the first edition, one of our goals was to eliminate the massive information asymmetry between entrepreneurs and investors. Venture Deals is now in its 4th edition and has continued to be a popular and helpful book.

May 22, 2025 · 1 min