This Week in Startups - E1149: Brad Feld on building startup communities, reconciling anxiety as an early-stage investor & remembering Tony Hsieh

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

Check out The Startup Community Way: https://rb.gy/onxkwm FOLLOW Brad: https://twitter.com/bfeld FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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promo code Twist and Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Kalakhanis, and I am super excited to have back on the podcast for his third appearance, my pal, Bradfeld of Foundry Group. He was on episode 35 back in 2010, a decade ago. And in 2013, he was on, for episode 319. And then I always like to have people in person, but here we are in the pandemic.

And I was like, wait a second, Brad's never available in person. He never comes to San Francisco. He never came to L.A., I mean, once in a while. But he's always in and out. And then I was like, wait a second, pandemic, we're forced to do these remote. I got to get Brad back on the podcast. Also, he's got a great new book out called The Startup Community Way, follow up to the startup community, right?

you had that as the previous one, and this is the follow-up to that. So welcome back to the pod. How are you doing, my friend? I'm good. Well, three is my favorite number, so I'm glad to, I'm glad to join you for a third time. There's only one number you like more than three. It's three cubed? Yeah, three times three. Three times three. Three times three is good, but three cubed is also a very good number. 27 is a great number. You can just keep going, right? 81. Let's keep going. 243. We're goofing. I could do this all day long. I know, but we're goofing on you and laughing. This is because we're all friends. We can do this.

But I'm literally making fun of your mental disorder, which is you have literally OCD and your number is three. But you didn't know you had OCD. When did you discover you had OCD? Probably 23, 24. So near the middle of the time that I was running my first company, I sold it when I was 27. Right. And actually 28, I guess. And it was one of these things where if I knew anything about obsessive compulsive disorder, I probably could. have self-diagnosed myself, but I didn't know anything about it. And it was a pretty mysterious thing in the 1980s and early 1990s still. People didn't really know what to do with it.

And the way that I discovered I had it was I had a huge depressive episode that landed me in therapy. And the psychiatrist I had diagnosed it pretty quickly. Wow. It's so interesting that they really didn't know what it was back then. and it almost feels like one of those things like, what is the disease when people feel exhausted all the time? And they're like, that's psychosomatic.

That's just in your mind. And it's like, well, that's kind of the definition of all mental illness is that it's in your mind. Right. Congratulations. Thanks. Not helpful. I'll be not helpful. The interesting thing about this time frame was, you know,

OCD for people that don't know really what OCD is. Even today, so many people say they have OCD, but they don't. We all have obsessive behavior. We all have compulsive behavior. The actual disease is that you link the two together inappropriately. And so you have the sets of compulsive behaviors that are triggered by obsessive thoughts. And the real reason that it's happening is you're trying to control your environment. and you're trying to control your environment in a way that's irrational.

So you don't actually control your environment. And that creates a negative feedback loop that can be very pernicious. And it consumes a lot of background processing in your brain. And so you spend a lot of your time sort of struggling with stuff around anxiety, but have with this linkage that's of no productive value for you whatsoever in terms of dealing with your anxiety. So there's so much unpacked there. And so I just want to pause for a second.

You have OCD. And it's really defined as like this excessive orderliness, wanting to have things organized and doing behaviors that are repetitive, et cetera, in order to give yourself some order, as you defined it, over a chaotic world or a non-controllable world. And then this eats up your processor, which then creates up your processor, which then creates a really bad loop because you're losing processing power to this background, you know, job that is making you check the lights or, you know, typing in certain numbers, or I used to do it on my, I noticed when I was watching TV, I used to just hit the numbers one,

two, and three on my remote control over and over again. And I was like, what am I doing here? And I was like a little Twitch. But you chose to be in venture capital, which when you want to talk about having no control over outcomes and being in a chaotic system, you literally chose venture capital as the defining and entrepreneurship and startups as the wider sector as your chosen profession. This is like a person who has a fear of heights choosing to be a window washer. You realize this, right? Yeah, although there's no causality between the two because of my own journey, right?

The timing dynamics were I was running a company. I had this depressive episode. I discovered and learned about OCD. I did a bunch of therapy and took medication for it. I learned how to break the link between the obsessive and compulsive behavior well before I was even investing as an angel investor. Now, that didn't eliminate a lot of the underlying dynamics. Right? You know, the OCD is just an anxiety disorder. Lots of different flavors of anxiety disorders. So, you know, if you want to simplify the whole discussion, you say, hey, so Brad, so you're an anxious guy, you know, how's that going for you in the context of being a VC? And, you know, there are many, many entrepreneurs who are very anxious, lots of investors who are very anxious. And the way that people deal with their anxiety has a lot to do with their long-term health. And I think, frankly, they're long-term success.

in whatever way they define success. And so, you know, for me, it became an ongoing exploration of how best to deal with, mitigate, eliminate, understand my anxiety. And, you know, I just turned 55 recently. And in the context of that, like, I feel very comfortable that at 55, you know, I've got a lot of healthy behaviors around all this that when I'm, I'm starting to feel exceedingly anxious for some reason. It's usually a warning sign now versus, you know, some kind of causal event.

See, that's super interesting. The anxiety is something in your body, in your mind, your soul, wherever you think it emanates from, telling you, hey, be vigilant, maybe pay attention to something. So that's not necessarily a bad thing, but we are so advanced in our brains and how big they've gotten that we are just constantly spouting things to worry about and this vigilance can then become debilitating, right? So how you channel that anxiety, that vigilance can define as you're saying your success in life or happiness. But you do have to say, you do have to do two things I think, correct me if I'm wrong, be able to identify that anxiety is coming

so you can break it or control it or understand it and then maybe define some goal and how to use Is that what you're sort of saying is the best practice? Or just understand how you want to relate and respond to it. I mean, you know, every human being is just a big bag of chemicals. And, you know, we all create our own narrative bullshit about what's going on in the world to try to create meaning. And everybody gets their own definition of what success is, even if you're trying to emulate somebody else's definition of it, you still get control over your own definition of it from wherever you are. all of these things are our own mental constructs. And, you know, in the construct of being your big bag of chemicals, right, you have a mental

construct, but then you have all these chemicals in your system that are influencing you in lots of different ways. And then you have all this exogenous stuff going on, things that are outside of your control, things that you might not have any ability to do anything with, including, by the way, change things that happened in the past. or prevent things or have things happen a certain way in the future. So really you can only deal with what's going on right now in this moment. And all this stuff in the past led up to this moment and all this stuff in the future

is going to result from this moment. But it's so very, very hard to have yourself be in that space against the backdrop of endless complexity, continual disappointment, continual failure with interwoven success. And then everyone's own... That one is particularly pernicious, isn't it?

Where you are... You have this bag of chemicals. You're now in a space where you have all these failures. And then they are ultimately the precursor to some outlier success, which then you just can't explain why did this one? Why did this project?

Why did this effort, this experiment, investment, et cetera, go to the moon? And the other ones that we worked 10 times harder on and suffered through for twice as long resulted in zero. I want to know, as somebody who's been my big brother in this, and, you know, we met back in the 90s with Jerry Colon and Fred Wilson and you were working at SoftBank in the early days. When we get back from this break, I want to understand if you have come up with a way to recognize. the incredibly insane life roulette wheel of our profession when we get back on this week and startups. As someone who's invested in over 200 amazing startups and advised countless others, I want to talk to you about a serious pain point I see all the time.

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I'm getting in your head, Brad. Is it triggering when I say 3? 333 is a good number, too. But if you've got to do something 333 times in a row, that's a lot of times in a row. Right. But if you put 333 to get it. together three times, you get 999, which is but one, if you just increment one, you're at a thousand. Oh my God. It's all happening. Which is, you know, 10 to the third. Absolutely. In the name of

the father, the son, the Holy Spirit, praise Jesus. There we go. The Holy Trinity. Oh, my God, the trifecta, when you pick the first, second and third place, before we went to break, you've been an investor now for decades. You were a founder before that. So you've been on both sides of the table. But, uh, and you've had an amazing run as an investor. Let's be honest. And you've, you've survived.com bus, financial crisis, now pandemic, which I guess we're not even, it's so weird to even say this, but pandemic has been an accelerant for our profession, all of our valuations going up. That's another one to try to reconcile with the anxiety we're feeling from the pandemic. But I described what we do as like this crazy roulette wheel, we're

replacing these crazy bats and then all of a something, something pays off 40. one. It's almost literally like that in terms of the numbers work out. Have you figured a way to reconcile this and sleep at night as an investor? And because I see young investors now, it seems like there is this archetype that I've now, I just turned 50. I'm right behind you this past weekend. And I now see this now because I'm in the, I feel like I'm in the midway part where I see young investors who are super anxious, they haven't had a win yet. They're kind of losing their shit.

They're grinding their teeth. They're acting spastic. And then I see folks like you or the Sequoia team or Bill Gurley. And you kind of got this more Jedi like it's going to be fine. And then you got the people over here who don't know how to use the lightsaber yet. And they're swinging it all around losing limbs and arms are getting lopped off. And then you have the Obi-Wans over here. So how have you?

you reconcile this crazy profession or have you? It's a long winding question. I want you to take it where you want to go. Let me start with a have you, which is, I don't know that I've reconciled this as a profession. I probably refer people to a couple of things. One is, you mentioned him earlier, Jerry Colonna and I've had Jerry on the show a few times. Sure.

Jerry is one of my closest friends. We now live a mile from each other just on the edge of Boulder. And just the amount that I've learned from him and not just in terms of listening to him, but reflecting back and forth between the two of us, has been incredibly powerful. One of the key points for me, And it happened probably about three or four years ago.

And it tracks back almost seven years ago now. In 2013, I had a very deep depressive episode again for about six months. And this one was really triggered physiologically. I ran a 50-mile race in 2012, which was too much run. I'm a big runner, but that was too much training and too much running in the context of all the traveling I was doing. and I won't sing the country music song of all the things that happened for the next six or nine months. In general, my life- They do call it, Brad, by the way, an ultra-marathon for a reason.

It's like two marathons. It's not three marathons, but it's two. No, I love running marathons, but a 50-mile-er was too much. But, you know, I had a near-death experience. My dog died. I ended up with a kidney stone. I had surgery. Like a bunch of shit happened.

And along this period of time, a couple of people, in the entrepreneurial world committed suicide. And there was this, if you sort of track back and look around in 2013, there was sort of a flurry of articles suddenly about mental health and entrepreneurship. And Jerry and I were in a bunch of them because I was very open about my depressive episode. And as I was open about it, many entrepreneurs reached out to me. Less investors, but many entrepreneurs, lots of ones whose names you've recognized, And in a lot of cases, I was the first person that they'd reach down to or they'd say,

you're the first person other than my therapist or other than my wife or my husband or I haven't talked to anybody about it. I'm afraid to talk to anyone about it. And through these conversations, what I realized was a couple of things. One was the stigma associated with mental health was really pernicious and was a real problem in our industry. And for anyone that wants a quick hit sort of experience with this, not in our industry, but in a powerful way, should watch the HBO documentary, The Weight of Gold, which getting Brett Rapkin did. I got connected to it by Jeremy, who's CEO of Integrate, which were investors in Jeremy, was Olympic skier. Michael Phelps is the narrator. And it talks about the stigma of mental health in professional sports.

but the parallels with entrepreneurship were profound. And so I started thinking about this a lot going back six or seven years ago and had as my own sort of one of my own internal things to help eliminate the stigma associated with mental health. But that led to another thing, and that's the answer to your question, which is Jerry had been a Buddhist for many years. And I was always interested in Buddhism intellectually, not. as a religion and you know, there's interesting debate about whether Buddhism is actually a religion or not, but not really as a spiritual practice, more as a philosophy. And it's about three years ago, I started to really dig deeper into that and learn and understand it. And one of the powerful things that comes out of that philosophy is sort of the essence of suffering and the notion

of attachments. And I had been talking about the idea of of non-attachment for a number of years. My therapist that I go to is a professionally trained, but also a Buddhist. And I didn't really realize that by using that phrase non-attachment, I was linking to a very powerful construct. And the construct is this. And it goes back to your question.

Like when you have failure, you want less of it. Right? You want to get away from the failure. You want to have success. When you have success, though, you want then to have more of it. The success only lasts for a little while, and then you want more of it. You become attached. And the negative reaction that many of us have, especially in the Western world, is detachment.

I don't give a shit. Or I'm not going to let that bother me. Or you sort of push away from it. And the pushing away from it is the similar behavior to the attachment. And the real trick is this non-attachment. It's not whatever it's going to have. happens, going to happen, but you accept that it's going to happen. And instead of seeking more good or pushing away from the bad, you focus on trying to do whatever you want to do and can do sort of in

the moment and in the context of all of it. Now, I'm not trying to be a Buddhist philosopher here. And I'm sure I'm butchering the essence of it. Buddhist capitalist. For anybody who's listening, yeah, Buddhist capitalist. For anybody who's listening, I'm sure I'm butchering the essence of it. But sort of in that for me, over the last six or seven years, a lot of what I have tried to learn and understand and adopt and become of is this notion of non-attachment. You know, do I enjoy things that are successful, of course. Do I dislike things that are not successful? Of course. Right.

But I try not to be attached to those experiences, but rather exist in this experience. I'm having. And I'll just end with having just clicked over to 55, right? Like, you know, at 55, you still might be able to make the argument that you're not quite at midlife yet, that you might live to be 101. When you're 50 down, yeah, when you're 55, it's pretty hard to say you're not at solidly at midlife. Right. And all of a sudden, you're like, holy shit, like, you know, this is a finite phenomenon. And, you know, especially in the year of COVID, I mean, I've had a few friends die. You know, there's plenty of health issues in and around my direct world. Several people who are really close to me who are in their 80s. One died this year. One is very ill,

you know, on and on, right? So you start to have this recognition of, yeah, this thing's pretty finite. And all of a sudden, this notion of striving, which again comes back to this Buddhist essence, Like striving for what? Striving for more? And Jerry has this magnificent book. I'm sure I think the podcast you did with him around the book was powerful. I don't know if you talked about this in the book, but he has a section where we're sitting outside one day just talking.

And a couple of years ago while he was working on the book. And I said to him, I think I'm just fucking done striving. Yeah. Like I'm just done. Like, yes, sure, I'm sure some more things will happen that are good. I'm sure there will be more things that happen that, that fail, but whatever. And it's, I think it's really hard.

I have met lots of people in their 20s and even their 30s say, well, you've been successful, you know, how do you, how do you deal with that? Or of course you can say that because you've been successful or your middle age white privilege guy with lots of resources. Of course you can say that. And yeah, I accept all of that. And that's valid feedback. so what?

Right. It definitely there is something about getting the success under your belt that takes the edge off, of course. But at a certain point,

when you realize it's finite, you're like, is there something I think I'd rather be doing than this, right? And then you start, instead of looking at the outcomes, you're looking at,

well, what am I waking up today and doing? Am I stoked to go to the office and meet those next three founders today? Am I looking at my calendar with dress?

or with enthusiasm, right? And I think that's like the ultimate test I try to, you know, sort of do for myself, which is when I saw last night and I was having a hard time sleeping and I was like, oh, Brad's on the pod tomorrow. Oh, I got my staff meeting. And then, oh, I got to go to this memorial.

You know, memorial's sad and bittersweet, but tragic. But, you know, I was like, oh, I really want this day. I kind of want this day. You know, like it's going to be my team. I get to catch up with Brad. I get to remember Tony, Shea for a little bit this afternoon with some friends or just doing a Zoom call to talk about him.

And it is really interesting in your book. The startup community way, which you just published, it starts off in Vegas, in fact. And it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks when I started listening to the podcast. I was like, oh, Tony, oh, Vegas. Oh, so we get back from this quick break.

I want to talk to you a little bit about Tony and Vegas and just building these hubs. We get back on the street serums. Well, you guys know all about Masterworks. If you don't, it's the first company that allows any type of investor, whether you're retail or accredited, to gain exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class. I had the founder and CEO, Scott Lynn, on the program. back in July, it was episode 1087. Now, I had one question that I wanted to answer during the podcast with Scotland, which

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A bunch of people asked me to do some press around Tony Shea passing, and I just haven't been ready to talk about it because I've been dealing with it. You know, it's a, it's a great way to start to answer to that question is just to take a moment and remember him. Just a moment of quiet and deep breath. I mean, you know, there's so many different things to process with something like this. You know, the amazingness of the person, Tony himself. And, you know, everyone that I know that had any interactions with them had the same kind of

interactions I had with them, which were just interactions that were uniformly awesome. Learning experiences, always curious, you know, plenty of ups and downs, but always sort of, you know, in this full of life kind of way, you know, against the backdrop of just this abject tragedy. and, you know, the snuffing out of somebody's life at 46. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. Yeah. Does it? You know, there's no, there's no rational way to process it other than real loss and sadness,

which is what, I mean, clearly you're feeling in this moment. I feel in this moment. And I think Tony was an inspirational entrepreneur that was unique. Yeah. Because of a lot of what we were talking about, right? I mean, he woke up each day loving the day. Yeah. I mean, not only loving the day, but wanting to bring other people into that orbit of loving Verde and literally wrote the book delivering happiness.

Like, he was the title of that book. Every day and every interaction he had with people, he was just trying to make people happier. He was just trying to make people enjoy that moment more, right? And in that he was willing to do it his way, not somebody else's this way. And I think that's, for me, that's one of the powerful lessons, right? He did it the way that he was interested in doing it, not the way somebody said, this is how you do it, or this is what you have to do, or you need to go to the Silicon Valley and do this, or you need to do it this way with this kind of company.

He lived his own way. And he did that every day. It really was just amazing that he just packed up the company and went to Vegas at a time when, you know, and you're writing about your book, hey, where do you pick to put your company? Where, where do you, how do you build a community like this? And he's just like, yeah, Vegas. That's where I choose. And he just manifested it there and just said, I'm going to, to create this world. And there was a practical reason for it.

He couldn't get the, he wanted to have this customer service be at the core of the brands. He just couldn't do that in a place where he couldn't get 500 people to work at a call center. It was a very pragmatic reason. He needed 500 people in a call center to be able to spend an unlimited amount of time on the phone with people and not be looking at the clock saying, I got to get off the phone with them. And it just led to this incredible community being built, which was just an extraordinary. I have three moments that I remember so powerfully that were big impressions on me in my own belief system about place and entrepreneurship. And people know me. They know that one of my mantras is that you should be able to build a startup community in any city with at least 100,000 people.

So I had three experiences in downtown Las Vegas in and around Tony. One was an event that I talk about in the book, which is the Up Global Annual Summit. And it was in downtown Las Vegas. It was in the container park. And it was really, I think it was the, I can't remember if it was the first or second time that I'd spent any time in that area. But it was one where I had no interaction with Tony on this particular trip, but spent a lot of time with Mark Nagar, who was running. up global at the time, Steve Case, and all the work around the Startup America Partnership. And it was really very early on in the discussion about entrepreneurship globally and what has

become the democratization of entrepreneurship. And I thought it was very fitting to have that moment there. Yeah. The next moment that I remember, and I think these are in order, but could be wrong, is I spent the night at the Airstrain Park. And did you stay there? Yeah, I did. I didn't one of the airstream trailers. And I can't remember, I can't remember what the link, what sort of caused that to happen. But I spent the night,

and it was with Kimball Musk, who's a long-time friend, based in Boulder. Good friend of mine. And when Tony passed, I texted Kimball a photo of him and Tony playing. They had jam sessions, I think either Tuesday or Thursday night.

I can't remember which one it was. and, you know, they played until one o'clock in the morning just sort of jammed stage. That's right. And it was just one of these evenings of a different kind of settling into community. Right. In a place that for me was extremely foreign. Like the idea that I would be in downtown Las Vegas in an airstream trailer park was not my natural place. Yeah.

You're not a city guy. You are a 40-acre. I'm hang out and I'm hang out and go for a long run in the woods, right? So that was powerful. And then the other one that I remember is I took my dad to Vegas. My dad and I would go away on a trip every year, just the two of us, and I'd go wherever he wanted. So we one year went to Austin and went to Chicago. He said, let's go to Vegas.

And neither one of us are into gambling. Neither one of us drink. Vegas, why do you want to go to Vegas? Yeah, he's like, I just, want to sort of people watch. And so as part of that, we ended up going and wandering around, you know, in Fremont and, you know, downtown Las Vegas. And I remember walking up to the Airstream Park and saying to my dad, let's go in here, you know, I'll let me introduce you to this. And we got up there and there's some guards, you know, like, who are you? And they let us

in. And Tony was there and I introduced him to my dad. And my dad's like, oh, you're that guy. right right and you're that guy and you want to talking to your dad for an hour i bet yeah totally just hanging around on whatever the artificial turf was where the couches are llamas just just these moments you know these moments not of hey i don't have time for you or schedule a meeting or whatever but just of experiencing life and reflecting on what real community is yeah and that's that that that was profound for me. Yeah. I have so many moments.

It's almost hard to catalog them from, you know, playing cards until two or three in the morning, you know, countless times. And when I would go to Vegas, I always, you know, would stay at the ARIA or something. And, you know, then he created this downtown thing. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. He's like, yeah, should stay with me. And then I just found myself going to Vegas for a poker tournament or, you know, CES or something and I would just text on it and say, hey, can I stay with you? And I just found myself gravitating towards that and staying in a, you know, tiny home with a little

tiny space heater, you know, and putting my suit on or something to go to a speaking gig on the strip at CES or do something fancy or whatever and some big dinner or somewhere. And I would then go back to my trailer park. And the juxtaposition of like, okay, I got to get out of my suit and get to the campfire and have a frenet with Tony or play Liar's Dice. He's trying to teach me how to play Liar's Dice, and I don't know how to play this game. And, you know, he's trying to teach me.

I was, you know, I had taught him poker and all this stuff. And it's just, yeah, an incredible, we run in an elite circle, you know, and you can get disconnected from reality. And for somebody who had had the level of success he had, the level of humility and humanity. was just transcendent, right? I mean, he would... Great word.

Yeah. I mean, he would just talk to your dad, you know, or, you know, Kimball Musk or whoever, you know, famous venture capital is Bradfell, whatever. It was all the same to him, right? The person who was answering phones at Zappos, you know, in their first week or two, was as important to him as, you know, the venture capital is on his board. Probably more so, right? Yep.

In a way. And, you know, I'm sure I have a lot more to say about it. But, you know, right now just my thoughts are with Jen and Mimi and his family and everybody who is also sharing in the loss, the incredible human being. And really one in a million. Like we so many unique people in our industry. And then you look at him and it was like, wow, he's really unique. like he's unique on the level of your unique, Brad. That is a big compliment.

I think it is a big compliment. In a way, I kind of consider you guys symponico in a way because you're both, I look at both of us people who have a great amount of humanity, searching, improving, you know, trying to figure it out, but also being present in the moment, right?

Like appreciating that moment that you're in. And that is unique and special. Such a powerful and, you know, incredibly sad, but powerful reminder of this is all we got. Well, it's interesting you say that before I broke down. Apologies for falling into the microphone. But I have been processing this since Thanksgiving because I do about it. The day it happened. And I was getting daily updates, you know, because we're part of a poker group together.

And, you know, luckily it didn't leak or anything like that while he was, you know, they were trying to save him for 10 days or whatever it was. And, you know, leading up to my 50th birthday is, and you having your 55th, you do start counting down, right? And you realize the finiteness of it. And then if, you know, when Tony passes, you're like, oh, my God, it's even more finite than any of us could imagine. Like, not only could you be counting down, it could be all be gone.

gone tomorrow, right? I mean... This is one of the really... It's been hard for me to process as an adult, something that I try to reinforce with myself and my wife Amy regularly reinforces it with me. Oh, the famous Amy, yes. Yes, which is... I'll tell my Amy story after the book. But the thing that gets reinforced is the utter...

and complete unpredictability of it all. Of it all. And not just a thing, of it all. And in that context, recognizing that it's really easy for, one, for a human to defer reality or deny reality. Why face it?

Yeah, and we constantly do it. As you get older, it gets different. But it's still pretty, I'm only 55, you know, da-da-da-da-da, whatever, right? And but yeah, it could be over in the next minute. You just don't know. You don't know. Hey, when we get back from this last break, I want to talk a little, I'll tell my Amy story. And how I knew you were evolving constantly as a human when I first met you.

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That's all you need to know. They make it easy. they make it fast, easy, breezy, and $1,000. Vanta.com slash twist. All right, welcome back to this week in startups. Yeah, a little melancholy there in the last segment, but a lot to learn from the life of Tony Shea, obviously. And I mean, it's really what's, I think, very important is,

and it does relate to, you know, what we do every day into our building community and dealing with the stress of what, you know, entrepreneurship brings. I remember when we were first meeting, and I had one of my first meetings with you probably don't remember, but your phone rang, and you looked at it. And I think you had one of the fancy new StarTax. This is in the 90s, so we're dating it.

This is before SMS message. Flip it open, right? Flip it open. It's on your belt. You got the cool belt clip, got the extra double battery on it. You know, I get the carrying an extra double battery with these things. So I had so forgotten those things even existed. Remember that?

the StarTack. I mean, it was like $500. People couldn't believe that you had one. And it flipped out. It had such a great crisp feeling when you flipped it out of the case and flipped it open with one hand, pull out the antenna with your mouth. It was really, yeah, it was one of the great gadgets. But you said, I have to take this. It's Amy, my wife. And I was like, okay, this is the weirdest thing ever. Like, people have voicemail. Like, what is he doing?

Like, we're in the middle of a meeting. We have like a half hour meeting or 45 minute meeting in New York. And he just laughed. And you just left. And you came back and you explained to me. You said, well, you know, I made a deal with my wife that whenever we called each other, we'd always pick up immediately no matter what was going on. And you had caller ID.

Like, caller idea was like not a thing back then where it was just starting. You had to pay extra for caller idea. It was extra $10 a month or something. And you explained to me how you had to call her idea and she was calling you and you had to take the call. You probably don't remember. I don't remember the specific instance. I totally, like you're telling a story that I totally.

believe. It's so interesting the text dynamic and how it changes that. But when we really, when we really want to just even say hi, sometimes it's just as simple as that. And I just made a commitment. I traveled so much. And I'm glad to remember it because it's, I'm going to make her watch this. So she remembers that it's part of the Lord. You are definitely focused on that. You are an enigma to me in a couple of ways. And I think it's worth unpacking a bit because you seem to be a type A personality where you were very driven and wanted to be successful, but you also seem to have some other side of the coin where you desperately also wanted to be a bit of a hippie or an introvert or be alone. I got the sense. And I could never figure out with you.

Are you faking being an extrovert, but you're really an introvert? And I was like, I think I know this archetype where I have friends who are introverts, but they're extroverted because they need to be at work. And they do enjoy people, but maybe it drains them. Or they're type A and they want to be super hyper successful. But then they're torn because they just want to go for a 50 mile run in the woods and take a nap in the afternoon and read science fiction books. So explain to me this sort of dichotomy and your personality. and if I am in fact describing my experience with you over the last 20 years correctly, that there is this push and pull of these opposing forces in you.

Yeah, it's actually a really good description of it. And when I read Susan Kane's book, Quiet, whatever, was it? Power of introverts or something, yeah. Yeah, it was a really helpful book. It was a really helpful book for me because she gave voice to a certain person. So for me, I've always been very comfortable in groups and with lots of people. I'm, you know, I don't prepare in advance of getting on stage. You know, I get in front of a thousand people and I'm comfortable just riffing.

So I've always, I've always had that sort of essence, but it drains me of energy. It takes away energy. The battery gets to be able. So that's right. And the inverse of it is when I'm alone, And I've really come to learn. It's with a maximum of four people including me. Oh, you actually know the number. Wow.

Yeah. Ideally, interesting, it's three other people. One, two, three. Back to that number three. For my, my best battery recharge is to be alone. So that's the best. Your high speed charging? That's high speed charging.

Next, very close second is with Amy. Got it. And a distant, not close, a distant third is with another couple. Right. The two of us with another couple. And you'll notice in there that me one-on-one with other people in person is not in that list. So it took me a while to understand that. But being one-on-one with other people in person does not actually fill me up.

That's part of the tearing down or depleting the battery. So over time, what happens is because of the work we do, because of the dynamics of this business, being in person and being very visible as part of it, although there is a point on that curve where it doesn't become that important anymore. And I hit that point probably five or six years ago. And people that know me know that I've been a remote worker for a long time. I you know I I I for many years you know you'd hear the background chatter every now and then two things would happen in the background one is somebody would complain that I wasn't physically coming to a board meeting right and that would all because I do it via video and I'd always try to do it via video even before video was it was a popular thing because you can engage really very effectively via video as we all know now but the other end was interesting I had um after a board meeting of a fairly large board, a board member who I didn't know, a woman investor that I was working with that I had just got,

start to know, sent me a really nice note. And the note was something to the effect of, you know, you're really surprised in a pleasant way how present you are even when you're not in person. It was a note like that. And it really stuck with me because it reinforced,

you know, you don't get a lot of that kind of validation. Mostly it's people saying, you know, you don't show up or whatever. He's phoning it in. He's getting straight and ride. He's not actually coming into the meeting. He didn't come to the dinner.

The board's dinner. He wasn't at the dinner. Like the last thing in the world I want to do is a dinner. Now, here's an interesting on top of it, just in terms of the, I'm puzzling the enigma is I don't drink anymore. I stopped drinking four or five years ago. I never drank a lot. It wasn't a problem for you, right?

No, I just didn't enjoy it. I didn't like most alcohol. I wasn't really into anything. I like scotch sometimes, but I didn't even really like wine that much. And my biggest, one of my challenges is, and it's a balancing act,

is the difference between being an abstainer and a moderator. This is part of the other dynamic, right? I'm an all-in kind of person. Right. So it's not that I go for a job every day. It's like I'm running marathons. Right. Right.

And so it's very hard for me to, moderate, it's much easier for me to abstain. Yep, I'm not eating sugar anymore. That's much easier than a little bit. Yeah, no, once you get that first scoop of ice cream, like the pint's coming out of the fridge, it's not going back. It's fucking over. So, it's over. Anyway, in all of that, like, if I gave people something to play with, not so much about play with, with the ideas of me, but I find it really interesting to explore oneself. Right. And instead falling into an archetype, right? Are you an introvert that's comfortable being an extrovert? I don't really care to label myself. I've kind of figured out what depletes me and what gives me

energy. Right. And when I'm in a modality where I have plenty of energy, okay, cool. I'll do some things that deplete me. But when I'm depleted, man, I need some stuff that charges that battery again. It's really interesting, too. You know me as somebody who's a high extrovert. And I, did not understand this until I read that book, the quiet book, Power of Introverts, that I was for introverts, maybe like a fun, you know, hang for an hour, but then an hour two, I would be running over them and smashing their battery pack and like, it would just be too much to hang out with J-Cal all night. And you have, I realize, oh, you know, if I'm going to go on a one-on-one walk with Bradfeld or

something like we don't need to fill every moment of the airtime or ask Brad a thousand questions. We can just be normal and maybe even have some quite. So for one-on-one stuff, I'm, I'm just cognizant of it now because I have so many friends who are introverts and I know I'm draining their batteries. So I don't want to do that, right? Tim Ferriss is a good example of it. We have a mutual friend and Tim. And I got to like spend some time with them on vacations.

And it was always very interesting because I'd be like, wow, Tim is just so on when he's on and then he just disappears. Yep. I'm like, totally. Tim. Like all of a sudden you turn around. It's like Batman. He's just gone.

It's like, we're out of dinner. It's like a group dinner that he's gone. It's like, did we have the hot tress? Yeah, we had an hot tress. But he's gone. Wait, was it going to have a nightcap or something? It's a really, there's two things in there. And I'll play them back because I think they're both great.

One is you just did exactly what I was talking about, right? Like you've learned about yourself. Yes. And it's less about me. And it's more about you learning about you so that when you're engaging with me, it's more powerful. The other, which is a great, like it took, it's such a good example of social convention. Now that I don't drink, everything lasts too long. Every social experience lasts too long. And I was always an early to bed person. Amy and I are in bed between nine and ten every night.

We get up early. We like to get up early. We just, you know, we're done. And if I'm at dinner at 8 o'clock, everybody now knows that I'm going to leave if dinner's still going on an 8, because I've got to get home to go to bed. And at some point it becomes a joke, hey, Brad's got to go to bed.

I'm totally good with that because it's social convention. Like social convention would be you stay till the end of dinner. Versus, you know what, I'm done. It was nice having dinner with everybody. It's time for me to go to bed. And so learning that about you and then the people that you're with and that you work with and that you care about

and that you have affection for and they have affection for you. Like everybody's starting to learn that about each other. That starts to become powerful. And I feel fortunate that my close circles and then extended circles around that, most of, I don't say most, many of those people are on their own sort of exploration. By the way, it then makes other things easier to do. And I'll just use an example.

When George Floyd got murdered, I was disoriented for a day or two. And then I realized in talking to Amy and then I won't go through the whole story here because I've talked about it plenty on other places. But I realized that while I had been philanthropic around social justice issues for the last 20 years, my behavior was fundamentally passive. Right. And I was not proud of that. And as part of that, I said, all right, I'm not proud of it. I want to shift my behavior from passive to active. I'm not sure what that means.

And so that, you know, by definition, I'm going to have to go learn. And in the context of going and learning, that means I'm going to engage. And almost by definition, that means I'm going to be uncomfortable. Because this is an area fraught with, you know, challenges, mistakes, things. said that are hurtful. I'd had this experience with gender equity going back to 2005 when I got involved with the woman named Lucy Sanders, who started an organization called National Center for Women in Information Technology, where I became the founding chair. And within about three months of starting to work with Lucy, I realized that when men showed up at the gender equity discussion,

at best they were neutral and mostly they were hurtful or harmful. And so I realized that, okay, here I am. If I show up here at best, I'm probably neutral. And what I know is probably hurtful or harmful. And so I know nothing. And I'm going to bring in complete beginner's mind to this issue of racial equity. And, you know, in six months, it's been extraordinary, both good and bad, around many dynamics. But part of that is one's willingness, and I'm not, this is not about me, but one's willing to, but one's willing to, to show up somewhere with beginners mind. Right.

To show up somewhere not saying, I know the answer. Here's how you do it. Or if I were you. I'm a problem solver. Here's some really a punch up. Which, by the way, is natural for investors, is natural for entrepreneurs, is natural for CEOs because we're the ones that are in the middle. We're the ones who are solving the problem.

If you imagine, even with your, and starting with yourself, say for yourself, you know what, I think I know the answers to all the things about myself, but maybe I don't. Right. And let me explore some of that. Yeah. That's powerful. Therapy or a 360 review. All of a sudden, you thought you had it dialed in and you knew everything.

And then that Netflix 360 review comes in and whatever radical candor, you know, and it's like, oh, yeah. And you're like, oh, shit. I got some stuff to, I got some stuff to work on. Let's talk about the pandemic as we ran third base here in our discussion, which is been rambling and fantastic and interesting. The pandemic has been a crazy accelerant for our industry, whether it's telemedicine or delivering groceries or, you know, MRNA vaccines. I mean, it's just extraordinary what a crisis can do to, you know, accelerate the adoption

of technology or people's creativity. But it's also been absolutely brutal on people psychologically, I think and obviously the devastation of hundreds of thousands of people dying and we're sitting here in December of 2020 taping this. And it's looking pretty dark. The darkest hour before the dawn has probably never been more appropriate as a description of where we are right now in America in 2020 in December of the pandemic year or having a record number of cases, record number of people in hospitals and sadly it looks like record number of debts or about to break the record number of debts, which is not something you want to break. But also having a record number of hospitals. And having record numbers of vaccines just around the corner, like literally this month

starting to happen. So what do you think the world looks like post-pandemic? If you had to put your thinking cap on and just make a prediction, when do you think life we're able to go back to normal, go to a restaurant, go to a music concert, and then will we go back to normal? Or is this going to be different? Do you believe in this great reset? Yeah.

So I'm not a prognosticator. I feel like I'm a shitty. I'm a shitty prognosticator. So I chose, I choose not to. So I'm going to answer your question. Pretty great investors. So you are a prognosticated when you get with those bats. You've done pretty well. I don't, I don't, every year, you know, I get emails from people, hey, will you, you know, give us your top 10 predictions for next year? And I, I very politely decline. You don't like doing it, but you're good at it. Let me describe how I'm thinking about this moment because I think that's probably more useful than the specific predictions. First, I think we just accelerated five years and nine months. And I think we accelerated a bunch of things good and bad. So we're seeing enormous acceleration in a positive way of lots of things in and around technology. And we're seeing the complete and total collapse on the other end of the spectrum of lots of things. things. There's whole categories of businesses that are being wiped off the planet. There are

extreme number of social norms that were already fractured structural systems that were already fractured where those fractures have accelerated. Whatever was going to happen over the next five years just happened. And I think when you look at those things, and this is a powerful part of the book that I just wrote with Ian Hathaway, we use the idea of complexity theory and complex systems to define how startup community has grown and evolved. And it's important to recognize that we're actually dealing with the collision of multiple complex systems that have just had this massive accelerant.

The health crisis itself is one. The economic crisis that represents, that resulted from the health crisis, which depending where on the spectrum you are, may not look like an economic crisis. It may look like economically thriving. I mean, if you were a Slack investor or, you know, in, you know, Zoom or something, you're sitting here looking at your portfolio going,

oh, my God, this has been the greatest nine months of my business career. The value, there's a quote somebody saw. I'm not going to get the quote exactly right, but the value creation in the last nine months of the top five companies, tech companies, the sum of that is greater than the entirety of the entire small business sector in the United States. That is extraordinary. Some number like that, right? Just incredible dynamic.

That's what you mean by the accelerants, right? The businesses that would lose some of these small businesses, mom and pop restaurants, they were teetering. Maybe over the next five years, a cloud kitchen would have replaced the local sandwich shop or the local bodega would succumb to same-day delivery from Amazon. But it might have taken five years or ten years, and it just happened this year. It just happened this year. So then the third is mental health crisis.

And we've had a mental health crisis in our country for a long time, but now all of a sudden it's very front and center. And then the fourth complex system we're dealing here, it is a racial equity crisis, and we've had a racial equity crisis in this country from inception. But again, five years of acceleration. So what happens sort of coming

out of those, my view is there is no normal. And I really have grown to dislike. I'll use the word despise the phrase new normal. Because the new normal implies some linkage back

to January 2020 and normal. And the idea that people want to revert back to how things were in January 2020, I don't think that's what's going to happen. I think we're in a completely different phase in our society. I think the better approach or the approach I'm taking instead of pretending like we're trying to track back to a year ago and then build from there is I'm trying to live in 2025. I'm looking at 2025 and saying,

how do I think things are going to be five years from now? How do I want to live and how do I want to interact with those things? And at the same time, I'm also trying to live in 2040, which I read a lot of science fiction. And I like to read science fiction about now that was written 20 or 30 years ago. So, you know, read something, right? That's right. read something from, you know, the 1980s or the 1990s, about 2020 is the same as thinking about 2040 today. Yeah.

Still no flying cars. Yeah. And, you know, look, flying cars are kind of interesting on one intellectual level. If people want to go down on this thread, my favorite author to encourage people to start with is Philip K. Dick. Because Philip K. Dick got about half things right. he wrote his books in 1960s, 1970s. He got about half things right and about half things completely wrong.

But the creativity with which he got things wrong is awesome. You have examples of that? I mean, he did have the off-world colonies and we're sitting here, and Elon says he's going to get to Mars and five, and based on Elon time, that means like seven years. He's usually a little bit late.

Or 15, who knows. Who knows? Right? But, well, here's one of my favorite is he had this whole notion of data storage and that it was all stored on basically audio tape in these gigantic underground bunkers that were hardened. And I'm not going to remember which book this was in, but it was like ox tape. And that's where all of the information of society lived.

Well, he got some of that right, right? Cloud computing and data centers. There's huge data centers somewhere. But like audio tape. He didn't make that transition from, from, um, We'll be swapping out audio tapes. But there's hundreds and hundreds of gems in PKD's writing like that. So I'll just sort of end with, I think the next five years are actually quite unfathomable from this moment.

You know, the optimistic view is that I see people pointing back to as the roaring 20s is after the pandemic. pandemic, you know, subsided in 1990, 19, 1920. All hell broke loose. Yeah, everybody was like, YOLO. I mean, all hellbrook was in a positive way. And in a lot of ways that were really powerful in terms of growth and innovation, development. But there were also some very, very deeply, deeply negative things that happened in the 1920s that then instantiated in the 1930s and 1940s and continued to this day.

But there's this optimistic view of we're all. going to be partying like crazy. For sure. There's another perspective. And that view, by the way, I think misses the tragedy of what has happened, I think, not just from the pandemic, but the inequities that have been accelerating over the last three or four years. And the amount of our society that is deeply dislocated right now, I was talking to a friend of

in Boston, whose husband was potentially exposed to COVID. So they went and both got COVID tests. And, you know, they were able to get COVID tests pretty quickly. I like to say she's kind of, she's kind of a hippie, kind of a bohemian. And she always dresses funky or whatever. And when she was getting her test, the person said to her, do you need any food? Oh, they just assumed. And she said, she said, what do you mean?

And the person said, oh, just checking. We got lots of, you know, lots of food for people if they need, need some food. You know, it was just one of those things where the person made an assessment based on whatever my friend was wearing in terms of clothes or whatever. And on this moment, like there were people who had no money. And it was an active, it was an active generosity. But the idea, the idea that we are living in the United States of America and people are not able to get access to food. So weird.

Yeah. I mean, what has happened? And when you were talking and you were talking about things getting accelerated in mental health and this whole gamut, one thing that came to mind immediately was we had this big debate about UBI. is UBI going to be problematic or not? And then we get this use case, hey, nobody can go to work. Not that we don't have jobs, but just people cannot go to work.

They're not going to pay their rent. The entire financial system is going to seize up if there's no, if people who are consumers, have no money to spend. So we're just going to air drop everybody $1,200. Nobody had a problem with it. Not conservatives, not Republicans. There was nobody. I did not hear one person say, is this a good idea?

Are we sure we want to air drop everybody $1,200? Did they earn that $1,200? It's just like, you know what? I'm scared. Give everybody $1,200 because that is a small price to pay for knowing that people will be safe and they're not going to run out of food and kids are not going to starve. People may hit their rent or whatever they need to hit to get through this, right? So you made me laugh out loud.

It's such a great one. It's such a great example. Because, you know, for the preceding three or four years, you know, there's a little experiment about UBI over here. There's a-A-Hasca has a far, you know, a far-left progressive argument about it over here. And then there's lots of people sort of saying it doesn't work and just sort of the endless hand-wringing. Yeah. In contrast to the immediate action with no exploration of anything. Nobody pulled up a study.

It does link back to a thing, Amy and I talk about this all the time, is a fundamental motivation for action for so much of our human behavior is one four-letter word, fear. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you play it all the way out as fear of death. But it's fear. And you think about how motivating that is compared to the amount of energy we spend trying to understand things with complete or argue about things or prevent things from happening

or manipulate situations because of other versions of fear. And when that fear becomes so existential and so overwhelming, it changes behavior so dramatically. And, you know, it will, it is powerful, but I think, unfortunate, my skepticism that anybody will actually do the work is low, or my skepticism is hot. We do have an incredible thing that we can try to understand about crisis response. And things like UBI, things like is modern monetary theory really not valid, the sort of approach that we've been taking for the last 20-year-th 30 years. But, you know, you know full well and good that the intellectual efforts to explore that will be hindered by data, will be hindered by resource, will be overwhelmed by tribalism,

and the tyranny of whatever the newest urgent thing is. And as time passes, we will miss the opportunity to really learn from the moments. And I'm not going to remember the name of the book, but it's such a good one. People want to, I can send it to you later. You can put it in the show notes or put it in good reads. I believe the author is Debbie Meadows. And it's something like COVID-19, the pandemic that didn't have to happen or something like that.

Right. And she's a 30-year science writer. And she wrote in two months this fantastic book about what was going on. sort of April, May, June. But she also then went back into prior pandemics, of which we've had plenty that just never, you know, H1N1. People remember that. Swine flu, Ebola, and HIV.

HIV, all of the, and HIV was formative for us. I mean, you were in high school, I was in college. And, you know, today we're, that's pretty much it, right? If you have sex to die. They literally said that to us, like sex equals death. And so the idea of so many opportunities as a country, as a society, as a species to get prepared for something like this. Yeah. Just avoidance is such a powerful.

And just never did. And so here we are again. And once we come out of this, will we get prepared for the next thing like this? Because it is inevitable that there will be a next. I have great hope for this. I think for our generation, this becomes the defining moment. I thought 9-11 was the defining moment. Some people thought the financial crisis, great recession.

This is way more profound. This is way more because sitting at home for 10 months with yourself and your immediate family, and that's all you can do. Like, that might have been Bradfell's norm for the last two decades. That was not the experience of Americans to have this amount of time, you know, to think about things. I think a lot of people looked at and said, you know what, I don't need to be on this treadmill. I don't need to be in San Francisco. Work from home works.

Brad's calling into the meeting. Now, everybody's calling into the meeting. I kind of like this better. And it gave everybody permission to question every single thing in their life. Am I going to homeschool or not? Am I going to live in a city or in the country? Am I going to work for myself or am I going to work for anybody else in it? You know, that to me is incredibly powerful.

The other one that I take away from it is thinking about this. I don't know if you know what a challenge trial is in terms of vaccines and stuff like that. So it's a very cool. Yeah, yeah. Where you have them against the vaccines against each other? Well, you basically, it's close. What you do is you give people a vaccine. So you take the placebo.

I take the actual vaccine. And then you expose us both to COVID on purpose. Now, this is think about how quickly you can run experiments if you could do this. And why don't we do that? Oh, it's unethical to expose somebody to a deadly virus. And I was thinking about this out loud. And I was like, we let Alex Honnold climb half dome without a rope and we give him a North Face, you know, full page ad and a million dollar sponsorship or whatever

he gets paid for that. we let people, we pay people to go to war and to run into burning buildings as firefighters. And we let them go to war and we pay them to go to Afghanistan and, you know, potentially get in a firefight and die as well. But we can't have a challenge trial where we pay a 25-year-old person or a 30-year-old person, $100,000, could be life-changing money, to expose himself to a virus that is, you know, probably no different than the flu for it there. age group. And it turns out, here we are in month, whatever it is, 10, in January, in the

UK, they're going to do challenge trials. And I was just thinking to myself, like, wow, that could be an incredible one. If you looked at people who were doing those challenge trials as explorers, as pilots or, you know, astronauts or pilots of, you know, airplanes when they were first coming out, the Wright brothers, they're heroes, right, for going off to war versus the virus. And That alone, this vaccine was made by Pfizer and Moderna in two days. They had the virus and the DNA of it or whatever sequence really quickly. We could have had the vaccine in month three or something. At scale production.

You know, I said it earlier. You gave just with that example of what I was trying to allude to, which is societal norms. Right. Right. You know, it's, there are so many societal norms. that are rigid and entrenched. And this experience in 2020 has shredded many of those societal norms. Now, some of the societal norms are ones that need to be debated or ones that are actually

got shredded that are quite effective ones, but there's a lot of societal norms that are not. And my sense is, my hope is that people, or that as a society, We're more open to challenging the norms. Doesn't necessarily mean that you run them over, you eliminate them, you declare them invalid. But the openness and the willingness to have that conversation about those norms and whether or not those norms are actually the right ones is significant. And in rational ways, my skepticism around that is we're so wired into propaganda, that there's no way to have those rational conversations.

And when I say propaganda, I don't just mean, you know, the media and television and websites and Facebook and Twitter and stuff that gets amplified on that. It's not just the stuff that gets promoted. It's our reactions to that and our need to react with authority and immediacy to all of that stuff. Right. We're not open to exploring it and letting it breathe. which when we talked about wins and losses before and, you know, balancing yourself when that anxiety comes up,

it's very hard for people to say UBI or challenge trials. Okay, I'm listening. Tell me more. That's right. If it's not the way I believe or not the norm that I've subscribed to or not what I've been programmed with, fuck you. Yeah. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to engage or, you know, my way is the right way. Let me prove to you my way is the right way by not listening to you and just by saying over and over again, my way is the right way.

or hey I'm the smartest one in the room just listen to me because I'm the smartest one in the room versus you know what I actually don't know shit about this and I'm kind of curious so I'm going to listen now for a while yeah I mean when you think about the challenge trial things like if you are in the medical field and I asked some people who are in the medical field about them and their reaction was like yeah no no we can do no harm we can't do that and I was like why how do you come to that decision and And then I brought up the examples that I, you know, like we have people do, we pay people to do deep sea diving. That's much more dangerous than this. We pay people to go to war. It's much more dangerous than this on a statistical basis. Like why do we people, we allow people to drive race cars. That's much more dangerous.

And they're like, yeah, but that's not our industry. And it's like, okay. In your book, I wanted to ask you if I am correct in my interpretation that the most important thing is to be of action and to be patient when you're building a startup ecosystem and that you can't force it. So therefore, you're kind of setting the stage, setting the table for a dinner party and setting that context, setting that community up is enough. And then you're basically playing the waiting game.

Will entrepreneurs create something that resonates that breaks out that creates the alumni effect that we all know and, you know, the angel. coming out of some company IPOs or gets acquired and a bunch of angels come out of it. Is that at the end of the day what building the startup community is about and what worked in Boulder for you? Yeah, it's a pretty good description. Setting the table, the thing that you can impact is the initial conditions. Right?

And you can learn about initial conditions or how the table set from other places. It's not that you're trying to create the same dinner. that somebody had somewhere else, but you say, well, okay, they set the table this way. They put these kinds of things on the table. They made sure they invited these kinds of people to dinner. They played this kind of music. I don't like that kind of music. That's not the people that are coming to this.

I'm going to play different music, right? So you determine the initial conditions. And then the important thing is the interactions, not the parts. So it's not who came to dinner. it's not what food was served. It's not how people ate their food. It's the interactions that occur between all those people once you set the initial conditions. And it's not a single event.

It's a continual event that unfolds and changes where every output becomes the new input. So think of it as a continuous stream of every. changing opportunities to set the initial conditions and run the experiment again. And if anybody says, well, that sounds kind of like how I do a startup. That's right. I mean, a startup fundamentally is you have a hypothesis, your initial condition, you test the hypothesis. If the hypothesis fails, you learn from it and run another experiment. Set up conditions again, run another experiment. If the experiment works. You do more of that.

And so really you're focused again on the interactions. And I think the mistake that so many people around the world make is that they focus too much on the parts. How many of this do we have? How many of that do we have? How many startups? How many angel investors? How much money? How many companies got funded?

How many this? How many that? Versus saying, you know what? It's going to take us a long time to build a vibrant startup community. Let's get the initial conditions as good. We care about this place. Let's set up the initial conditions that make sense for our place. And let's just go at it.

And if you look now, I wrote that startup community's book in 2012, I really wrote in 2010, 2011. If you think about the difference today in 2020 than 2010, in 2010, the stick still existed, the cliché still existed. If you're really serious about starting a company, you should just move to the Bay Area. Right. And my comment, whenever somebody said to me, is, hey, if you want to live in the Bay Area,

you should move to the Bay Area. Right. But you should be able to start a company anywhere you want. And that's come to fruition. And now, in 2020, 10 years later, I don't think that people say, if you're really serious, come to the Bay Area. I think they say, you want to live in the Bay Area and live in the Bay Area. And yeah, the Bay Area is an amazing place to build companies.

But if you want to live somewhere else, build your life around where you want to live. Yeah. And the ability and opportunity is extraordinary. the advice became over the last five, six, seven years, hey, this place is all filled up. There's no room at the end. You should get the money here. Yeah, you could have an office here, but you need to get out of here. Like go back to Texas, go back to Florida, go back to San Diego or Los Angeles, because

you can't hire here. There's no office space for you. And now it's collapsed to an extent that is, it's wild to see what's happening in San Francisco. I think the average apartment in San Francisco will be, we'll flip with New York again and be cheaper than New York. And then I think it eventually will become similar to the prices in like an Austin, Los Angeles or Boulder, which is then become super interesting because then you might, yeah, you might choose to come here or not, but you'll make that decision because you want to be here, not because you have to be here. I'll just anchor, anchor on a thing that, you know, Amy and I moved to

Boulder in 1995 and have lived here since. And it is an essential part of my worldview. And that essential part of my worldview is you choose where you want to live and you build your life around it. Right. And yes, I know that there are many people on planet Earth that don't have that choice because of whatever the resources or constraints or structural inequities exist. I get that.

So I should probably preface it by saying, if you have the ability to choose where you want to live, you should choose and then build your life around that. And I say to entrepreneurs, the place you want to be is where you want to be, not where somebody else tells you should be. It's really interesting. You, I heard I caught your podcast with Tim Ferriss over the summer. and you both talked about topophilia. Yep, great word. From the Greek word, topos, which means place and filia love of, you found the place you love.

You love Colorado. You love the mountains. You love that big open space. You also had an affinity for Alaska for a period of time. I don't know if you're totally. Still do. Still do. Still got that topophilia for Alaska.

Well, here's just a 30, 60 second version of me. I grew up in Delaware. is Texas. I went to school in Boston. My wife, Amy, grew up in Alaska. She went to school in Boston. We lived in Boston 12 years. Boston was good to us, but it wasn't home. I couldn't have told you why then. Now I can tell you. Now I understand myself all enough. And there are two places on planet Earth that I love, Colorado and Alaska. And there are lots of other places on planet Earth that I enjoy. But I only have topophilia, really,

for Colorado and Alaska. Yeah, I mean, you like going to a city for two or three days and catching up with people, I'm sure. And that's enough. And that's enough. That's enough. And then I got to get out of there and recharge my battery again, because I've just depleted my double,

my double extra wide battery. It's just gone to zero. It is really interesting. I had a topophilia for New York City. and then I feel like I fell out of love with the city and which is a very weird experience after 9-11 I was kind of like I feel like this chapter is over I kind of want to live in the woods or the forest or something

and I very much love the Bay Area but listen this has been an incredible hour and a well yeah almost an hour and a half Brad you're just a great person and human to know over these years I love you like a brother my question is great so I comments on me, like all these years. Just great mentor to me.

I'm happy to be here virtually with you today. Yes, absolutely. Continued success. You guys know all the books that Brad's written over the years. Venture deals still just crushing it. That book, people still to this day are reading on a regular basis. I always have people talking about that. Startup boards, startup community, startup opportunities, startup life.

with your wife Amy, right? Fairmore correctly. Yep, the book we wrote together. Yeah, and the startup community way, which is really just if you're going to take that 10, 20 years, it's probably a two-decade, closer to two-decade process to build a startup community, get started today. You might already be five, 10 years in,

but you're going to get a lot out of the book. It's a great listen as well. And yeah, it's been an interesting life so far, and we still have hopefully. Hopefully, we have lots of things. We need to get every, appreciate every sandwich. I don't know if you ever saw, you know who Warren Zevon is? I know who Warren Zevon is.

I don't, I don't know his lines, but I know Warren Zivon. Yeah, so Warren Zivon was on. I'm a Frank Zappa guy. Okay, well, you're going to like Warren Zivon, actually. It's kind of going to be like songwriter in your wheelhouse then. Warren Zivon's kind of like a Jackson Brown, Bob Dylan, interesting kind of artist. And he smoked.

And he didn't go to the doctor for like 20 or 30 years. And he was David Letterman's favorite musician to the level at which David Letterman would have him sit in for Paul Schaefer when Paul Schaefer was on vacation. And Paul Schaefer felt fine about that. And sometimes Warren Zevon, who was a New Yorker, would just sit in with the band sometimes just for fun. And then he found out he had terminal lung cancer state. whatever, you know, less than a year to live type diagnosis. And Dave had him on the show. And he dedicated an hour to him.

And this is with full knowledge that Warren is going to die, you know, in the next couple of months. And Dave said to him, hey, you know, you must know something that we all don't know. I wonder if you know something. And I'm paraphrasing here. And I'm probably buturing it. But she said, what can you tell us, you know, about what you've learned, to, you know, when you get this diagnosis and said, well, you know, you should go to the doctor.

You probably have 20 years to go to the doctor, which was a great line. It was very funny. And he said, but, you know, in all truth, you really want to enjoy every sandwich. Oh, I like that. And it just hits you like a ton of bricks. And you can see this on YouTube. And then he plays his famous song, Mutantir, which is one of my favorite songs of all time. And you'll listen to Mutantier.

I'll go look at it. And it will go watch the David Letterman. You watch the letterman episode. It is, and he and that was, I think, one of the, like, most important moments I ever start my life of appreciating life is just really enjoy every sandwich. You know, rest in peace, power, whatever the term is to my friend, Tony Shea, our friend, Tony Shea, lifelong friend and just a great human being and everybody out there listening. Do what Brad and I are going to do, which is enjoy every sandwich. Yes, I will go have mine now. Enjoy that sandwich.

Every bite, just soak it in for, you know, each of those three, three bites you take out of each half. I'll cut it into thirds, even Brad. There you go. Kind of enjoy it a little bit longer. Enjoy each third. I get each three parts of my sandwich with three parts. All right. All right.

We'll end where we start. We'll end where we start. All right, brother. I love you. Take care. I love you, too. See you.