Going off-grid and under the hood of VC investing with Brad Feld

Brad Feld is the author of seven best-selling books on venture capital investing and entrepreneurship, has been an early-stage investor for 30+ years, and is pretty much a global legend when it comes to startup communities, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and what makes their flywheels spin.

Currently Managing Director at Foundry Group – a US-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies – Brad also co-founded Techstars, and has been a major force in the global startup ecosystem, backing thousands of founders on their startup journeys to date.

But truth be told, the world of venture investment can get a bit of a bad wrap sometimes. Competitive, fast-paced, low on diversity and high on testosterone, it is often regarded as the arena of Alphas.

So in this conversation with Brad, Human Cogs Cohost Madeleine Grummet gets under the hood of his real life as a VC, uncovers his personal drivers, trigger points and life learnings, and discovers that the human underneath is incredibly thoughtful, deeply reflective, remarkably wise – and a great storyteller.

As you’ll learn in this episode, Brad shares how it has taken him a while to find his place, and that as a reformed workaholic, he now regularly goes off the grid to hit the trails around his hometown of Boulder in Colorado to run miles and miles solo.

With his ‘engineer’s brain’, he’s also committed to continuous improvement, and the kind of person who’s more interested in moving towards not away from problems. To that end, he and his wife Amy schedule monthly mandated ‘life dinners’ – kind of retros on their relationship – in order to keep it alive and thriving.

So whether you’re a founder, funder, searcher or finder, Brad’s unique perspective, wisdom and worldview are well worth sitting in for a while.

Why? Because we are all works in progress, and we each have so much to learn from simply hearing each others’ stories.

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SHOW CREDITS

Host: Madeleine Grummet
Guest: Brad Feld
Links: Blog, Books, Podcast, Foundry Group, Techstars
Technical Producer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax
Join us on Instagram at human.cogs
Available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or listen via our website.

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