I went to school in Boulder CO, and kind of grew up professionally in the Foundry Group / Techstars universe, in what I consider the good ol' days. My first real exposure to startups was through an internship at Foundry, where I was the only intern. They affectionately called me “Carl the Intern“ or CTI for short, and my job was to do a lot of the annoying busy work that the partners or principals didn’t want to do. I was officially a “data intern“, but that didn’t really mean data science. For the most part, it meant making $10 an hour living in spreadsheets cleaning data (eventually they promoted me to a salary of $25 an hour). Fun fact, the original corporate name for Coherent, which Foundry co-led the seed, was actually CTI API Inc - in honor of that nickname. At the time it was kind of cringe, but in hindsight I find it pretty funny.
I like to think that Foundry was where I learned how to be a good professional, and Coinbase is where I really learned how to be a good engineer (story for another time). The main people I learned from at Foundry were Jaclyn (my direct boss), and then a few of the partners, mainly Lindel and Brad. A lot of the lessons that have worked well for me in my early career came from those folks. Lindel and I would always talk career strategy and crypto mostly, sometimes he’d give me dating advice. Brad was always generous with his time, even helping with some school projects I was doing around startups and what was going on at the time, which was primarily a lot of discussion around women in VC (2016/17 that was one of the main topics of conversation and one I was doing school projects for).
Probably the main lesson that stuck with me from Foundry, which I was thinking of today, is called “Give First”. I’m not really sure who deserves credit for this one, but I think it’s Brad:
The basic idea is that you start by giving something, really anything, without a specific quid pro quo expectation of something in return.
For Brad and the partners this usually meant some amount of their valuable time, to write a blog post, give a talk or do a podcast for the community
The key is that although you’re not expecting something specific in return, giving first in some ways generates good karma, which through the ways of the universe will make it’s way back to you.
I watched the Foundry crew, and tangentially the Techstars crew, live this fully, and it worked very well for a long time.
About a month and a half ago, I noticed that Brad had stopped blogging, and so I emailed him with a slightly poking subject line “Brad Feld should blog more“. He took it well, although I’m guessing there was some slight annoyance that the former intern was emailing him telling him to blog. His response was pretty simple: it got to be too much to constantly be in the public spotlight, which is totally fair for someone who has had a 30+ year career in venture.
It’s part of what inspires this blog though. I spent so much time both watching and reading the Brad and Lindel’s of the world that I kind of realized it’s time for me to pay that forward, even in a small way, in what I can contribute around entrepreneurship and engineering. Sometimes part of giving first is just doing it yourself and trying to produce something that might someday be valuable for someone else trying to do it. It’s a really small thing that I can do just to write in my free time.
I’ve tried to take this into the YC experience too. This week I’m hosting an info session on how to do linkedin outbound for engineers that has almost 100 people signed up for it. No expectation of return, just trying to make friends and help other entrepreneurs.
Building startups is quite hard, and what you’ll find is that by helping people, for free, will attract good people that will help you too. It’s a good way to build a natural community of people that help eachother, and I think this is what Foundry and Boulder really got right. Give first not only benefits others, but it benefits you too by bringing the best people into your orbit and helping uplift them to where they can truly go.