490. Why Foundry Isn't Raising a New Fund, Lessons from Hibernation, and the Benefits and Drawbacks of a Give First Philosophy (Brad Feld)
Episode
70 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Relationships, Investing
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Fund lifecycle reality: Venture funds take far longer than advertised to close—Feld's last Mobius fund took 22 years to wind down, not the typical 10-12 years claimed. Signing up for a fund means committing to decades of work, not just a decade, which influenced his decision to make the 2022 fund his last.
- ✓Techstars scaling mistake: Consolidating capital into centralized funds after 2015 destroyed local community engagement. Earlier geography-specific funds with local LPs created powerful feedback loops—one Chicago fund returned 100x—because investors had skin in the game and reinvested locally, creating self-sustaining startup ecosystems that centralized capital couldn't replicate.
- ✓Managing inbound requests: When strangers request meetings, assign a 15-minute task relevant to their inquiry. Fifty percent never respond, 25 percent provide good context enabling email-only engagement, and 25 percent demonstrate they're doers worth knowing. This filters without gatekeepers while maintaining accessibility and responsiveness as core values.
- ✓Passive versus active avoidance: Passive avoidance—seeing problems but not addressing them—creates the biggest regrets in 40-year career. Active avoidance—consciously choosing not to engage with certain issues—is acceptable. The difference lies in intentionality. Shared experiences require direct engagement, not complaining to others or burying concerns.
- ✓Mentor effectiveness framework: Mentors provide data points, not directives. Mentees should feel comfortable ignoring advice. The most powerful mentor relationships occur when both parties become peers learning equally from each other. Guide without controlling, share stories rather than commands, and accept that your advice may be wrong or context-inappropriate.
What It Covers
Brad Feld discusses Foundry's decision not to raise another fund, his two-year hibernation from public life, lessons on effective mentorship versus performative VC behavior, and his new book exploring give-first philosophy in entrepreneurship.
Key Questions Answered
- •Fund lifecycle reality: Venture funds take far longer than advertised to close—Feld's last Mobius fund took 22 years to wind down, not the typical 10-12 years claimed. Signing up for a fund means committing to decades of work, not just a decade, which influenced his decision to make the 2022 fund his last.
- •Techstars scaling mistake: Consolidating capital into centralized funds after 2015 destroyed local community engagement. Earlier geography-specific funds with local LPs created powerful feedback loops—one Chicago fund returned 100x—because investors had skin in the game and reinvested locally, creating self-sustaining startup ecosystems that centralized capital couldn't replicate.
- •Managing inbound requests: When strangers request meetings, assign a 15-minute task relevant to their inquiry. Fifty percent never respond, 25 percent provide good context enabling email-only engagement, and 25 percent demonstrate they're doers worth knowing. This filters without gatekeepers while maintaining accessibility and responsiveness as core values.
- •Passive versus active avoidance: Passive avoidance—seeing problems but not addressing them—creates the biggest regrets in 40-year career. Active avoidance—consciously choosing not to engage with certain issues—is acceptable. The difference lies in intentionality. Shared experiences require direct engagement, not complaining to others or burying concerns.
- •Mentor effectiveness framework: Mentors provide data points, not directives. Mentees should feel comfortable ignoring advice. The most powerful mentor relationships occur when both parties become peers learning equally from each other. Guide without controlling, share stories rather than commands, and accept that your advice may be wrong or context-inappropriate.
Notable Moment
Feld reveals he stopped all public activity without announcement, rejecting the common pattern of VCs making themselves heroes of startup stories. He describes growing tired of performative founder-first positioning and shtick-driven venture capital marketing that contradicted actual behavior during difficult board situations.
Episode Transcript
This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Brad Feld is back on the show. He joins us today from Aspen. He's a founding partner at Foundry and a cofounder of Techstars. Brad has invested in companies including Zynga, Fitbit, Harmonix, Havenly, Mapbox, and Formlabs, amongst many others. He's a prolific writer and recently released his new book, Give First, which explores how a philosophy of mentorship and generosity can fuel entrepreneurial ecosystems. Brad, welcome back. Thanks. Delighted to be here. It's been too long. For long term listeners, Brad was Brad was the tenth guest we ever had on the on on the show back in 2014. And I gotta tell you, Brad, I think we went from maybe 600 total listeners, you know, to 6,000 after your appearance. So I owe you a lot for helping us kick start this whole thing from Hello hello, my new 5,400 friends. There we go. There we go. So Brad's back. Brad, you know, I would love to start out just with a recap on Foundry before we jump into the book. So Foundry has decided not to raise a new fund. Can you talk a bit about that decision and and why, you know, you're gonna deploy the rest of the current fund and and not do another? Sure. When we started Foundry in 2007, one of our sort of viewpoints and perspectives of what we're trying to do is not create a multigenerational firm. So Seth, Ryan, Jason, and I sat down and said, you know what? We're gonna raise the number of funds. We don't know how many. We're never gonna increase the size of the fund. It's gonna just be a small firm and just us, and one day, we'll decide that we raised our last fund. And that was part of what we told all of our LPs. That was part of our fundraising pitch. That was part of what we talked about. And, of course, 2007, we're just getting started with Foundry. After having, you know, all spent time and work together, Mobius, which had been a spin off from SoftBank and affiliated with SoftBank going back to when I started you know, confounded that fund in in the mid nineties or 1996. So so we have this starting point. Now we raised the fund. We raised …
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