Top 146 Quotes & Sayings by Brad Feld

I'm not deeply involved in politics, but about 25% of the people I interact with in politics went to law school.

I'm glad I get to live in the United States of America.

When the entrepreneur is obsessed with the product and the company has organized all of its activities around that, it's very powerful.

If the crisis lasts moments, rapid action is critical. But if it's simply the beginning of a broader issue, especially one where the root cause isn't known yet, the worst thing a leader can do is act immediately.

I wish more LPs would blog to help VCs and entrepreneurs understand them better.

My initial desire to blog came from something that's always been my approach to investing - I'm a nerd, and I love to play with the technology, and part of my approach has really been to understand things both at a user level and at a reasonably deep tentacle level.

By definition, as a company scales rapidly, it adds people quickly.

Kauffman Fellows is not necessarily for people just entering the venture industry but for experienced VCs looking to accelerate their growth. The program is centered around established innovation leaders - if you are looking to grow and become a better investor, you should think about doing this program.

When I struggled with a depressive episode in 2013, I realized that I had a glitch in my thinking about my own motivation. I had separated learning and teaching into different concepts.

I talk often about being intrinsically motivated by learning. It's the primary driver of most of my activity.

Q1 is the easiest quarter to make. If you miss your Q1, regardless of the type of revenue you have, you aren't going to make your revenue plan for the year because your budget process isn't accurate.

Don't be afraid to have a big vision, but make sure it's a clear one.

At Foundry Group, we always look for companies that we think build magic into their products. Occipital has been one of those companies.

I watched my parents act as completely equal partners in their relationship, and as a son to a woman I respect immensely, I never thought of gender inequality as a child.

My weight fluctuates between 205 and 220, depending on how much I pay attention to it.

Repeat after me: 'There is a very limited amount of easy money.'

There are two great fictional TV series about technology and the computer industry that each have now had three seasons. The one everyone knows about is 'Silicon Valley.' The lesser-known one is 'Halt and Catch Fire.'

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a strong advocate for diversity across all dimensions.

I hope more cities engage with immigrant entrepreneurs the way St. Louis has - it's a great model.

For those trying to protect the past, it is a way of retaining power, status, money, a way a life, predictability, comfort, control, and a bunch of other things like that. It is a struggle against the inevitability of change.

As a company grows from 25 to 50 to 100 to 200 to 500 to 1000 people, the characteristics of who is the very best talent in leadership roles will change. It's rarely the case that your leadership team at 1000 people is the same leadership team you had a 25 people.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Kauffman Foundation working with Jana Matthews on 'learning programs for high growth entrepreneurs.'

While it's trendy to outsource your accounting to a third party, once you hit a certain size, it's dangerous.

One of the consistent characteristics of the tech industry is an endless labelling of technology and approaches.

The first thing that any city that's trying to create a startup community or an entrepreneurial ecosystem that's vibrant should do is get rid of the idea that they're trying to be like Silicon Valley.

It's much easier to get a reception from someone if there is an introduction versus randomly trying to get in front of people.

Stress on fast growing companies comes from a lot of different places. The one that is often the largest, and creates the most second-order issues, is the composition of the leadership team. More specifically, it's specific people on the leadership who don't have the scale experience their role requires at a particular moment in time.

Taking a great new idea with an entrepreneurial team that wants to create something significant and trying to build a real company is what is interesting.

While I live a busy life, the pace ebbs and flows.

As I continue to believe that innovation and entrepreneurship are the key drivers to our economic future, it's frustrating to hear such little cogent discussion around it.

I think 'Shoe Dog' by Phil Knight is the best memoir I've ever read by a business person.

I believe that all men and women are created equal, but it took our country until 1920 to acknowledge this for women. And then it took until 1964, the year before I was born, to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. And same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015.

I have no idea what the economics of the movie business is, especially with all the new Amazon, Netflix, Showtime, AMC, SyFy, and HBO series. But I am intrigued with what feels like a new type of show - the six-to-eight-hour movie. It's a little too long to watch in one setting, but you can watch it over a three- to five-day period.

Over the years, I've been involved in many business crises. I qualify this, since my crises have never involved life and death or the survival of the human race. But they are still crises.

I think one of the brilliant parts of our democracy is how resilient it is. We are each allowed to have our own beliefs and, as long as we follow the rule of law, we can express them however we'd like. This is a unique characteristic of the best democracies and one I value tremendously.

St. Louis is a good example of a vibrant city. Having stayed in a hotel in 2011 overlooking Cardinals stadium when they won the World Series, their fans definitely show up loud and proud.

'Sunspring,' the first known screenplay written by an AI, was produced recently. It is awesome. Awesomely awful. But it's worth watching all ten minutes of it to get a taste of the gap between a great screenplay and something an AI can currently produce.

If you sell a physical product, you have a lot of Q4 upside and unpredictability, but now you have to manage your cash to get to Q4 so that you can invest in building inventory to over-perform.

I've been traveling more and feel like I've figured out a comfortable way to do it. The biggest shift is that I spend my traveling time 'in the moment,' I don't over-schedule when I'm somewhere and instead focus on longer time with less people. I also give myself plenty of me time on the road.

If you aren't going to make your revenue plan, it's unlikely you'll make your EBITDA or Net Income plan. You don't even have to get complicated and look at Gross Margin or more derivative metrics - if you are off in Q1 and have any sort of growth expectations , you are going to miss for the year.

One of my core values is diversity of everything.

I have a long history with Kansas City.

St. Louis has a great startup scene and a vibrant business community.

If you are feeling some December blues, or even depression, don't fight it. Instead, do something for yourself. Be reflective. Let the emotions exist. And be encouraged that, like me, you can get to a better place, but it can take time.

What I'm looking for in my interaction is critical thinking on the part of the person pitching to me.

I have several close friends who are insomniacs. Over the years, I've heard their stories about being up in the middle of the night, completely awake. I see them yawn at 11 A.M. and know that, regardless of what they are doing, they'd probably rather be in bed sleeping. I've always had sympathy for them, but I've never really understood it.

A typical leader has - a natural tendency is to be defensive in the face of a crisis. The first reaction is to blame someone - or something - else. Often, the blame is aimed at something abstract or non-controllable, which often has nothing to do with the crisis but is adjacent to whatever is going on, so it's an easy target.

I wonder if, as the tech to deliver content continues to evolve, we will start seeing the one season / 6-8 hour show that ends at a peak moment rather than is cancelled because it sucks.

Some Sundays, I read it quickly - other Sundays, I savor it. I generally spend most of my time in 'The New York Times Book Review,' 'Sunday Business,' 'Sunday Review,' and 'The New York Times Magazine.' I turn all the other pages, only stopping when I find a headline that interests me.

As an investor, I'm always looking for the next great American company. Who will create tomorrow's Twitter, Facebook, or Google?

When we raised the first Foundry Group fund in 2007, we took over 100 first meetings. We told our story several hundred times. As part of it was a slide called 'Strategy.' I still repeat the elements of that slide regularly, a decade later, as our core strategy has not changed.

I'm usually an excruciatingly happy person.

As a teenager, my dad taught me about the idea of unintended consequences, and I've had the experience, and how to deal with it, pounded into my soul over the years.

I've been using email since 1983. I started with MH and Rmail, then cc:Mail, then Microsoft Mail, with Compuserve mixed in. Eventually, I ended up using Pine for non-Windows stuff and Outlook for Windows stuff. For a while.

I regularly see leaders change what they say because they get bored of saying the same thing over and over again. It's not that they vary a few words or change examples, but they change the message.

I'm a strong believer that you can build great companies in time of both greed and fear. But you have to be paying attention and operating under the right assumptions. You don't have to believe history repeats itself, but you should accept that history rhymes.

Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning.

My optimism holds that the good guys eventually come out on top.

Having read my share of tell-alls over the year, including some that were passed off as autobiographies, I mostly feel sad - sometimes for the writer and sometimes for all the people in his way. I hope that the process of writing the tell-all gives some release and closure on what clearly was an unpleasant and unfulfilling life experience.

On a daily basis, I pay almost no attention to the macro.