Brad Field on “Giving the First” and the art of guidance (at any age)

Brad Field spent contracts to work with a simple principle: given without expecting anything in return. He says that this philosophy goes beyond the traditional thinking of push forward. It comes to helping others, and only know that the links and opportunities with meaning will appear organically over time if you do this.

The businessman and VC, who started investing in the 1990s, rose to the lead through his explicit blog “Feld Fesidents”, which restored the project industry at the time and sparked countless discussions through the Silicon Valley. After decades as an investor and participated in the establishment of both Techstars and the Found Forms Group-which supported hundreds of companies over 18 years before it decides Stop collecting new funds In early 2024 – Feld distilled its approaches to work and life in his last book,Give first“

TECHRUNCH talked with Feld last week about guidance and borders and why the weakness might be the most important leadership skill.

You were thinking about this concept “giving first” for more than a decade. What finally prompted you to write the book now?

This is my ninth book, and I was close to finishing writing fictional stories; I am interested in exploring science fiction writing. The intersection of this may be my last book and I really want to capture these ideas that made me sit about three years ago.

The concept appeared in 2012 in the book “Startup Communities” as a paragraph called “Give” before you get. The idea was that if you want a start -up community to move, you need people ready to put energy without specifying what they would return to. It is not altruism – they will get something, but they do not know when, and who, during the time period, or in any way.

Once it appears to be everywhere, then I withdrew back. After a two -year break from public life, what brought you back?

I decided that I do not want to participate in anything that it faces. I was tired and burned. I focused on working behind the scenes, which means (my wife) Emmy and I was together all the time because I was not distracted by other things. This was really satisfactory.

When David Cohen Return As an executive of Techstars a year ago, I told him that I will participate as much as he wants, but I still do not feel public. Working with him on the strategy made me deeper into this. I also took the (draft of the book) off the shelf, looked at it, and thought, “This is very good.”

This book revolves around guidance in its various forms. You also talk about the importance of setting borders to avoid exhaustion. There is a reason to count the proverb, “There is no good work that passes without punishment.” How should the mentors protect themselves while they are still giving generous?

There is a lot in the book. I was very open about mental health struggles to help these issues. . There are no absolute answers to the question. One of the challenges when you are ready to contribute to energy without transactions is that there are people who cannot do this, or who are extracted.

Adam Grant describes this spectrum in “Give and take“With makers in one of the parties, applicants on the other hand, and merchants in the middle. Most of our world, in fact, is merchants for employees. In the short term, retirees can do a very good job, but in the long run, people at the end of the donor are more successful when success is not simply measured as power and money.

You emphasize the importance of saying “I don’t know” when guidance. Why is this very important?

It is very harmful to new founders when successful people themselves put themselves as getting an answer to everything. Magic in entrepreneurship has a lot of hypotheses, tested quickly, and learning when most fails.

We are in an environment that people cannot offer to objects. They provide them as assurances. The lack of clarity of opinion and the truth is chaos. The best mentors provide data and hypotheses, not assurances of what you must do.

One of the Mentor (My) statement is “evidence, do not control”. Sometimes you know the answer, but anyone who was a great manager knows that the best way to obtain commitment is to make people adhere to commitment to themselves.

There is a lot of shopping behind the scenes. How should the founders move in conflicting advice from several guides?

When I received notes on my first draft (from the book) from 25 people, I got completely conflicting information. The higher the number of mentors, the higher the guides can make notes from their own experience, and the more useful. Instead of saying, “This is what you must do,” they should say, “This is an experience that was similar, and here what I did.”

If the teachers listen this way, the Mentor Whiplash is not a big problem; You get multiple data points from multiple experiences. It is less “choose your own adventure” and more to synthesize the things that make it logical in your context, make a decision, and bring it to the mentors, then make them commit and support you.

At what point is a person ready to be a guide?

Here is the magic trick of guidance: The best relationship of its teacher becomes a counterpart, as the teacher learns more than the teacher as the teacher learns from the teacher. This means that anyone can be a guide at any time.

Some people whom you learned more than others are at the beginning of their career – people are still in college, running their first company. My friend Raja Bharajava was 21 when we started working together in 1994. The amount we learned from each other since then is unrealistic.

There are very successful people with terrible guides, and people with a few experience are unusual mentors. Your ability to be effective as a guide is not related to your success or experience – it is a way to exist.

How this philosophy applies at times like nowand Where we see the huge demobilization of workers in technology, disrupting artificial intelligence in everything. . .

Currently, there is almost a predictive power associated with anything that anyone says. We are separate from understanding what will actually happen. The strong loud statements that people make have the lowest predictive power I have ever seen.

We live in a place where it is a high and amazing sound, but I hope these things will be immortal. My goal with this book is not for people to say that I got it correctly. It is to motivate people to think differently about some things, or to enhance what they already think of in an added way.

I still manage the funds and assets dating back nearly two decades. Any final ideas about retracting the traditional project model?

I and I say that all the time: we will all die. We do not know when that day is. What will you do with your precious life? The number of people hanging on their nails in the seventies and eighties. . . If that gives you meaning, wonderful. But for many, the answer (a question about whether you should do this) is not yes.