018 | Building Communities with Other Companies with Brad Feld | Studio CMO - a podcast by Golden Spiral, Shaping Technology Marketing

The Episode in 60 Seconds

Everybody knows that Brad Feld "wrote the book" on start-ups. But what does he have to say to growth-stage companies or mature companies?

A lot.

Brad takes us into the stories of companies he helped start that have grown and learned tough lessons along the way.

The core of the interview explores:

• The call to always experiment and innovate. What tasks to keep doing so that you can keep learning.
• How to build communities with other businesses. You can't scale your company alone.

Our Guest

Brad Feld has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars. A writer and speaker on venture capital investing and entrepreneurship, Brad has written a number of books as part of the Startup Revolution series, and writes the blogs Feld Thoughts and Venture Deals. Brad holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Management Science from MIT. An art collector and long-distance runner, he has completed 25 marathons as part of his mission to finish a marathon in each of the 50 U.S. states. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Show Notes

John urges Brad to reflect on his career and contributions with this question, "If you were to sum up what others should know about you in a paragraph, what do you want others to know about you?" (2:04 and following)

Your company is an endless series of small experiments. - Brad Feld

We explore other questions including:

• How does a CMO of an established or growth-stage company learn from a successful startup in 2020?
  
  What has hindsight taught you about coaching and leading other companies? What was one thing you concept you got wrong in the first edition Venture Deals?
• What did you learn from your work with Uber?
• How does a company change when stagnant? How do you keep growing, or more importantly, scale (or scale again)?
• How would you advice a marketing leader to play an active role in growth?

Regularly learn from the things that fail. - Brad Feld

I think the best marketing leaders spend much more time with customers around the selling process and the product process than they do internally with their teams. - Brad Feld

Brad's Latest Book: The Startup Community Way

Many cities fail to nurture startup communities because governments, large corporations and universities are not effectively collaborating with entrepreneurs or with each other.

A critical disconnect remains between the entrepreneurial mindset and those of many other organizations who wish to engage with and support entrepreneurship. There are structural reasons for this, but these obstacles can be overcome with appropriate focus, specific behaviors, and sustained practice.

An explanatory guide for startup communities, The Startup Community Way is rooted in the theory of complex systems. The book establishes the systemic properties of entrepreneurial ecosystems and reveals why their complex nature leads people to make predictable mistakes. As complex systems, value creation occurs in startup communities primarily through the interaction of the parts - the people, organizations, resources, and conditions involved - not the parts themselves. This continual process of bottom-up interactions unfolds autonomously, producing value in novel and unexpected ways. Through these complex, emergent processes, the whole becomes greater and substantially different than what the parts alone could produce.

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