Building Startup Communities with Investor, Entrepreneur & Author Brad Feld

Startups get the party started.

You want.

Tech in tacos, tacos in tech you know we got tacos in techies on smash border green guacamole keep accountants counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us tryna raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping paella tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a craft beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos stand in puesto lucha libre and sombrero gotta shout out to coast angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside to Tijuana estee be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shoot for the Moon SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party Startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, San Diego's Tech Ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

Startups get the party. Startups get the.

I want to take a moment to thank our friends at Cox Business who have enabled us to tell these amazing stories of local leaders, technologists, founders and funders. Cox is actually a 121-year-old family run private company that thinks in terms of decades in building community a lot like we do in building a startup community. For years, the local Cox Business team has helped us grow through partnering at San Diego Startup Week, South Dakota. Quick pitch and in celebrating our technical leaders at the Top Tech Awards. The Top Tech Awards are September 17th and you can join this unique virtual networking event and awards ceremony with a very cool avatar environment built by local tech company Verbella. Buy your tickets and see who the nominees are at toptechawards.com thanks again to Cox Business for your partnership. Welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neil Bloom and I have VC entrepreneur, community startup community builder Brad Feld with me. Brad, thanks for joining.

Neil, thanks for having me. I'm psyched to be here.

Yeah, we're very excited to talk with you. We're excited for a number of reasons. One, you've been mine and many people's gurus in Building community. With your first book, Startup Communities, you've obviously helped grow a lot of great companies that have impacted us greatly. And now you're writing a second book that's going to kind of help us continue on the path of building building great communities. Do you want to quickly give a little bit of your background around first company build, maybe first investment you made and what made you want to build this? Write this, the first book?

Sure. First company was company called Feld Technologies, very creatively named. I started in 1987, had a partner, guy named Dave Jilk, self funded. We built it to about a 20 person, couple of million dollar a year business that was nicely profitable and sold it in 1993 to a public company called Ameridata Technologies. When I was with Amerit, I worked for them for about a year and a half and quickly transitioned from running my small little business into a staff role that was a cto. But I took most of the money that I made from selling my first company and invested in 40 companies between 1994 and 1996, sort of at the rise of the commercial Internet. The very first one of those was a company called Net Genesis that was started by a guy named Raj Bhargava. Raj is now running a company called JumpCloud, which is our seventh company that we've worked on together. My partner Seth Levine is on the board. It's one of the faster growing companies in Colorado and in our portfolio. And an early company that I invest in, I think it was. A fourth company that many people will have heard of is Harmonix, which is a particularly fun one. It's a company that made Guitar Hero Rock band and Dance central. And I was one of the seed investors there. And today Foundry Group is still an investor in Harmonix because the company was bought by Viacom and then the founders bought it back and we got a chance to invest again. I wrote my first book, well, the first Startup Communities book in 2012. It was my third book I'd written Do More Faster with David Cohen, who is one of the co founders of techstars with me. That was our first book. My first book I learned how to write a book and it was an interesting experience because it's pretty challenging. Second book was Venture how to be smarter than your Lawyer and vc, which I wrote with Jason Mendelson. That book's now on its 4th edition and continues to be a very popular book for all things investing in venture capital. I was motivated to write Startup Communities, which came out in 2012 because I had been thinking about and working on this idea. I didn't really have a label for it. Nobody really called things a startup community back then. Sometimes you'd hear like innovation cluster or research something or innovation hub, or occasionally you'd hear the phrase entrepreneurial ecosystem, but nobody really knew what that phrase meant, and it was kind of ponderous. I had been really fascinated with what was happening in Boulder. Probably around 2010, I started thinking about it more intellectually. TechStart started in 2006. We ran our first accelerator 2007. We started Foundry Group in 2007. And the Dynamics of what was happening in Boulder was pretty awesome. And at the same time, there was this giant global financial crisis thing that was happening between 2008 and 2010. And yet the Boulder startup community just cranked along. And in 2010, there was starting to be talk about how innovation and entrepreneurship would lead us out of the global financial crisis. And there was an article that talked about that activity, specifically naming cities like the Bay Area, which of course is not a city. New York, Boston, and Boulder. And that was perplexing and intriguing. Right, Because Boulder is much smaller than all the others. It's 100,000 people. So I started thinking a lot harder about what was going on, and that prompted me to start running startup communities.

Interesting. So you had a long, long journey before you kind of wanted to start talking about it, Right? You built companies, you'd invest in companies. You were building the Boulder community for a while. And do you think it took a while to kind of synthesize and say, oh, here's the playbook. Here's how I should put it down?

Very much. And the experience I had was as an entrepreneur, and I started a number of companies, not just that first one as an angel investor and then as a venture investor. I had this experience as a venture investor of riding the bubble up and then getting crushed by Internet bubble. So a lot of time spent experiencing company creation from lots of different angles. I lived in Boulder. I lived in Boulder, moved to Boulder in 1995 from Boston, where we lived until 1995. And I was very involved in what was going on in Boston, but it was different because there was a lot of texture to the startup community in Boulder and a long history, or, sorry, in Boston, and a long history of entrepreneurial activity. Interestingly, in 2009, I would suggest that the Boston startup community was really depressed. And in some ways, when we brought Techstars to Boston in 2009, it was one of the things that helped re energize what was going on in the Boston startup community. Again, it's useful to go back in time and realize that I'm referring to these things as startup communities, even though back then that's not what people called them. In addition, when I moved to Boulder in 1995, I had no expectations of doing any business in Boulder. I was traveling across the country. My investments were East Coast, West Coast. I chose Boulder to live, and Amy and I decided to give it six months. And we knew one person here and he moved away. So our view was, we'll either love Boulder or not. If we love Boulder, we're here. If we don't love Boulder, we'll go try a different place. And that helped form a view that I have. It's very deeply held that you should choose the place you want to live and build your life around it rather than go someplace because of an opportunity. And one of the things that always some spectrum of troubled annoyed bothered me was this notion and the cliche that if you want to start a tech company, you need to go to the Bay Area. I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. There's lots of great things about the Bay Area, but there's also lots of challenges about the Bay Area. And personally, it's not a place I'd want to live. This is not my place. And I just never agreed with the sentiment that if you wanted to start a tech company, you needed to be in the Bay Area, which then extended to be, if you want to be entrepreneurial, you need to be in the Bay Area. And I experienced many successful companies in lots of different parts of the US I have a little bit of exposure globally around the world, but most of my experience is in the US And I just didn't agree with it. So part of my motivation, certainly part of the motivation for starting Techstars in 2006, part of our foundational view at Foundry was that we were going to invest around the US About a third of the companies in California, about Northern and Southern, about a third of our companies in Colorado, and about a third of our companies everywhere else in the U.S. and of course, Techstars today is global. My view was not only is it important for entrepreneurs to be able to start companies anywhere, it's important for cities to be able to have a vibrant startup community. And the notion that a city needs to have this endless stream of innovation as one of the inputs in the city, as one of the things that's going on, it's not the only thing. You need lots of other stuff to make your city healthy and vibrant over a long period of time. But the absence of a startup community and real entrepreneurship and new company creation is. If it's lacking in your city, it'll really inhibit the health of your city over the long term. Hmm, interesting.

So a lot to unpack there, but obviously from reading Startup Communities multiple times, you can see where you synthesize that all through and how you said, this is what I know and this is what I learned. Try it yourself. And a lot of people did, obviously, right? A lot of people have read that book, taken it as the blueprint for starting their startup community. But you fast forward eight years, you obviously observed a lot of that happening and realized there's not one blueprint, which I think you highlight a lot in the New Startup Community Way book, which is that you've figured out these are all complex systems and it's really about the inputs and less about kind of forcing, controlling the outputs. Did I summarize that right? Kind of the big piece that you learned from.

Extremely well said. When Ian Hathaway, my co author, and I started working on the Startup Community Way, we knew we wanted to create a sequel to Startup Communities. And I already had the idea. I was going to do a second edition because I got a couple of things wrong in the first book and I wanted to add a chapter on corporations, and ultimately we added a chapter on rural startup communities and added a couple of new examples as we're writing the sequel after about a year of writing, we started in about 2017, we'd probably written 30,000 words, which is a good first draft. I mean, you need about 50,000 words for a book like this. And we felt like it sucked. We just were not very happy with it. Some of the stuff we'd written we liked, some of the words were good, some of the sections and anecdotes and descriptions were good. But we were not happy at all with the book. And we just didn't feel like we hadn't nailed the organizing principle of the book. And we also didn't have the right metaphor or framework or whatever that we wanted for the idea of the startup community. We're trying to answer the question, what now? Right? Where people have been doing Startup communities for five years. Lots of things. Well, lots of things that they've struggled with. Some things work, some things don't, but sort of like, okay, now what? And we were trying to answer that question, and one day Ian called me and he said, I've got the framework. And I said, all right. And he just Said one phrase. He said complex adaptive systems. He knew that I knew about complexity theory some because we talked about it a little bit and we shortened the phrase complex adaptive systems just to complex systems. Because a complex adaptive system is a subset of complex systems. It's a particular type. The idea was startup communities are complex systems. At the time, we knew that in the book we'd have to explain complex systems. And so we started unrolling that and reorganizing the book around it. We hit another and we. And we redid the whole book. We threw away the first draft completely. We kept little pieces here and there. We just threw it away and we built the whole framework around complex systems. One of the ideas of complex systems is they're non deterministic. There is no blueprint, there is no playbook. You don't know what the outcome is. And the inputs to different things, the experiments you run, the things you try generate outputs and those outputs become inputs. And all these things are happening and interacting with each other in lots of different ways. Now today, in this moment, in the middle of 2020, it's actually very broadly useful because complexity theory, which really started to emerge as a thing in the 1980s, systems dynamics was the origin of it in the 1950s, 1960s at MIT, Jay Forrester. But then the Santa Fe Institute and a bunch of people created this notion of complexity theory. We're living in the middle of the collision of a number of complex systems that are unprecedented in terms of both the magnitude and the dynamics of those systems in our life. And that's the COVID crisis. We have a health crisis which is in and of itself a complex system. It's one that there's no playbook for dealing with this. And if you think about how everybody is addressing things in the United states, we're running 50 different experiments, one per state, some failing miserably, some doing okay. Sweden just ran an experiment that appears to have really failed. And the subject matter of the experiment are human beings, which is a little complicated. Complicated is kind of a loaded word. It's complex because human beings themselves are complex. You have this health crisis that generated an economic crisis. Our economy was very strong. In the absence of a health crisis. Economy itself is a complex system. It's not deterministic. It runs in cycles. And there's lots of different things that affect the cycles from lots of different dimensions and lots of different times. It's generating a mental health crisis. We're not used to being in our houses 24 hours a day. We've got unemployment that is the most we've ever seen in our lifetime. A huge number of people that are under lots of stress from lots of places. Frontline workers, healthcare workers, family members that are sick or afraid of sick or die, just all the different stuff. Oh, and layer on top of that sort of the craziness around our media and our global political dynamics and how everybody talks about things and sort of in the middle of this, George Floyd gets murdered. You know, not the first time in recent history that a black man gets murdered by police, but it generates interdependent with all these other things, a resurgence of focus on racial equity and the racial inequity crisis which has been going on for, you know, over 450 years in the U.S. all of these things are interacting with each other in ways that are unpredictable and generating all different kinds of effects, which is how a complex system works. Interestingly, when I, when you think about, if you go zoom into your own startup community, all the same characteristics are happening within your startup community as it unfolds over time. And you know, one of the important messages in the first startup communities book was that it the startup community is bottom up instead of top down. It's network driven instead of hierarchically driven. I made those points pretty firmly in 2012. Today, in 2020, right. Not only are we doing bottom up and network driven, sort of, we're living in a world that is much more virtual and much more interconnected. So while physical place is still a fundamental part of a startup community, one of the things we try to do in the startup community way is talk about the importance of physical place, but also disconnect pH from the idea of how a community grows and evolves and expands and how a network grows and evolves and expands and it becomes very rich and very powerful when you figure out how to get these startup communities interconnecting with each other across geography rather than being limited to just within their own geography. Yeah. Wow.

How timely for all these concepts to be coming out while we're figuring out new ways.

The new normal couldn't have predicted it. You know, in February when we were putting the final touches on the book, we didn't have a single word about COVID in the book. I think the last, you know, there are books coming out in July, so I think the last edit cycle we had was, you know, in April we were able to add some things in and in two or three places we made allusions to Covid or mentioned Covid explicitly. But it's, it's so helpful in Some ways when I read through the book using the lens of COVID rather than using the COVID crisis, rather than the lens of Startup Communities. And all of it's the same. Yeah.

And you've got kind of a new input or that you're testing out with this virtual community. You've created the Startup Communities community, which is an experiment there as well too, right.

Yeah. I have decided whether to call it the Startup Community Community, which is what I started calling it. I'm using a tool called Mighty Network. So I started trying out on some people the idea of calling it the Mighty Start. And yeah, I've been waiting since I wrote Startup Communities for somebody to create a global virtual startup community. And nobody has. And there's been plenty of LinkedIn things and Facebook things and Slack Groups. Slack Groups and whatever. But that's different, right. That's not really what I'm looking for. And Slack is while it's an interesting tool for something like this, I'm in lots of Slack communities. It's totally the wrong kind of tool for this kind of dynamic. And I sort of stumbled upon Mighty Networks. I knew of it, but I'd never really used it. I looked at some of the other larger communities. It's really a great product for this kind of thing. And what I've done is created a completely open, bottoms up organic startup community that's virtual, that's self evolving. I'm not trying to control it. Yeah, I seeded it with some content, I seeded it with some topics. I immediately got about 20 people to act as moderators who are people in the startup community and so sort of gave them the ability to help it be self organizing. And as part of that, anybody can invite anyone. Sure. At some point I'm sure we'll have edge case issues that we've got to deal with as like any community. You have to. But the community can be self policing and self organizing in that construct, which is something I talk about in the first Startup Community book. Like you assume good intent and when there's a bad actor, the organ organism deals with the bad actor. And you know, you're in that community so you've seen a little bit of it. You know, I. I'm frankly blown away. I mean, I didn't have any real expectation around it. And you know, less than two weeks with very little promotion, a couple of blog posts and a tweet here and there. It's got 2,500 people in it. It's growing every day and the content's evolving. Right. You know, at first, it's a lot of, hi, here I am, and I'm doing this, and a couple of things that people are sitting and now all of a sudden people are organizing into what are called circles, which are geographies, where they're starting to focus on, okay, I can't follow everything everybody's doing, but I'm going to focus on these three topics. I care about accelerators, I care about complex systems, and I care about events around startup communities. All of a sudden you start to see the people in those areas asking questions and doing stuff. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty fun to be a part of. Thanks for your involvement in it, too.

Absolutely. No, thanks for having me. It's really fun to. To add people in and see what they go off and do, you know, different than what I intended for them to enjoy, join and get out of it. So it's exactly the perfect concept.

It's an important point. One of the things that humans are uncomfortable with in general are situations where they're not in control. And as humans are now. And we talk about this a lot, Ian and I talk about this a lot throughout startup community way as humans, we, we want to create systems that allow us to control things, makes us more comfortable, makes us feel safe. But many things that we engage in that are complex systems, you can't control them. And so it's an artificial feeling of control. And so you feel good about being in control until you're not, and then you end up in a much worse position than you would have been in if you recognized a priori that you couldn't control the dynamic. Think about a parent with a kid. A kid is the epitome of a complex system. If, if, when your child is born you say, all right, here's the deal, they're going to go, they're going to get A's in high school, they're going to play tennis, they're going to go to Harvard, they're going to be a doctor and they're going to become a cardiologist. And when I'm old, they're going to take care of me. Like, I can almost guarantee you that, that the kid is going to do the opposite of those things. None of those things are going to happen. If you try, you have to, as a parent, try to enforce that on it. There's some situations where that might happen, but then the kid's going to need a lot of therapy because of all issues that happened. And like, the more you try to now you can provide Inputs you can nurture, you can provide suggestion, you can create experiences. That's very different than saying this is what you're going to do and this is what the outcome will be. So you have to get comfortable with that. And once you get comfortable with that ambiguity of a complex system, with the inability for one to control it, that's when magic can start to happen.

Yeah, absolutely. I have a follow up to that, but I want to introduce the concept that you around the feeders, the leaders, and in this book you add in the instigators.

Yes.

Do you want to kind of talk through those three parts?

Yeah. And this was one of the things I got wrong in startup communities. So I went back and in the second edition I've added instigators in as well. In startup communities, I talk about feeders and leaders and they're the two components, the two different components of a startup community. I say entrepreneurs have to be leaders, everyone else is a feeder. The thing I got wrong was not that the separation, but the way I labeled them. I should have called them apples and papayas because I inadvertently created a one up, one down relationship between leaders and feeders. I did not mean that leaders were more important than feeders. They're both important, they just play very different roles. As Ian and I were working through this, we realized that the thing that we were missing was not the idea that organizations couldn't be leaders. That's correct. The organizations have to play a different role as feeders. But what we missed was there's a whole category of people who today there's lots of different words for them, but community, champion, ecosystem developer, that kind of dynamic, that person who works for a feeder or who isn't an entrepreneur who plays a leadership role in the startup community. We ended up calling those folks instigators. So people end up being leaders. They're either entrepreneurs, the leaders are either entrepreneurs, or people who are these instigators who are playing the leadership role in the startup community. By the way, there's lots of people in the startup community who are not leaders, but they're just participants in the startup community. But then the organizations themselves play a feeder role. Interestingly, that clicked it into view for us that we created these two categories. Leaders who have to be entrepreneurs, instigators who are everyone else playing a leadership role, and then the feeders who are the organizations. One of the powerful things about that separation is we start to give a voice to a lot of people who spend an enormous amount of energy and time playing leadership roles. In startup communities, but don't necessarily identify as entrepreneurs and help them understand that there are some different dynamics between them and the entrepreneurs who are playing the leadership roles. They're not equivalent in terms of their functional behavior, but they're equivalent in terms of their importance.

That's interesting. So it's interesting that you, that there's some functions of instigators or say, maybe aspects of being a service provider, maybe like say in the capital side. Right, as an investor. But you could also be an entrepreneur. Right. So can you play multiple roles?

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, I, I'm a good example of that. If I view myself as an, as an investor from a, from a foundry group VC perspective, I view myself much more as an instigator than a leader. When I view myself from the frame of reference of a co founder of techstars as an entrepreneur, I think of myself more as a leader. And so I always had some confusion in my brain when I talked about leaders and feeders because my own identity was such that whenever I talk about VCs, VCs are feeders, they're not the leaders. And as a VC, while people would regularly refer to me as a leader, I'm like, nah, actually I'm a feeder too. I'm a vc, I'm an investor. I exist to help entrepreneurs succeed. That's what the startup community exists for. I'm not the entrepreneur that the startup community exists for. I'm a participant in the startup community helping other entrepreneurs be successful so people can cross over between those roles. And that's super healthy. And so in some ways, the separation of organizations. Right. If you are a university or you are a city government, you can't be the leader. You can't try to organize your natural tendency to create hierarchical structure around whatever you're doing, organizing principles around things where you'll try to put yourself at the top and the center of it, and you'll lose sight of the idea that the reason that the startup community exists is to help the entrepreneurs succeed. And that's natural. That's not because universities are bad. That's just naturally how they're wired to work and how their incentives work and how their cultures work and how people talk and think about it. So when they intersect with the startup community, like having a different kind of language around the power of how their behavior can be, is important. You said this at the beginning. Right. The other thing that's really useful that I think we bring out in the book pretty well, we started to label a lot of the conditions around the startup community and the people around the startup community in more depth. So we refer to actors who are the people and factors which are the activities and conditions. Really important thing to understand about a complex system is it's not the specific activities or the specific people, it's the links between and the things that happen. That's where all the juices and so a lot of systems, a lot of structure starts to focus on the individual pieces rather than the connective tissue between the pieces. And that connective tissue is where so much of what really happens. Both in a network, in the evolution of something, in how things work or don't work. Interestingly, lots of institutions, if you go back to university, are very focused on the university as the thing and the pieces of the university thing. Again, not bad, just natural, trying to figure out it's not exclusive. Many people within the university are very focused on the interconnectivity of this stuff, but it's not the natural orientation. Whereas in a startup community, if you take two entrepreneurs and you put them on a timeline over 10 years, they're thinking about all the stuff that's happening and all the things they're doing and all the interconnecting points rather than I have a company and it looks like this. More verb than noun.

Got it. Well, it's interesting. Related to that is you talk about kind of product market fit of a startup community or when you feel it, you have a different word for it that you use though. Ecosystem fit. Is that what it is?

Ecosystem, community fit. So in this book, in the startup community way, we very deliberately separate between a startup community and an entrepreneurial ecosystem. They're different things and they often get conflated and it's pervasive. I was on another conversation earlier today and the person continued to use the word, mix up the word. So you hear startup ecosystems, you hear entrepreneurial communities, and they're fine. But I really wanted to try to separate the two and really get focused on startup community as a thing where that thing, its mission is to help entrepreneurs succeed. The entrepreneurial ecosystem is the ecosystem of participants, of actors, of which the startup community is a piece of. And when you start zooming out and thinking about the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the motivations of the different participants, the different actors change. So inside the core of startup community, your goal is to have help entrepreneurs succeed. But when you get to entrepreneurial ecosystem, if you're a university participating in the entrepreneurial ecosystem as well, your motivations around that may change. If you're government, your motivations around that may change, and that's fine. But understanding the difference between those two constructs and when you're focusing on evolving the startup community, I would make the assertion that without a really vibrant startup community, you can't have an entrepreneurial ecosystem that's of interest. Once you have a vibrant startup community, the entrepreneurial ecosystem starts to get some critical mass and build around it. And you've seen it. I mean, you see it today in 2020, 2020, with the number of feeder organizations that have emerged that are really additive to both the startup community, but also the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. Whereas I would assert that most of the entrepreneurs involved are 100% of their energy focused on the startup community and their companies.

Yeah, I think I touched on it or I connected a lot to the fit part in San Diego when just a few years ago, all of a sudden people started building bridges between organizations and said, hey, like, let's align. Let's realize, like, we're good at one thing, we will feed from us to you and help the entrepreneur on their journey from ideation to crushing it. Right? And that was a big turning point. And I related to that feeling when people said, hey, let's break these silos down, let's feed people through their path. So you touched on that part. And I think San Diego specifically is just starting to feel that that fit in the last few years, which is being a force multiplier for us.

It's a great aha moment. Because the ecosystem community fit happens when that starts happening, because startup communities are naturally smaller than the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. And so in an entrepreneurial ecosystem, you'll often have multiple startup communities. And when you start seeing those bridges being connected between things, not because you formally connected organizations and did a business deal and merged them together, but people just start collapsing, collaborating in different ways. You're playing what I now in the second edition of Startup Communities refer to as a positive sum game. In the first edition, I referred to as a non zero sum game. This is a case where entrepreneurship is such a small part of the overall fabric of our society. It's a really important piece of the fabric. But it's small that when you start getting people that I'm working on this over here and you're working on that over here. If you view it as a zero sum game, I win, you lose, or you win, I lose. Just like in sports or in politics. And that's a dumb way to think about it, because we can have a positive sum game, we both are benefiting, that links Nicely back to the notion of complex systems and the idea of a positive feedback loop increasing returns, which was a phrase first coined by Brian Arthur in the 1980s. It's the beginning of complexity theory, this notion of these positive feedback loops. And it's very easy instinctively to understand them. It's very hard to kind of live in them. An example would be if you think about contagion. In this moment with COVID we all think about negative contagion, the feedback loop of the disease spreading. It's a negative thing. And the feedback loop is one where the more the disease spreads, the higher the infection as the what's called R naught increases above 1. The higher it goes above 1, the faster the disease spreads. But it doesn't have to be a big number above one, because you know of that positive feedback loop, or in this case, a negative dynamic around it. Interestingly, positive contagion is what you see when you're playing a positive sum game, where all of a sudden you have a positive feedback. By the way, positive and negative contagion can be confusing too, because the feedback loop that's happening with the spread of disease is actually positive contagion. Even though it's a negative thing. Negative contagion is a slowdown of it. But this interesting dynamic of a geometric curve or an exponential curve rather than a line, and you know, what you described is another example, which is a component of a complex system called a phase shift, which is everything is moving along on a trajectory that feels good, and then suddenly something happens and it's totally different. And in a positive way. It's like you leveled up in some weird way, and there's not like a date where people said, oh, this happened, and then now we're better. It's that all of a sudden you're like, whoa, how did that happen? And the same thing on the negative, right? You can have a phase shift that puts you into a negative context where everything felt good, and you're like, whoa, when did that get all screwed up? And the example you give with San Diego is helpful, and it's something I've seen with my interactions around many startup communities, including San Diego, which is people are making good progress in different things. And there's lots of interaction around the startup communities. And then a couple of things happen, and you can usually point to them. A company goes public, some organizations get some critical mass. You get some entrepreneurial recycling of some people who generated some wealth that are investing in new startups. You have a new wave of people come into the startup community from other geographies and the startup community welcomes them in. And so you get this cross fertilization. All of a sudden three or four of these things happen all at the same time and you know, whoa, we're in a totally different place than we were in positive way than before.

Yeah, yeah, I absolutely can. I know that feeling when it happened, you know, when the elements, the ingredients came together. Similarly, on like even more micro level for an entrepreneur to almost say, you know, instead of only building my business, I'm going to look up and look around me and say, is there a community? Should I be helping? Should I be joining, should I be building and leading myself? Is there a similar moment there? Is there something we can, I don't know, harp on around that for the entrepreneur's awakening?

Sure. I encourage for the entrepreneurs to be, to be selfish or self interested, figure out things that are going to help your business. In the context of the startup community. One of the big easy ones to point out is recruiting people. If you have more visibility in the startup community, your ability to recruit people is going to be higher. If you need a specialized set of people, here's an example from 2012 ish 2013. I talked to an entrepreneur in Denver who said, I don't have time, I'm too busy running my company. Everything you're saying, Brad's nice and interesting, but I've got to run my company. I said, all right, what's the biggest problem you have with your company? And this person says, the biggest problem I have my company is finding iOS developers. Just can't find them. That's the rate limiting factor in my company. If I could find more iOS developers, I grow faster. I said, I don't think there's an iOS meetup in Denver. Why don't you start hosting an iOS meetup each month? Just serve pizza, have your iOS developers lead, invite their friends, make a lot of noise about you having an iOS meetup. There's this thing called meetup.com that you can build it on and just go for it. The end result of that phenomena was incredible. And what you ended up having a year later was 50, 75 people every month. New people would come each month. The pizza was still mediocre pizza. And when I asked this CEO entrepreneur how it was going, unbelievable. Like, you know, we've got no, no issues on finding people. Now everybody's referring their friends to us. You know, we're, we're, we built a really good community. I'm not even worried about the guys that Work for me, leaving and going somewhere else because, you know, they're so excited about being at the center of this, you know, iOS dynamic. Right. So it doesn't have to be that you're selfless as an entrepreneur. You should orient it from the standpoint of things that are going to feed you and satisfy you and make you feel good and feel excited.

Yeah, that's a great example. This being the tacos and tech podcast. We do like to talk tacos, which San Diego has some good ones. So does Denver as well, too. And Boulder. I don't know the taco scene in Boulder. Do you have a favorite kind of taco and a Go to spot?

Yeah, probably. The Go to spot in Boulder for me for a long time has been a place called Tiaco, which is across from our office. It's run by a guy named Peter, so sort of a local place rather than a chain. And it's. It's what you would expect, Right. It's got. And the window's open, so it's sort of on. On the street level too. I don't eat meat, although I eat some fish. So my favorite tacos generally are some version of either veggie tacos. Spicy. I grew up in Texas, so I like spicy. And then I actually don't view shrimp as meat. I view shrimp as protein pods. So I particularly like shrimp in whatever I'm doing. So I'd say the Tiaco shrimp tacos are probably my favorites.

Okay, that sounds good. We can take you out sometime. Post Covid for some fish tacos in San Diego, which my guess is the.

Fish in San Diego is a little better than the fish in den in Boulder.

It's possible. I don't want to ruffle feathers, but we have some pretty good fish tacos. I know you have some San Diego connections. I think StockTwits originally was there and you have some connections to them. And Howard Lindsin, right?

Howard's a really close friend and we've been friends for a long time. I was early investor in Social Leverage, his venture fund. We'd done some stuff together. I was actually with Fred Wilson, Investors in Wall Strip, which was Howard's previous company that never really raised any venture funding. We just invested personally as angels. He had a nice exit to CBS. And this was in the mid 2000, so like 2005 or 6 or somewhere in that time frame. And then Foundry invested in stock twits and we're very happy investors in stock twits. It has grown very nicely as a business and. And Howard's obsessed about fintech and finance and stock trading and he's just peeing your pants. Funny kind of guy. So as friends we've become really close. Him, his wife Ellen, my wife Amy, and his kids are good kids too. They're now grown up and so it's pretty funny to see little Lindsayns as young adults taking on the world. It is, it is.

And seeing them affect startups now. I remember I think Rachel having a role with Rally Road, which is pretty.

Cool to see as well too. And I was in, I came and visited Howard in Phoenix earlier this year after he got sick. And Rachel, we went out to dinner one night and Ellen, Howard, Rachel and I. And then we sat around and we watched Fire island. One of the Fire island ones. I can't remember which one. People don't know Fire island, it's F Y R E and it's like the complete total train wreck millennial event that just goes horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly wrong. And it's an entrepreneurial story of disaster. And we watched it all together and it's so fun to watch Rachel roll her eyes at Howard.

Oh, I'm sure, for sure there's plenty to roll your eyes at. He's fun and we miss him being in the startup community as much. But he still spends his time in San Diego and meets with companies so he's really giving of the local community too, which is awesome. Well Brad, thanks for the time, thanks for the opportunity to talk through startup communities, but really to help us look at what's next, which is the startup community way to help us say here's what more we can be doing for our own communities from an input perspective. So I'm really excited for everyone else to read it. And we're actually have already set up a virtual discussion group at least in San Diego where we're all going to read it and then have a little book club discussion. So I look forward to giving you some feedback from that as well. And thanks again for joining the podcast, Neil.

Thanks for having me and everything you do and look forward to seeing you around.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter, too.