Brad Feld - Nietzsche for Founders

Angel Invest Boston

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Sponsored by Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson

Brad Feld and Dave Jilk bring the wisdom of modernity's most unsettling thinker to entrepreneurship. Like the ancient Stoics, Nietzsche has much to add to the thought of people disrupting existing assumptions today. Brief excerpts from Nietzsche are paired with essays from founders who grapple with the ideas in question.

Highlights:

• Sal Daher Introduces Brad Feld, Co-Founder of Techstars
• The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors by Dave Jilk & Brad Feld
• “…for every two lines of Nietzsche, there's probably two pages of Brad Feld and another entrepreneur talking about something really important.”
• “…I thought I knew something about Nietzsche, and pretty much everything I knew about Nietzsche was wrong.”
• “…Nietzsche was a Nazi.” - "Don't believe everything you hear about Nietzsche."
• Nietzsche’s Sister and Literary Executor Was Indeed a Nazi Who Tried to Co-opt Her Brother’s Thoughts into Nazism
• “Dave [Jilk] and I met at MIT, we've been friends since college. I met him on the first day of college.”
• Product Placement for Toscanini’s Ice Cream in Cambridge 
• Dave Jilk Is the One Who First Became Hooked on Nietzsche
• Brad Fled and Dave Jilk Edited Quotes from Open-source Translations of Nietzsche’s Works to Make Them Intelligible to 21st Century Readers
• LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Who Read Philosophy at Oxford, Wrote the Foreword
• “…page one would be the title page and would say The Venture Playbook, and the next 299 pages would be blank.”
• “The power of being an entrepreneur is finding your own way.”
• Nietzsche and Mentor Whiplash
• Silent Killers
• Fake It Before You Make – Bad & Good
• "If thou gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."
• Sal Daher Talks About Sponsor Peter Fasse of Fish & Richardson
• Brad Feld on Angel Investing
• “…of the 40 investments, 20 of them were zeros, 20 failed. Three of them were worth each more than a hundred times my money.”
• One of Brad Feld’s 100X Investments Was Harmonix (Guitar Hero)
• “…recognize that being an entrepreneur…will be more successful for you if you view it as a life journey rather than a single company.”
• “Don't ask people to be your mentor. Do things for those people that engage you with their world…”
• Brad Feld on Biotech: “…life sciences is so big…picking a couple of areas or types of companies, where you can start to build both expertise and real networking...an understanding of what's real and what's not real”
• Adam Grant’s Give and Take

Topics: co-founder, management, Techstars, software, returns, angel investing strategies