#448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster

You can create and build companies anywhere. The ability to build startup communities and really vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems isn't just important ... it's actually an imperative that any city with a critical mass of one hundred thousand people have a vibrant startup community.

It's important to pick the place you want to live and build your life around it rather than go to a place that you feel like you should go to because there's an opportunity there.

We are living in the middle of a crisis like none other that I've experienced in my life that's the essence of a complex system. The COVID-19 crisis is not a crisis; it's a health crisis; it's an economic crisis that was generated by the health crisis; it's a mental health crisis. In the US now, we have a racial equity crisis. By the way, none of these crises are new. The intersection of these things is part of the essence of the complex system. Each of them on their own are complex systems.

Pirsig's book, 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,' is a book I think anybody who makes anything should read. I recommend it to all entrepreneurs.

In the context of business in the US, entrepreneurship, and trying to create things, those things are true: They're not allowed to kill you, and they're not allowed to eat you.

It's really helpful to sometimes just look out the window or sit in your backyard and feel like, 'I actually don't have anything I have to be doing right now other than be right here.'

You have many people out there who are trying to create the next Silicon Valley by looking at the current Silicon Valley, but what they should be looking at are the initial conditions, say 60 years ago, that provided all the opportunities for all these emergent properties to form what we now think of as Silicon Valley.

I am not a note-taker. I'm just not. I have a good memory, but I have a memory that's a synthesizing memory versus a factual detail memory. Taking notes actually clogs up my ability to synthesize things.