Entrepreneurship and Nietzsche feat. Brad Feld

Jan 17, 2022

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Today we’re talking philosophy. And we know you may be thinking, somebody creating an app that entertains people or automates some routine office work can’t be compared to the great philosophers or great artists. But there’s more of an overlap than you may think.

Brad Feld is a co-founder of the Foundry Group, Mobius VC, and Techstars, the famous accelerator. He is also known as the author of a bunch of books, including Venture Deals, Startup Communities, and the most recent, The Entrepreneur's Weekly Nietzsche: A Book For Disruptors.

In this episode we’ll hear all about Brad’s early startup life, “authenticity and vulnerability,” his thoughts on certain entrepreneurship cliches, and mental health in the space.

Episode Quotes:

How Brad and his co-author got the idea for their latest book:

There's so much depth in Nietzsche. And when you start to unwind pieces of it and think about them in whatever the context is, an awful lot of the things, the quotes, stimulate thinking about different aspects of entrepreneurship.

And that was really what captured both of us. It's not that, you say, okay, well, Nietzsche's philosophy applies to entrepreneurship and therefore you should do these things. That's not it at all. It's almost the inverse of it. It's - here's a very provocative quote of his. Think about it, ponder it, play around with it. Apply it to your own experience. And there were so many of those that resonated against the backdrop of all the different things that happen in entrepreneurship.

Mental health and entrepreneurship:

The stigma associated with mental health is incredibly toxic. It is a huge burden on many leaders and significantly inhibits many people's ability to accomplish things and have really successful lives. It's not the mental health challenge, it's the stigma associated with it. Because the mental health challenge is a challenge. Diabetes is a health challenge. You break your arm, you break your arm. If you have bipolar disorder or you have borderline personality disorder, or you have obsessive compulsive disorder, you have chronic anxiety, these are things that you can work on.

But if you're in a place where you're afraid to even acknowledge it. Because leaders don't acknowledge those things, leaders don't do that kind of work. It's not my problem, it's your problem. I think most people that think about it for more than a couple of minutes, know many very powerful people that have extraordinary mental health issues.

Importance of sleep and self care:

There's nothing wrong with working one hundred hours a week. If you work many hours, whatever that many hours is if you are not, then taking care of yourself in the hours you are not working (which by the way includes sleep) but also include what you put into your body, how you spend your time with other people, how you spend your time by yourself. It's not healthily sustainable over a long period of time.

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