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Friday, May 29, 2009
Q&A with Brad Feld of TechStars
By Mass High Tech staff
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After the 1994 sale of Feld Technologies, the Boston company he founded in 1987, Brad Feld moved to Boulder, Colo., where he has helped found two venture capital firms since 1995. In 2006, he helped start the TechStars incubator program in Boulder. The program announced a Boston session in 2009, which launched this week with nine startups participating. Mass High Tech reporter Galen Moore met with Feld at the Nantucket Conference in April.
Q: Boulder has become a recognized center for technology and innovation. How did that happen?
A: I came to Boulder and what I found was, in the mid-90s, there is a legacy of high-tech stuff. It came from the storage industry, the cable industry and the telecommunications industry… and what I didn’t know at the time was the makeup of Boulder as a population. Boulder today is roughly 150,000 people. It’s the largest per capita number of Ph.D.s in the United States; the largest per capita number of software engineers in the United States.
So, in Boulder you had this explosion of software in the Internet entrepreneurship between 1997 and 2000… A lot of people made some money — $5 million, $10 million, $20 million, $50 million — enough money where as entrepreneurs they had made it. Then the bubble burst, and it was just, you know, calamity. So what happened is in — maybe 2002, but really 2003, 2004 — those entrepreneurs who had success and failure were now experienced entrepreneurs.
Q: But why did they stay in Boulder? Why not head to Silicon Valley?
A: Well, there’s a couple of reasons. One is Boulder is a place where people come and they stay. So in the late ’90s, the rap was there’s no management talent here; there’s a lot of engineering talent and no management talent… We imported a lot of management talent between 1996 and 2000. A huge number of people came and they came in like, ‘Why am I living in Silicon Valley? My lifestyle sucks.’
Q: So with the Ph.D.s, the software expertise and the quality of life — the kind of sticking factor — it sounds a lot like Boston.
A: Here’s where the story rolls out. Boston has the same ingredients, which is that you have now in Boulder a critical mass of multi-time experienced entrepreneurs. People that have done it two, three, four times. The trick is to engage the entire life cycle of that ecosystem. The first thing that Boston should do is get rid of the Silicon Valley envy. Just say, “look, it doesn’t matter. We’re going to be the best that Boston can be at being great.” The second is to say what then are the characteristics that make an entrepreneurial community great and sustainable? I believe that the most important one is that you have to figure out and then do things that engage the first-time entrepreneurs with the experienced entrepreneurs all the way up and down the chain.
The brilliance of Silicon Valley is the endless recycling of the experienced entrepreneurs back into the first-time entrepreneurs. The willingness of 40-50-year-old guys that have made a ton of money to write $100,000 checks to seed-fund two guys that are coming out of college.
Most places don’t have it naturally occurring so you’ve got to figure out how to wire the community to create that. That’s what we did in Boulder. And the punch line is, that’s what TechStars was.
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