Brad Feld

"We've learned a lot about how to do this at TechStars. Month 1 is "mentors meet with everyone / whomever they want." At the end of month 1, teams ask individuals to be lead mentors (three to five per company). It's bidirectional - both sides have to agree and commit." - Brad Feld

"In addition, I think people typically overestimate the engagement of "advisors" at the early stages. Some are awesome, but many are passive, and it's often hard to get the right kind of engagement. So - when you want this early help, figuring out how to incent / motivate it is important, and the board is a tool for that." - Brad Feld

"Even worse - when they show up and are uniformed, haven't looked at any material, and then proceed to ask 371 questions of the CEO and management team that don't have much to do with what is actually going on in the business. Happens ALL THE TIME - really painful." - Brad Feld

"Yup - real engagement takes real work. And a real board member will do the work. Fred is a spectacular example of this - not just with the Freeloader case, but every board I've ever worked with him on - and I expect every entrepreneur he's ever worked with would say the same." - Brad Feld

"I grew into it after having many things fail, not work, or disappoint me." - Brad Feld

"Harsh is probably the wrong word - "direct" is better (I'm tone deaf to harsh - nothing ever bothers me)." - Brad Feld

"Great - really helpful example. I like where you took this." - Brad Feld

"Super helpful - thx!" - Brad Feld

"I like the new site design. A few observations / criticisms related mostly to functionality ... LAG TIME ON EMAIL UPDATES - I am signed up for the email updates, but notice that your posts generally publish a # of hours before the update goes out on the email side. Why? It's nice to be able to comment when there are other people commenting as well (as opposed to feel like I'm always late to the punch when I want to say something - and everyone has moved along). DIMINISHING UTILITY OF TAGS AND CATEGORIES - I do not believe that the utility of the tag cloud and the categories on the right nav is sufficient for it to consume so much real estate. The first few categories that I clicked on had 1-2 posts, and they were as far back as 2009. Then there is the sort of wackiness of overlapping categories like "VC Financing" and "Venture Capital." I would guess that heuristics on where people are clicking would show that right nav to be driving very few clicks relative to the % of screen it..." - Brad Feld

"Yes - I have I, Robot on my Kindle. Time to do it again!" - Brad Feld

"Yup - Gary is my running coach!" - Brad Feld

"Super - it is a critically important and excellent book." - Brad Feld

"It perplexes me." - Brad Feld

"Enjoy!" - Brad Feld

"Awesome - glad you liked it!" - Brad Feld

"I will remind people of this!" - Brad Feld

"Fubar is one of my all time favorites." - Brad Feld

"Sure that works also for polite society!" - Brad Feld

"I never use GTTFP with Amy! Excellent reminder, calibration." - Brad Feld

"That works! I also often say "I understand. Can you be specific about what you want from me?"" - Brad Feld

"There is a huge style point in this. I don't agree with your assertion that GTTFP doesn't sell things. However, GTTFP doesn't mean "don't create context when it is needed." If someone calls me and I have no idea why they are calling, or it's a first meeting, creating context is important. But hopefully they did some of this before we met for the first time. And then, in that first meeting, hopefully the context setting is short - and crisp. I don't need the person to "audience level" by spending 15 minutes asking me questions about things that sort of lead me down a rhetorical path to the punch line of what the product or service does. In the presentation I was referring to, the first 10 minutes where a combination context setting and audience leveling in the complete absence of knowing what the product really was. Totally unnecessary and misplaced." - Brad Feld

"Or make it really easy and obvious how to cut to the chase with a big "End the Tour" button." - Brad Feld

"Yup - and think long random jaunt in a Grateful Dead concert." - Brad Feld

"Bwahahaha. Actually, two chocolate shakes from the Shake Shack usually do the trick." - Brad Feld

"Interesting - I'll look into that. I missed that for some reason." - Brad Feld