How To Build Startup EcoSystems

Feld talks about travel, startups, and communities.

I would have traveled a lot more around the world when I was younger. I travel for work in the U.S. a lot, but I’m actually quite uncomfortable in much of the world other than Europe, because I just didn’t travel that much to other parts of the world, and I think that especially today, with the globalization of business, and the amount of entrepreneurship happening everywhere in the world I think that inhibits me because I’m uncomfortable and I’m a little nervous about it. There’s some places I don’t want to go to because it seems to hard at this point in my life.

On building communities:

I’ll put energy into a startup community without knowing what I’m going to get in return. It’s not altruism. I expect to get something back. But I don’t know what, in what currency, form whom, or over what time period I’m going to get something back…I’ve gotten back so much more by taking a give-before-you-get approach than if I had defined everything transactionally up front.