The Investor's Shelf — one person
Brad Feld
Co-founder of Foundry Group and Techstars; earlier co-founder of Intensity Ventures and Mobius Venture Capital
Venture Deals is the standard practitioner reference on term sheets and Startup Communities named a field; both long outlived the blog posts they grew from.
9 books of their own · 1 letters · 11 articles · 61 books they recommend
Books they wrote 9
Jason Mendelson · 2011 · Multiple editions since 2011; grew out of the 2005 term sheet series
· 2012 · Subtitled 'Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City'
Amy Batchelor · 2013 · Open Library lists Feld alone; written with Amy Batchelor
Mahendra Ramsinghani · 2013 · Open Library lists Feld alone; second edition 2022 adds Matt Blumberg
· 2023 · Open Library records it as '#GiveFirst' with a 2017 date; published 2023
Letters 1
Feld Thoughts (feld.com) is Feld's own twenty-plus-year archive - he has posted since 2004, and the /archives/<year>/<month>/<slug>/ structure makes every post individually addressable. It is a blog rather than an investor letter series; Foundry Group and Techstars publish no LP letters.
Articles and essays 11
- Helping To End The Stigma Around Mental Health By Talking About ItFeld Thoughts, 2017
- Why This VC Is Dropping 'Entrepreneur' From His VocabularyInc., 2015
- Brad Feld author archiveInc., 2015
- Mentors 2/18: Expect Nothing In ReturnFeld Thoughts, 2014
- The Best Way to Improve How You ThinkInc., 2014
- Entrepreneurial Life Shouldn't Be This Way - Should It?Inc., 2013
- The Simple Change That's Completely Transformed How I Get Things DoneInc., 2013
- U.S. Immigration Policy Is Killing InnovationInc., 2013
- Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture CapitalistFeld Thoughts, 2011
- Revisiting the Term SheetFeld Thoughts, 2008
- Term Sheet Series Wrap UpFeld Thoughts, 2005
Blog
Books they recommend 61
Brad Feld's reading list reflects two largely separate intellectual lives that occasionally cross. In the first, he is a working venture capitalist and startup builder: the books are operational, focused on how companies are structured, how deals are made, and how early-stage founders can avoid the most expensive mistakes. In the second, he is a person who has struggled with depression and written honestly about it — and that experience drives a very different set of reading choices, toward psychology, mental health memoir, and the science of the mind. Feld has maintained an active reading log and review practice on his blog since the early 2000s, making him unusually transparent about what he reads and why.
Book recommendations listed on their Good Books profile 41
Fiction 9
Entrepreneurship and Startups 7
Biography and Memoir 5
Technology and Computing 3
Politics and Government 3
Psychology and Behaviour 2
Sport 2
General History 2
Business and Management 2
Artificial Intelligence 1
Philosophy 1
Company Histories 1
Economics 1
Travel and Exploration 1
Productivity and Habits 1
Superbook reading list 12
Entrepreneurship and Startups 5
Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson · not in an entry yet
“Feld co-authored this book specifically because founders kept getting taken advantage of in term sheet negotiations. He has described it as the book he wished existed when he was first learning the industry — a plain-language breakdown of every clause in a venture term sheet and what it actually means for control.”
Ben Horowitz
“Ben Horowitz's account of running Opsware through near-death experiences is one of the books Feld has cited most consistently on his blog as an honest portrayal of what startup leadership actually feels like. The absence of a framework or a tidy conclusion is precisely what he values about it.”
Peter Thiel
“Feld has recommended Thiel's contrarian take on startups and monopolies as a useful provocation — less a how-to guide than an argument about which questions are worth asking. He values it for pushing founders to think about category creation rather than incremental improvement.”
Steve Blank
“Steve Blank's customer development methodology predated the lean startup movement and is a Feld staple recommendation. He has pointed to the customer discovery and validation phases specifically as the discipline most early-stage founders skip at their peril.”
Eric Ries
“Feld has recommended Ries's systematization of customer feedback loops as one of the most influential frameworks to emerge from Silicon Valley in the 2010s. He values it particularly for founding teams who are building before they have validated what customers actually want.”
Not yet given a topic 3
Brad Feld, David Cohen · not in an entry yet
“Feld co-edited this Techstars anthology with David Cohen as a practical companion to the accelerator's curriculum. It collects hard-won lessons from founders who went through the program, organized around the core decisions and inflection points every early-stage company faces.”
Jessica Livingston · not in an entry yet
“Jessica Livingston's interview collection captures the early days of companies that became significant, before the mythology hardened. Feld has recommended it on his blog for the texture it gives to what the first year of a startup actually looks like — unglamorous, uncertain, and almost always different from the story told later.”
Kay Redfield Jamison · not in an entry yet
“Kay Redfield Jamison's memoir of bipolar disorder is the book Feld has cited most directly in discussions of his own depression. He has written about reading it as a recognition experience — an account of a high-functioning person whose inner life bore no resemblance to their external success. It shaped how he thinks about mental health in founder communities.”
Sales and Marketing 1
Geoffrey A. Moore
“Geoffrey Moore's technology adoption lifecycle framework appears repeatedly in Feld's discussions of how startups reach mainstream customers. He has called it one of the most durable marketing books ever written for technology companies and returns to it when advising portfolio companies on go-to-market transitions.”
Business and Management 1
Andrew S. Grove
“Andy Grove's operational manual has been on Feld's short list of management books for years. He has written about it on his blog as one of the few books that actually teaches how to run a company at the process level — meetings, performance reviews, and decision-making under uncertainty — rather than just describing what good management looks like.”
Leadership 1
Jerry Colonna · not in an entry yet
“Jerry Colonna's book on leadership and psychological depth is one Feld has discussed specifically in the context of his own mental health work. Colonna, a former VC, addresses the way founders and investors bring unresolved personal material into their companies, and Feld has cited it as essential reading for anyone in a high-stakes leadership role.”
Psychology and Behaviour 1
Johann Hari · not in an entry yet
“Johann Hari's investigation into the social and structural causes of depression appears in Feld's reading recommendations in the same cluster as An Unquiet Mind. Where Jamison writes from personal experience, Hari examines the research — and Feld has noted that reading the two together gave him a fuller picture of what depression actually is and isn't.”
Books category archive (book reviews) — feld.com 8
Not yet given a topic 2
Entrepreneurship and Startups 2
Fiction 1
Technology and Computing 1
General History 1
Artificial Intelligence 1
Reid Hoffman · not in an entry yet
Where they publish 8
- Books category archive (book reviews) — feld.com
- Good Books — Brad Feld profile
- Superbook reading list
- Brad Feld's blog — feld.com book reviews
- Venture Deals book site
- Techstars blog
- Brad Feld on mental health — feld.com
- feld.com/books — Feld's own books, plus his statement that he reviews what he reads on the blog and logs everything on Goodreads