Brad Feld

Brad Feld grew up in Dallas, where they think big.

Now 31, Feld is an investor and advisor to 25 software companies. “If I’m doing what I love with great people, amazing things happen,” he says.

He got a computer for his bar mitzvah. At 16, he began writing software for a Dallas company, working through high school and later at MIT. In his fraternity house over Chinese takeout, he and a friend began Feld Technologies, which fast became a $2 million company.

He graduated from the Sloan School in 1987, earned a master’s, then sold the company to AmeriData Technologies, heading its consulting branch. He now runs Intensity Ventures. (”The name is no accident. It’s so intense,” he says.) “Being involved in 25 companies,” he says, “I focus only on solving problems not on having them, like I did when I had more time.”

In addition to a fat paycheck, he’s driven not only to gain new experiences but to build great long-term relationships.

“I have to really care about the people I work with,” he says. In fact, he won’t hire anyone who wants to work for him. “I want only to work with people who are partners, ones with the courage to be honest, and who have a willingness not only to be known, but to know me.”

His big goal is to create “business intimacy,” he says, adding much of his business success has been born of relationships built of trust, honesty, mutual respect, and constant communication. “Relationships have everything to do with business. The long-term effect is that you end up not only having more business success but a much richer life.”

Because you can’t do it alone, he says, he founded the Boston and Colorado chapters of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, an international group of entrepreneurs under 40 with $1 million or more in annual revenue.

He now lives on a 40-acre Colorado ranch–a place he bought big enough to sleep all his friends.

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On Topic: alumni/ae, business, entrepreneurship