Human Input: Why, in the age of AI, one should Give First: Startup communities run best on generosity

The University of Colorado Law School’s Silicon Flatirons event was nearly full on the morning of October 3, with students, founders, and community members gathered for a conversation between Brad Feld and Brad Bernthal. The mood felt warm and curious, the kind of collective focus that happens when people show up not just to listen, but to connect.

Feld is a longtime venture capitalist, writer, and co-founder of Foundry and Techstars, known for shaping Boulder’s startup identity through his “Give First” philosophy, the topic and title of his new book. Bernthal, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School and outgoing director of the Silicon Flatirons Center’s Entrepreneurship Initiative, studies the intersection of law, technology, and entrepreneurship. Together, they’ve helped define Boulder’s startup playbook — one grounded in mentorship, collaboration, and shared responsibility.

On stage sat the two Brads, ready to talk about a simple phrase that has come to define Boulder’s startup identity: Give First.

It’s a topic Feld has lived for decades. But as I watched the students, founders, and mentors around me lean forward in their seats, it struck me that the philosophy he described, giving before you get, isn’t just startup folklore. It’s a blueprint for how innovation communities, including those building the next generation of AI tools, survive and evolve.

Give First is not altruism. You expect to get something back. You just don’t know when, from whom, or in what form. — Brad Feld

The roots of a philosophy

Feld traced Give First back to a single paragraph he wrote in Startup Communities more than a decade ago: the idea that if everyone in a startup community puts energy into the system without knowing what they’ll get back, the flywheel starts turning. It’s not a zero-sum game.

That mindset helped make Boulder one of the most collaborative startup hubs in the country. Techstars, which Feld co-founded, was born out of that spirit: Mentorship as an act of contribution that ultimately enriches everyone involved. Feld described it as “for-profit philanthropy” – not charity, but an economy of trust.

Listening to Feld, I kept thinking about how different the tone feels in today’s AI boom. Founders are sprinting toward patents, compute access, and investment rounds. Competition is fierce; openness often feels risky. Yet the same dynamic Feld described, that willingness to put something into the system without a guaranteed return, is exactly what allowed open-source models, research communities, and developer networks to flourish in the first place.

Generosity as strategy, not charity

What resonated most for me was Feld’s insistence that Give First isn’t moral posturing: It’s pragmatic. The mentors, investors, and peers who give time, introductions, or honest feedback eventually see that energy return in unexpected ways, sometimes years later.

In the AI world, that looks like open collaboration: researchers sharing model weights, developers improving each other’s prompts, early-stage founders comparing notes on regulatory navigation. When generosity becomes part of the operating system, innovation compounds faster than any one company can control.

Generosity isn’t weakness. It’s the infrastructure of strong communities.

The communities still left out

Feld also acknowledged that the Give First model doesn’t automatically lift everyone. Some communities, especially founders of color, women, or those outside major funding hubs, are still excluded from the networks where giving and getting circulate.

That struck a chord. “Community” can easily become shorthand for “people who already know each other.” The hard work is expanding who gets to participate. In Colorado, we’ve seen AI meetups and university programs open new doors, but access to capital, mentorship, and even compute resources remains uneven.

In the conversation, Feld challenged us to think about leadership as non-transactional: to build systems where the default assumption is positive-sum. That reminder felt urgent in a moment when AI’s growth runs the risk of concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands.

If the AI revolution is built by only a few, it won’t be revolutionary.

When showing up is enough

Near the end of the event, a student asked a question that landed with quiet weight: "How do you “give first” when you’re just starting out?"

Feld smiled and said something simple but profound: Showing up is giving first.

That moment encapsulated the feeling in the room, the sense that community isn’t an abstract concept; it’s a behavior. Showing up to a meetup, volunteering for a student project, sharing what you’ve learned on a forum, or mentoring a peer who’s half a step behind you, these are the micro-acts that build ecosystems.

As someone who’s spent years in startups, I’ve seen how powerful that can be. Every AI founder I know who’s thriving has a story that traces back to someone else who gave first: a conversation, a code review, a late-night Slack message, an introduction that came without strings attached.

The future of Give First

As the AI startup wave accelerates, we face a paradox: unprecedented access to knowledge, but increasingly siloed communities. Feld’s philosophy offers a corrective. The real differentiator won’t be speed or scale; it will be the density of trust.

Give First reminds us that mentorship, generosity, and inclusion aren’t side notes to innovation. They’re the operating principles that keep it human.

The ecosystems that thrive won’t be the ones with the biggest compute budgets. They’ll be the ones where the people keep showing up for each other.

Leaving Silicon Flatirons that morning, I felt the same optimism that animated the room. Feld and Bernthal weren’t just revisiting Boulder’s past; they were modeling its future, a future where collaboration is currency and community is the ROI.

In an age when AI founders are rewriting the rules of creation, maybe the oldest rule still applies: give first, ask later, and trust that what you build together will outlast what you build alone.

Disclosures: Brad Feld is a platinum sponsor of the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group (RMAIIG). The writer, Crys Black, serves on the RMAIIG advisory board and is a silver sponsor of the organization.

Feld’s latest book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship is now available at bookstores everywhere.