What give first actually means

“Give first” isn’t my phrase. Brad Feld coined it, and Techstars turned it into a movement years before I started GrowthMentor.

Feld first wrote about a version of it back in 2012, in his book Startup Communities. He’d been trying to work out why Boulder, Colorado punched so far above its weight as a startup town, and he kept landing on the same habit: people there helped each other before they had any idea what they’d get in return. He called it “give before you get.” Over the years it tightened into “give first,” and it became the core philosophy of Techstars, the mentor-driven accelerator he co-founded.

This is the definition I keep coming back to:

"Give First means that you’re willing to put energy into a system without knowing what you’re going to get back. You don’t know when, from whom, over what time period, and in what magnitude."

He is careful about one thing. Give first is a wager, not charity: the bet is that a system where people help before they keep score ends up healthier, and more valuable to belong to, than one where everyone is matching favors.

The part Feld worries about

Here’s the bit that stuck with me. When Feld came back to the idea for his 2025 book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship, he admitted that inside Techstars the phrase had drifted. It had become more of a slogan than something the culture truly ran on.

That tracks with everything I’ve seen. “Give first” is the easiest thing in the world to put on a careers page. Every community says some version of it. Almost none of them can tell you what enforces it once the founders stop watching.

If nothing in your system makes it costly to be a taker, give first is decoration. So the interesting question was never whether I believe in giving first. It was what, mechanically, keeps the takers out and keeps the givers from getting bled dry.

The research nobody quotes

There’s a second piece of this that usually gets dropped, and it’s the one that stops give-first from turning into a martyrdom contest.

Adam Grant, the Wharton psychologist, spent a whole book on it. Give and Take sorts people into givers, takers, and matchers, and his headline finding is uncomfortable: givers are both the most and the least successful people in nearly every field he studied. The same instinct that makes someone generous is the one that makes them easy to exploit.

The givers at the top of his data weren’t the most talented. They were the ones he calls “otherish”: generous, but still keeping an eye on their own interests. The selfless ones, the people who give until there’s nothing left, burn out and get taken advantage of. The otherish ones give more than they take and protect their own time while they do it.

So a real give-first system has two jobs running at once. Make it cheap to give and expensive to take. And make sure the people doing the giving don’t get drained for the privilege.

The mentors here give first by design.

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How we built give first into GrowthMentor

When I started GrowthMentor in 2018, I wasn’t trying to dramatize a philosophy. I was professionally isolated, hiring freelancers off Upwork just to have someone to think out loud with. But as the marketplace grew I ran into Feld’s slogan problem from the other side: how do you keep “give first” real when you have hundreds of mentors and you can’t personally vouch for the spirit of every one of them?

The answer we landed on was to stop treating it as a value you state and start treating it as something the product enforces. Three examples.

We let mentors charge. Most stay free.

Mentors don’t show up and set a price. On GrowthMentor a mentor is free until they’ve earned three reviews. Only after that can they charge for a session at all, and they can’t charge over $100 an hour until they have ten. We call it the Give First Pricing Model, and it’s still exactly how the platform works today.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect when we built it. Once a mentor passes three reviews and could start charging, most of them don’t.

By then they’ve felt what giving first does for them: the reviews, the network, the founders who come back months later with good news. Putting a price on the next call would be allowed, and it would also feel like trading something they’ve come to value for something smaller. So most keep their sessions free. Some switch on a rate when they’re slammed and need to protect their calendar. A few set a token one, the mentorship version of buy-me-a-beer. The default they keep choosing is free. It’s the same reason the best mentors rarely lead with a rate.

Michael Taylor, who has given more than 200 sessions on GrowthMentor, puts it more bluntly than I would:

From a mentor

"A lot of people think of mentorship like, oh, you’ve got to give back, it’s charity. I don’t see it that way at all. It’s selfish motivation, and you get just as much out of these calls as everyone else is getting. It has to be bilaterally valuable, otherwise it’s not sustainable."

Michael Taylor · Co-founder at Vexpower

Read Michael's story

That’s the otherish idea doing its job. The platform keeps compensation on the table so nobody has to be a doormat, and most mentors wave it off because giving first turned out to be the better deal for them too. It helps that they can see it working for everyone around them. When a new mentor looks at the platform and the norm is giving first, they tend to fall into it too.

It’s a no-pitch zone

The second thing is a line we put in front of every mentor applicant: this is a no-pitch zone. People come here to get help, not to be sold to. If your main reason for mentoring is filling your own sales pipeline, you will not enjoy giving sessions away for free, and you tend to self-select out before we have to do anything.

It’s one sentence in an application form, and it does real work. It makes being a taker uncomfortable before they’re ever on the platform.

We curate hard for givers

And we read every application. I still read every application. We accept under 5% of the mentors who apply, and the thing we’re filtering for, more than the logo on someone’s resume, is whether they genuinely want to help. Givers, in Grant’s language.

We’ve now had more than 750 mentors give around 60,000 sessions. That free-by-default pattern isn’t something we engineered after the fact. It’s what happens when you select for givers and then build a system that doesn’t punish them for it.

The only defense against a slogan

Feld’s fear was that give first becomes a poster on the wall. The only defense I’ve found is to make it structural: make the generous move the path of least resistance, and make the selfish one annoying enough that takers leave on their own.

Most days that looks completely unremarkable. A mentor in a different timezone takes a call at an hour that doesn’t suit them, with a founder who can’t pay, about a problem they solved years ago. No invoice, no pitch waiting at the end. Just someone putting energy into the system without knowing what they’ll get back, or when, or from whom. Which is exactly how Brad Feld defined it in the first place.

Mentors who give first

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