Brad Feld co-founded Techstars, backed Fitbit, Sphero and MakerBot, wrote the book on startup communities — and just got New Zealand residency because he fell in love with Wanaka and thinks NZ might be the next Boulder, per capita.In this episode of TechMates, Hendrik Remigereau and Mark Pavlyukovskyy sits down with Brad Feld — co-founder of Techstars, partner at Foundry Group, and one of the most influential voices in startup communities over the past three decades — recorded in person at Brad’s home in Wanaka, New Zealand. It’s TechMates’ first-ever in-person recording, and the setting says a lot: Brad and his wife Amy recently got New Zealand residency through the Active Investor Plus visa, and after six weeks exploring the country, chose Wanaka as their base in the southern hemisphere.

The conversation covers a lot of ground. Brad reflects on his hardware investing journey — from backing Sphero when it was just a technically impossible robotic ball, to watching Fitbit go from 10 steps-per-day tracking to 80 million active users, to funding companies like NEMA and Little Bits that had great products but couldn’t crack the economics. His honest diagnosis of why hardware startups fail is one of the sharpest things said on this podcast: once gross margin drops below 40%, you’re done — and the best founders are the ones obsessed with user value, not product launches.

But the conversation really opens up when Brad talks about startup communities, Boulder, and what he sees in New Zealand. He spent 30 years helping turn a 100,000-person college town into the highest per-capita startup density in the world. Now he’s watching something similar start to happen in New Zealand — and he thinks the non-zero-sum culture, the natural constraints that drive real innovation, and the growing number of VC funds are exactly the right ingredients. What’s missing? Just time.

🔧 The Hardware Trap: Why gross margin below 40% is a death sentence, why software investors kept getting hardware wrong, and what Physical AI is repeating today.

📱 Fitbit’s Missed Opportunity: How 80 million users and a clear subscription model never came together — and what Apple Watch did differently.

🌱 Boulder vs. New Zealand: How Brad helped turn a 100K-person hippie ski town into the world’s highest per-capita startup hub — and why NZ has the same ingredients.

💰 Three Things Brad Looks for in a Founder: Are they put on Earth to work on this problem? Do they want Brad as an investor? Does Brad care about the product?

🎧 Listen On:YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gQnb_WbBSpotify: https://spoti.fi/4is21QIApple Podcasts: https://apple.co/42KZ2x1

🔗 Learn more about NZVC: https://www.nzvc.co.nz

Mark Pavlyukovskyy — https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavlyukovskyy/

Hendrik Remigereau — https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrik-remigereau-09a03067/

Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro

01:20 — First in-person TechMates recording in Wanaka

01:41 — Why Brad invested in Sphero and Little Bits

07:22 — Why hardware investing went wrong

09:22 — The gross margin rule: below 40%, you’re done

10:12 — What Fitbit got wrong about subscriptions

16:24 — NEMA: great product, broken economics

22:06 — Three things Brad looks for in a founder

26:03 — “I’ll be there as long as you don’t lie to me”

32:36 — How Boulder became a startup community

38:24 — Why Brad and Amy came to New Zealand

46:16 — Residency visa and the Active Investor Plus route

51:13 — Can NZ build a Boulder-style ecosystem?

54:07 — Boulder: the highest startup density per capita

58:49 — What NZ is still missing: time

1:06:59 — Halter, Bovonic and NZ innovation

1:15:46 — Why one dominant VC fund hurts an ecosystem

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