Confessions of an Investment Banker Turned VC | MHV | Monk's Hill Ventures

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more

So if not for the structure, what caused venture’s shift towards such risk-averse investing? As fund sizes grew dramatically and a tech boom spurred a startup surge, the industry's emphasis shifted from discerning selection towards a more diversified 'spray and pray' approach, diluting the value of traditional tasteful investing. When the game of b... See more

In the 1980s, a venture capitalist could truthfully say their investment was the difference between life or death for an important, generational technology company. Funding such companies, in this way, was absolutely a good quest. But today there are more people "helping the builders" than actually building, fighting one another in a zero-sum game

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"Seeing is Believing as a Potential Entrepreneur" -

@davidcummings

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I credit a lot of my self-belief with having worked in startups before making the jump to my own.

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Direct exposure to other founders/operators dispels the myths of going from 0 to 1 or 1 to 10.

My biggest takeaway from this whole experience was that luck plays a big part in the startup journey (both good and bad). Also, shit can change fast in this startup game. Hot one day and barely holding on the next. About to sell the company, to about to be fired, to back to closing an acquisition. More than anything though I learned that if you rai... See more

Intro highlights:I believe my lack of business education was an asset because it encouraged me to ask a lot of questions and  to think from first principles.

Repeat after me: neither venture capital investment nor easy access to risky, highly inflated assets predicts lasting success and impact for a particular company or technology. Remember the dot-com boom and the subsequent bust? Legendary investor Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway recently noted that we’re in an “even crazier era than the dot-com... See more