Edward Lando

Whenever you shift from the substance of a business to the financial question of whether or not it fits into a diversified hedging strategy, venture investing starts to look a lot like buying lottery tickets. And once you think that you’re playing the lottery, you’ve already psychologically prepared yourself to lose.

Being a founder requires constant calibration between arrogance and humility, optimism and pessimism. You need the arrogance to believe that you have something important to say, but the humility to know most people won’t care. You need the optimism to convince yourself and others (employees, investors, customers) to believe in you. But you need pes... See more

Sometimes the prize feels closer, other times farther away. Still other times it feels like we are drowning in aimlessness and exasperation. An identity crisis looms for any high achiever flirting with failure, and a calculation begins on the conflicting forces of sunk costs and lost time on the one hand, and reputational harm on the other. As entr... See more

Take entrepreneurship—not as a job title, but as the fundamental posture of business itself. The Austrian economists, particularly Israel Kirzner, recognized that entrepreneurship is essentially the act of recognizing value where others haven't seen it yet. This "entrepreneurial alertness" is less a calculated search and more an aesthetic

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Cantillon argued that the origin of entrepreneurship lies in the lack of perfect foresight individuals have about the future. Rather than consider this lack of foresight a defect of the market system, Cantillon accepted it as part of the human condition. Uncertainty is a pervasive fact of everyday life, and those who must deal with it continually i... See more