good artists copy, great artists steal

Like most things, though simple, it is not easy. After all, the map is seldom the territory.To hammer this home, below are two things Venture Capital is decidedly not:If you are funding a company to “pour gas on the fire” and replicate/scale already-validated results, that is not venture capital. If you are funding a company to “run the same, prove... See more

In investing, higher volatility usually equates to higher possible returns. In today’s world of online expression, we settle for lower expected value, market-level outcomes so as to not ruffle any feathers and not take any outsized risk. We’re basically hoping to allow people to know us enough so that they include us in their passive index of human... See more

Brand is arguably the only thing that resembles a moat in traditional venture capital. The venture capital flywheel archetype is pretty simple: pick and invest in great companies and founders, support those founders and companies, and over time those founders and companies, particularly if they are successful, lead to more deal flow and better acce... See more

I just think that most VCs don't have anything that they truly believe in. Which makes them hard to be indistinguishable from soloists. Because what do you care about? If you don't believe in anything, it means that you don't deeply truly care about something. To me, I mean, maybe this is harsh, I think that's like someone without a soul. Like they... See more

A corollary to this is that as governance has decayed and the focus of most VCs is on uprounds and markups, there has been a meaningful decay in strategy at many startups.

In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don't know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.

There are a ton of good founders who are bad at fundraising, and thus, don’t raise adequate capital. On the flip-side, there are a lot of bad companies that were funded simply because the founder was persuasive and good at raising money.