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The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
A great deal has been written about what constitutes Venture Capital and what does not (including by this very author) in these seventy years. Though many different things to many different people, Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dictum in Jacobellis v. Ohio works for our purposes:I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I ... See more
Tom White • How does Early-Stage Venture Capital Perform in a Recession?
If my goal was to pitch a specific idea, then why would I waste a backer’s time with such a macro perspective? But as I interviewed backable people from all walks of life—inside big companies and small—I realized how every one of them took on the role of an “armchair anthropologist” and first showed investors where the world was headed.
Suneel Gupta • Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You
Much of this success stems from the firm’s gift for thinking deeply about the future and devising a thesis that distills an investment opportunity. It is the venture capital equivalent of pointing toward center field before the pitch comes in, calling one’s shot
Mario Gabriele • Union Square Ventures: The Thinkers
Stereotypically, the startup world is supposed to consist of heroes producing an excess return by pursuing ideas that nobody else believes in. In reality, the multi-stage nature of venture capital makes it very easy for the field to end up pinned to traditions about whether entrepreneurs ought to have red hair—not because everyone believes it, but
... See moreEliezer Yudkowsky • Inadequate Equilibria
At Founders Fund, we focus on five to seven companies in a fund, each of which we think could become a multibillion-dollar business based on its unique fundamentals. 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
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