The more you see, the more skeptical you become. Optimize for skepticism and curiosity. Having been a VC and invested as an angel in well over 100 companies, my inbox flows with ideas of all kinds from aspiring and repeat entrepreneurs. In the earlier days, I’d get excited by ideas especially the first time I saw them. But over time, I soon... See more

The quote below, from @WillManidis, is worth the consideration of every venture investor, GP and LP. (It's also core to the mission of @equidam: making idiosyncratic ideas more legible for finance.) As a product of incentives, capital in VC has gravity. It is inclined to collect in pools,... See more

What Jerry is talking about is not adverse selection. It’s the second way of increasing convexity: funding the far-out-there-ideas, the Big If True ones. It’s one of the reasons I love the general venture zeitgeist around deep tech right now. If crazy bets like underwater energy storage, transformer-specialised chips, or tiny semi fabs succeed,... See more

In short, VCs in these frontier domains essentially need multiple miracles for these companies to succeed. Compare those scale up challenges to traditional biotech and pharma, where the entire industry has designed systems and processes to prove safety and efficacy and grow production. There’s still serious technical risk, but it’s knowable... See more

The central point of the post below is that risk is the product of venture capital, and some managers understand that better than others. Many of the replies talk about the futility of 'financial engineering', and how concepts like portfolio construction are less relevant to early stage VC due to the greater... See more