VCs act wise as everyone in start-ups gets fired
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VCs act wise as everyone in start-ups gets fired
Companies with poor unit economics found themselves propelled by aggressive venture dollars (which themselves were propelled by a low-interest-rate environment). Those companies then turned those dollars into aggressive customer acquisition. Until recently, the market rewarded growth at all costs.
Digital Native • Revisiting Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition
Timour Kosters added
the power of imagination and optimism is an amazing and essential part of innovation. But over the years, we’ve become so enamored with the unicorn valuation as the goal, that we started valuing the wrong things and overlooking the fundamental physics of business.
With capital at zero cost, growth at all costs became the mantra. How fast can you gr... See more
With capital at zero cost, growth at all costs became the mantra. How fast can you gr... See more
Where does VC go from here?
Britt Gage added
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
... See moreMarkie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
Reza Saeedi added
The past several years have been characterized by higher and higher private company valuations, which, when the public markets for tech companies reset over the past few months, left venture capital investors that had invested in later stage private rounds in the red on these investments. In other words, not dissimilar from the issues that employee... See more
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Employee-VC Alignment
Mark Fishman added
Hindsight is 2020
I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.
See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing a business in 2023, and in that article I referenced this very same seismic shift in startup dynamics — a shift that, no surprise, began all the way back with the pandemic in 2020.
That’s the tricky t... See more
I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.
See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing a business in 2023, and in that article I referenced this very same seismic shift in startup dynamics — a shift that, no surprise, began all the way back with the pandemic in 2020.
That’s the tricky t... See more
Joe Procopio • Starting a Business Looks Drastically Different in 2024
Britt Gage added
How startups changed since 2020:
-Consumer fell out of love with technology
-Business & Venture OverIndexed on AI
-Money went from Tight to Scared
What’s happening now:
-self founded, funded & reliant
-Profitable out of the gate
-solving problems and building with slower burn rate
-Innovating strategically alongside technical innovation
How do generalists help? Taking a broad approach gets you further faster
The tech industry is built on the venture capital model where hockey stick growth and selling to a larger company or going public are markers of success. But the traditional VC model does not leave much room for startups that might not be the next unicorn but still generate revenue — just not the type of returns investors are looking for.
Techcrunch • Instead of IPOs and acquisitions, exiting to community is one alternative
sari added
The venture ecosystem went from cottage industry outsider to institutional insider – from a nascent practice to a consensus component of institutional portfolios. The result has been the industrialization–and bankerization–of venture. Firms that make dozens or even hundreds of investments per year, relentlessly focused on assets under management, u... See more