David Bloom

The highest performing venture capitalists in any (rational) environment are likely to have a particularly raw and tactile interface with the world. They are maximally open-minded, energetically curious, and have mastered the reflective act of developing opinions about the future. Most importantly, they have escaped the cognitive prisons of... See more

That fork in the road will be determined by whether or not the industry can develop a more sophisticated view on behavioral economics, and resist current incentives to embrace bias. This is part of a sustained battle to professionalise the strategy and squash rent-seeking grifters who achieved huge success in the ZIRP bull run.

LLMs are powerful tools, but they are fundamentally backwards-looking in their reliance on training data, with limited ability to reason toward novel conclusions. Thus, they are quite specifically unsuited to early-stage venture capital investments where extreme idiosyncracy grapples with realities that may be a decade away.

That’s not to say they... See more

What’s particularly interesting about these studies (detailed below) is the clarity they provide about our vulnerability to cognitive biases. Where investors are able to reason objectively, they comfortably outperform algorithms. Where they can’t, they are soundly beaten.

The irony is that Power Law outcomes almost always come from market expansion or market creation, not from capturing a predictable percentage of an existing market.

Historically, I’ve believed no one really has special insights. It all comes down to execution and focus

Ribbit wasn’t the lead investor in any of their biggest value drivers. They didn’t lead any of the initial rounds above for Coinbase, Robinhood, Nubank, Revolut, but still wrote meaningful checks and had exceptional returns.

As in the USV story, it is never too late to build what could potentially be the best fund in venture history. Micky was 38 years old when he founded Ribbit, having built five companies prior, most with good but none with generational success.