David Bloom

“What I’m there for is to have a strategy discussion with the founder — for them to be totally ruthless and put me in my place. And not in a bullshit way. At this point, I’m pretty good at spotting the delta between bravado and actual competence.”

Sometimes one differentiates with a killer blog and by being an outsider vs. being the Nth local firm (our Brazilian friends call this the Gringo effect ).

The tension I often feel is that you always have to be pushing forward, but you can never forget where you came from,” Josh said. “My biggest fear is ... what is the line? ‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.’ You always need to stay rooted in your values and in the... See more

Strengthening incumbents' positions as arbiters of innovation capital. These large funds have a vested interest in controlling distribution, and favoring them distorts capital flows into the startup layer and risks emerging funds’ future market leadership potential.

It’s cutting through the noise, ignoring investor WhatsApp gossip about which startups are “good,” and having the conviction to back the ones that still feel too strange or risky, even if the broader category is already consensus.

In other words: being a non-consensus investor inside consensus.

But from a higher balcony one might view even excellent process and results as actually just the best at a given level.

It made markets more competitive, but also enabled new types of investing, like programmatic, quantitative strategies and technology-native investment firms.

One marker that I’m seeing someone clearly is when I understand how their strengths are also their weaknesses, how their genius lives right next to their dysfunction. I know that I’m further away from clarity when I am overly excited or overly skeptical.

Despite mountains of theory and evidence supporting idiosyncratic risk as the source of outperformance, it’s just not where the incentives lie for venture capital.