Juan Orbea

Also, their discipline of walking away from insurance business when it was badly priced was key to their success.

That said, this is a mindset you want to encourage in all employees. One way to do this is emphasize values or impact outside of your job description as part of the performance review process. The importance is emphasizing something bigger than the individual, particularly in the most critical stages as a company scales from a few dozen people, to... See more

Crossroad #4 – First JobThe professional relationships you form during your first job are the seed of your professional network which influences the arc of your career — from how you think about work, to how you’re known, to the geography where you have advantaged job access for a long time.

Of these companies that become well financed we only need 15–25% of those to pan out to return 2–3x the fund. But this is all driven on the assumption that we didn’t write a $20 million check out of the gate, that we didn’t pay a $100 million pre-money valuation and that we took a meaningful ownership stake by making a very early bet on founders... See more

We can’t allow the excitement of science fiction to occlude the challenges of realizing it into science fact. Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance means finding the rare but tangible scientific advancements and propelling them forward on the path to commercialization. Otherwise, you’re investing in steam, and those returns on capital will just... See more

Hard times call for furious dancing

From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been character- ized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this? For the modern world, the death of... See more