Juan Orbea

The book calatogs over 100 mini case studies of other innovators who are defining state-of-the-art in those 11 building block areas.

Going back to the job candidate, he has the benefit of having a less foggy view of his terrain. He knows (or at least believes) he wants to end up at the top of a different hill than he is presently climbing. He can see that higher hill from where he stands.

There are these people that are powerful mediators to other people. And if you can identify who those people are and how they’re operating, you’ve just identified sort of one of the root causes of problems, or just one of sort of the root players in this system. And identifying those mediators is sort of really key.

But pretty soon, Balaji's examples do start to point to some particular themes:

The power of large numbers is significant. If you earned $1,000 a day every day, it would take 1,000 days (or just under 3 years) to earn $1M. But it would take 1,000,000 days to earn $1B (over 2,700 years). 

Some funds perform “return the fund” analysis before making an individual investment. This analysis essentially looks to understand what value a given company would have to exit at to both return the fund as well as hit the targeted net return given assumed dilution over time.