Matthew Giampetroni

Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it

A more suitable mindset is that capital is accessible but comes at a cost...

many executives act as if the cash that the business generates is essentially free. The right mindset is that all capital, whether from an internal or external source, has an opportunity cost. 

“What is the right amount of capital (and the right number of people) to have in this business in order to support the strategy that will create the most wealth?”182 The answer is based on the future and does not rule out reducing net investment when appropriate.

the people around you will either protect or infringe on the climate within your skull.

Many high achievers are compulsively exploring the world in search of something — some for truth, some for power, others for beauty — and I think it’s a disservice to yourself and your future partners to not orient your platform around the piece of investing that you really love. Embrace your funk.

Speculative investment, with ambitious but inexact expectations of financial return, is important fuel for founders who build the unknown future. However, investors and operators are often deeply misaligned: investors think in bets, while operators think in consequences. The relationship is tense, but can be explosively productive.

In an ideal world, corporate executives would allocate capital to maximize long-term value per share. But, for reasons that are mostly understandable, there’s a lot of evidence that they fall short of this objective

Start-ups of any kind are awash in ambiguity. It’s the founder’s responsibility to hold that ambiguity for everyone, which is often a lonely job.