International opportunities remain vast for those brave few willing to expand beyond local borders and limited markets. Put simply, it’s what the “Smart Money” is doing. Data shows that larger market participants such as QED have shifted their focus more on markets outside the US in recent years.Given this international opportunity, deal flow and d... See more

Local market conditions will undoubtedly continue to fluctuate. By targeting markets with sizable momentum at a given funding stage or within a particular vertical, both startups and their investors can gain a true edge.For example, TechCrunch recently analyzed African startup valuation trends and found more robust tailwinds out of Kenya than any o... See more

Due to the seemingly inevitable march of globalization, our world is more interconnected today than it ever was before. Ironically, despite this growing overlap, inter-regional correlation rarely follows. That is, startup and venture capital conditions in one market seldom (if ever) correlate directly to the conditions in another. A wide variety of... See more

History shows some of the best opportunities come in bad times, not good ones.Though we’re not in the business of prediction here at Stonks, in the words of Lord Byron: “The best prophet of the future is the past.”Put simply, if public/crypto market turmoil persists, early-stage valuations may well drop ~30% or lower (i.e.below levels seen merely a... See more

Put simply, the Global Financial Crisis produced some of the best Venture Capital vintage years in modern history. A great deal of this value accrued to those GPs and LPs who deployed capital during the crisis’ nadir.

A great deal has been written about what constitutes Venture Capital and what does not (including by this very author) in these seventy years. Though many different things to many different people, Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dictum in Jacobellis v. Ohio works for our purposes:I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I ... See more

On Failure: I think seeing failure is really important. It’s important to learn the lesson of what didn't work, sometimes more so than learning the lesson of what did work.On Networking: Replace the word networking with relationships. Networking feels transactional; nobody wants to be networked. Your job in your 20s is to forge relationships and re... See more