Tom White

When I have given oral presentations, I reach my people more directly than if I’d written everything down for them to read. When people can see your face and hear the melody of your voice, your point gets across more vividly. Language evolved, after all, for face-to-face contact, not rendered as glyphs on paper.Imagine a square divided into four... See more

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

The truth that applies to many fields, which can frustrate some as much as it energizes others, is that the person who tells the most compelling story wins. Not who has the best idea, or the right answer. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads.Harari recently said about writing Sapiens:I thought,... See more

  Readers crave lessons; aspiring diplomats can learn from them; old hands can quibble with them. Cooper calls them “maxims.” One is particularly powerful – and painful. It comes from Robert McNamara and his reflections on Vietnam written in 1995. It is a searing indictment as we ponder the calamity in Afghanistan. It sums up a lot of Cooper’s own... See more

Diplomacy, in Cooper’s view, is high-stakes drama. An admirer of Shakespeare, he approaches it as a playwright would. Or a screenwriter. For example, here’s how he sets the scene for Kennan’s epoch-making Long Telegram, the embryo of the U.S. policy on containment: “February, 1946. Moscow. George Kennan is sick in bed . . . His ambassador is away... See more

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... See more