Tom White

If the mention of words like web3, crypto, and their complementary acronyms—NFT, DAO, DeFi, et cetera—prompt fears or jeers, derision or confusion, I shall serve as Virgil to your Dante.

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... See more

If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all. —Joseph Campbell

  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

Material is a collaborative NFT art project. The canvas is a pair of jeans. That I wear. The artist is you. Or you. Or Yu Darvish. Who knows?Whenever I wear the jeans, the canvas is live. When a person impacts me in a certain way, we forge a deep connection, or we share a memorable experience together, I may invite them to add a piece—an... 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.