Tom White

Like most things, though simple, it is not easy. After all, the map is seldom the territory.To hammer this home, below are two things Venture Capital is decidedly not:If you are funding a company to “pour gas on the fire” and replicate/scale already-validated results, that is not venture capital. If you are funding a company to “run the same,... See more

I spend 90% of my time thinking about stories and narratives, and like so many other things, narrative formation is getting decentralized. This is my attempt to figure out what’s happening and where it’s heading.Crafting and telling stories is part of what makes humans humans. Stories let us coordinate across time and space. Stories are undeniably... See more

“Niccolo is a good diplomat: he is interesting to talk to; he listens carefully, writes well, thinks ahead.”

Despite this grandiose fervor, venture capital is not changing.Like a word’s denotation, it is unchangeable — an absolute, a fixed paradigm.Venture Capital, very simply, funds:The test of a true, novel hypothesis with…Enough capital to definitively prove or disprove said hypothesis so as to generate…Supporting data that makes it clear that the... 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... See more

our brand’s story and your product’s positioning need to be unique, personal, simple, repetitive, and reach the right audience. But this is how you avoid getting lost in the crowd, among the 10,000’s of other startups who won’t make it.Throughout these milestones, we focused on Accord’s POV: From Vendorship → Partnership. There’s a simple framework... 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

Like a raging river, information courses along faster than ever before.The maelstrom will never cease. In fact, her gales will blow harder, her raindrops grow fatter with the bits and bytes that make up our digital deluge.We have too few hours to comb through too much information. Not to mention, it takes real, hard, honest work to separate the... See more