Tom White

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. —E.O. WilsonI am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to steer my ship. —Louisa May Alcott

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.

Forward Deployed Engineers were pioneered by Palantir: instead of throwing software over the wall and hoping for adoption, you put engineers on the ground who understand the customer’s problems and can bridge the gap between what the product does and what the customer needs.

It’s been copied across the industry. And it works.

But I wonder if we’ve... See more

By definition, you will likely succeed a vanishingly-small percentage of the time, but—as the saying goes—that’s a feature, not a bug. The point is to venture—fistfuls of money in hand—at the furthest extremes of capitalism, hoping to stumble upon that rare, proper intersection of technology and commerciality.By design, most investments will miss... 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

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

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