Musings

After seeing StartupLJackson’s tweet today, I was inspired to look inward and take stock of how we are performing today at Collaborative Fund on diversity. By virtue of being a vocal and relatively politically active young black man, I spend a lot of my time and energy thinking about diversity, social justice, and racial equality; when it comes to my day-by-day, it is constantly humming in the back of my mind, but I shy away […]

Reflecting on the passing of R.H. Coase a few years ago, I noted that his theorem was being undermined from all sides. For the uninitiated, “The Nature of The Firm” was published as an essay in 1937 by Coase, then a young British student of business who wanted to understand why the American companies were producing so efficiently and profitably. He concluded that it was because they were developing mass production, consolidating resources for distribution […]

I can’t tell you the number of investors that I admire who have a story about how they were offered an introduction to Company X, but turned it down before taking the meeting, only to watch the company go on to be massively successful. This is the second most frustrating feeling in venture, from my experience. (The most frustrating is when you never got an intro to meet the company, because there you didn’t even […]

Deciding whether to implement sharing tools first, or an email importer, or to add profile picture, or even profile pages, can be a fraught and confusing exercise for young internet companies. Most founders with a strong point of view about what they want their product to do have an intuition for what the universe of features should be, but the extent to which those features should be implemented, and particularly the order of operations, has […]

Ben Bernanke wrote a great series for the Brookings Institution, where he is a Senior Fellow, on why interest rates remain so damn low in so much of the world. His major points were not really a surprise, but were very clearly laid out, and included the following considerations: – Secular stagnationIt costs less to make a a good today than it did last year, or last decade, and so the ultimate price has gone […]

In Brothers Karamazov, one of my favorite ever novels, Katerina Ivanovna suggests the brilliant notion of ‘second-order love’. At one point in the story, in saying “I love you”, she means “I love (that I love you), but when it comes down to it, I don’t fully love you”. We colloquially refer to this type of circumstance as someone who has been ‘idealized’. That is, I’m experiencing a second-order volition, or will, more strongly than the first-order […]

Should calculus be required in schools? What about statistics? I have had this debate a number of times over the past few weeks with folks from very different fields (medicine, finance, software, education).  The pro-calculus team says: — understanding the rate of change is critical to how quickly, or in what manner, a set changes in time, or a number grows. This is important for measuring a disease’s propagation, or understanding your 401k’s compounding interest; […]

This morning I read Matt Yglesias’s incredible post on Vox about the apparent oncoming collapse of the democratic political system. His view, as described in the article, is that political parties are increasingly ideological; that parties are using the extreme political tools of the constitution to create zero sum scenarios in policy-making, eroding the effectiveness of the democratic process. I thought it was interesting (and Chait’s response just as much so) because it got me […]

One of my favorite characteristics of many innovators: “They don’t know what they don’t know” Indeed, the more experience you have in a market, the more confident you are in the status quo, the more likely it is that the scars of trying something new are fresh, and all the hidden challenges of scaling in ‘market X’ are apparent to you, because you’re more likely to have faced them all. “You’d have to be crazy […]