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 […]
I heard this advice today to some angel investors: “Be careful not to become too enamored with the entrepreneur and their product” Wrong. Painful. Couldn’t disagree more. First of all, it’s very hard to stop yourself from becoming enamored with a founder or idea. It just happens to you. But second, most importantly, the only things worth investing in at the earliest stages are those where you are enamored with the entrepreneur and their product. Angel and […]
I sometimes come across a question that founders pose in the context of fundraising, wanted to share my reaction and get yours. One pair of founders are starting a really interesting, technically-sophisticated, company in a smaller (non-SF/Seattle/LA/NYC/Bos) market. They were able to cobble together $150K here, $25K there, and end up with enough runway to last them 18 months working as a duo, building the technical infrastructure that would underpin their product. As they started […]
In a meeting today* I was introduced to a new phrase which I loved, describing what I had always thought of as the ‘gravity well’ of a great founder. That is, someone who seems to have an incredible ability to attract other talented people, who can tell a story that soars above the common and conventional, and who you know will win at *something*, whether it is what they’re currently working on or not. As […]
Venture capital investors have long feedback cycles (as much as 6-7 years) and extremely unstructured time (one could justify almost any activity as being in furtherance of getting a deal or helping a portfolio company). So, we often look for signals that we are good investors along the way. Hunter Walk said wisely last month to Run Your Playbook, Not Someone Else’s, which got me thinking about this. Many of these signals are external and […]
Technology makes an inevitable march, and along with that, we tend to want to believe that we will at some point (perhaps) infinitely far away, uncover the true infrastructure of science, solve all of the world’s problems, and discover the root of it all. It’s Kantian, if you have any experience with transcendental idealism. And it’s attractive. The world is on a steady march to perfection. And yet, on the other hand, we tend to […]
I see dozens of pitches a month, and so I tend to ask some questions over and over again. Among these, here are my favorite questions. I don’t always ask them (because sometimes it’s obvious) but when I do, I really enjoy the answers. I’ll present them without any additional comment. – If this is massively successful, how will it make the world a *better* place? – If you weren’t working on this, what else […]
I watched Interstellar over the weekend. It’s a fantastic movie, and I highly recommend it. As a sucker for film scores and dramatic filmmaking, the quality of those two alone made it fun to watch. But my favorite part was ultimately the exploration of the different aspects of theoretical physics and astrophysics. Without too many spoilers, it visually represents event horizons of wormholes/blackholes, pushing our imagination along the way. I was thinking, after the movie, […]
TL;DR: we invested in a company called Buffer and I start to ponder radical transparency in business. The more I think about it, the more strongly I believe that there are a few ways to think about the social impact of any given business. This question weighs heavily on us at Collaborative Fund, given our stated bias towards pushing the world forward through innovation. The impact all of us normally think about, of course, is *what* […]
Unions were a fixture of the 20th century, serving as a stabilizing force against corporate and investor interests in business, creating deeply influential voting blocks for elections, and creating community among individuals who otherwise might not have known each other, or been close. In modern times, the labor union is at its lowest ever approval rating in the United States. 2009 represented the nadir, when the population may have been reacting to the first national […]
Musings 