How I Work with Consultancies and Academics on Research
If you are a consultancy, academic, or graduate student seriously interested in investing and/or entrepreneurship, I welcome serious proposals to partner with me. I can help provide you with research materials, guidance, introductions to interviewees and other experts, and access to unique data sets. I have worked with many of the leading finance media which have published my past research. Please do not consider this list below exhaustive; I welcome your creative suggestions.
For example, I worked with a team of three Columbia MBAs (McKinsey and BCG consultants) on a research study on Best Practices of Venture Capitalists in Increasing the Value of Portfolio Companies. They earned an A, and the article was the most-viewed study in the Journal of Private Equity for the year following its publication. I provided a lot of the content, research materials, guidance, and introductions to interviewees. We have since published this research in many leading publications.
If you are a student: I prefer to work with graduate students (MBA/PhD/MS/etc.), but am open to truly exceptional ambitious undergraduates also. I require that you’re part of a team and are executing this research for a class or independent (for-credit) research. To learn more, contact me with: your proposed research topic(s); the full resumes of your team members; the course for which you are writing the paper; your professor’s name and website; timeline; and your targeted deliverable (length, format, detailed table of contents, etc.).
I’ve listed below some of the research questions about which I’d like to learn more, long-term.
Sector Thesis Development
Write an investment thesis and competitive analysis around sectors of interest. Typical deliverable from these studies is a market map and evaluation of competitors, with a SWOT evaluation and analysis of potential investments and entrepreneurial opportunities. Here is a template investment thesis and the sectors I am currently most interested in:
- Sales 2.0 – the best technology tools to accelerate B2B senior executive sales
- Disruption of the investment management industry.
- How Private and VC investment firms can use technology internally to become better investors.
- Emerging asset classes. Most of the best returns of all time in finance were earned by early investors in emerging asset classes, which were not viewed as formal asset classes when investors first assessed them. Examples: art, carbon credits, collectibles, cryptocurrencies, divorce loans, NFTs, farms/ranches, frequent flyer miles, insurance, internet domain names, lifetime individual income, litigation, patents,receivables, timber, virtual currencies, motion picture rights, music royalties, fiber optic cable, health club fees, and meal credits, securitizations of revenues from professional sports stadiums , notes and certificates in financings backed by rights and revenues under national media contracts for National Football League and Major League baseball team, single-family rental industry, tax shelters, abandoned assets, and other alternative assets. I am looking to understand how to identify these emerging asset classes early.
The Business of Investing
- Alternative models for VC investing. See A better way to fund SaaS companies; Six Paths to Financing a SaaS Business; Should Private Startups Be Issuing More Bonds?; Revenue-Based Investing overview.
- Research the organizational structure of portfolio-operations focused VCs and their portfolio, vs. conglomerates, studios/foundries, and other organizational structures for large businesses promoting innovation.
- Research and publicize best practices in running venture studios/startup foundries, which are models in between an entrepreneur and a VC (e.g., Betaworks, Idealab). See The Emerging Role of Venture Builders in Early-Stage Venture Funding.
- Identify most pertinent metrics for investors to evaluate early-stage companies, and collect data on the normal range of such metrics. Use to analyze their future needs, e.g., whom they should hire. Leverage work of Bright*Sun, CB Insights, DataFox, Disruption Corporation, PrivCo, StartupCompass, etc.
- Study characteristics of the most successful Entrepreneurs in Residence, and the attributes of successful EIR programs.
- Analyze the most rapidly growing open-source tools/ecosystems in order to identify entrepreneurial opportunities in those spheres. Analyze opportunities that emerged from the growth of earlier ecosystems, e.g, Ruby –> Heroku. Identify opportunities that emerge from the growth of HTML5.
- Identify white space on market maps: Target sectors that are not yet transformed by the internet: finance, healthcare, energy, education, etc.
- Identify how, when, and why senior executives/time-pressed professionals are using social media, and business opportunities that emerge from the use of social media by this most influential demographic.
Process Improvement in Investing
- Write a generic guide to market mapping a new industry sector. See this article for background. We have not found a good book or even article on how to go about doing this.
- Create a systematic approach for identifying industries ripe for disruption, and disruptive companies, using the ideas in Clayton Christenson’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” and its followup books. E.g., look for hated companies (AT&T, cable companies); look for the largest private companies in a sector (which may be seeking to hide their profitability).
- Analyze the fastest-growing companies in every significant country, and then identify if we can create a comparable company in the US market. This is the reverse of the ‘geographic arbitrage’ strategy used by many emerging market entrepreneurs copying US models that are successful.
Entrepreneurship Processes
- Identify the metrics that are appropriate for measuring the value of a firm’s corporate network, using the network measurement paradigm developed in the book, The Virtual Handshake.
- Research and publicize best practices in managing a virtual file server (e.g., Dropbox, Box) for a diverse international team.
- Research which functions are most logically outsourced in a startup, and which are best done in-house. Identify best service providers.
