Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, wrote in a thoughtful essay: “The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one’s opinions in bulk. You don’t get to pick and choose. Your opinions about taxation can be predicted from your opinions about same-sex marriage.…Accidental moderates, on the other...
[Continue Reading]Competitive Intelligence 101
I advise my portfolio companies to be careful about what information they make searchable publicly. But on the other side, I definitely recommend seeing what information others have made public. For each competitor, I suggest you do the following: Look on Angel.co for their pitch deck. Look on Crunchbase.com and Pitchbook.com and see if they...
[Continue Reading]Venture capitalists eating our own dog food: Using AI and analytics to make better investments
Private equity and venture capital investors are copying our sisters in the hedge fund world: we’re trying to automate more of our job. When I was single, I registered for (a lot of) dating websites. When I met my now-wife, I realized that any technology that can find me a spouse is a killer...
[Continue Reading]Free money for your impact tech startup
Congratulations! You’ve decided to launch a technology-enabled startup with a positive social impact! Nearly every major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm has now invested in a B Corp; maybe you will be one of them! Now the bad news: some venture capitalists have a bias against startups with an explicit positive social impact, on the grounds...
[Continue Reading]Use agile budgeting to manage your business
Instead of budget approvals, monitor key metrics and give managers more flexibility Traditional budgets can be destructive and a huge waste of time. How should a growth company manage their budget? Does the annual budget approval process even make sense in a fast-moving firm? My friends who are executives at large, established companies complain about...
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