Thought Leadership Threads

Building a #StartUp business has similarities to a spacecraft crashing down on an unknown planet. I talk to Founders about this all the time. Unpacked:

Have you ever had a concept explained to you that helps frame complex issues you’ve been wrestling with and opens your eyes to new possibilities? A concept that I share that seems to resonate well with Entrepreneurs and Investors is what I call “Truth Files”. Unpacked:

Of all the questions I’m being asked on recent diligence calls about our companies, the most common is “What are the skills/gaps of the Founder(s)?” Given COVID, this has become an important topic so I thought it would be worth sharing how I think about the issue. Unpacked:

I’ve been told that some of the simple concepts I routinely share with Founders get adopted by their firms as “truths” (which is flattering). I was asked to outline a few of them in Tweet form. Unpacked:

What the heck is going on with the #fintech ecosystem’s obsession with Neo-Banks? Do they actually make sense in the US? Traditional Bankers say “absolutely not”. I say “they can”. Unpacked:

The most commonly debated and IMHO the least grounded topic in early stage VC is “how do you determine what a company is worth?” Recent early stage #fintech and #venturecapital valuations seem to defy gravity but are they justified?

The biggest question coming out of my recent tweet thread about the evaluation of startups is: “How important is the startup’s distribution strategy in your diligence work?” The answer is: “Damn important because the business needs customers to exist!” Unpacked:

Every early stage startup pitch looks the same at a foundational level. This means that the analysis of every early stage startup also looks similar (especially true in #venturecapital and #fintech). Unpacked:

There’s been a lot of talk about how difficult it is to produce great returns in the VC space, and while this is true it suffers from over-simplification. Unpacked: