Thought Leadership Threads

MANY startups are living with bad decisions they made when cheap capital flowed freely.

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Massive value destruction was driven by Founders playing Hungry Hungry Hippo, trying to accumulate as much revenue as possible.

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A few thoughts on how to learn from their mistakes:🧵👇

Startups that have clean narratives and “up-and-to-the-right” results can generally raise capital with minimal friction.

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But a fundraise takes on an entirely different form when a startup has “asterisks” that complicate the story.

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Unfortunately, asterisks are now the norm!🧵👇

There’s a lot of mis-information being shared about VC performance and how it translates into LP returns.
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There’s also a lack of understanding about how the VC ecosystem broke the LP ecosystem over the past few years and why this matters A LOT.
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Here’s what’s going on:🧵👇

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It used to be common for a startup to de-risk in distinct phases that aligned with capital raises.

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Discipline disappeared and the number of rounds a typical startup raised exploded into “alphabet soup”.

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The market is returning to “normal”. Here’s what you need to know: 🧵👇

VCs didn’t know what fintech was until giants emerged like Stripe, Credit Karma and NuBank.

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Then every VC wanted fintech exposure. But these “fintech tourists” have exited the building.

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What follows is advice 8 VCs who stayed the course are giving their fintech companies.🧵👇

Over 100 startups in our portfolio have refactored their operating plans in the past year.

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Some have become profitable with as little as $5MM of revenue while others have found ways to do more with less.

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Can you guess the four most common levers they pulled?🧵👇

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Memecoin trading is back with marketcaps for select coins exploding by 5X, 10X and sometimes even 100X+.

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Over the past few days I talked to traders who hold anywhere from $500 to $20MM+ of memecoins.

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Their views are eye opening! 🧵👇

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A disturbing change to society over the past few decades is the number of people addicted to “unearned dopamine”.

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Having spent countless hours with high stakes poker players and professional day-traders, I’ve seen the fallout. It can be ugly!

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A few thoughts:🧵👇

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The biggest fallacy in the Startup world is to believe that the entry price for a great investment is irrelevant.

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While great investments generate great returns, being indifferent to price is a function of sloppy thinking.

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A useful mental model that great Investors use:🧵👇

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