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I invest in early stage companies through Neu Venture Capital.
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5M ago
For some ten years I have advised students in my entrepreneurship class to use a 40% discount rate in their lifetime value calculations. Every semester someone decides to take advice they found on the internet and use a much lower rate. It does seem like, of the advice given, mine is at the high end ..read more
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7M ago
The book I wrote with Liz Zalman has been released! We chose an unusual format: we take specific times and events in the life of a startup, times that can cause conflict between founders and investors, and we each give our views on them. We disagree. A lot. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback. Some ..read more
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9M ago
Generative AIs can do some things better than people: they can code faster in many instances, they can write junior high school level essays faster, they can create detailed images on demand no matter what the demand, and they can write a mediocre sonnet about whatever you want. But it’s still obvious that human intelligence ..read more
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1y ago
Uncertainty results in unpredictability, and two types of things cause unpredictability: novelty and complexity. Novelty uncertainty is when you can’t predict something because it has never been done before. You might not know know the existing conditions, all the actions you can take, how those actions might change conditions, and/or what the possible outcomes are ..read more
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2y ago
One of my portfolio companies raised a round a few months ago and I left their board. So, for the first time in a long time, I am not on any boards of directors. Since I no longer have anyone specific to offend, I have some advice. You’re running your board in a way that ..read more
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3y ago
Bill Janeway recently said of something I wrote that my focus on uncertainty “seems rather untethered.” Janeway is one of the few people writing about venture capital who have been in the business longer than I have, so this made me sit back and think for a bit. I’ve spent a while now writing primarily ..read more
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3y ago
If the point of a startup is to create excess value then the startup needs an innovation that can be defended over time. This means the team must have a strategy to defend their position once they have mitigated uncertainty ..read more
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3y ago
Every firm competing in an industry has a competitive strategy, either explicit or implicit… The emphasis being placed on strategic planning today…reflects the proposition that there are significant benefits to gain through an explicit process of formulating strategy, to insure that at least the policies (if not the actions) of functional departments are coordinated and ..read more
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3y ago
This is completely irrelevant to the current moment. Enjoy. We build models to see what the future will hold and then tailor our actions to what the models tell us. If the models are accurately predictive then great. But sometimes the models are predictive only because we do what they tell us to do. It ..read more