Advice Aggregated
By Alex Mackenzie at
A perpetually evolving doc of the advice I've received or inherited about the business of VC.
Josh Wolfe was the first person I heard refer to venture as a business of aggregation. In venture we see a lot -- fungal computation to open source contributor models (fan of allcontributors) to gift card breakage state laws.
Below you'll find my ~unique aggregate of learnings about the business of venture - beyond the "usual" / "technical".
"Suck the oxygen out of the air" - Pat Grady on winning founder mind share. (about Sarah Guo!)
"Do good deals" - Anon on becoming a great investor. "Obvious" - but very easy to climb the wrong hill.
"Look at the steepness of the slope" - Geoff Lewis on assessing the MOIC of people vs. companies.
"Rock, sand & water" - Sarah Tavel with a framework on consumers' time allocation.
"Not all revenue is created equal" - Bill Gurley on meta financial analysis.
"You can still improve an axe" - Jeff Bezos on invention.
"Work with life's work entrepreneurs" - Geoff Lewis on investing in upside & resiliency.
"What's the last step" - Palmer Luckey on how to avoid working on (or investing in!) incremental ideas.
"10*9" - Roelof Botha on investing exceptionally vs. incrementally.
"World's most important companies" - Bryan Singerman. "Obvious" - but useful way to keep incremental bias/adverse selection in check.
"Study Burning Man" - Jess Lee on building / appraising communities.
"Builder & Persuader" - Mike Maples on profiles of co-founders to look out for.
"Failure to imagine failure" - Josh Wolfe on company failure being ok as long as the cause of failure was anticipated.
"Bat-signal" - Marc Andreessen on Peter Thiel optimizing for the type of founders, colleagues, peers he wants to work with.
"Sell what LPs know how to buy" - Paul Martino on fundraising narratives for emerging managers.
"N-of-1 vs. 1-of-N" - Arjun Sethi on investing in companies capable of generating persistent differential returns.
"There are operate to win companies or outright innovation companies" - Henry Ward's taxonomy of companies to build / invest in.
"Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets" - Josh Wolfe on identifying founder tenacity.
"The power of defaults" - Julien Digital on atom-based network effects.
"Technical logistics companies" - Alex Wang on the value of investing in / building intangible complexity.
"Their time is already allocated" - Marc Andreessen on the difficulty of capturing consumer attention.
"Look for what sucks" - Josh Wolfe on investing in what matters.
"Multi product companies" - Bedrock Capital on assessing the feasibility of second / third acts by companies.
"Truth seeking" - Benchmark on due diligence.
"Ask the same question, 10 different ways" - Wes Chan on seeking the truth.
Pull requests encouraged if you have a learning to share!