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Neu Venture Capital Investor Update
Dear Neu Venture Capital investor, Our frequent informal communications have generally taken the form of late night discussions where you vent your darkest fears about us losing all of your money and...
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The Deployment Age
A couple of weeks ago James Gross, co-founder of Percolate, had me speak at their Transition conference. I talked about Carlota Perez, her theories, and the transition to the deployment period that we...
View ArticleStrategies Against Systems
There is one other circumstance, peculiar to human conduct, which stands in the way of successful social prediction and planning. Public predictions of future social developments are frequently not...
View ArticleVCdelta now part of Mattermark
I built the @VCdelta twitterbot five years ago to solve a problem. I needed to keep on top of the companies the firms I respected most were investing in. The obvious way to do that was to keep track of...
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Disruption is not a strategy
I was at a research lab to talk about commercialization. The presenter put up a slide of some exciting new technologies. The slide’s tagline said these technologies would “disrupt the biomedical...
View ArticleAR will be startup dominated, VR will not
[I really meant to write this in a longer post because it’s arguable and I like to argue. But while this is timely because of the excitement around Pokemon Go, I’m working on something else and only...
View ArticleOn being special in the venture business
Chris Douvos, one of the smartest fund-of-funds guys, once asked me the three questions he asks people who are raising a VC fund for the first time. The third was: “what makes you so special?” I was...
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Venture Follow-on and the Kelly Criterion
EDIT, 6/20/17: Kelly justified betting a larger amount of your bankroll when you have a larger informational advantage. But the Kelly Criterion itself imagines a specific scenario: sequential parlay...
View ArticleBetting your Beliefs
Here is the second-best thing any entrepreneur has ever said of me, to another entrepreneur: “you should talk to Jerry. He’s one of us.” I was an entrepreneur once, I have a different job now. But the...
View ArticleRuling out rather than ruling in
One of the dangers of working alone is that when you start doing things oddly there’s noone to call you on it. It’s almost nine and a half years since I started angel investing as a full-time thing,...
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Power Laws in Venture Portfolio Construction
Every article that has ever given advice on investing in venture capital has said that you need to invest in a portfolio of companies, because each investment on its own is probably going to be worth...
View Article20 Minute VC with Harry Stebbings
My friend Harry Stebbings interviewed me for his podcast The 20 Minute VC a little while ago. He published it today. I love his podcast, he asks great questions and tailors them to his guest. You get a...
View ArticleZipcar Fundraising Breakdown
Thank you to Tom Eisenmann of HBS, who gave valuable feedback on a couple of iterations of this. I teach entrepreneurship at Columbia University. We devote the second-to-last class to a Harvard...
View ArticleThe Complected Bird
I saw Bill Janeway speak at Columbia the other night. One of the things he said was “pessimists don’t make good VCs.” A truism. This Summer, talking to a younger colleague about the pace and direction...
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iTunes and the Basis of Competition in the MP3 Player Market
CC-BY. PDF here. iTunes and the Basis of Competition in the MP3 Player Market “It’s official: the only thing more popular than MP3 is sex.” So said Rolling Stone magazine in 19991: Virtually unheard of...
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Why do VCs insist on only investing in high-risk, high-return companies?
Sorry this is so short. It’s an interesting topic that I don’t have time right now to do justice.\[\] Last week I updated my “am I going to run out of money before I die” spreadsheet, as I’ve been...
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Schumpeter on Strategy
It’s Friday and I’m procrastinating, so here you go. Let’s talk about Joseph Schumpeter. Good old John Joseph Jingleheimer Schumpeter, as he wasn’t called. Schumpeter once wrote in his diary that he...
View ArticleManaging Technological Innovation, Spring 2019 Syllabus
Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research IEOR 4998...
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Managing Technological Innovation: Industry Analysis
My short post a few weeks ago on one of Schumpeter’s ideas lightly suggested you could derive most of modern business strategy from that one idea. I suppose this might technically be true if you are a...
View ArticleBoiling Frogs
I was responding to a pitch this week. Stellar team, big market, demonstrated customer need. I wasn’t going to invest, despite all that. I wrote: “not the kind of thing I invest in.” I’ve written this...
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