Edward Lando

Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good idea with competitors than a bad one without.

I think what does separate some entrepreneurs from other entrepreneurs is we're not handwringers. We don't worry about the unknown. We don't really worry about the risk points ahead. As you get older and you get more experience, you train yourself to think ahead about the risk points versus just to take the next hill. But non–risk-takers and non-en

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We believe that investors in any market need “edge” … knowing something (thesis) or somebody (access) better than almost any other investor. We also focus heavily on geographies.

I prefer founders who are willing to pursue their visions long before an investor comes along and takes some of the pressure off of them. What this signals, in my experience, is that if these founders someday run out of money—and almost all startups do—they will likely revert back to not paying themselves, while still pushing the company forward wi

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For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the p... See more

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more