The Lost Art of Early Stage Venture Capital

By definition, you will likely succeed a vanishingly-small percentage of the time, but—as the saying goes—that’s a feature, not a bug. The point is to venture—fistfuls of money in hand—at the furthest extremes of capitalism, hoping to stumble upon that rare, proper intersection of technology and commerciality.By design, most investments will miss t... See more

Of these companies that become well financed we only need 15–25% of those to pan out to return 2–3x the fund. But this is all driven on the assumption that we didn’t write a $20 million check out of the gate, that we didn’t pay a $100 million pre-money valuation and that we took a meaningful ownership stake by making a very early bet on founders an... See more

A great deal has been written about what constitutes Venture Capital and what does not (including by this very author) in these seventy years. Though many different things to many different people, Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dictum in Jacobellis v. Ohio works for our purposes:I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I ... See more