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

From the perspective of an operations guy, there is a lot of riff-raff in venture capital: posers, herd mentality, technology infatuation, too much education, not enough experience to appreciate what grit and focus it takes to grow a business out of nothing. To have a fighting chance, you want to be with the best firms, and the best partners in tho

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narratives. As VCs, the most basic decision we face daily is whether to invest in a startup. Will this be a good investment? A high risk/high return investment? A long- or short-term investment? The Razor does not answer any of these questions. It provides a vehicle for organizing our energies so that we can find the data and create a narrative tha

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But what could a future-proof venture firm look like if it was built from scratch? These are the most common ideas that have come up in my conversations- Visionary leadership- An org chart that reflects value-creation- Product-led value proposition- Incentivizing collaboration and apprenticeship internally- Intellectually honest decision making