One result of this past tech cycle was a view that companies needed to build hyper complex ponzi schemes of ambition in order to accumulate capital and be valued. This led to a variety of shooting stars that never realized their main goal.

Another view was an insane amount of value ascribed to hyper-narrow features masquerading as companies, leading... See more

The past several years have been characterized by higher and higher private company valuations, which, when the public markets for tech companies reset over the past few months, left venture capital investors that had invested in later stage private rounds in the red on these investments. In other words, not dissimilar from the issues that employee... See more

Overall, booms and busts in the economy, including in the stock market, have an impact both on the amounts invested by VC firms and on valuations, with later-stage startups getting hit harder. However, the impact is not catastrophic. While startups find it harder to raise capital and find themselves raising at more modest valuations during these ti

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You might be wondering why VC firms don’t focus on lower-risk, lower-return companies. Instead of looking for a rare 10x, why not look for ten, 3x deals with more certainty? That idea is interesting in theory, but startups die for a million different reasons—co-founder conflict, founder loss of interest, departure of a co-founder, losing a key cust

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