Topic
investing
- On Markets, TAMs, and Agency
If you've been involved in investing or fundraising activities in the past, you've likely heard about "TAMs" (total addressable market), as in "So what's your TAM look like?" The general idea is to determine a metric…
- Stealth Objections
An interesting post from Sandy on the "stealth objection": when a customer, investor, user, employee — anyone — harbors some resistance to what you're selling them, but doesn't make it explicit. My experience here is…
- TAM for Seed Stage is Overrated
One of my favorite ideas from my friend Sandy Kory is that "great product-led companies create their own TAM". His latest post is on this topic, that worrying about deep TAM analysis is a distraction for early compani…
- Lines Not Dots
A classic from Mark Suster on patience and pattern recognition for investors: The first time I meet you, you are a single data point. A dot. I have no reference point from which to judge whether you were higher on the…
- A Brief History of Construction Startups
The construction market for startups (one that I'm fairly involved in, but only as a segment of our market) has been a historically tough nut to crack for technology companies. This is a great breakdown from Brian Pot…
- Weekend Reading: Robotic Bricklaying, Medici and Thiel, and Airtable, Roblox of the Enterprise
🧱 Where Are the Robotic Bricklayers? Brian Potter wonders why work as taxing and seemingly-mechanically simple as brick masonry is difficult to automate: Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, b…
- Weekend Reading: Koestler on Awareness, 21st Century Alchemy, and the Gini Coefficient
🔮 The Nightmare That Is a Reality In early 1944, journalist Arthur Koestler was onto the horrors of the Holocaust taking place in Europe. He wrote this essay, originally published in the New York Times, calling atten…
- Bessemer Investment Memos
Internal memos are insightful resources to look at how organizations work and make decisions. Bessemer has published an archive of the investment memos that their partners have written to their internal investment com…
- Building in World 2.0
Daniel Gross has a good list of things that will change post-coronavirus lockdown — patterns of lifesytle, businesses, real estate, and others: A few notable ones: The (temporary) end of cities. We might see a tempora…
- Weekend Reading: The Anti Portfolio, Downlink 2, and nucoll
📂 The Anti-Portfolio Bessemer maintains this page of companies they passed investing on. I like the idea of publicly acknowledging your big misses or errors as an organizational accountability tool. Some big names he…
- Weekend Reading: Enemies of Writing, Wealth, and the Superhuman Inbox
✍🏼 The Enemies of Writing A great piece from the Atlantic's George Packer, a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize. At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from o…
- Every Great Investment Hurts
Morgan Housel on investing: Every great investment is born from decisions that were harder than they appear to an outsider. There are so few exceptions to this. Investors have a fascination with no-brainers, obvious d…
- Entrepreneurs, Then and Now
I always enjoy conversations with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. This interview (conducted by Slack founder Steward Butterfield) reviews their experiences as founders back in the pre-bubble era and compares and con…
- Counterintuitive Competitive Advantages
Investor Morgan Housel writes here about features that can, at face value, appear to be competitive advantages at one scale, while being destructive disadvantages at another. On being wiped out (local disadvantage) an…
- Luck, Risk, and Avoiding Losers
The latest episode of Shane Parrish's Knowledge Project podcast is an interview with investor Howard Marks. There's a ton here on how he thinks about opportunity and risk. I loved the sound beliefs on cycles — people…
- How Investors Think About Ideas
A good overview from YC’s Kevin Hale on how to break down startup ideas: The “solution looking for a problem” trap is all too easy to fall into, and to justify your way out of even if you fall prey to it. I love the a…
- Weekend Reading: AV-Human Interaction, iPad Pro, and Buying Out Investors
🚙 How Self-Driving Cars Could Communicate with You Interesting work by Ford’s self-driving team on how robotic vehicles could signal intent to pedestrians. You normally think Waymo, Tesla, and Uber with AV tech. But…