Entrepreneurship as the Renaissance By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read To be an entrepreneur right now is the most powerful thing that you can do. It is our version of the Renaissance. So people that are creating companies now, especially if they create them correctly, have the ability to do two things: #1 is massively impact the world in really important ways. #2 is capture... More
Capital Allocation By editor on January 28, 2018 — 1 min read Mark is becoming a master capital allocator. What Warren Buffet is is a capital allocator. What Larry is learning to become is a capital allocator. Jeff is actually the best capital allocator of all of them. He takes just enough small bets, makes thousands of bets. The minute that something works, he’s able to put... More
Win By editor on January 28, 2018 — 1 min read There should be one culture: Win. We fucking win. When we’re done winning, we win some more. When we do that, we have winning for dessert, and then we go to bed in a blanket of winning. It’s about winning. Those are artificial tactics: “We only do Series A’s.” No. It’s about winning. Buffett started... More
The Business Narrative Barbell By editor on January 28, 2018 — 1 min read Most people should probably be running quarterly businesses unless they’re not. If they’re not, they need to tell that story and just be open and transparent about it and build the credibility to tell a broad narrative and then back it up with facts. Stay small and really tight, or go really, really, big. It... More
Narratives By editor on January 28, 2018 — 1 min read It’s a real litmus test of a CEOs ability to tell a narrative that creates an envelope of trust. It’s not dissimilar to how a CEO has to manage his or her employees at a company if you’re going to build a very successful company. You have to tell a story that is both inspirational... More
Funding By editor on January 28, 2018 — 1 min read These big problems take an amount of funding and people that is just different from an eight person team trying to build an app on the internet. This is fucking cancer. It’s hard! If you build a big company, you see the investment required to solve really big, meaningful, long-term problems. That can be lost... More
Liquidity and Team Turnover By editor on January 28, 2018 — 1 min read Bringing liquidity into companies sooner will actually allow companies to bake longer and more patiently. So part of what this vehicle is, is about bringing liquidity sooner in a company’s lifecycle. If we can take this company, use it to acquire something else, and that CEO is now able to compensate their employees — as... More
Slow Success By editor on January 28, 2018 — 1 min read The fail fast approach works for consumer internet businesses, but I don’t think it works for anything that really matters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMotykw0SIk (18:00) More
Define the Critical Metric By editor on January 28, 2018 — 1 min read You have to be able to define the critical metric that defines the core product value of the business. Revenue is a lagging indicator that reflects the magnitude of the product-market fit. In our case, in our precision medicine company, this company called Syapse, we literally talk about lives saved. The reason is because we... More
Iteration By editor on January 28, 2018 — 2 mins read We stumbled into this business model accidentally. In my family, my dad, who passed away, had diabetes for 30 years. Of my 17 aunts and uncles, 11 of them had diabetes. The first thing I really did once I left Facebook was I helped co-found this company called Glooko, which is a diabetes company. We... More
