I’m diving into investing, and I'm writing about the process. Read or watch my initial announcement, and read about week 1 here.

Partnership

My naive initial opinion was that seeking consensus among a large group of people was a great way to filter outliers. VC is a home-run business, so this seems like a bad structure.

There is a lot of nuance here as to why this view is wrong. 

One side is that a single person can’t do 30 deals yearly and still build a balanced portfolio. Your returns won’t be good if you do 8 deals. So you build out a partnership to make the portfolio 30+ while also allowing partners to work very closely with founders. This is stage dependent. So this might fit a Series A stage, a seed investor can individually do 30 investments - but not work closely. 

Look at YC or SV Angel, where they do many investments but don’t get on boards. They also aren’t closely involved day to day. 

There are more mechanics here too, like who has the final decision to invest. Founders will build a close relationship with a single partner, but it might be the whole partnership needs unanimity to invest. This dynamic is different with 5 or 25 people in the room. I'll also look at the tone of this debate.

Another issue is generational transfer. How does a firm ensure retiring leadership allows for continuity? When diving into the details here, the mechanics of control and splitting carry become very important. As I get deeper into the actual corporate structure, there will be much more to explore here.

Brand

I have a lot of operating experience as an engineer and product manager, with specialization in machine learning and robotics. I get the tech. I’ve been a founder multiple times and I’ll always be founder friendly. 

This is probably not enough for a personal brand. Brand matters in competitive deals, and I want to be someone a founder will seek out. 

This is why I'm going to be so open. Thinking in public is a great way to achieve clarity. But it is also living authentically and giving back what I've learned to the community. Going deep and democratizing access are two things very important to me, and I'll live that by example.

Go subscribe to my new YouTube Channel here. You’ll see a lot more of me there. 

Metrics

• Meetings: 18, (+6 over last week, 30 cumulative). I still need to bump these numbers. Scheduling isn't efficient and I’m exploring calendaring tools. 
• Posts: 2 (+1, 3). I started a video channel, which has a lot of setup required. 
• CRM: 28 (-4, 60). I still haven’t found agreement on tools here, and another layer is sharing deal flow. There are some basic mechanisms I want, like automatically extracting entities from my inbox. I’ll write more on this area in a future post.

Currently Reading

I’m diving into Secrets of Sand Hill Road and enjoying it so far. I’ll post a review when complete, but it’s already obviously worth reading for those getting started in investing.

On a meta level, I treasure this time of learning because it builds empathy for those that don’t know. I remember reading a VC website in 2007 about a seed program with convertible debt. At the time, I thought, “I don’t want to go into debt”, obviously not understanding the structure. Whenever I talk to new founders I can understand their perspective. Never be condescending to novices because they’ll learn the mechanics in time but remember your attitude.  

Keep Up

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