What is impact investing? It’s a question that gets asked a lot, even in the crowd that calls itself impact investors. I explained the general idea on-stage at The Nature-Accelerator in just three and a half minutes:
Entrepreneurs are farmers of ideas.Farmers who are living in a perpetual drought.No matter how well we teach entrepreneurship, the drought creates year after year of failed crops. The fix has little to do with more and better incubators, accelerators, and startups labs. This drought is the lack of capital to support the existing startups. Just as we can’t solve a regional drought by...
There are a few aspects of venture capital whose origins are lost to history. One of these is the 20% stock option pool. Or more simply, the idea that everyone in the startup should own (at least a small amount of) the equity. Does this idea date all the way back to Rock and Davis, or did it come later? Why 20%? Why not 10% or 33% or 50%? Was this idea ever debated, or did one VC decades ago tout...
Nothing lasts forever is misleading. It implies that some things last for long periods of time. Western philosophy craves stability, predictability and tradition. We want today to be a lot like yesterday. We get upset when it isn’t. Buddhism has a different view. Buddha taught that the only constant is change. That nothing ever stays the same. That everything is...
A few times per year I attend conferences full of fellow fund managers, managers of family offices, and big impact investors. The rest of the year I share investment opportunities multiple times per week with other investors. From all these conversations, I’ve come to realize the power and benefits of running a business accelerator rather than a traditional venture capital fund. From 10,000...
Blogging is just one more example of the key lesson I teach entrepreneurs, that it takes multiple iterations to find something that works. That is true not only for products, but also for sales, marketing, and messaging. The words I’ve failed to find in the story of WeWork and its lead investor Softbank I found buried in a CNBC article: Too big to succeed The problem with Softbank’s Vision Fund...
