I saw Bill Janeway speak at Columbia the other night. One of the things he said was “pessimists don’t make good VCs.” A truism. This Summer, talking to a younger colleague about the pace and direction of technological innovation I said there was less potentially society-changing technology today than at any other point in the […]

Thank you to Tom Eisenmann of HBS, who gave valuable feedback on a couple of iterations of this. I teach entrepreneurship at Columbia University. We devote the second-to-last class to a Harvard Business School case study about the early years of Zipcar. It’s a good case and we can review most of what we learned through […]

My friend Harry Stebbings interviewed me for his podcast The 20 Minute VC a little while ago. He published it today. I love his podcast, he asks great questions and tailors them to his guest. You get a distilled view of what they’re thinking about. He and I talk about some of the things I’ve […]

One of the dangers of working alone is that when you start doing things oddly there’s noone to call you on it. It’s almost nine and a half years since I started angel investing as a full-time thing, plenty of time to develop strongly held beliefs that happen to be completely wrong. The only thing […]

Here is the second-best thing any entrepreneur has ever said of me, to another entrepreneur: “you should talk to Jerry. He’s one of us.” I was an entrepreneur once, I have a different job now. But the implication that I was like them, that I understood them, that I would have empathy for what they […]

EDIT, 10/31/19: I’m withdrawing this piece. I’ve become convinced that since the Kelly Criterion is not directly applicable to venture, using the spirit of it to justify follow-ons is cheating. I still think I’m right, but if I want to make the argument I think I have to do the math. EDIT, 6/20/17: Kelly justified […]

Chris Douvos, one of the smartest fund-of-funds guys, once asked me the three questions he asks people who are raising a VC fund for the first time. The third was: “what makes you so special?” I was stumped. I couldn’t think of an answer. I figured I’d come back to the process once I did. That […]

[I really meant to write this in a longer post because it’s arguable and I like to argue. But while this is timely because of the excitement around Pokemon Go, I’m working on something else and only had a few minutes to put it down. Not sure why I’m apologizing for not giving you another 25-page, […]

I was at a research lab to talk about commercialization. The presenter put up a slide of some exciting new technologies. The slide’s tagline said these technologies would “disrupt the biomedical industry.” My first thought was that disrupting the biomedical industry–“to interrupt by causing a disturbance” or “to drastically alter or destroy the structure of something”–is probably the exact […]

I built the @VCdelta twitterbot five years ago to solve a problem. I needed to keep on top of the companies the firms I respected most were investing in. The obvious way to do that was to keep track of the firms’ portfolio pages. I found it really useful. Other people found it useful too, and […]