It’s Friday and I’m procrastinating, so here you go. Let’s talk about Joseph Schumpeter. Good old John Joseph Jingleheimer Schumpeter, as he wasn’t called. Schumpeter once wrote in his diary that he aspired to be the greatest economist, horseman, and lover in the world1. I can imagine the women and horses edging away nervously. Luckily […]
Why do VCs insist on only investing in high-risk, high-return companies?
Sorry this is so short. It’s an interesting topic that I don’t have time right now to do justice. Last week I updated my “am I going to run out of money before I die” spreadsheet, as I’ve been doing every January for ten years. I need to do this because, aside from the paltry […]
iTunes Case: Technological Innovation
Ralph Waldo Emerson reportedly once said “If a man can…make a better mouse trap than his neighbors, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”1 Every engineer fervently wishes this were true. It is not. The success of any interesting product is not just a function of […]
iTunes and the Basis of Competition in the MP3 Player Market
CC-BY. PDF here. iTunes and the Basis of Competition in the MP3 Player Market “It’s official: the only thing more popular than MP3 is sex.” So said Rolling Stone magazine in 19991: Virtually unheard of a year ago, MP3—short for MPEG 1 Layer 3—is an audio-coding technology that allows digital music files from CDs or other […]
The Complected Bird
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 […]
Zipcar Fundraising Breakdown
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 […]
20 Minute VC with Harry Stebbings
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 […]
Power Laws in Venture Portfolio Construction
Every article that has ever given advice on investing in venture capital has said that you need to invest in a portfolio of companies, because each investment on its own is probably going to be worth nothing and if you invest in just a few you will almost certainly lose all your money. This is […]
Ruling out rather than ruling in
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 […]
Betting your Beliefs
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 […]