Alex Rampell
Almost every day I get a note from a student saying they want to get into venture investing. got a nice one yesterday from a rising senior at Harvard (comp sci major), here was my response: my strong, strong recommendation: don’t start in venture capital or even investing! this is the greatest...
Alex Rampell
Seed bets are largely people bets, and the way I think about them is a set of simple (but hard to know!) assessments of the entrepreneurs — can they materialize labor and capital, are they going to get to traction on the seed (vs what I call a “slow boil” company), and how prolific/encyclopedic...
Alex Rampell
The best entrepreneurs constantly “read the room” (or the market) and adjust their presentation style, their mannerisms, their product description, their team, their focus, their advisors — everything. They have the smallest number of axioms (things they accept without questioning). Everything...
Alex Rampell
If you have a product that can be used in many different ways, do not let your customers’ creativity run wild. Be very prescriptive and don’t be afraid to say no to a bad integration. It can be an unrecoverable mistake. In 2006, I started TrialPay as an alternative payment system – “pay by...
andrew
I deliberated putting a question mark at the end of that title. Education Technology is a topic of contradictions, and has a history of hype, so it is clearly bold of me to be asserting This Time It is Different. But, maybe this time it is different. The recent State of Australian Startup...
M.G. Siegler
A narrowly avoided VC thought-leader post™This is me not doing email…I sat down to write this and thought it would be some big reflection on the state of venture capital over the past dozen years. But I quickly came to my senses. The world does not want, nor need another one of those posts. And...
bgurley
If you are looking past or through Covid — and why not, all of Wall Street is — the topic du jour in Silicon Valley is Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs. SPACs are all the rage, and everybody and their brother have either raised one or are talking about raising one. What are they,...