Investment theses and ideas:

  • New Zealand - Andrew Wilkinson
  • Airport businesses - Andrew Wilkinson
  • Butter thesis - USV
  • Remote control for life - Matt Cohler
  • Product innovation or GTM innovation - Unknown
  • Big Problem. A few companies have had large outcomes. Last innovator has not innovated in a while - Ajeet Singh, Thoughtspot
  • Eight Laws for Developer Platforms - Bessemer
  • 10 laws of cloud - Bessemer
  • Invest in the arms dealer - David Perell
  • Invest in a big market. Then invest in adjacent markets - Don Valentine
  • Is the market big? Can you win and defend a large share of the market? Can your team do the job? - Randy Komisar
  • Product solves a functional need. It also solves an emotional need which gets users to share with others. Big market or market which can become big - Todd Jackson 1, Todd Jackson 2
  • N of 1 - Tribe Capital
  • 5 Questions decision tree - Rob Go
  • Does the audience skew “young”? Is there a gap between engagement and monetization? Are there artificial barriers holding back scale? - Brett Bivens
  • Soon-to-be obvious but only recently possible. Solving a difficult, boring, complex problem with an easy-to-use, elegant solution - SHL
  • Look past what it is now, and ask how much cheaper and better it can become. Think who else would buy it once it becomes cheaper and better, and how else would it be used - Unknown
  • The insight hack (insight development). The value hack (customer development). Growth hacking (going from 0-1 to 1-X) - Mike Maples
  • Backcasting: live in the future, find what’s missing, and then show people the way forward - Mike Maples
  • Dominance friction - Jesse Beyroutey
  • What is anomalous? What “secret” is the company predicated on? What could this be? Could this be one of the most important companies on the planet? What is the accumulating advantage? Can the founder attract the talent requisite to achieve the vision? Why do we have a comparative advantage? - Keith Rabois
  • Find large highly fragmented industry with low NPS; vertically integrate a solution to simplify value product - Keith Rabois
  • Vanishing tailwinds - John Luttig
  • Often early-stage investing is as simple as assessing the “followability” of the founding team: will recruits follow them? will larger VCs follow them? will customers follow them? - Semil Shah
  • Start with large markets, go searching for teams working in them, and writing checks only when you find talented teams working in large markets who have built excellent products - Fred Wilson
  • Feasibility, Desirability, Scalability, Knowledge, Role, Repeated Game vs Market, Product, Team, Deal - Jerry Neumann
  • 9 components of Point Nine Capital’s memo - Point Nine Capital
  • The Team, The Tech (a.k.a. Product), The Total Addressable Market (a.k.a. Market), The Traction (a.k.a. Growth), The Trenches (a.k.a. Defensibility) - Point Nine Capital
  • Before Turner became a VC meme lord, he wrote this - Turner’s Fantasy VC Portfolio II
  • Why now?, Product category, Market size, Distribution, Long term moat - Nakul Mandan, Lightspeed
  • Strength of the Management Team, Size of the Opportunity, Product/Technology, Competitive Environment, Marketing/Sales Channels/Partnerships, Need for Additional Investment, Other - Harry Alford, Humble Ventures
  • Index companies - Elad Gil
  • Vertical, Model, Use Case, Technology, Geography - Thesis-driven early-stage Investing
  • A collection of pitch decks by VC funds that they used to raise money from their LPs - VC pitchdecks
  • Connected hardware, Fin tech and non traditional founders - 500 startups investment thesis
  • Take business risk but not product risk - Scale Venture Partners’s thesis
  • VCPT - Big vision, ability to raise capital, hiring the right people, right timing - Marc Lore
  • Bet on the Founder, Vision and “Secrets”, in that order - Michael Karnjanaprakorn
  • Do you have capability to build a large outcome? Can you hire a team who can also build this outcome? Is market large enough? If not, can you expand the market? - Karthik Reddy, Blume Ventures
  • Market, Opportunity value, and Probability of Success - Will Bricker, Hustle Fund
  • You’re solving an important problem, that you’ve got the path to an important solution, that there is a big market opportunity, and that your team is positioned to execute - Samir Vasavada, Vise CEO
  • Invest in big waves - Mike Maples
  • Make what is available to the rich today acessible to everyone - Jack Abraham
  • 6T - Sheel Mohnot
  • Founder References, Size the Opportunity, Use The Product, Customer Calls, Traction Analysis, Why Now, Community Review, Tokens and Value Accrual, Competitive Landscaping, Returns Analysis - Casey Caruso, Paradigm
  • Ability to get to product/market fit, ability to build a team to scale without the wheels coming off, ability to build an organization that can prosecute many products and markets in parallel - Marc Andreessen
  • 7Cs - Lorimer Ventures