May 2012
12 posts
10 Years and 5 Years
I attended my 10 year college reunion in Providence this weekend and, in order to avoid holiday weekend traffic insanity, my friend, my fiancee and I took Amtrak.
While we successfully avoided traffic, we were not able to listening to other people’s conversations on the crowded train. The loudest conversations were being held by a crew that was pounding tall boys and headed to Brown for...
I Thought I Was the Only One!
Having been out of the country when Spotify-mania first hit, I am late getting to the extremely cheap music party. Now that I’m at here I’ve been finding myself playing the same “Top Tracks” over and over again as I hustle from one meeting to the next. While my musical knowledge and imagination are not growing, it’s been a good soundtrack.
Among the Top Tracks,...
Opacity and Access
I studied mechanical engineering as an undergrad and then, after some time working abroad, went to law school. It’s a funny but not unheard of combination and I argued in my law school essay that legal analysis and the scientific method are actually analogous:
facts : law :: data : science
legislation : law :: natural “laws” : science
holdings : law ::...
Feeding the Pipeline vs. Thinking Deep
Among the many things I learned in my brief time working in private equity was the importance of feeding lots of opportunities into the deal pipeline. For us, finding a deal was a matter of keeping the volume of relevant items entering the pipeline as high as possible, turning the crank — having the meetings, reading the decks, debating internally, deciding whether to move forward or not...
Brutal but not Malicious (cont'd)
A friend responded to my discussion of whether it might be tacky to credentialize yourself by telling people the specific sale price of your previous company by pointing out that, not only is it not tacky, it is the best credential of all. His point was that, at base, entrepreneurs are supposed to create value for their investors and that’s why it’s good to tell people you sold your...
Brutal, but not Malicious
I attended last week’s Ultra Light Startup pitch night and discovered that critics can be brutal without being malicious. Eight companies pitched for two minutes in front of four judges (real-world VCs) and about 200 audience members. Some pitches were strong and some were weak and there was surprisingly little schaudenfreude when the pitchers stumbled or were stumped.
A couple highlights...
High-percentage shots
The Knicks’ Tyson Chandler had two notable achievements this season: He was named Defensive Player of the Year and he had the third highest field goal percentage ever. Each of these distinctions relate to different parts of the game — and opposite ends of the court, to boot — but they are both pretty clearly the result of a single core attribute. Namely, Tyson Chandler works...
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WatchObama on equality: Finally.
House of Genius
I attended a novel networking event last week organized by House of Genius and held at Think Conservatory. House of Genius shares DNA with a lot of tech networking events — three companies presented and received feedback — but the genetic connection is like that of penguins and ostriches.
The defining novelty of House of Genius is that for almost the entire three hours the twenty...
Be the 100%
One of the big and mostly pleasant surprises of moving from a well-resourced law firm to a decently funded impact investment private equity fund was that I had unwittingly joined a startup.
It is unusual, I think, to describe an investment company as a startup but that’s what it was (per Ries): The fund was trying to deliver a new service — double bottom line investing on behalf of...
