Background As a founder, one of the most critical decisions you’ll face is how to scale your company. Your options include: The venture path : chasing rapid growth with venture capital; Sustainable growth (with funding) : balancing scale and stability with external support; or Sustainable growth (founder-funded) : building value over time on your own terms. In this post, we’ll explore sustainable…
Background As a founder, one of the most critical decisions you'll face is how to scale your company. Your options include: The venture path : chasing rapid growth with venture capital; Sustainable growth (with funding) : balancing scale and stability with external support; or Sustainable growth (founder-funded) : building value over time on your own terms. In this post, we'll explore the venture…
Last time, our Truly Great Questions: Level 1 gave a quick way to size up any business. Now, Level 2 takes it further. These are the questions we ask to identify long-term winners and include how we think about markets, moats, and long-term value. Does a company have the potential to be Truly Great ? Let’s find out. The 5 Questions We Use to Size Up Long-Term Winners Whether you’re a founder…
A friend recently asked how we size up opportunities so fast. My answer? After years of building, investing, and advising, we have honed our ‘Truly Great Questions’, a quick way to understand any business, deeply and strategically. We’ve split them into two levels: Level 1 is for clarity; Level 2 is for conviction. This post dives into Level 1; I’ll share Level 2 in another post soon. The 5…
Overview The Rule of 1 is a quiet rebellion against complexity. It’s about focus: doing one thing exceptionally well before earning the right to expand. In a world that glorifies rapid scaling, this principle feels almost contrarian. Yet, for startups and growth companies, it’s often the difference between building something enduring and chasing shadows. Startups and Growth Companies The best…
Overview Over the past few years, we have witnessed significant developments in AI, with the rate of change continuing to accelerate. We are now well and truly in The Code Age , and agentic systems are reshaping how businesses operate. Key Themes Rapid AI Adoption: Organisations that embed AI across their operations have outperformed their peers on speed and efficiency. Businesses that embrace…
Last year, I shared a thought on The Code Age , envisioning a state where anything that can be generated or performed by code, will be. Today, this is unfolding before our eyes, particularly in fields like customer service, content creation and media generation, where AI's influence is becoming increasingly clear. We're starting to see AI begin to permeate our daily lives and we are about to enter…
Setting ambitious long-term goals can be exhilarating. It fuels our drive to tackle significant challenges and provides the motivation needed to overcome challenging obstacles along the way. However, there's a delicate balance to strike. If all your goals are overly ambitious and consistently unattainable, it can erode trust within your team, among shareholders, and even within yourself. When it…
The Rule of 40 is a metric that measures the equilibrium between sustainable growth and profitability for later stage companies. This principle has found resonance with many investors and analysts, particularly in the context of listed SaaS and tech companies. Made prominent by Brad Feld, I’ve found it has relevance in later stage companies across the software, e-commerce, and digital services…
Contributed Capital Return (CCR) is a financial metric that estimates the potential value created by new contributions or reinvested earnings into a company. I’ve found it to be a helpful frame to evaluate the efficiency of capital allocation and deployment when comparing alternatives, with a focus on value creation over time. It is particularly helpful if the company is working towards a…
The Exit Equation is a financial formula used to estimate the potential exit value of a company at a specific point in time. I’ve found it to be a helpful frame for companies that are working towards a first-class exit or are considering their funding and liquidity options, or growth initiatives, as it helps to identify the key valuation drivers. The Exit Equation It is expressed as: Headline…
The recent breakthroughs and rapid adoption of generative AI have resonated deeply with us. We are convinced that we have entered The Code Age , a period where everything that can be generated by code or done by code, will be. Over the past year, we’ve accelerated our investment pace and have made several new investments in startups and companies that we believe are well positioned to benefit from…
Overview I use this frame for startups that are on the venture path or companies that are founder funded and working towards a first class exit . This post’s genesis is the result of putting together a lightweight frame to consider “what” a great company or startup looks like. There are many different ways of “how” to achieve a great outcome, but that isn’t within the scope of this piece. For…
It is such a fun time to be alive. I’ve played with more interesting tools in the last 3 months than I have in the last few years. As an example, 6 months ago I could not write any meaningful code. Today I still can’t write code, but now I have a whole heap of fairly complicated interconnected programs that GPT wrote for me. Cost? Almost zero. That’s not to diminish the importance of coding or…
Overview As we move into The Code Age , it seems like the time is right for Adaptive Businesses to take off. I think we will see the emergence of Adaptive Businesses in 2023. An Adaptive Business is: Founder-led: A small number of founders architect, curate and provide the human element Code-first with zero touch operations: efficient and scalable, the code does the heavy lifting and operations…
Overview In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously stated that “Software is eating the world”. Today, we're on the cusp of a new era: "The Code Age", where code - software and artificial intelligence - will create new opportunities, transform entire industries and has the potential to reshape the fabric of society itself. Software and AI isn’t new - the 1950s saw the early foundational work, but in the…
Overview A first-class exit describes the sale of a company for a very high value, generally one that beats the expectations of the company's founders and investors and is well executed with a strategic approach. It doesn’t necessarily mean selling at the maximum possible value, rather it is about the overall outcome for the company, shareholders and employees, including creating opportunities for…
During one of the covid lockdowns, I was sitting at home in a zoom meeting that felt like it would never end. I was three hours in, listening to lawyers argue about various non-commercial matters in a trade sale negotiation. I sat there, staring at the screen, wondering is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? Over the next few days and weeks, I spent time reflecting. Lots of reading,…
I caught up with the founders of a business with a few million dollars in revenue last week. They are growing quite quickly and haven’t raised any capital. We were discussing incentive schemes and some of the challenges their team was facing (people not acting in the interests of the company, leaving problems unsolved and not wanting more customers because that means more work). Here was my…
I’ve had quite a few conversations recently with founders on this topic but one recently stuck out. A co-founding team of a company I’m fond of (but not invested in) has 90 days of cash in the bank and has had 50+ investor meetings recently. While raising previous rounds was relatively easy for them, now... crickets. It is a difficult situation, but it can be navigated. We spoke for a while and I…