You need to make a decision and you’re stuck. You don’t have the experience to confidently choose a path. What do you do? The natural thing to do is to “ask for advice”. You find someone with more experience, someone who really should know, and ask for a direct recommendation about what to do. This expert will almost certainly be happy to “tell you what to do” and you’ll be relieved to listen.…
Sarah Fraher, a woman who had an outsized impact on my life, died yesterday. She was my best friend Shelton’s mother, and beyond that, she played an outsized role in my life as my “landlord” during most summers in high school (unofficial, just crashing) and college (official). She was an incredible leader, which she put to work as both a school principal and a family matriarch. She taught me a…
“It never hurts to ask!” I get this advice a lot. It’s bullshit and we all know it. We hate getting asked for things. It’s painful at a visceral level to have to say no. We generate narratives about the ask-er to justify the “no” we have to deliver. “They are CRAZY to ask me for this” or “what a snake to ask for something so out of bounds”. It doesn’t matter that they were “just asking” and that…
Kids are obsessed with fairness. The consistency with which children will say “that’s not fair” given the opportunity is impressive. If a situation can possibly be put into terms of “fairness”, a child with use fairness as a weapon of protest - everything from their sibling getting something the child didn’t get to being told they can’t go to a particular event that their friends are going to.…
Investors love traction. Even at the early seed stage, almost every investor has “traction” near the top of their list for what they look for in an investment. And for good reason! Even with a great founder, a plausible idea in a big market, and a team to execute on the vision, there is a lot risk that nobody actually wants what the founders are building . A “launched” product with some early…
In 2010, a multi-featured location-based app called Burbn pivoted and became a simple photo-sharing app called Instagram . Less than 2 years later, Instagram sold to Facebook for 1 billion dollars , and may be worth as much as 35 billion dollars today . Many people hailed as victory for the lean startup method 1 of product development, where launching quickly, learning, and iterating is said to be…
When the founder of VISA Dee Hock joined the advisory board of Bitcoin startup Xapo , it seemed pretty strange to me. After all, Bitcoin’s very existence appears to be a reaction to VISA’s shortcomings. VISA represents everything bitcoin fans hate: fees, centralization, archaic design, and more. The VISA network, it seems, is designed to make the banks more money by charging high fees to…
Average people do not love fintech. In fact, in many cases they hate it . I’ve seen this first hand since I took the ( currently on pause ) dive into fintech a little over two years ago, but two posts by Pascal Bouvier of Route 66 Ventures got me thinking about how deep this problem really is. Pascal’s example of the relative lack of progress in modernizing remittances (sending money home from,…
What does my company need to look like to raise X amount of money? Almost every founder I know has this question. The founders have a vision and some unique knowledge of the market while investors have heuristics derived from the market as a whole that they use to make investment decisions. Coming to terms with these two things to define “success” for your next round of funding is critical, and…
I’ve been thinking about fan death a lot lately. Many of the recent news stories I’ve been following have centered around powerful cultural myths and institutions , with defenders of the entrenched cultural forces dismissing the critics outright as ridiculous or evil. Each time I find myself caught up in these conversations, I find my mind wandering back to “fan death” and how so many people can’t…