Stories by Nick Moryl on Medium
Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash 10 years ago I concluded the most intense learning period of my career as a junior member of the investing team at Khosla Ventures . I spent the last 9 months distilling what I learned over that period into a 9-part curriculum, replete with exhaustive references and resources . The biggest takeaway was that there isn’t one specific skill you need to learn to be a…
Photo by Ian Talmacs on Unsplash The final part of our nine-part journey into the Silicon Valley VC mindset. Eight chapters in, we’ve covered an enormous amount of ground: how VCs analyze markets and businesses, the history of the industry and asset class, the mental models and frameworks they deploy, and the psychology and the inner game. We’ve assembled the whole toolkit. So — what do you…
Photo by David Tip on Unsplash The eighth part of our nine-part journey into the Silicon Valley VC mindset. There is no easy in life. You just get to choose your version of hard. For founders, hard means living on the knife edge between ebullient optimism and anxious paranoia. You need to believe you are uniquely capable of inventing the future while remaining painfully alert to every way you…
Photo by Vincentiu Solomon on Unsplash The seventh part of our nine-part journey into the Silicon Valley VC mindset. “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” — Frederik Pohl Every VC will tell you they’re in the business of funding the future. Most of them are lying. If you look at the majority of venture portfolios you won’t find the future…
Photo by Robb Miller on Unsplash The sixth part of our nine-part journey into the Silicon Valley VC mindset. Until now we’ve focused on how founders operate and how businesses are built. Now we shift our focus to capital: how investors decide, how they win deals, and how the messiness of human behavior leads to unpredictable market outcomes. It’s easy to picture investing as sitting in front of a…
Photo by Startaê Team on Unsplash The fifth part of our nine-part journey into the Silicon Valley VC mindset. You could write an entire book about how to run a startup. (Many people have!) But there’s a significant difference between knowing how to scale a company and, as an investor, being good at quickly assessing a founder’s ability to do so. For founders, operating is the slow, unglamorous…
Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash I try to read 52 books every year. This year I fell short by eight for two reasons: (1) I read a bunch of long books (The Prize, LotR); and (2) I simply had less reading time than I’ve had in the past. Historically I’ve “read” a lot of books via audiobook, usually during commute, travel, and other dead time (laundry, dishes, walking places I’m going to walk to…
Photo by Muhammad Raufan Yusup on Unsplash The fourth part of our nine-part journey into the Silicon Valley VC mindset. The vast majority of startup founders don’t get written about. Multi-billion dollar outcomes are the exception, not the rule. Pattern-matching just on the successful cases risks creating survivorship bias in your mental model of what a good entrepreneur looks like. Survivorship…
Steve Jobs The third part of our nine-part journey into the Silicon Valley VC mindset. A century ago, industrialists were household names: Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller. Now it’s technologists: Jobs, Zuckerberg, Musk. Venture capitalists are in the business of pattern matching. They study outlier successes in search of the key to predicting the future. What enabled previous generational tech…
A portrait of the author as a young man Today I turn 40. It’s an obvious opportunity to reflect on life, mortality, and meaning. 40 carries a lot more weight than 30 did: I remember when my parents turned 40. Not only was I alive but I was able to understand the concept of aging and the existential questions that arise with it. So it’s easy to use my parents’ 40th birthdays in juxtaposition to my…