Venture capital is changing. Capital is abundant and increasingly consolidated. The VC industry as a whole is shape-shifting to more of a service based business as investors realize they need to bring more to the table than just money. Now more than ever, differentiation is critical to remain competitive across…

I’ve recently been embracing my inner skeptic, in an age in which skeptics sometimes get a bad rap. In my idealistic San Francisco bubble, people regularly make the impossible possible and skeptics are typically frowned upon for having a negative polarity — sticks in the mud who only see the…

In early stage venture capital, we hear a lot of firms (including our own) say that they invest in people. Businesses create value in unique ways that are often manifestations of the founders themselves. It is easy to forget that organizations are first and foremost places of human interaction, not…

For many years Jake (my co-managing director) and I have watched founders struggle through varying degrees of personal turmoil as they build their companies with little to no available support. At our new fund, Alpha Bridge Ventures, we are stepping up our game by re-imagining what founder support looks like…

“Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” — Warren Buffett I believe many aspects of life compound the way interest does in finance; slowly in the…

Growing up in the eighties, the concept of “stranger danger” was a phrase that found widespread adoption and echoed throughout hallways of U.S. schools year after year. The overall harrowing theme was that strangers are the enemy and we should never speak to them. All strangers had a hidden agenda…

I wanted to briefly “share” my thoughts about the movement KJ and her team at Simbi are leading in terms of their overall collective vision for a new and improved shared economy, how digital currencies factor into the equation and some predictions on what the future holds in this particular…

When applying standard top-down logic or deductive reasoning to decisions that deliver against expected outcomes, our worlds begin to trend into the realm of “making sense”. Aligning predictions with results. Expectations with reality. We all strive to “make sense of things” because it makes us feel stable, comfortable and somewhat…

“Dear Optimist, Pessimist, and Realist. While you guys were busy arguing over the glass of water, I drank it. Sincerely, the Opportunist.”- Unknown Why do we do what we do? It’s a simple question that has perplexed behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists for centuries. I’ve asked myself time and time again…