Earlier this week, I was chatting with a very talented entrepreneur on the train on my way home. We didn’t know each other, so we briefly discussed our past life and when I told him that I co-founded the venture capital firm Daphni, he was amused and confessed that his…

A couple of years ago, I had lunch with a music producer, who also happened to own concert halls. As we were looking at the menu, I shared my thoughts with him: it was striking to see how strong and unique the place identity was, and yet, the menu was…

I love Jeff Bezos’ annual letters to shareholders. I read them all, even published an article with the key highlights from 1997. Lately, I have been thinking about something Jeff Bezos mentioned in his 2005 edition, where he talks about two types of decisions in the day-to-day job. …

Making an investment decision involves both analysis and intuition. These decisions contain an irreducible intuitive component, but when early stage investors rely largely on intuition, growth stage and later stage investors will increasingly add rational, objective elements and models to make their decision. It’s very natural indeed: the level of…

I was reading a great research article about startups in times of crisis, with a focus on the Covid19 pandemic. The team of researchers identifies the main adversities faced by startups and “bricolage responses“ (leveraged resources) startups are using to cope with the different threats. They also discuss measures to…

Early March 2020, a singular meeting happened in every startup of the Western world. Even within the rank of entrepreneurs, the most optimistic among the optimists, there was no more possibility to ignore the fact that a tsunami was coming hard and fast towards their beloved organization and their teams. …

Something is often misunderstood regarding the VC and Growth industries. And nothing’s more effective to resolve it than the old case of the whaling industry (to be honest, there may be other comparables perfectly working, but they are way less exotic and fun). Whaling became a commercial industry in the…

Over the past 100 years, epidemics have only temporarily impacted the economy with short, sharp shocks, following a V-shaped recovery. Unsurprisingly, the optimists expect once again this V-shaped recovery for our current crisis. JPMorgan indicates that the large majority of stories concerning COVID-19 mention a V-shaped recovery.

In his General Theory, John Maynard Keynes declared that: “[o]ur decisions to do something […] can only be taken as a result of animal spirits — of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative…