Antifragility and Blockchain — Founders and investors swear by this framework for developing lasting ventures.
After the past year of incubating our idea for a Venture Operating Model, BoCG Ventures has expanded our thesis around building antifragile, technology-enabled ventures to also include blockchain-based infrastructure. The market shocks related to the current global pandemic has unearthed a major challenge in the way that the majority of companies operate. Specifically, risk management, infrastructure and an over reliance on non-transparent third-party providers has left enterprises across the world open to increased operational risk. In this new normal, companies are seeking to re-imagine the way they conduct business from predominantly in-person world to a virtual one. BoCG has long advocated for this type of antifragile business model design and has now added blockchain integration as a significant part of its fund thesis because of the efficiency and transparency that this technology brings. Below is a brief video introducing the expansion:
Throughout the pandemic, BoCG has seen a wide variety of companies seeking help with business model innovation. What all these companies have in common is that they all lack the infrastructure and resilience to weather the effects of these unprecedented times where virtual has become the only reality. In helping these companies develop antifragile roadmaps, it became abundantly clear that blockchain was the common denominator that could simultaneously provide speed, efficiency, and transparency to allow companies to compete in today’s fluid and ever changing environment. We believe that robust and transparent blockchain-based infrastructure is the key to any antifragile enterprise. This is what brought us to recognize the need to bring additional depth to BoCG Ventures’ investment thesis by coupling antifragile systems with blockchain technology.
There’s a timely notion in business from Peter Drucker, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” and this is where we see the additional value-add of blockchain. The concept of antifragility makes us understand fragility better; while blockchain provides transparency to the underlying causation of a robust enterprise. To borrow a concept from medicine, we cannot improve health without first reducing disease. Similarly we cannot increase wealth without first decreasing losses. Antifragility and fragility are degrees on a spectrum. BoCG believes in building robust blockchain-based infrastructure that supports innovative operating models and customer value. Inherent in these innovative designs are digitization, transparency, and efficiency; all of which drive the venture closer to antifragility. Ventures that embrace the concert of antifragility fortify themselves from potential market shocks and more importantly place themselves in a stronger market position by virtue of business efficiency and transparency, BoCG is betting on these types of companies.
”By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility we can build a systematic and broad guide to non predictive decision making under uncertainty in business, politics, medicine, and life in general — anywhere the unknown preponderates, any situation in which there is randomness, unpredictability, opacity, or incomplete understanding of things…We propose to stand our current approaches to prediction, prognostication, and risk management on their heads. In every domain or area of application, we propose rules for moving from the fragile toward the antifragile, through reduction of fragility or harnessing antifragility.” — Nassim Taleb
BoCG Ventures, sees blockchain technology as a stable framework for building the innovative companies of tomorrow. Through the venture operating model (VOM), we help companies of all sizes develop technology-based antifragile scalability roadmaps that provide a competitive edge. The BoCG Ventures fund works hand-in-hand with our consulting team to capitalize ventures with fully developed roadmaps. The VOM model allows BoCG to move with unprecedented efficiency in both venture development and time to market while also reducing investor risk. The shock of the pandemic has shown that antifragility is the future and BoCG, through its VOM model, is responding by providing companies with the roadmap and the capital to take command of their future.
In our next post, we will be highlighting one of our current portfolio assets that is leveraging distributed ledger technology to innovate within alternative lending systems — beyond that, it will become a tool that measures the pulse of the different asset classes that apply our technology to its lending capabilities.
To learn more about our work, contact our team or follow us on LinkedIn. For more insights, follow our writers and editors: LK, Chris MGH, and Gabriel Queiroz Silva.
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