If these poll results are anything to go by, we should cut back the budget for the Olympics and ditch Meta stock. — The Olympics and World Cup are both global events that take place once every four years. They pit the world’s athletes against each other at a inter-country level. Only difference being, the Olympics hosts a variety of sports, whereas the World Cup does just one — soccer. Typically they do…

How FOMO, Diversity and Risk will shape venture capital and startup fundraising in the next year. — More than 91,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2022. A lot of them are from the likes of Meta, Twitter, Amazon, Lyft, Stripe and other tech giants. Many are well-paid, highly talented software engineers or senior business executives. They will probably be reluctant to take a…

It‘s the dream of every startup to have VCs begging to invest, but how these founders did it are important lessons to learn. — Parker Conrad is the founder of Rippling, a startup which is valued at US$11.25 billion. This is his 3rd attempt. When he started his first company back in 2006, it dragged out for what he called “seven years of slow, grinding failure”. In an interview with Garry Tan, he spoke…

A VC declared on Instagram that founders with active roles in several companies is a “MASSIVE” red flag for him, sparking off a big debate. — As a serial entrepreneur and occasional investor, I struggled with this question when I saw it in my Instagram feed. On the one hand, I do agree that trying to run more than one company concurrently is a massive effort that increases your odds of failure, especially in the critical…

A few good reasons why we should do away with this absurd piece of modern fashion. — Did you know that Peter Thiel said in his book “Zero to One” that at his fund, they have a rule of not investing in a “tech CEO that wears a suit”? “This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket…

The metrics through which venture capital views internet based startups are all mashed up to their own detriment. — In 1999, when I was a sophomore in university I visited a ‘dot.com’ era startup as part of a school project. That was when the whole culture of ‘it’s hip to be in a startup and go to work in t-shirts and sandals’ started. And that was exactly how the…

Many big companies who tried to replicate their early success failed because they did not understand this, and Jobs explains why. — “When (companies) start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think… somehow there is some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to try to institutionalize ‘process’ across the company. And before very long, people get confused…

Like nature, the internet needs a self-regulating component that consumes dead material, before old and useless content overwhelms it. — In nature, fungi are a harbinger of death and decay. Its function is to create space by getting rid of dead material and returning nutrients to the earth, so that new plants can grow and thrive. And connecting the tens of thousands of different types of fungi is a vast…