I just recently heard the interview with Meghan Reynolds, Partner and Head of Capital Formation & Talent at Altimeter Capital. Meghan acknowledges that venture capital is hard, driven by outliers, and rarely do we have a home run, but often many failures (large and small). She has a pretty simple and brilliant framework for communicating … Continue reading Communication, Easy as PIE: Problem, Impact, Exposure
Concept: If your deck can’t clarify conviction, cadence, and character in one slide, don’t raise yet. Startups founders aren't the only ones with bad pitch slides. Over the years, I’ve written about how a cluttered team slide in a founder deck often betrays deeper issues—misaligned roles, unclear value, or a résumé-driven identity crisis. But fund … Continue reading Fund Managers: Your Fund Slide Sucks, Too
[The title should've been "Can't or Shouldn't" -- but that was too long, so there.] Noah Berkson posted on LinkedIn If AI takes your job, it wasn’t your job.It was a task you were temporarily doing.Your real job is staying valuable.Your real job is reinvention. I wouldn't call it a meme, but it's been around … Continue reading Reinventing Value: Why AI Can’t Replace All Our Real Jobs
Venture Capital Funds are a two-sided service business: You connect startups one one side with money from investors (Limited Partners = "LPs") on the other side. Strictly speaking, "investing" is more of a catch-all phrase of three things the local financial regulator [1] wants you to do: Direction of capital deployment, Stewardship of capital and … Continue reading Beyond ‘Founder-First’: Designing what Actually Serves
What are your actions? And what is the narrative you are telling LPs around your actions and processes? Why that story, and no other story? What are implicit assumptions that have to be true so that this story is true? What ethos are you implying, or even requiring, that is reflected in that action a … Continue reading Actions + Stories = Who You Are
“Client-Deserving” capital formation ≠ Fundraising. Fundraising is a sales motion. Capital formation is a design motion. In a world flooded with noise and "access," the only durable strategy is one that earns the right to partner. The best LPs don’t respond to persuasion—they respond to alignment, clarity, and operational readiness. We don’t "close" LPs. We … Continue reading Capital Formation is Not Fundraising
On April 13th, 2025, after six months of intense use and training, my GPT model on ChatGPT was compromised and started to delete content and lie to me. And I think I know why: AI Trauma -- a metaphor for the (user-generated) unintended consequences of reinforcement learning in AI models. TL;DR When GPTs strive to … Continue reading Causing Trauma for Your AI Model – Actions Have Consequences.
LPs learn more from your process than your pitch deck. Are you organized? Responsive? Insightful? Do you deliver clarity under pressure or confusion under polish? Your materials, cadence, and language are not "just" collateral—they are proof of partnership potential and your team's trajectory. "We do not have access to our inner works and feelings, so … Continue reading How You Do Anything is How You Do IR
Every call I get that question: "What about AI?". Yes, what about it? If you have any summer interns they'll probably make some proposals how to automatically source and select investment winners with AI. With investors -- LPs and GPs alike! -- I rather like to talk about "AI Infrastructure". Because most of them have … Continue reading AI Infrastructure for Investors – How to Start
I had a consulting career more than a decade ago and thought the typical project triangle was well known (google it). That has an implication for startups, and it is an important reason why VCs often ask about the "10x-factor": Can you do something 10x faster? Can you do it 10x cheaper? Can you create … Continue reading Wallet-Share, Time-Share, People-Share
