Tag: VC
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Fortuna and Facebook
In the early consumer web days, venture firms started investing in businesses that looked very different from the kinds of businesses they were used to. Apparently Accel in particular had some problems building conviction in the new crop of startups In the end, “Skype looked too weird to us,” [Kevin]…
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Philosophy and VC
As I was reading Mallaby’s The Power Law, I was tickled to learn that Paul Graham gave his iconic “How to Start a Startup” lecture in Emerson Hall at Harvard. Although the lecture was for the Harvard Computer Society, it was delivered in the philosophy building. And Graham himself was…
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VC Mythology and Branding
Sebastian Mallaby on the origins of venture capital: Rock and Coyle met Kleiner and his comrades at a San Francisco restaurant for dinner. The visitors from Wall Street understood that the rebels wanted to operate as a team, without Shockley’s suffocating oversight. They further understood that the engineers wanted to…
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Four Theses on Deep Tech
The last few years have given rise to a renewed interest in deep tech. Peter Thiel’s punchy “we wanted flying cars, and all we got was 140 characters” has captured technologists’ imaginations. Meanwhile, tech has emerged as an important potential bulwark against climate change, and venture capitalists have responded by raising…
Matthew Mandel 