Dan Gray
@credistick
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Writing about VC at https://t.co/mlaeDB0Em9
UK
Joined February 2009
"In the early days of Valar, a lot of VC’s passed on us because they didn’t believe we could raise the money." Yes, VCs will pass on a company out of fear that other VCs will pass on it. This is institutionalised insecurity. Venture capital emerged from opportunity of frontier
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a VC, everything looks like a capital problem. In the early days of Valar, a lot of VC’s passed on us because they didn’t believe we could raise the money. In one way, they were totally right. We raised less than
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When the waves hit, strength isn't enough. NOT WITHOUT HOPE - a true fight for survival.
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It's difficult to get a coherent picture of how the venture market has changed over the last few years. Depending who you ask, early-stage VC is either a dead-zone or busier than ever. This has been characterised as "the haves and the have nots". This is the consequence of
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As someone about to close my first fund here are some thoughts: 1. The opportunity cost of building a fund right now is exceptionally high if you are a decent operator at all. 2. Capital keeps concentrating in the blue chip funds lowering the aggregate pool of capital
Venture fundraising is the worse it’s been in at least a decade! And I don’t mean for startups, which are seeing an AI boom (bubble?) The firms themselves are often struggling - we are seeing the lowest number of venture funds raised in at least 10 years. https://t.co/HjM6eYo5YY
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CA saying you should limit seed exposure over the next ~3 years because the bar to go public is higher at the moment. Truly giga-brain stuff. And using 2022 data on seed funds? The small end of the venture market has been hammered in the years since. Yes, median pricing has
This is what happens when too many of us racing to be first one in on cap table I remain as bullish as ever for Inception/seed but as I’ve said many times, get your helmets and cleats on as the dispersion between top and bottom performers will be wider than ever as well From
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You remember COVID era censorship, right? They banned us from their apps. They deplatformed alternate views and tried to silence any form of opposition. That's why we built Unplugged. So when the chips are down, we know we have an independent platform that will have our back.
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"Deus Ex Machina": https://t.co/D0Kay1SGPT "Venture Banks": https://t.co/5gwUa5EFld "Venture Capital's 'Knowledge Work' Problem": https://t.co/bPtTJ675d7 "Sam Altman, the man behind ChatGPT, is increasingly alarmed about what he unleashed. Here are 15 quotes charting his
credistick.com
While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-s...
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If you compare 2021 and 2000, it's implied that there should have been a bloodbath for venture capital in 2023, similar to the ~90% collapse by 2002. Instead, OpenAI turned the world upside-down and there was a more restrained pull-back of ~50%. Even badly-burned LPs didn't want
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“What’s interesting about the ones we get really wrong, every single one of them — if you play the ‘5 Whys’ game; why, why, why, why, why — every single one of them comes down to a psychological bias or emotional trap.” - @gradypb
https://t.co/Mg2ui7XWIn
"Seeing a model make relatively small mistakes consistently decreased confidence in the model, whereas seeing a human make relatively large mistakes did not consistently decrease confidence in the human" (source: "Algorithm Aversion: People Erroneously Avoid Algorithms After
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Take the Ferry to NYC. Kids Ride Free Thru Jan 4. All Terminals & Routes. Free Shuttles to Attractions. Watch Video. Click for Routes & Schedules.
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It’s fairly common for emerging managers to use SPVs for follow-ons, to get around capital constraints. However, that comes at a cost to the visible performance of their fund. How common are aggregated TVPI/DPI or look-through IRR metrics in EM decks? Bonus: is there any
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A recurring theme in pre-2010s VC research is the incumbent price advantage — legacy firms getting more ownership for the same capital. Today, it seems more common for well-capitalised incumbents to win deals by being the highest bidders. It’s not clear what this means for
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"Venture Capitalists’ Decision-Making Under Changing Resource Availability: Exploring the Use of Evaluative Selection Criteria", by Noah John Pettit: https://t.co/Qk48Tk4ETU "Algorithm Aversion: People Erroneously Avoid Algorithms after Seeing Them Err", by Berkeley J.
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"Seeing a model make relatively small mistakes consistently decreased confidence in the model, whereas seeing a human make relatively large mistakes did not consistently decrease confidence in the human" (source: "Algorithm Aversion: People Erroneously Avoid Algorithms After
These three paragraphs from Kahneman in 2017 (pre-LLM) are something else - full of, as James says, "painful claims" that are grounded in a lifetime of research.
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Writing is a great way to learn so planning on doing it more often. Essay below on the relationship between venture funding and the ideas founders decide to pursue inspired by some writings from @WillManidis and @credistick More to come https://t.co/fsw1SAadYw
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The only way out is stubborn optimism; blinkered positive-sum thinking. It doesn’t take a lot of growth to inspire significant positive-sum thinking in others. We just need to start.
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In turn, the media exploits this pessimism with increasingly negative headlines. The problem grows deeper. https://t.co/BBEG6Zkwt7
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Indeed, growing-up in a zero-sum world also makes people less conscientious, more introverted, and more neurotic. If we tear down role models and believe everyone is out to get what’s ours, this is a natural consequence.
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That failure compounds across generations. If you grow up in a weak economy, you’re more likely develop zero-sum beliefs which deter ambition. https://t.co/p7XdlzxPwu
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We have mostly talked ourselves into this problem. Growth is more difficult when we fall prey to these base instincts and villainise the successful. “Innovation is risky. Billionaires are evil. Industry is destroying the planet.” https://t.co/QPTxZT0OW8
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It wasn’t always like this. When economies are strong, people are happy to share that prosperity with others. Success is accretive and celebrated. When growth is stagnant, people become protective. “Success” is implicitly to take from others. https://t.co/p7XdlzxPwu
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