For lemons to stand

Timing is everything - the punchline of a joke or falling in love.  Courage and weakness, success or failure.  Grace . We shouldn't confuse timing with luck.  From Seneca to Oprah, folks agree  good fortune occurs when the conditions are perfect.  Preparedness (in one's own control) meets the shape of the universe (outside one's control) and we're struck lucky.  This God shot is not some mythical unicorn, but more karmic  fusion .  It happens when the conditions are perfect. The physics of luck are known, to the first order anyway.  Attitude drives learning, requiring purpose .  The practiced achieve moments of superfluidity .  Most of us are merely lucky, sometimes. Beyond the individual wiring, attitude and approach of the principal founder(s), ideas have context.  The old joke that fusion is 30 years away and always will be may meet it's end shortly.  The Jetsonian  vision of flying to work may...

Technology is not a zero to one problem, if only because that first proof of life ≠ job done. Innovation is neither black nor white, but rather endless grey.  There is ambiguity, uncertainty and innumerable factors outside of one's own control.  Filled with nuance - like  art  - it requires judgment. That said, there is a hierarchy of value and an implicit Goldilocks problem.  Services scale.  Products deliver customer value.  Meanwhile novel, pure invention protected through IP (absent commercialization) doesn't buy more than the right to be sued . "Just right" defines investable.  Venture has historically funded software, fabless semiconductor and other high margin & low CapEx approaches.  Sure, a few folks do hard tech these days; billionaires fund moonshots .  Any  four letter word can buy Chinese scooters, build an app, and either sellout to an auto OEM for $100s of millions or achieve $1-2 billion private va...

Few is fun, functional, fast - agile . We cannot do everything alone.  A gross is massive, but not necessarily good.  Bigger is rarely better; in particular, employee growth ≠ good.  Groups of people have their own physics (e.g., inertia/momentum, action/reaction, etc).  Square-cube laws dictate size, weight and agility. So what's just right ? Much of the ceiling has been described by Dunbar  - above 150, it becomes challenging for an individual to maintain deep relationships with more people.  The beer test  posits the same idea.  Extreme misanthropes and introverts  skew an order of magnitude fewer, while extroverts target 10x more.  However, if teams are going to achieve extraordinary performance, between one-third and two-thirds of individuals' relationships need be outside of the company (e.g.,  friends, family, external professional network, service providers, suppliers, customers, etc.). The corollary: healthy pro...

None of us has gravitated toward a conventional "job." Sure, there are creature comforts such as consistency (e.g., 72-degrees and florescent), predicability (e.g., 9 am - 5 pm) and balance (e.g, home in time for dinner with our 2.2 kids).  But it feels sterile and uninspiring - a routine we loathe, devoid of purpose. If we want to start something new, but do it quickly, a lot has to come from outside.  We're repulsed by  coddling hatcheries or hermetic petri dishes  meant to shoehorn the most creative stage of a company into a box within a box.  The same network for hire model sans office may yield insufficient velocity.  Instead, we champion the explosive consumption best demonstrated by starfish stomach  eversion .  Talk about letting oneself be vulnerable and leaving it all out on the field, that little guy is committed!  Step into our paradox: the world is our office, and we have none at all - so we often borrow yours, or the ...

What if we could bring it back , but make everyone better off by fixing v1.0? Aluminum is 95% recycled due to energy content.  Lead acid batteries schlep cores around because the alternative fails price, performance and sustainability requirements.  If we don't start doing something similar with lithium and cobalt, or commercialize solid state batteries, we may paint ourselves into a corner during the electrification of everything . Rockets are reusable now, because scaling space logistics is prohibitively expensive without it.  Most of  micromobility will falter due to the disposable fleets of the market leaders, and the subscale progress of their fast followers and laggards.  Global unbalances remain stark, primarily due to waste . Why doesn't that thinking apply to young companies, especially the small and/or unlucky?  Private equity and distressed credit investors do this kind of work with middle market companies, and sometimes large public b...

F = m*a Holding force (i.e., effort, capital and time) constant, we remove mass (i.e., inertia) to accelerate the velocity of learning, cash flow and demonstrable impact. Entrepreneurs commonly cite roadblocks and investors highlight risks - the top few include: (0) Execution - will it work ? (1) Market - will people want it? (2) Financing - will it snowball before dying? Our value(venture) job before investing a single dollar is to answer (0), making an implicit bet on the team, timing and technology.  We work with founders and industry to eliminate (1), qualifying demand at specific requirements, unit volume and pricing.  Our execution along these goals reduces the need for true risk capital in (2), although growth equity, working capital lines and project finance are just as useful to scaling our businesses as others. What's your escape velocity and how can we help you achieve it in ~1 year?

Timing created the shape of the universe; we ignore that fact at our peril. Failure should not curse a neighborhood forever, if facts have indeed changed.   Value  comprises quantity and quality, neither of which is possible without alchemy (i.e., the parlaying of time, capital, momentum, talent and luck for one another).  Unit economics matter and clever structuring can't fix fugly . So we engineer companies to generate more cash than they consume.  We build credible 18-month operating plans.  We recognize scale cannot resolve negative contribution dollars, and rejigger the plan accordingly.  We aim to break even within ~1 year, but recognize  no plan is right  so  change tactics  as necessary. We are all responsible for  shooting puppies  destined to consume significant cash beyond two years. Try your hand at Lemonade Stand , in life or online.

Lemons + sugar water = lemonade Some sugar water is better than others.  We have just 12 years  to harness capital flows for sustainable global change.  The origins of venture capital and the definition of entrepreneur prove instructive. It's hard to be hopeful that your ship will return with a bounty of blubber after more than a couple years, so capitalists rely on a diversified portfolio .  That said, the captain defies mispriced odds as the bearer of risk (e.g., see Shackleton's formational role in Type III fun).  At the intersection of risk and capital, roles and responsibilities were clear then.  So what changed? Aiming for "impact" where needed most, we added capital  to excess.  In the face of misadventure, we failed to build real businesses  while ironically citing "sustainability."  We've spent decades talking about it.  The best intentions have splashed the pot with concessional capital, destroying markets....

Let's face it, we've made some lemons over the past couple hundred years. And we're not even the first to view it through that analogy. But have we done enough ?